CPSIA redux

By way of masgramondou:

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal noted a study by the Motorcycle Industry Council that concluded “90% of the youth fatalities and injuries on motorcycles occur when kids ride adult vehicles.”

[...]

The Journal quoted Ken Luttrell, a Democratic state house member from Oklahoma as noting the obvious: “With these new regulations, Washington has only succeeded in making biking much more dangerous for kids.”

[...]

Whenever I report on the law on air my e-mail box fills up with small business owners who cannot cope with the expensive (and in some instances impossible to comply with) mandates of the law.  Follow a blog like Overlawyered.com that chronicles the chaos, and the picture of an extraordinary blunder by Congress emerges.

Billions lost and who knows how many jobs disappeared is a scandal in good times and an unpardonable one in a severe recession, but the idea of a measure intended to increase child safety resulting quite directly in the death and injury of children really does set a new low mark for Congress.

Unfortunately, yet another sad comment on the failure of our government is that it no longer comes as any surprise when Congress once again throws the baby out with the bath-water.

Three small steps

Very few people will deny that Congress is badly broken and needs fixing.

A lot of what’s wrong with Congress doesn’t have simple solutions.  But there are some relatively small changes we could make right now that would make a big difference.

Of course, Congress would hate them...

1. No more voice votes.

   Congress uses unrecorded voice votes, usually late at night, when it wants to pass a bill but doesn’t want any record of who voted for it.  With voice votes, only the tally of votes is recorded, not who voted which way.  This gives Congress plausible deniability; your representative can get away with lying to you about which way he or she voted on an unpopular bill.

   There’s a very simple principle here that should be applying:  If you don’t want your constituents to know you voted for a bill, you probably shouldn’t be voting for it.

2. Do one thing at a time.

   Can anyone really make sense of a thousand-page omnibus bill that modifies a hundred existing laws?  Does anyone really believe Congress can make sense of them?  We’ve all seen the kind of crap that ends up in these things, buried five hundred pages in.  Congress uses these huge omnibus bills to take some piece of legislature that stinks from here to Madagascar, and pass it by attaching it to the coat-tails of a dozen different things that “must be passed, For The Children”.

   This needs to end.  Make bills address a single subject, with no non-germane attachments or riders permitted.  So you say it means you now need fifty bills to pass what you could do with one?  Then pass the fifty bills ... if you can get each one passed on its own merits.  But if you can’t pass it on its own merit, then you shouldn’t have been trying to sneak it through in the first place.

3. Read the bills.

   Lately, more and more bills are built up in committee by one party and dropped on Congress as a whole at the last minute, then called to a vote before there’s even time for anyone to actually read the entire bill.  This goes along with the gigantic-omnibus-bill tactic.

   It’s a little more difficult to implement than the other two above, but there needs to be a rule that no bill may be brought before Congress for a vote until at least, say, 80% of Congress (perhaps even 90%) has read, or had reasonable time to read, the entire bill from beginning to end.  (The “reasonable time to read” clause is necessary, sadly, to prevent our rat-fink “representatives” from blocking the passage of a bill by simply refusing to read it.  You KNOW they would, if they could.)

Three small steps.  They’d make a good start.

"Worth a try"

By way of bruce_schneier:

One of the few home secretaries who dominated his department rather than be cowed by it was Lord Whitelaw in the 1980s.  He boasted how after any security lapse, the police would come to beg for new and draconian powers.  He laughed and sent them packing, saying only a bunch of softies would erode British liberty to give themselves an easier job.  He said they laughed in return and remarked that “it was worth a try”.

Humorous anecdote aside, the Guardian article states some telling things about the state of government surveillance in England:

( Cut for length )