Three small steps

[unixronin]

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.

Comments

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Amen.

[rosencrantz23.livejournal.com]

seconded. Mind if I repost?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Go for it. Take it as standard policy that anything I post that's not friends-locked may be freely reposted.

[radarrider.livejournal.com]

What is your opinion on term limits for Senators and Representatives?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't know what all of the implications would be, but overall I'm in favor. I think it might help keep congresscritters from getting too deeply into any particular special interest's pocket.

[vetpsychwars.livejournal.com]

Imposing term limits on the states at the federal level, except by Constitutional amendment, is an abridgement of a citizen's civil rights. You're removing their ability to choose the representative that they truly want.

I've waffled about on the concept but the conclusion I have come to is that people have a right to elect whatever asshole they want... and they deserve what they get. If they elect the same jackass 60 years in a row, that's their problem.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the other side of the coin exactly. If your representative is doing a good job of representing you, why should you be forced to change?

Making provision universally for recall of representatives who aren't doing their jobs to the satisfaction of their constituents is probably a better solution overall.

[vetpsychwars.livejournal.com]

We already have that. It's called "elections". Plus, representatives can indeed be recalled if the constituency wants them recalled. It's not easy, mind, but it can and has been done.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, no. That's not the same thing. Elections mean you have to wait until the end of the current term before you have a chance to kick the bum out, and even then you may well not succeed given that (a) many people may by then have forgotten what he did, (b) he has the incumbent advantage, and (c) if he's more beholden to deep-pocketed special interests than to his constituency, he may well just be able to outspend his way to re-election. If you can get enough people moving to get a recall election, you can probably get him out right now and he can't just run again.

Sure, it won't always work, even for the states that do have recall laws. What does?

[luxobscura.livejournal.com]

I have never understood why voice votes are even allowed. It makes no sense. Well, it makes cynical sense, but I don't see how the idea could be sold to the public. I should probably do some research on how the practice came about and how it remians justified.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Referencing number 2, I find it incomprehensible that anyone could possibly do number 3 with any amount of understanding the implications of what the excrement on page 523 really would do. A single sentence can gut the enforcement of important legislation, and it is easy to include in the big bills. Unless you are looking for it, you would never catch it. Even if you have a background in law, and congress.

The thing that makes the constitution so powerful is that you do not need to be a lawyer to understand it. It is written in plain language. Where it is ambiguous, it is deliberately ambiguous to satisfy competing interests to get it passed. It would be nice if our laws were equally comprehensible.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The thing that makes the constitution so powerful is that you do not need to be a lawyer to understand it. It is written in plain language. Where it is ambiguous, it is deliberately ambiguous to satisfy competing interests to get it passed. It would be nice if our laws were equally comprehensible.

Agreed. (Though that doesn't prevent lawyers from arguing endlessly about what it actually means, and some of them have some pretty strange interpretations.)

If I were to cite a fourth step to follow the first three, it would be that all laws must be written in plain English readily comprehensible by a native English speaker with an average level of education. Any law should be able to be challenged on comprehensibility. A challenged law has to be presented to a truly-randomly-chosen panel of, say, twelve citizens plucked off the streets. If more than, say, three of them are unable to understand the law after being given time to read it, it's out. You get a choice: Rewrite it to make it comprehensible, or scrap it.

There is a long-established legal principle that ignorance of the law is no defense against the law. I submit that this principle has become obsolete and untenable when the law comprises thousands or tens of thousands of volumes covering subjects upon which the average citizen has no idea that there even are laws, most of which require a law degree to understand even the basics of, let alone the associated case law.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I submit that this principle has become obsolete and untenable when the law comprises thousands or tens of thousands of volumes covering subjects upon which the average citizen has no idea that there even are laws, most of which require a law degree to understand even the basics of, let alone the associated case law.

Yeah, that!

The scary thing for me is that on any random traffic stop, a police officer can arrest me for any imagined offense, and find some law to justify their action. It is impossible to live in my country and not be in violation of some law, rule or treaty.

(A side note: I actually have been arrested on a routine traffic stop. I spent four days in jail. It took that long to prove that I was not the person that they were after. Some clerk had entered the license plate number incorrectly at the FBI. I won that lottery.)