
Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand - paltman
http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2013/02/us_rep_justin_amash_introduces.html
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ejdyksen
This is my congressman. Here's why he's interesting:

He doesn't miss any votes, and he explains every single vote (even boring,
inconsequential votes) on his Facebook page:

<https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash>

Here's an example of a boring explanation:

[https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash/posts/51291397874801...](https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash/posts/512913978748013)

Here's a longer explanation:

[https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash/posts/51246580545949...](https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash/posts/512465805459497)

~~~
anigbrowl
_Here's an example of a boring explanation:_

He explained why the vote took place. He didn't tell you why he voted for it.

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jellicle
Legislatures run mainly on norms and customs. As people have pointed out
already, no legislature can bind a future version of itself (which is why the
60-vote filibuster is unconstitutional, but I digress).

Congress could establish better customs, of course. It is customary in many
nations to limit legislation to a single topic and to codify the laws on a
single topic in a single published Act. For example, virtually all of the
important laws relating to, say, education, might be published in an Education
Act, and from time to time, a legislature would enact a new version of it,
replacing the old version entirely.

This tends to make reading up on the laws (and proposed laws) much easier, and
it also makes super-specific tax breaks for individual companies and things
like that really stand out.

The U.S. custom of publishing bills as a list of "replace "and" in line 76422
with "or"" statements is a really poor legislative custom.

~~~
joonix
Agreed. The states do it this way as well. I worked on updating some statutes
after a legislative session and it was a nightmare. Many bills conflict with
each other. Often, nobody even knows what the latest version of a statute
really is. It's a joke.

In some states, such as Georgia, the public can't even read statutes! They
have to buy a copy. Pay to know the law to which you are bound. How does that
make any sense at all?

~~~
walshemj
In theory good parliamentary practice is not to allow conflicting motions and
any consequentials should have been worked out beforehand.

Also any amendments should be relevant to the original motion - which if
applied in the USA would stop a lot of the pork barrel amendments.

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rayiner
Bills are a lot easier to understand if you think of them as source code
diffs. This bill is basically requiring them to provide context diffs which is
actually a pretty decent idea.

~~~
mangostache2
They should just make a law that requires all legislation to be hosted
publicly on github.

~~~
shadowfox
Why would you choose a private commercial entity like Github as a host?

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voyou
Some people, when they find legislation hard to understand, think "I know,
let's legislate to make legislation easier to understand." Now they have two
problems.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
I think you might not have read the article, because the proposal is rather
simple and reasonable.

Laws are often written with links to other laws that are required to
understand them. Some laws are even "diffs" of other laws: "Paragraph 5 in law
65/1996 is removed, and the following paragraph is added instead: blah blah".*
This means that you often need to open four or five different documents to
understand a single law.

The proposal seems aimed at doing away with the links and the diffs, which
sounds very reasonable.

*Note: the example is based on my country's laws (I'm not from the US so I don't read US laws), but judging from the content of the article, it seems like US laws have the same problem.

~~~
cpleppert
From the article:

‘‘No Act shall be revised or amended by mere reference to it. Every bill or
joint resolution which amends an existing section, subsection, or other
subdivision of any Act shall set forth the section, subsection, or other
subdivision sufficiently to enable the intent and effect of the bill or joint
resolution to be clearly understood," the two-page bill states.

First of all, any bill that can't be understood will be struck down by the
courts immediately. The "clearly understood" provision violates the principle
that legislation will be precise. If the legislation lays out a supplementary
principle that serves to explain it then it can't be enforced in court so it
absolutely meaningless.

Congress already lays out why it passes bills in introductions. This is a
political stunt and nothing more.

Law is by its very nature hard to understand especially in a common law system
like ours based on precedents. There is no easy way to allow citizens to
understand the law. It would be great if you could go online and clearly see

1)what the law is and sections have changed over time 2) which law led to
which changes in the published statute and see how that law changed other
sections

I'm working on something like that right now. Please keep in mind that making
the law more accessible doesn't make it easier to understand. There are so
many terms embedded in the law and the courts may not have a clear
interpretation of the language yet; or different circuits have different
precedents.

~~~
rtpg
Quoting a bigger part of the changed text will not make the law meaningless.

Saying "we replace '5kg of solid gold' with '3kg of solid gold'" Instead of
"we replace 5 with 3 here" makes it clearer.

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gamblor956
The Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress _already does
this_. In fact, it's what this particular agency was created to do.

Maybe Rep. Amash should spend more time learning about existing resources and
less time passing redundant laws?

~~~
gizmo686
As an not very politically active person, when I go to look up laws, I am
confronted by the reference problem this bill is designed to solve.
Furthermore, this bill can essentially be viewed as Congress slightly
modifying their own operating procedure to make things easier for themselves
(and others). They are probably the only entity in the US that needs to pass a
law to change how they format documents.

~~~
adestefan
Every Congress has the ability to change any rule about how they work before
the session starts.

------
pserwylo
Slightly off topic, but this reminds me of a great talk on simplifying
legislation so that law people can actually read and understand it:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/alan_siegel_let_s_simplify_legal_ja...](http://www.ted.com/talks/alan_siegel_let_s_simplify_legal_jargon.html)

In the talk, Alan discusses how they simplified a non-trivial set of
legislation to something more like an advertising brochure. They then
confirmed with appropriate lawyers that it was equivalent to the original
legislation.

I would love to see a NPO or volunteer group spring up, comprised of marketers
and lawyers, who retroactively applied this technique to existing laws, then
published them freely.

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theevocater
Isn't this more the arena of a procedural than federal law? This definitely
seems more feel good than reality. I believe the court precedent is called
"legislative entrenchment"[1] which seems to prevent Congress from passing
these laws that "bind" future Congresses.

So, to answer the Representative's question, it would appear that courts would
hold this bill unconstitutional.

[1] [http://www.yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-
journal/essay/leg...](http://www.yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-
journal/essay/legislative-entrenchment:-a-reappraisal/)

------
dctoedt
Minor point: Absent a constitutional amendment, I don't think the bill would
be legally binding (it could, of course, establish a social norm within the
Congress, enforceable by peer pressure).

Suppose that a senator or representative were to introduce a bill that didn't
conform to the diff requirement. Suppose also that both houses passed the
bill, and the president signed it. I don't think anyone would argue that the
bill hadn't become law.

~~~
saalweachter
Yup. "Congress cannot bind future Congresses" and all that. Basically any "I
want to change the way Washington works!" movement is so much circle-jerking
for this reason.

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javajosh
Love love love this! It is precisely the kind of ideology-agnostic change that
needs to start happening! Most of us argue politics in a state of almost
complete ignorance. Politicians take office not knowing the first thing about
the actual job itself. Ideology is a preoccupation, governing is an
occupation.

------
mtgx
The bill should also include the fact that you can't add stuff to the bill
that have nothing to do with the main topic of the bill. This happens far too
often - like putting indefinite detention clauses in budget bills, and so on.

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csense
If I'm ever President, I'll veto any bill that's over two pages without
reading it.

If we really need to pass a 1000-page law for the good of the country,
Congress can send it to me in 500 pieces, which I can veto individually.

~~~
protomyth
So, no Federal Budget during your administration. While your at it, perhaps
you want to look at the actual text density on federal bills.

~~~
csense
Not as a monolithic bill. Modularity and delegation would be better.

The main side effect of having Congress micromanaging tens or hundreds of
thousands of numbers is that everyone goes for pork. For example, everyone
wants military bases in their home state. But with a smaller budget, you might
just have a single item for "Military - Domestic Bases - $15 billion" (or
whatever the actual number is) and let the military high command decide how
many are actually necessary for national defense, where the best locations
are, and whether it's better to have a lot of cheap ones everywhere or a few
expensive ones in crucial locations.

And also, having a 2-year, 4-year or 8-year budget would make a lot of sense
too. We can always write another law to repeal it if it's not working (or the
next administration/Congress opposes the previous one's decisions), but we'll
probably usually let it stand after we pass it. And it reduces waste if
agencies know what they're going to get well ahead of time (especially for
things like certain kinds of scientific research where you're running long-
term experiments).

~~~
protomyth
"military high command decide"

No, that's what we elect congress to deal with. We do not want the "permanent
undersecretary" problem showing up in the US like it has in various other
governments around the world. Its bad enough much of the regulation we have to
deal with was never voted on by congress after seeing what the consequences of
their legislation was. That's where the money is in government and what
directly affects the voters.

Congress cannot pass anything over a two year budget because that would be
unconstitutional.

