
The Plain Writing Act of 2010 [pdf] - fsethi
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-111publ274/pdf/PLAW-111publ274.pdf
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GeneralMayhem
>SEC. 6. JUDICIAL REVIEW AND ENFORCEABILITY.

>(a) JUDICIAL REVIEW.—There shall be no judicial review of compliance or
noncompliance with any provision of this Act.

>(b) ENFORCEABILITY.—No provision of this Act shall be construed to create any
right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable by any administrative
or judicial action.

I'm not particularly familiar with the intricacies of self-regulation in the
US government; if judges can't review whether an agency is following the rule,
and individuals don't have grounds to force the matter because it's not a
"right or benefit", does this mean that there's no enforceability at all, or
is there some other mechanism not mentioned here that kicks in by default?

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dragonwriter
Its essentially unenforceable: the only avenue left is Congress using
violations as motivations for future action, but Congress doesn't need a law
for a basis of that. Its pretty much purely symbolic.

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noahlt
This is funny and ironic, but really it's no different than implementing Lisp
in C. Naturally, the implementation language will not be as nice as the
implemented language.

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irixusr
We also need a bill length vs. review time rule.

If a law is too long for a representative to have read it (Patriot act, ACA)
then Congress should not vote on it until they've had enough time to read it.

I propose 10 days + (number of pages / 5) after it's been introduced to the
public.

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TazeTSchnitzel
> (number of pages / 5)

Five pages alone can require a lot of reading.

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irixusr
Agreed, as anyone who codes and therefore understand how much understanding
five pages of logic can be.

But bills often have more pages than days in an elected congress (two years is
just over 700 days) so you have to divide out

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RankingMember
The way some governmental texts are written, I wouldn't be surprised if they
run the original text through an obfuscation find/replace algorithm that
replaces words <5 letters with a similar word from a thesaurus with the
maximum length available.

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granos
Those algorithms are called lawyers.

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MalcolmDiggs
It took 2+ full pages to tell people to keep things simple. Awesome.

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cpfohl
You'll notice they explicitly _don 't_ cover regulations (like the one they
were writing), probably because of the amount of legal precedent for
nitpicking the exact phraseology of a given law or regulation...

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dragonwriter
> You'll notice they explicitly don't cover regulations (like the one they
> were writing),

No, they were writing a law, which is different from regulation; law isn't
covered, but not because it is explicitly excluded, but because its not
included, at a minimum because it is written by Congress, and this only covers
work product of Executive agencies.

But more importantly, they've specifically acted to make the law _completely
unenforceable_ (see Sec. 6.)

