
Frankenstein Veto - Tomte
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_veto
======
waterheater
As one user alludes to below, it did originate from an overuse of omnibus
bills in the 1930s [1]. Here's something important to realize:

"Neither the framers of the 1930 amendment, nor the voters who ratified it,
had any intention of creating a unilateral executive power to create laws that
the legislature did not approve. Instead, they sought to ensure that each
separate item that might become law as part of an appropriation bill would
have the approval of the governor, in addition to that of the senate and the
assembly. [2]"

And guess what? The Frankenstein veto doesn't exist anymore! It was removed in
2008 [3]. The Wikipedia article should more explicitly state that.

Note that line-item vetoing still exists widely across the US and is quite
useful.

From an absurdist standpoint, I find the Frankenstein veto hilarious because
it's, to use the term from the Wikipedia article, "quasi-legislating." You're
not actually adding content to the bill, but you're changing the meaning! It's
twisted and brilliant at the same time.

One commenter says "how can this possibly be legal?" Well, it's not anymore!
But it did make for some clever and humorous legislating. Like, look at link
[1] and find the picture half-way down with yellow highlights. You have to
have a certain audacity to do that.

Also, I'm from Wisconsin and would love to see Jim Doyle fight the Bears at
Lambeau. He probably would have wiped the floor with Cutler...

Sources:

[1] [https://wiscontext.org/story-wisconsins-singular-partial-
vet...](https://wiscontext.org/story-wisconsins-singular-partial-veto)

[2]
[https://www.wisbar.org/NewsPublications/WisconsinLawyer/Page...](https://www.wisbar.org/NewsPublications/WisconsinLawyer/Pages/Article.aspx?ArticleID=1640)

[3]
[https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/us/03wisconsin.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/us/03wisconsin.html)

~~~
twic
> Note that line-item vetoing still exists widely across the US and is quite
> useful.

Almost every other country on earth seems to get on fine without it.

It seems like a bizarre and trivially abusable power to me. Say a left-wing
legislature passes a bill to make taxation more progressive, by decreasing the
standard rate of tax, and adding an additional rate of tax for people earning
over a million dollars a year. A right-wing governor can just line-item veto
the second part, and turn it into a tax cut. So either the legislature simply
won't pass such a bill, effectively silencing the voice of the people as
expressed through their votes for legislators, or they will have to draft it
in a cunning way to make it line-item-veto-proof, spending time and text, and
reducing clarity, to overcome that obstacle.

~~~
walshemj
From a democratic perspective how exactly is having an executive be able to
change a motion after it has passed a "good" thing

~~~
sarah180
America was not intended to be a pure democracy.

The "checks and balances" of our government are really several different forms
of government. We have the democracy of the public, the plebeian officers of
the house, the aristocracy of the senate, the council of philosophers on the
court, and the dictatorship of the executive.

None of this, however, argues in favor of giving the executive the authority
to rewrite legislation. Even the much more mild line-item veto is an absurd
workaround for a broken legislative process. If the legislature wants smaller,
separable acts, it doesn't need to go crying to King Solomon.

~~~
jfengel
Unfortunately, the legislative process may be inherently broken. The bar to
pass legislation is 50%+1, and it's very hard to find any issue on which you
can get a genuine majority entirely in isolation. What happens instead is that
allies are made, and they agree to support each other: I'll vote for your
thing if you'll vote for mine.

That's most effective when you can lump those votes into one, rather than two
bills voted serially. That happens sometimes anyway, but some bills
(especially budgets) contain thousands if items each of which is only of
interest to a minority. That happens even without bad faith or earmarking. A
bill to build a road between two states is most favored by those two states; a
weapons system makes jobs where it's made, and the runner-up gets nothing.
That's the ordinary give-and-take of trying to run a large country.

A line-item veto upsets the ability to do that... which seems appropriate when
it runs off the rails, but also prevents legitimate business. I don't have a
good solution to that problem, and I'd be very happy if King Solomon were to
propose one. Running a country of hundreds of millions of people with diverse,
and often competing, interests is hard even under the best of circumstances.
And today, I believe, the circumstances are not best.

------
jka
Imagining legislative text as if it were software code, this is akin to
discovering that an engineer has been running a regex across pull requests
which replaces 'if (safety-condition-encountered)' with 'if (false)' \-- just
prior to merge/deploy.

What would happen to that engineer and code review process in a well-run tech
organization?

And why should we not apply the same principles to legal changes -- which
affect our real world environment -- as we do for software changes which
affect our application environments?

~~~
bordercases
Software systems are meant to be totally consistent, both for the sake of
being able to execute deterministicly on dumb machines, and for reliable
performance in relatively static or funneled environments.

Legal systems operate in constantly evolving environments and in thick,
untransparent cases where the truth of the matter is typically unknown and
needs are conflicting.

You might be able to do this kind of thing in limited settings of
organizational design or corporate policy – but you will not be able to
completely replace federal law with software.

~~~
jka
Even in evolving environments, it's important to have terminology that
describes what is acceptable and what is not in clear terms.

Writing precise language is hard, but ambiguity of language is worse, since it
can lead to potentially unsafe interpretation.

The Frankenstein Veto makes it possible for state Governors to alter the
meaning 'near runtime' \- certainly post-review - and accidentally or
intentionally create loopholes which enable damaging outcomes.

~~~
bordercases
But laws are already not written ambiguously. They may be written with
technical jargon which may be too specific or euphemistic, but that's not
quite the same thing. What you would be advocating for at that point might a
common language for law that avoids euphemism and keeps the reading level at a
certain level of complexity, but doing so also limits the richness of language
that we can use to describe legal agreements in the first place.

Furthermore any software system that could handle the Frankensetin Veto would
have to be extremely competent in natural language and somehow do model
checking on all the combinations of cases that natural language can cover. Not
going to happen in polynomial time buddy. Not for all sorts of law anyway.

The problem that the Frankenstein Veto case demonstrates doesn't necessarily
have to be handled in software either. It's a problem with the workflow of
law, not the systems implementation.

~~~
jka
I'm asking for simple language, accessible to a broad audience, which allows
rules to be written so that most people applying them to a set of example
situations would arrive at the same results.

Beyond that, what I'm suggesting is that it could be helpful to gradually make
it easier for the public to view, comment on, and search proposed and historic
legislative changes.

Collaboration, tracking down bugs and coaching/mentoring in open source
software is greatly aided by tools like GitHub; it's worth having concerns
about whether such a service itself should be proprietary, but I do think the
value it creates is worth looking at.

If something similar could be created for legal texts, I think it's possible
that there could be similar benefits. There may be risks, too.

My suggestion isn't that we should devise a software system to implement the
rules of the Frankenstein Veto; instead my theory is that the time-to-detect
and time-to-recover from a process problem like the Frankenstein Veto would
both be shorter in the presence of an open, collaborative, transparent
legislative repository.

------
nathell
This reminds me of an idea I've had for a while.

In Poland, bills that amend laws are formed in a rigid way. They consist of a
long list of recitals like:

"article such-and-such is amended to 'new text goes here'"

or

"after article 1.2.3, article 1.2.3a is hereby inserted with the following
content: 'text goes here'"

(random example:
[http://prawo.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/download.xsp/WDU2019000180...](http://prawo.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/download.xsp/WDU20190001802/T/D20191802L.pdf)).

It has occurred to me that this kind of bills should be automatically parsable
and convertible to a diff. Hence, a collection of amended acts should, in
principle, be convertible to a Git repository.

The existing systems that cost heavy money probably already support something
like this. But it still would be awesome to be able to do `git bisect` or `git
log -S` on such a repo.

~~~
orhanhh
Check out this: [https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-
Constitution](https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution) It's not an
official source, but they added the history with correct dates etc. Very cool
concept!

Our student organisation (for CS students) also has our organisation statutes
in git: [https://github.com/abakus-ntnu/statutter](https://github.com/abakus-
ntnu/statutter)

------
rebuilder
I'd be really interested in hearing from someone who thinks this is a good
thing. How can this possibly be legal?

~~~
wrkronmiller
Venturing a guess: the goal was to allow line-item vetoes in omnibus-type
bills so that the legislature can’t force the executive into accepting
unwanted legislation alongside badly-needed and potentially unrelated
legislation.

~~~
mikepurvis
This is basically what happens with the budget every year in Canada. And we
don't even have the "executive with veto power is the other party" issue
because it's parliamentary.

~~~
cperciva
We have no shortage of politicians promising to put an end to omnibus budget
bills, though! Unfortunately they seem to forget about those promises once
they get elected...

~~~
rtkwe
The problem is they're a simple answer to the problem of highly divided
politics. Passing everything at once is the only guaranteed way to hold people
across the isle to their word that voting yes on this bill they want will mean
a yes on the thing you want. Instead vote on all the compromises at once.

In that way the line item veto is anathema to that. The legislature agreed to
this bill allowing the governor to just cherry pick the parts they like breaks
that down.

------
jonnycomputer
I have not yet found a good argument for the line-item veto; its purpose seems
to be to be able to subvert the intent of a legislative body and extend the
authority of the executive. But I'm open to hearing other opinions. I change
my mind frequently enough.

~~~
Waterluvian
Bills, at least in the US are often already a disaster of loading up a ton of
often unrelated items.

The best argument I can muster is that it can be utilized to fight this.

~~~
unishark
That is pretty much the whole point of the argument. And the unrelated items
aren't just noise, but themselves a kind of subversion of the democratic
process where votes for a bill are "bought" with boondoggle projects and
benefits specific to particular legislators and their districts. Presumably
worse bills can get passed this way, versus if a bill had to get majority of
votes on its own merits.

------
andrewflnr
We need to invent the idea of well-formed bills, with requirements of clarity,
factorability and maybe focus. This probably means we need a new branch of the
judiciary to adjudicate whether bills and edits thereto are well-formed before
they can be enacted. This would allow you to make a precise definition of a
line-item, and therefore a line-item veto, without allowing monstrosities like
in the article, among other benefits.

Edit: alternatively, just don't allow bills that do more than one thing.

~~~
int_19h
It would be nice to have judicial review of all bills as they pass, for
constitutionality as well.

Some would argue that it would slow down the legislative process. But looking
at the sheer size of the US Code, I would argue that it's not at all a bad
thing.

~~~
andrewflnr
In my wilder moments, I argue for requiring the entire US code to be read
aloud in Congress each year before they're allowed to pass new laws.

------
_hardwaregeek
Reminds me of buffer overflow attacks that repurpose/rearrange existing source
code in ways that the author never anticipated to gain control of the system

~~~
SilasX
lol yes I'm working through reverse engineering CTFs now, and that's what I
thought of as well. It seems like this means all your laws have to be super-
convoluted to be robust against individual word deletion, maybe have checksums
in logical expressions scattered throughout.

"I think I'll veto the 'not' here."

I don't know who thought this was a good idea.

~~~
duskwuff
Clearly, the solution is embedded checksums. ;)

"The following bill shall only be valid if it contains exactly 1,672 (one
thousand, six hundred, and seventy-two) words."

~~~
iudqnolq
"The following bill shall be valid" :)

------
cproctor
It would be fun to use this for 'code injection,' specifying that the contents
of an URL under your control should be included verbatim in the bill.

------
einpoklum
Taken from the "Top 10 signs the US is a totally nuts."

... and still not the topmost one!

------
binichgross
This is really against the RAI if you ask me.

~~~
closeparen
What's the RAI?

~~~
jml7c5
"Rules as intended", I think. The phrase seems to be used mostly in tabletop
gaming.

------
macinjosh
Government is absurd.

------
t0mas88
This kind of thing is a bit crazy. It feels like it's related to shared
history with the UK where some political procedure rules also cause clearly
unintended outcomes. It would never happen in more pragmatic systems (think:
Germany) because nobody would accept it.

I think it's based in a difference of legal philosophy, English law has always
considered "exactly what is written down and nothing more" where some other
systems tend to give weight to what is considered reasonable (with the
ambiguity problems that comes with it) and the intent of the contract.

~~~
pjc50
> English law has always considered "exactly what is written down and nothing
> more" where some other systems tend to give weight to what is considered
> reasonable (with the ambiguity problems that comes with it) and the intent
> of the contract.

This isn't really a good description; English civil law leans on
reasonableness a lot, and administrative law has "Wednesbury
unreasonableness". And US constitutional law discussion goes on about the
"intent of the founders" a lot.

No, the Frankenstein veto is a consequence of having a highly partisan system
_and_ multiple layers of government. So you can get situations where the
govenor and the legislature are engaging in this kind of stupid warfare. I
don't think that's actually possible in Germany? Possibly the powers and
subsidiarity are distributed in more clearly defined ways in the (partly US-
written!) federal constitution?

~~~
rebuilder
The US have a system where the president has the power to start a nuclear war.
Consequently, the presidency is an supremely powerful office only one party
can control at a time. This is a winner-takes-all system where the stable
optimum is a two-party oligarchy.

~~~
unishark
The presidency is one branch of three in the US federal govt, each with
supreme power in their particular roles. The primarily powers of the
presidency relates to foreign policy, as opposed to the congress which writes
the laws and controls the budget. So an example of a power regarding who
controls military capabilities doesn't prove the president is supremely
powerful in a discussion about writing laws. Unless you imagine the president
will use the military domestically like Caesar to create a dictatorship (which
people keep predicting for pretty much every single president, yet hasn't
happened).

