The problem is that "the authoritarians" (read: almost every politician at every level of government, but a drastically increasing percentage the higher you go) only need to get something passed once then it is there forever.
Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:
> I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?
>Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:
There's an interesting, one-time shakeup that we could actually accomplish. While it's true that there will never again be another constitutional amendment... there's already one out there that will never expire, partially ratified. Completely beyond Congress's ability to rescind it or cockblock it. Article the First.
Were it to be ratified, nearly immediately (whenever the next Census is), the House of Representatives has over 6000 seats. So many that the existing party apparatus wouldn't be able to vet candidates or manipulate. Lobbyists, even, would have a hard time allotting the slush funds to bribe them all.
And what would it take to do all of this? Maybe 10 or 12 people hammering (gently) on some state legislator in Nevada or Kansas. Convince him or her to pass the resolution to ratify. Nothing more than that. A single state even attempting to ratify it would start the ball rolling, and no one would be able to stop it.
I have long thought that capping the number of representatives in the House is the single worst thing to happen, structurally, to the United States government. Representatives should be as close to the people as possible, and spending millions every two years to represent nearly 3/4 of a million people isn't even close.
If you're outside of New England (and Kentucky), your state could still ratify it. The quantity of effort needed to do that is bizarrely small. A dozen people focusing on a single state legislator might convince him or her to bring it to the floor.
The last time this happened (in the 1990s), it didn't even take that much.
I'm not sure it really matters if the senate still exists. the money men will just move the bribes to the senators. winning a senate seat would mean you are a millionaire at minimum.
Concentrated interests want legislation favoring them at the expense of the easily-misled public. So what's your model by which repeal becoming less near-impossible makes the net damage from this dynamic greater.
I love that book, and its teachings of cell structures for decentralized rebellion. But it is a libertarian fantasy. And we've seen in the US, particularly due to the voting-system-imposed two party cap, that bad faith actors will sabotage good government as a goal in itself. I'm not confident that we need to make it even harder to pass laws in the US. We need to have voting reform in the country to allow a real free market of political parties that accurately represent the will of the people, and hold true to the values that we have in our Bill of Rights such as freedom of speech and freedom to privacy and civil rights.
Really I'm not married to that proposal, I agree some voting reforms like approval voting should help, and I don't think any formal changes are enough on their own to get our political culture out of the current pit. What I like about this idea is bringing attention to the repeal problem as worth attention and imagination. Achieving a setup with some powerful people with a career interest in simplifying the infinite codebase.
> libertarian fantasy
You can see it that way... though the Prof was not expecting uptake for those proposals, he didn't get them, and the protagonist at the end is thinking of emigrating to the Belt. The U.S. was a libertarian fantasy before its founding.
FWIW that's what I was getting at for "change the voting system". I don't like approval voting because despite every other election system advantage it has, I think most people have preferences in their candidates, and it would be better to allow them to express them.
There's score voting too. I believe approval is the best focal point for this kind of reform because it's the simplest one, simpler even than the status quo. (In UI terms it's switching from radio buttons to checkboxes.) Any complication or unfamiliarity is a problem in multiple ways. (Score voting goes from checkbox to a 1-5 stars or whatever.)
I was guarded above because even though system-level reform should be a bigger deal than object-level, I think putting a lot of hope on it is setting yourself up for disappointment. You need culture change or competition in governance.
> Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
Then you will have a lot of Constitution amendments. That's first.
The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators. That's second.
> Then you will have a lot of Constitution amendments.
You say that like it's a bad thing?
> The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators.
The "burden" would also include, for the most part, being able to look up at any given point in time whether something violated the law without referring to hundreds of thousands of pages of other codes, administrative law, and agency rules.
I am saying that politicians will get around the sunsetting rule, if any, that's first.
Constitution, then, will serve as what regular law does right now, without anything that makes something Constitution. That's second.
I also am strongly suspecting that hundredths of thousands of pages of codes and laws will not get leaner at all. There is no point in ceding regulatory capture, because the capability to capture regulations is the point of governance, as I see it.
That's attacking the symptom rather than the cause. The deeper issue is that the legislature is not responsive to the people who don't actually want X anymore. Instead, how about:
1. Replace plurality votes and single-primaries with some form of ranked-choice voting. This reduces the spoiler effect and makes it easier for people to organize around their real priorities.
2. Remove the hard-cap on the House of Representatives, peg it to a number of constituents, and let them meet and vote virtually.
3. Instead of a single "winner takes all" for one region (much smaller regions, if the House is uncapped) allow multiple proportional winners for a moderate region.
4. It's not possible to amend how the Senate seats are per-state, but we can at least make it easier for large States to fission if they decide those rules are screwing over their residents. (Subject to conditions conditions I won't bore you with here. Yet.)
The problem is that there isn't really this clean discrete sense of 'a law'. There is the federal code, and the federal register, and bills or rules enacted over time which amend those things. Often times those bills are collections of amendments which do things like add a phrase or swap out a word or add a bullet point to a list. They're like diffs. You can't just have those things sunset individually or you end up with a incoherent code and you end up creating a state of the code which is not what was intended by anyone, at any point along the way. And these can be significant things, like a substantial bill which makes a significant change to federal law may be just like adding a bullet point to a couple lists, or adding a parenthetical to a paragraph.
If you make it so all of the federal code and register has to be voted on every 1-10 years, then you'll just make it so everyone always votes to pass all of it, because no one is sitting down and reading all of it, because almost no one even sits down to read all the bills proposed in a year, which are much smaller in text volume.
The real underlying problem is that legislators are not responsive to the demands of their constituents. Ideas which have supermajority support among the public are not valued or prioritized. And none of the legislators suffer for it, because the elections are not generally competitive among candidates who understand policymaking, and there is a strong incumbency bias where people just vote for the person they recognize as long as they don't have major complaints and as long as they can't explicitly identify a reason that another candidate is clearly better across all measures.
That would indeed solve many problems. It would also focus legislative minds now and in the future. Not sure it would be beneficial for the judicial branch.
Also beneficial perhaps would be to have it be necessary that the law spells out the technical implementation. Sort of like patents do.
In this very comment I started talking about the patriot act two or three times but kept deleting it because I didn't want to ramble. But yeah that's exactly what I was thinking of - for people who care about privacy and freedom it was really one of the worst pieces of legislation in modern US history, and permanently changed the country for the worse.
In the saga period of Iceland, 1/3rd of the laws had to be recited orally each year in a public assembly. If we had something like that then our legal code would be a lot slimmer.
Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.