> I think what this highlights, however, is that legislation should stem from principles and the interest of the people (individuals only, please)
Exactly. No bill should be longer than a couple of pages. The Constitution is less than 15 pages, no bill should be longer than that. (Or you can pick another arbitrary number as long as it is low).
Special interests are unintentionally creating a worse world for all of us (and not just IP proponents, I mean all special interests from banking lobbyists to teacher unions), and the way they are doing it is because bills are impossible to understand (even if that's your job!), and so everyone tries to get their short term benefit while making the whole system worse in the long run.
Make a constitutional amendment saying no bill can be more than 15 pages and I guarantee you countless problems will go away.
I remember the article about lying to federal investigators several months ago that said something along the lines of "you are not qualified to know if you are breaking federal law. Get a lawyer." This is why.
Remember, of course, that without line-item or amendatory veto powers, the legislature can simply stuff unrelated things into unremarkable bills and get away with it. It's a great reason for your 15-page rule, and also a great reason why it will never happen.
Your constitution has spawned hundreds of years of bickering on how it is meant to be interpreted. I'm not sure this is a good model for all legislation.
It's like those solutions to fight bureaucracy: it's easy to come up with a simpler solution, but invariably you end up finding out that there's a down side to it.
> Make a constitutional amendment saying no bill can be more than 15 pages and I guarantee you countless problems will go away.
Then no bill would pass.
The default for a congress man/woman is to say no. The reason bills are so long is that if you want me to vote yes to your bill then I get to write 2 pages into your bill giving me what I want.
Take a 10 page bill get 100 votes and you've got a 210 page bill that has a chance of passing.
With a law that says no bill can be more than 15 pages you'd never get it passed unless everyone agreed to vote for everyone else's pet bill, then instead of one monster bill, you've got 100 small bills which is arguably worse off as it means you've got to kill many smaller bills rather than being able to kill one larger bill.
I would say that what you describe is a MUCH better situation. If you have 100 small bills rolled into one, it's easier for representatives to say "I voted for this part, not that," or even, "I didn't see that part of the bill." With many smaller bills, it makes the tit-for-tat more explicit.
Representatives could still trade votes if they wanted, but we would have more visibility into the process. What's bad about that?
My thinking was that the time to pass a bill would still remain about the same, regardless of size. This means that we wouldn't see as many little bills passed as large bills.
I get your point about smaller bills providing better transparency. That's a very good side effect of smaller bills!
Not sure we'd see fewer bills passed; the cognitive load for each one would be smaller, so maybe they could work faster.
Anyway, "fewer bills passed" could be a good thing, depending on your perspective. The job of Congress isn't to pass as many bills as possible any more than the job of programmers is to write as many lines of code as possible. Less output may be better.
Just make lots of short bills instead, or make a sort bill granting vast regulatory authority to another group. Congressmen are clever and they will get around arbitrary restrictions like that.
Exactly. No bill should be longer than a couple of pages. The Constitution is less than 15 pages, no bill should be longer than that. (Or you can pick another arbitrary number as long as it is low).
Special interests are unintentionally creating a worse world for all of us (and not just IP proponents, I mean all special interests from banking lobbyists to teacher unions), and the way they are doing it is because bills are impossible to understand (even if that's your job!), and so everyone tries to get their short term benefit while making the whole system worse in the long run.
Make a constitutional amendment saying no bill can be more than 15 pages and I guarantee you countless problems will go away.