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Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

> why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts

What incentives do lawmakers have to make laws simpler?

This is why judges cannot be the highest power - the people still need to be able to hold them accountable to ensure that the legal institutions don't become inaccessible to the common man.

(Not that they are accessible now... but it could be worse.)

That was Scalia's point in his dissent of the gay marriage decision:

Scalia argues in his opinion that the court is increasingly creating policy rather than serving as a neutral arbiter.

“Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court,” he writes.

“This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/246249-sca...

People in one part of the country go to the courts, and force their will/values on the rest of the country. Activists across the political spectrum do it.

It’s funny since that specific ruling is what stopped a minority of the US population from imposing their will/“values” on the rest of the country.

Clearly the electoral college and legislature is not setup properly to reflect the will of the people at this point in time, so we have a better chance of it happening from 9 Supreme Court judges.

Supreme Court judges are not reflecting popular will. They dont align with what the majority of population think.

How can we change incentives for lawmakers?

Campaign finance reform, same day primaries nationwide, vigorously prosecute bribes and conflicts of interest, make corporate lobbying illegal, prevent industry careerists from holding office, prevent outgoing politicians from working in the industry for some cool off period

These things aren't hard they're just blocked by years of propaganda by incumbents.

Edit: forgot ranked choice voting

Introduce a rule that any new law should be submitted in the handwriting of its actual authors. And not the handwriting of interns, or staffers of the official authors, the author themselves.

Congress has a 20% approval rating, polled weekly for over the past decade. Yet we vote every two years for the same folks who give us the same results. The problem isn’t them. It’s us.

I'd say the problem is one of competition. "We" cannot choose better legislators unless better legislators come forward for selection, but the incumbents - and by that I mean parties elected or not - have so much money and machinery behind them that to turf them out would be nigh on impossible.

The problem is that each “we” is pulling to benefit themselves at all costs.

Hence giant military fighter jet contracts that span multiple congressmen’s districts around the country, and while being terrible for the future of the country, is untouchable politically as not a single person will vote against their economic interests.

Exactly. It's hard to have collective reform without there being a collective.

I was going to say the same. Lawmakers are elected officials. They're incentivized to do what gets them votes. And voters are concerned with the complexity of laws. Perhaps what we need is better education to create more informed voters. But if lawmakers are in charge of that, too, I'm not super hopeful.

voters say they want that, but do they ever monitor the complexity of any particular bill and vote differently next time strictly because of it?

I misspoke. It's more likely that the vast majority of voters don't care about this issue, and in fact aren't even aware of it.

Doing this is very difficult and exhausting.

Several years ago I signed up to follow 3 politicians I cared about using this site https://www.govtrack.us/. Give it a try, and I think you'll see the deluge of laws, bills, and opinions is too much for a mere mortal mind with a 9-5.

I think this is why we talk about congresspersons' army of staffers and interns. You would not want a single person trying to deal with the complexity of all this information they need to have an informed opinion on in order to vote for/against.

Why does US Congress approval rating matter? If I considered my congressperson 100/100 and everyone else 0/100, the House would get an overall rating of around zero.

Obviously since I can't elect members of the House of Representatives from other districts, I could totally approve of my congressperson and senator and it still not be my fault for the other guys in power.

For any new law submitted, two others have to be removed

This just leads to longer laws, you need to restrict number (and range, eg only stuff in the dictionary) of words.

Lawmaking word golf must be fun.

I said it was necessary; I never said it was sufficient.

I thought the "remove two regulations to add one regulation" was an interesting hack.

Don't know if it's political rhetoric or even viable.

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