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Comment by shockeychap | Hacker News Reader

I get why bills are written in the same long-form as contracts. But it creates the problem that, just like most contracts, people don't really understand the contents. (Did you actually read the pile of papers you signed for your mortgage?)

Would it be unreasonable to require any proposed legislation include a comprehensive summary written at something like a 10th grade reading level?

Something like this could help eliminate the manner in which long-form effectively bars most citizen participation in the legislative process. It would also force a degree of clarity on the implications and meanings within a proposal.

We should never, ever have to hear "We need to pass it so we can see what's in it."

As an aside, I also think there should be hard limits on the size of a single piece of legislation. If a competent reader can't sit down, read, and understand it in a single sitting, it's too long.

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> Did you actually read the pile of papers you signed for your mortgage?

Yes, and it took a long time and really pissed off the sales person. Apparently I was the only one to actually read that stuff. And I learned how to opt-out of their marketing crap and I did so - boy were they bothered when I called them on sharing my info after I opted out. I think I must have been the only one ever to opt-out.

Out of curiosity, how do you make changes or opt out?

I also read my mortgage paperwork (annoyed the title company, but they didn't make it an issue, my realtor was fine with it). Mine didn't have anything about advertising or data sharing though. Mine was through a credit union, and the fine print was all reasonable.

I read mine also. The lender seemed way more surprised than I would have expected.

Then the title person later was like, "Almost all of this is standardized stuff. It's not really like you can negotiate it at this point."

Whatever, lady, I want to know what I'm signing, I want to see that this version matches the version I already signed last night (it didn't), and for half a million bucks, you can hang out for ten minutes while I do it.

There was no way to make changes, it was sign or walk away. But I still wanted to know what I was signing. I was told over and over 'this is all boilerplate'. The part about their selling my new address and personal info was not boilerplate and had an opt-out option in the fine print. I just exercised the opt-out - something I had to send in separately.

> I was told over and over 'this is all boilerplate'.

I really hate this response, and I've heard it so many times. It's "boilerplate" only because nobody can be bothered to read it to find out how they're being screwed, mostly because most of these are ridiculously long. If one doesn't want to negotiate, that's fine, but just be straight about it and quit wasting my time.

In one particular "contract", it was also insinuated that I didn't know what I was talking about, because I was (am) not a lawyer. I might not be, but I am not signing anything about "copywrite" (sic). (And there were more semantic errors to that particular one: I was being asked to sign over rights to a work that I didn't have rights to. They had waited until literally the day of a performance to show us this, too. It didn't get signed.)

I also read my mortgage, bank man said no one had ever done that and he clearly had not read it himself. The agreement obligated me to pay the bank unlimited money (in fees) and forbid using the loan for the purposes it was advertised for.

Agreed. And add in having easily-viewed diffs over the course of the bill’s evolution, so we can see who’s making which changes.

But there’s a lot of inertia against changes like this. And hard limits on bills mean there’s less horse-trading to help certain legislators sign onto a bill (which often might be pork). Not a great realization, but it’s part of how bills get passed.

We need radically more light on the activities of legislators. Sunlight cleanses all.

I think this is necessary to get us out of the quagmire that we find ourselves in, but any additional transparency will inevitably lead to witch hunts which -- even if deserved -- will lead to instability. We need to give ourselves and our representatives a path to transition to the light without letting cynical people bomb out the foundations of our society with emotion-fueled rage mobs.

Perhaps another post on the front page right now is relevant here:

On the bare necessity of psychological safety - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860743

And add in having easily-viewed diffs over the course of the bill’s evolution, so we can see who’s making which changes.

We already have that, except a) it's not as easily to read as it might be and b) without significant study, it's often not obvious what the import of a change is.

I think we need to be thinking about a long term goal fo dispensing with representatives as they currently exist and moving toward a wiki-ocracy, where anyone can write or edit parts of the legal code but there are procedures for conflict resolution, as well as constraints of various kinds.

That (sorta) exists. This bill doesn't appear to be on Congress.gov yet, but as an example, https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1

I appreciate the example, but that's way too broad and abstract compared to what I'm talking about.

"Specifically, the bill expands voter registration (e.g., automatic and same-day registration) and voting access (e.g., vote-by-mail and early voting). It also limits removing voters from voter rolls."

"The bill addresses ethics in all three branches of government, including by requiring a code of conduct for Supreme Court Justices, prohibiting Members of the House from serving on the board of a for-profit entity, and establishing additional conflict-of-interest and ethics provisions for federal employees and the White House."

What does any of that mean specifically? Expands voter registration and access how? Imposes what limits on removing voters from voter rolls? What's in the code of conduct for Supreme Court Justices? And on and on and on.

There has to be middle ground between a useless and abstract summary - that sounds more like a commercial than a true summary - and the bill itself with several pages of preamble just to define well-understood terms.

The more specific the summary, the more likely it is to be incorrect in some strict sense. Then if all of it becomes law, the courts have to interpret which part is right.

So, by that logic, a summary must be so vague as to be meaningless, lest it risk being incorrect by the strictest of standards.

We can do better. It would be very easy to establish a broad “good-faith” standard for a legislative summary while also specifying it’s use for “informational purposes only.”

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