Hacker News Reader

Comment by lockhouse | Hacker News Reader

Yes, a bill should have to be read out loud in its entirety by its sponsor in public before any voting can occur.

On the floor, with a majority present.

Nothing you do can keep the majority awake.

Budget bills in particular can get really tedious. And any bill that, say, strikes or adds a word to already extant law, would require reading the entirety of the law so changed.

I don’t care if they stay awake, I want to end omnibus Bible sized bills full of pork and erosions of our rights being put in bills that would otherwise be in the interests of the people.

Forcing them the discomfort of having to read it out loud all by themselves should help greatly with that.

I’m looking at you former speaker of the house that said we have to pass the bill to know what’s in it.

This will incentive Congress to delegate more than they do now. Instead of line items for each major expense in a budget bill, they'll just assign X billions of dollars to Y agency to parcel out as the agency director wishes.

Yes and that will reduce pork by no longer mandating the Army to buy a specific number of tanks that are built in an important Congressman’s district when they really need money to fix a barracks.

You'd hope so, but this will probably be covered by only appointing people willing to delve out pork as directors of the agencies.

While we're at it, every Git pull request should have to be read out in full. No `git diff` - that's just as bad as what Congress does. Read every source file, even the ones that didn't changed, just to be sure. /s

Self-filibuster?

The self-filibuster. I fully support it.

Now /that’s/ some bureaucracy

It would result in them being shorter

Is shorter better?

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Seen this quote recently, in some book about RISC-V.

That doesn't mean shorter is always better. When you take away necessary detail to make things shorter, you wind up with a shorter, less perfect law.

For instance, if the law was "No driving over 70mph on I-75", shortening the law to "No driving" isn't an improvement. And even if we maintain the detail and shorten to "No 70+mph driving @ I-75" it doesn't improve things.

Concise is good. shortness for shortness sake is not. We don't need to be playing code golf with laws.

Shorter makes it harder to stuff it full of pork.

It would result in a pointless formal exercise simply designed to make things more difficult without any tangible benefit. Bureaucracy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com