There should be a law that prevents bills that get shot down from being reintroduced in X years, and also to disallow the same person/group/party from reintroducing it (i.e., it has to come from another person/party).
Like double jeopardy style.
Like double jeopardy style.
There is no democratic process possible with bills taking hundreds or thousands of pages.
One more proof that we are living in (very free) oligarchic systems that think themself to be democracies.
First failure mode is that the metric for two bills being “the same” will be too narrow, in which case the rule will be ineffective due to legislators playing with the punctuation or paragraph structure, or
Second failure mode is that the rule will be too broad and this becomes a weapon which would increase gridlock even further.
By providing parties and non-majority fringe groups within them the option to “damn bills by weak praise” into the future, legislators working adversarially could propose a bill they don’t want to pass, veto it, argue any successor bills are “the same bill”, and now, they’ve effectively enshrined the state of the issue for the next X years.
Introduce a bill that everybody wants with some evil details here or there. Bill get rejected, and you can't introduct similar bill again.
For example, I don’t know if the Civil Rights Act would be renewed in this political environment.
Same with the Endangered Species act and various other environmental legislation.