Better yet, every law should have an expiration date that must be explicitly renewed.
It would be better to vote for better politicians who work together to enact sensible, reasonable and evidence based policies but that'll never happen, because humans.
A lot of state constitutions have single subject rules prohibiting this.
For example, if the goal of the law is to lower incidence of crime X and if crime X has not decreased by 10% by Jan 1st, 2026 the law automatically is voided.
The Oregon legislature only meets for 6 months in odd numbered years and a month and a half in even years.
In that time they barely have time to address pressing issues of the day, do we really need them to be rubber stamping a bunch of laws for weeks every time?
It’s a terrible idea.
You are saying that as if that is some in-mutable fact of life. I work the whole year. Odd and even years included. Why don't they?
> do we really need them to be rubber stamping a bunch of laws for weeks every time?
Maybe they will think harder about how to achieve the same level of service with less and better laws then.
Assuming you’re a programmer, why don’t you just write fewer lines of code?
Maybe we should just have every line of code automatically delete itself after a specified period of time.
Lines of code is actually a great analogy. The Linux kernel frequently removes old, irrelevant code that is poorly maintained and is no longer useful.
Most likely, they'd just resort to blanket renewing everything, in order to get to the real work, if it were a year that work was doable. And in years where there's no appetite for getting things done, it will probably take the whole session to get the renewals done.
What I don’t agree with is the idea that you should just slash away at it with a machete rather than cut away with a scalpel.
Making changes to laws is extremely politically fraught and challenging, the real world is messy, and we need laws.
For as much flak as people like to give our political system, America has succeeded for having fairly effective and good government, not in spite of it.
If anything it works like a series of patches. Imagine a codebase where each commit has an expiration date. If some patches are left to expire, I think we can would be in agreement that at the very least we would have no expectation that patch application would still be successful - leaving us with textual issues.
At the very worst, we have no guarantee that the resulting body of law would be consistent, or result in a consistent society. We already have potential loopholes when folks are careful with drafting laws. This is asking for exploits. There is no static analysis for political economy.
Oh I'm working very hard on that. Code is liability.
> Maybe we should just have every line of code automatically delete itself after a specified period of time.
I actually proposed that. We should just try to randomly delete lines of code and if it doesn't break any tests just commit it. And I was only half joking.
i imagine the original goal was to have "regular people" vs "career politicians"
The even numbered year session was added relatively recently (i.e. within the last 20 years.) And the minority party still complains when major when major work is done during that period of time, because “that’s not what it is for”.
In practice I don't think it works the way its being presented like this. You still need to be wealthy enough to kick off a campaign, raise awareness for running for office etc.
I don't think this has meaningfully made the Oregon legislature more representative of the "average" person
From anecdotal experience most people don’t even know who they are or what they do.
Is 6/1.5/6/1.5... "enough" for what they should be doing now or "enough" to do what they should be doing in a world where all laws sunset? How would I know from looking at the number of months they're in session?
If they only met 1.5 months every year, would it be obvious to you that they didn't have enough time to "address pressing issues of the day"?
If they met 6 months every year, would it seem to you like they must be spinning their wheels a bit?
This comment reads similar to people saying “why does it take so long to add a button to a website! It seems so simple to me I don’t know why you’re just wasting your time! What do we even pay you for?”
I’m sure most would just be put right back through, but politicians would probably be wary of effectively signing on to the worst stuff again.
ORS 811.315 Failure of slow driver to drive on right
A person commits the offense of failure of a slow driver to drive on the right if the person is operating a vehicle upon a roadway at less than the normal speed of traffic at the time and place and under the conditions then existing and the person fails to drive:
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So, when does this law expire and need to be renewed? If it was to expire and needed to be renewed, would it get a meaningful review as part of the renewal process?
How long would it take to go through https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_chapter_811 to renew each one? ... and then going up one level https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_title_59
If some individuals were protesting big government and refused to show up to establish quorum in a timely manner, would that result in there being no laws for the road? ... and would that be seen as a good thing?