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Comment by docdeek | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the fact that the amendment earned "unanimous approval in the senate” is what should really be concerning here. The idea seems clearly a joke but it was voted for by everyone in a senate split 27 Demoratcs/15 Republicans and headed for a house vote with a similar division (46D/24R). Does no one read what they are voting for?

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One of my thoughts is that legislatures need more money for staff. Executive branches have billions of dollars to hire experts on long term contracts. How many in house experts does a legislature have?

Maybe 100 years ago this would work, but the modern state is really complex, and the problems are really complex, because if they were easy they would be solved.

The amount of money that state and federal legislatures control is huge, My hunch is that if they spent more on extra staff, the increase in quality of legislation would provide enough economic benefits to cover the cost.

Theoretically, the agencies in the executive branch should fulfill this role.

Isn’t this part of the benefit of lobbyists? Assume that every bill that goes before the legislature has someone who cares greatly (because if no one cared, it’s a problem that would have been solved beforehand), and you can guarantee at least two opposing viewpoints being represented by lobbyists, for “free” from the point of the legislative admin budget.

Unless, of course, the best policy position does not create enough concentrated financial incentive for someone to hire a lobbyist to advocate for it.

> ...more money for staff.

Specifically, this staff:

https://www.reliks.com/lord-of-rings-hobbit/staff-of-gandalf...

Congress has the Congressional Research Service.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Research_Servi... and https://crsreports.congress.gov/search/#/?termsToSearch=&ord...

CRS reports are a phenomenal source of information.

If there are no lobbyists paying them to pay attention, why would they bother?

To be fair, Scott revealed the amendment was satirical prior to a vote in New Mexico House of Representatives.

prior.... so they knew it was satire.

Only if they were listening and say not elderly and half asleep.

I suppose (and hope) the representatives figured that out themselves, and were simply going along in the same spirit - but one can't be sure, at least these days.

Prior to the house vote, it had already passed the senate vote.

> Does no one read what they are voting for?

Does it really sound like the most likely explanation to you? Because I can think about several others.

Do share

Please could you share your other explanations? Whatever you're implying here is not clear, especially to non Americans.

The answer, of course, is that everyone sincerely agreed it would be beneficial to have the quacks wear wizard hats (to keep them from getting a big head)

What? You’re either speaking from the perspective of an American, or a non-American.

What is another likely explanation?

They might have read it, thought it was funny, and approved it anticipating someone else blocking or vetoing it.

I mean, it's certainly true that lots of gigantic, complicated bills don't get read properly by politicians before voting on them. But this is about a paragraph and written in clear English, so you'd imagine it would have a good chance of getting read.

I believe it is totally the opposite. Every single one of the voters has read the bill and agreed unanimously on passing it through, because it makes a lot of sense. Modern psychology is a little better than astrology back in the day. Psychology is yet to become a proper science, once it accepts proper scientific methods and discards the voodoo of past days.

Until then, hereby I vote for them to wear wizard hats in public!

> Modern psychology is a little better than astrology back in the day.

That really sounds like you're implying that modern day astrology is better.

It's shocking how popular astrology still is.

It seems like a joke but judges wear wigs in the UK. It is a pure style/tradition thing why not start a new one!

This is hilarious. Do you genuinely think this little of politicians? No, seriously. I know politicians are easy to dunk on, but do you genuinely think that this is the explanation? That this is even a likely explanation? They weren’t just, you know, having a laugh? This is out of touch, even for HN.

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