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Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

Problem is that they can just keep rewording and repackaging it endlessly until the checksum doesn't match but the final effect is mostly the same.

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I thought about letting people take the issue to court and making politicians face actual consequences if a judge decides that politicians brought up the same law over and over again in bad faith. But I guess it'd be abused when tactics like the filibuster work to kill off badly needed laws.

In a well functioning democracy, politicians that fail to bring laws that they and their voters believe in, into action, would be voted out.

And would be voted out, if they fail over and over. And would not be elected in the first place when they operate on bad faith.

Unfortunately, such a democracy doesn't exist and probably never will be. When marketing, spinning, populism and other such tactics make the civis vote in the best interest of the politicians rather than the civis themselves.

There would be massive counter-productive effects the moment a significant enough fraction of the population is willing to bring forward bogus lawsuits to use as a political weapon and for propaganda purposes. It is DOA.

I know a similar principle is successfully applied in judicial courts, in some cases.

If it's possible in justice, why not in law making?

Perhaps because courts are not a democracy? This class of problems gets much easier when an individual is designated to make a binding declaration (e.g. that these three seemingly different feelings are effectively the same) that's hard to challenge. Democracy has a hard time dealing with "obvious when you see it" problems.

The US House and Senate have parliamentarians, who have some power about what bills can be voted on. This was in the news some years ago, when they (if memory serves) blocked some bills from being voted on.

I am unsure of the limits of this power, and how easy it is to change parliamentary rules in the first place.

Similarly in 2019 John Bercow (then speaker of the British House of Commons) notably rebuffed the government when they attempted a third vote on what he considered to be basically the same motion

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47614074

> Mr Bercow cited a convention dating back to 1604 that a defeated motion could not be brought back in the same form during the course of a parliamentary session.

Courts are a fundamental part of a Democracy.

There should be an exponential back-off algorithm for proposals. The public should be able to ask a judge to decide whether a new proposal triggers the back-off or whether it's a new one that can be proposed immediately.

Solution, perhaps, is equally persistent opposition.-

But that's a problem. People get tired of having to fight against the same thing over and over and over.

Put another way, we have to successfully oppose things like this every single time it comes up. But the people pushing it just have to win once.

Well then again, we've been fighting against tyranny for thousands of years and things have slowly gotten better. There are always new people, new generations, prepared to fight for the same thing their parents did and they are not tired.

Put that way, it sounds a lot like infosec ...

(I'd humbly posit, however, that - even at worst - even if those promoting this were to win, it does not necesarily follow that any legislative/regulatory change is "irreversible" ...

... so contrarian persistence might still be warranted).-

Opposition needs public support.

The public, in general, gets tired of repeated messages.

I suspect their motivation to pass orwellian laws are higher than the public's resiliency.

The public is always changing; one generation will age out, while another joins the fray.

They're insisting on such proposals on a yearly basis. I suspect they'll intensify the frequency from now on. They can saturate the current generation's resiliency threshold until the proposal is passed.

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