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Comment by rmbyrro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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