That is the only way to run a government.
Consider for a moment what a government of "Yes"/"No Forever, without ever revisiting the question" would result in.
We aren't at the end of history.
Consider for a moment what a government of "Yes"/"No Forever, without ever revisiting the question" would result in.
We aren't at the end of history.
And for some reason, once these things pass, it’s a one way door. When does the US public get a chance to reconsider the Patriot Act?
Like, that's just the nature of representative democracy.
The practice deserves every bit of scorn it gets.
When you can't even figure out that having blatantly and openly vindictive and corrupt people in government is a bad idea, the fact that they aren't annually revisiting some legislature that's an issue for the 5% of the population that is the tech crowd isn't the problem. Like, it's a problem, but but it's not the problem.
We're now at over four years[1] since initial consultations were held and there's still not a formal consensus position in the council and the encryption bypass is explicitly excluded in the Parliament's draft, so it's not like we're particularly close to a law being enacted.
Basically the asymmetry you are describing is pretty exaggerated
[1]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/PIN/?uri=CELEX:52...
Stasis is not great, but surely preferable to an authoritarian ratchet.
I'm not suggesting that they never reconsider things, just those in government really seem to want it to happen, despite it being unpopular with the electorate, and so they try on a regular basis to get it to happen, despite the public outcry each time.
But what we do need is a wider no. Not just "no this highly specific combination of stipulations is not ok, let's try it again next month with one or two little tweaks". That's what we have now. Whack a mole. The problem with that is that once it passes they will not have a vote every month to retract it again, then it will be there basically forever.
What we need is a "No this whole concept is out of bounds and we won't try it again unless something changes significantly".
Every time your law fails to pass you cannot revisit it for a longer period of time.
1year 5years 10years Etc
Means that laws with enough political will get passed, but bad laws can be more easily blocked.
... And then figure out how to prevent poison-pill sabotage, because the best way to prevent a legislature from ever passing becomes 'deliberately draft a really bad version of it, and have your party veto it'.
Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.
If the Supreme Court of Canada rules a law unconstitutional, the government in power can overrule their ruling by using the notwithstanding clause. However, the notwithstanding clause override to keep the law in effect only lasts for five years. Subsequent legislatures have to keep renewing the override or the Supreme Court's ruling of unconstitutionality takes effect again.
There's no option to do that though. To block something for 10 years you'd have to stiff it at least 3 times, 1 and 5 years apart (which would mean doing it across at least two legislative terms).
Important bills generally don't go to a vote unless everyone involved knows exactly how many votes they are going to get. Your proposal won't actually stop anything that a majority wants passed from passing - as long as a minority can't get ahead of them by poisoning the bill.
Bills are not single-issue. Any bill - even the best - can be trivially tanked by attaching a bunch of awful garbage to it. You are giving a single person (or whatever the minimum quorum is for putting a bill to vote) the power to kill, for years, progress on any issue - by putting forward their own version that's saddled with crap.
This would immediately be abused to disastrous effect.
You will end up with a complete farce, with the minority trying to outdo itself by coming up with the worst possible bills imaginable, that happen to include slivers of a majority's agenda. It's completely ass-backwards way to approach any decisionmaking process - because you are effectively giving multi-year issue veto power to any member of a legislature that's willing to embarass themselves by proposing garbage (that they don't actually want passed).
Or, worse yet, the majority will take the bait, and pass the bad bill anyway (because if they don't vote for it now, they won't get the chance to revisit the issue for years).
That's pretty much what the US constitution is. Once something's in it, it doesn't realistically get out of it.