Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
> I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?
There's an interesting, one-time shakeup that we could actually accomplish. While it's true that there will never again be another constitutional amendment... there's already one out there that will never expire, partially ratified. Completely beyond Congress's ability to rescind it or cockblock it. Article the First.
Were it to be ratified, nearly immediately (whenever the next Census is), the House of Representatives has over 6000 seats. So many that the existing party apparatus wouldn't be able to vet candidates or manipulate. Lobbyists, even, would have a hard time allotting the slush funds to bribe them all.
And what would it take to do all of this? Maybe 10 or 12 people hammering (gently) on some state legislator in Nevada or Kansas. Convince him or her to pass the resolution to ratify. Nothing more than that. A single state even attempting to ratify it would start the ball rolling, and no one would be able to stop it.
The last time this happened (in the 1990s), it didn't even take that much.
> libertarian fantasy
You can see it that way... though the Prof was not expecting uptake for those proposals, he didn't get them, and the protagonist at the end is thinking of emigrating to the Belt. The U.S. was a libertarian fantasy before its founding.
I was guarded above because even though system-level reform should be a bigger deal than object-level, I think putting a lot of hope on it is setting yourself up for disappointment. You need culture change or competition in governance.
30% of Americans would surrender every right they have if it meant someone who looks different would suffer slightly more.
> Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators. That's second.
You say that like it's a bad thing?
> The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators.
The "burden" would also include, for the most part, being able to look up at any given point in time whether something violated the law without referring to hundreds of thousands of pages of other codes, administrative law, and agency rules.
> You say that like it's a bad thing?
Constitution, then, will serve as what regular law does right now, without anything that makes something Constitution. That's second.
I also am strongly suspecting that hundredths of thousands of pages of codes and laws will not get leaner at all. There is no point in ceding regulatory capture, because the capability to capture regulations is the point of governance, as I see it.
That's attacking the symptom rather than the cause. The deeper issue is that the legislature is not responsive to the people who don't actually want X anymore. Instead, how about:
1. Replace plurality votes and single-primaries with some form of ranked-choice voting. This reduces the spoiler effect and makes it easier for people to organize around their real priorities.
2. Remove the hard-cap on the House of Representatives, peg it to a number of constituents, and let them meet and vote virtually.
3. Instead of a single "winner takes all" for one region (much smaller regions, if the House is uncapped) allow multiple proportional winners for a moderate region.
4. It's not possible to amend how the Senate seats are per-state, but we can at least make it easier for large States to fission if they decide those rules are screwing over their residents. (Subject to conditions conditions I won't bore you with here. Yet.)
The problem is that there isn't really this clean discrete sense of 'a law'. There is the federal code, and the federal register, and bills or rules enacted over time which amend those things. Often times those bills are collections of amendments which do things like add a phrase or swap out a word or add a bullet point to a list. They're like diffs. You can't just have those things sunset individually or you end up with a incoherent code and you end up creating a state of the code which is not what was intended by anyone, at any point along the way. And these can be significant things, like a substantial bill which makes a significant change to federal law may be just like adding a bullet point to a couple lists, or adding a parenthetical to a paragraph.
If you make it so all of the federal code and register has to be voted on every 1-10 years, then you'll just make it so everyone always votes to pass all of it, because no one is sitting down and reading all of it, because almost no one even sits down to read all the bills proposed in a year, which are much smaller in text volume.
The real underlying problem is that legislators are not responsive to the demands of their constituents. Ideas which have supermajority support among the public are not valued or prioritized. And none of the legislators suffer for it, because the elections are not generally competitive among candidates who understand policymaking, and there is a strong incumbency bias where people just vote for the person they recognize as long as they don't have major complaints and as long as they can't explicitly identify a reason that another candidate is clearly better across all measures.
Also beneficial perhaps would be to have it be necessary that the law spells out the technical implementation. Sort of like patents do.