Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

That's one thing I'd introduce into the constitution if I were rewriting it today: sunset provisions on all laws. Everything should expire after 30 years unless explicitly renewed by Congress, giving each generation the chance to shape their world anew.

This would fix so many problems. The copyright and patent laws would look dramatically different if they were written today. You wouldn't have silly state laws like it being illegal to have a goatee in Massachusetts, or it being illegal for moose to have sex on state highways in Alaska (how do they enforce that one?) We might rethink the war on drugs now that we've been at war for a generation. The 2nd amendment probably either shouldn't exist or should protect the rights of people to own much more than guns, now that a guy with a gun is easy fodder for a tank. You really need to legalize Stingers and TOWs to fulfill the original purpose of the 2nd amendment.

Curiously, the sunset provision on all laws should itself be subject to sunset provisions. It makes sense to make laws persistent when the world does not change very much over decades. In fact, we probably would not have developed our post-industrial society without it. It's only when the world starts getting massively remade on the timescale of 5-10 years that it makes sense for laws to expire and be remade themselves.

If only this didn't cause logical paradoxes at the time the sunset provision itself sunsets...

I strongly agree that all laws passed by congress, the states and smaller jurisdictions should sunset. I don't think that should include the constitution, in original or amended form.

I have a few nitpicks about your examples though:

Copyright and patent laws might be different if they had to be renewed. I suspect there's a good chance they'd be worse based on the sort of laws that have been passed on the subject recently.

There have been credible movements in several states to rethink the war on drugs. They usually don't get the results you might want though. As an example, after Alaska's supreme court struck down the state's ban on marijuana, the voters put a new one in place (which was also struck down).

Small arms are very useful in modern combat, especially in a rebellion where it isn't desirable for the government to level an entire city. Asymmetric warfare works, and small arms are helpful for capturing more powerful equipment.

Every time copyright and patent laws have been revised, they've revised the protection length upwards.

If the sunset-provision had applied in the past, right now, the copyright/patent periods would be rapidly approaching infinity.

If constitutional rights had sunset provisions, we'd do away with the Bill of Rights the first time they sunsetted during a crime wave and we elected people to be "tough on crime".

He didn't say that constitutional rights should sunset. He said "all laws" should sunset.

He specifically mentioned the Second Amendment (part of the Bill of Rights). Also, the Constitution falls within the category of "all laws".

I'm kinda wondering myself whether constitutional amendments should be included or not, and whether it should only be criminal laws or civil ones as well. On one hand - yeah, if amendments could sunset, the bill of rights would probably be toast the first time there's a crime wave. But then all the laws enacted by the crime wave would themselves sunset, and if it's become a problem, they could reenact the amendment.

OTOH, the purpose of the Constitution in general and the Bill of Rights in particular is so that one group of people cannot gain the power they need to prevent other people from gaining power. And if amendments themselves sunsetted, that would most likely occur, and the disenfranchised groups wouldn't even have a vote next time they came up for vote. So in that light, perhaps amendments should stay regardless.

I still think that the 2nd amendment should definitely be reinterpreted in terms of the laws it allows or doesn't allows. It was intended to prevent the government from gaining too much power by preserving the right of the people to overthrow it by force of arms. In a world of tanks, planes, and nukes, the people no longer have that right anyway. Instead, the 2nd amendment has been recast as a way of preserving the right to kill other people, which works for the government as citizens become so concerned with protecting themselves from home invasions and petty criminals that they forget about the international invasions and grand crooks in Washington. IMHO, it should either be repealed or it should be interpreted to apply to classified information as well, so that the citizenry has the right to build their own nuclear bombs.

I've been saying the same thing for the past 10 years. I usually get a bunch of blank stares in response, I'm glad that there is another person with the same thoughts.

I disagree about the second amendment though, along with any other constitutional provision. They are a little too serious for me to sunset.

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