One of the real problems exemplified by the Gates arrest for being a mouthy asshole is that if they hadn’t gotten him for that, they would have gotten him for something else.
Here’s a blunt fact: you are, or have been, a criminal. You have broken the law at some point in your life.
Because the endless, churning factories of our legislative systems at every level spew out law after law, many of them unread, that end up legalizing almost every aspect of our lives. So if Gates hadn’t been arrested for being a mouthy asshole (disorderly conduct), he would have been nailed for something else - I don’t know what, but I do know that all police have knowledge of a grab-bag of generalized, vague crimes they can bend to fit almost any situation. Disturbing the Peace is only one such.
The solution is to shut down the sausage factories as much as possible, and put sunset clauses on almost all laws already in force, or legislated in the future.
If the law is a good one, then there should be no problem in passing it again. If it’s a bad one, or an unnecessary one, let it die automatically.
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“The worse the people are, the more laws are necessary to keep them in line. In Heaven there are no laws, nor need of any. In Hell there is nothing but law, and due process is meticulously observed.”
There are people who need and even want to live in a police state. The problem is that we have to have the government they deserve.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone?
-’Atlas Shrugged’ 1957
It sometimes seems I’ve been saying this for a hundred years. We continually, habitually elect lawyers to positions of power, and then we call them lawmakers, and then we glorify them for pushing bills that have their name on them, that become laws, and they point at them with pride when they run for re-election. Somewhat like a toddler pointing at his poop in the tiny toilet.
I’d love to see a law-taker movement, one where people run on a platform of literally draining the swamps by getting laws off the books and back in the realm of common sense. Note that I’m not holding my breath such a thing will happen, not with the rewards system currently in place. But it would be refreshing.
This is the point I wanted to make when I mentioned Pandora’s Box in one of the other threads. I am glad you opened this thread so we can discuss solutions, rather than just rant. I think this will be another good thread.
I like Scott’s notion - a “lawtaker” movement.
The strategy would be simple: Go viral with videos of congressment admitting they hadn’t read laws they’d voted for. Descriptions of the total wordage - or number of pages - of laws passed in a single year by legislatures. I’ll bet it runs into the millions of pages for the federal congress - so that in order to read all this stuff, a legislator would have to devour the equivalent of a hundred Stephen King novels a day.
Lots of stories about unintended consequences. Lots of stories about laws still on the books years, decades, maybe even centuries after they became irrelavant (you can only have six horse-drawn buggies parked in the street outside your NYC home….stuff like that).
And then ask candidates to swear to the lawtaker pledge: “I won’t vote for a law I personally have not read. I will vote to repeal any law whose justification no longer exists. I will vote to automatically sunset any law I do vote for after five years.”
100% agree that every law needs a sunset clause. After three or four sunset periods, perhaps the law can move into a grandfather status, or increase the sunset length, if it becomes obvious that sunsetting is an onerous and time-wasting task.
I really don’t see what’s hard about any of that, but I don’t expect that the Congress-critters we create today will cut their own throats by telling the special-interest groups that they’re going to have to re-justify this or that new regulation or law. Plus, there’s still plenty of incentive for once-in-a-lifetime rent-seeking by unscrupulous lowlifes, which we’ll probably never, ever escape.
Still, I really like the idea of keeping something of a lid on the unintended consequences of random Shuckerson-Jivers Chickens-For-Tots Protections Acts these a-holes love.
I’m not too sure about the lawtaker idea. It would be nice if candidates campaigned on the idea of rescinding laws, but how do we know they won’t campaign one way to get elected and govern differently? I’m sure somebody could dig up a recent example of that, maybe even at the national level.
Sunset clauses do nothing about the mass of legislation already on the books. It might be better to require that for any new legislation to pass, an existing statute on that topic must be repealed.