Starting over, the NEW new form of government thread

[Northern_Piper]

@TriPolar

This is not a structural suggestion, but does relate to supermajorities. While I think using supermajorities to make decisions is infeasible I do think that all legislation should have time limits. No tricky games with the time limits, a law is good until a specific date and then ceases to exist. This requires the legislative body(s) in whatever form to continuously review existing law and hopefully improve it and then pass a new version. There should not be a simple renewal process, no vote to simply repass a law, to keep a law in place it should have to be proposed and passed as if it were completely new. Among other things I hope this process would not leave a legislature with so much time to solicit bribes, and make them cooperate. The part about supermajorities comes into play with the time limit. I would suggest that it would take a supermajority to make the time limit on any law greater than 10 years (for example). Perhaps increasing on a scale up to 100 years based on the percentage of approving votes.

This suggestion keeps coming up. I think it’s a really bad idea. Here’s what I posted about it in a similar thread last spring:

@Northern_Piper

This is a really bad idea that for some reason keeps coming up in these types of threads.

It seems to assume that laws are bad and we should get rid of them. But laws are what hold our civil society together.

Do you want the title to your house, your car, and your bank accounts to be subject to legislative review every ten years? Because property law is largely statutory in the States, having been codified from the common law.

Do you want any contracts that you are a party to, to suddenly disappear every ten years? Because contract law is largely statutory.

If you hold stocks in a corporation, do you want to run the risk that those stocks go “poof” if the corporate law doesn’t get re-enacted in time?

If you’re happily married, do you want to risk having your marriage dissolved every ten years, unless the legislature re-passes the marriage laws?

If you’re divorced with kids, do you want to risk having your custody and access rights disappear on the sunset of the divorce act? And to have all your property, alimony and child support settlement, and rights to enforce it in court, disappear?

If you’re in the middle of probating one of your parent’s estates, do you want to risk all the probate rules disappearing because the sunset came on the probate law and the legislature couldn’t get the new law passed, so you and your crazy siblings have to come to an agreement on your own over who gets what?

Do you want your rights as a consumer to be subject to legislative review every ten years? Just when you’ve bought a lemon car, for instance, and the dealer is being uncooperative in fixing it? Especially since the warranty may have gone poof (see entry on contract law, above).

And do you want the risk that the criminal law may potentially all disappear every ten years, both the substantive offences, and the laws holding convicted felons in jail? No valid criminal law means Jake the Snake can drive off with your car without committing any criminal offence. And it may not be your car any more anyway (see entry on property law, above). And if there’s no statutory law authorising the state corrections system to hold convicted felons, constitutional law says they have to be released.

And of course, a lot of courts could disappear every ten years if the statutes creating them aren’t re-enacted in time. So even if you have some sort of common law or constitutional right that you want to enforce, there may not be a court that can hear your claim.

And the thing is, re-enacting all of those laws will take a lot of time and effort by the legislatures, meaning that they may not be able to address significant new issues, because they have to get the entire law book law re-enacted before the sunset.

This proposal also assumes that the legislatures are functional, not dysfunctional. As a hypothetical, what would happen if the sunset is coming for a lot of Washington state laws this spring?