Posted by
Nerdus Maximus on Saturday, July 14, 2007 11:26:54 AM
One of the reasons that we have too many laws is that we
have a constitutionally mandated branch of government that exists to make laws.
If Congress doesn’t make laws it has no accomplishments to show to constituents
and the incumbents are unlikely to be returned to office. It is much like the “publish
or perish” situation in academia, but with one very serious difference. When a
professor writes a pointless article or book just to get published the maximum
damage that is likely to be done is some time wasted by other bored academics
debating what was said or some hapless college students being forced to pretend
that they read it. When a pointless law is passed just so Congress can say it
is doing something it does far more damage. After over two hundred years of
passing laws, most of the good ideas for laws have been used long ago. So what’s
a country to do?
I propose a constitutional amendment that would sunset
laws after a period of time determined by the size of the majority by which
they were passed. All laws passed by a simple majority would sunset after three
years. A 60% majority would result in a five year sunset and a 70% majority would
create a ten year law. Only laws passed by an 85% majority would become
permanent, and the percentage required to repeal them would go down every five
years until any law more than twenty years old could be repealed by a 60%
supermajority.
The result of enacting this amendment will be that Congress
will be able to continually justify that it is doing something by passing the
same laws over and over again. The number of stupid laws would be reduced
because they would sunset after a reasonable period of time and Congress would
be so busy re-passing truly necessary laws that they won’t have as much time to
make stupid laws.
It is a good idea in any human organization to review
old rules and make sure they make sense. Why don’t we do this for the laws of
the United States?