I’m shocked to find myself in agreement with John Boehner:
House Speaker John Boehner says Congress “should not be judged on how many new laws we create” but on “how many laws … we repeal.”
Yes. We have too damn many federal laws, more (as he notes) than we have the resources to enforce and more than are needed to make all of us multiple felons every day. I’ll vote for the guy who promises to gut the federal code. Moreover, the notion that we should judge a legislator’s record on how many laws he passes (or has his/her name attached to) is as stupid as judging a diplomat on how many treaties he signs. The quality of the output is much more important than the quantity.
Very shocking. This is a principle I’ve always promoted but it’s very difficult to get across.
This is sort of like using Lines of Code (LOC) as a measure of productivity for a programmer. While many in management like to use this as an objective measure actual programmers who know what they are doing have learned a long time ago that it is a lot better to keep the number of lines of code as small as possible while retaining all relevant functionality. The more lines you have the harder it is to understand and hence debug a piece of code. The same way of thinking should apply to laws.
While it makes perfect sense to remove obsolete or redundant laws you should not remove relevant functionality e.g. repeal Glass-Steagall without replacing it with something that provides the same functionality.
You’re assuming that the functionality is actually useful. There are many federal laws whose functionality is the opposite.
Depends who’s doing the using.
What people need is not a banking act that reduces competition or limits what a bank can do. What we need is visibility for those volunteering to save their money with a bank.
Put the consumers in charge of regulation where they vote by choosing the bank they want to be involved with. The government doesn’t need to provide FDIC. Banks can work our their own insurance or not where depositors see it and choose to be a part of it or not.
Competition and visibility works better than any government legislation.
But, Ken, this is The Most Transparent Administration Ever(TM). Surely the increased visibility and transparency has helped the country, no?
How about repealing some laws “so we can find out what is in” them, and see just how much better or worse the country runs without those laws? I say we start with the 16th and 17th Amendments…
Everyone involved with passing a law that’s later ruled unconstitutional gets the question “Should this person be banned for life from American politics because they endorsed an unconstitutional law?” on their next election’s ballot.
Congress should be paid by the law.
Deduct $1000 for each law added. Add $500 for each law removed.
Like the C++ “rule” that anyone who proposes to add a new keyword to the language needs to donate a kidney first.
And a life-in-prison minimum sentence for any elected official who leaves office with a net worth larger than when he entered it.
Very few people work a job just to “scrape by and barely feed themselves”. I humbly submit that the last time I worked a job for longer than 18 months, I ended with a net worth larger than when I began; that’s the primary reason why I negotiated for the slightly larger salary than I was originally offered.
That being said, even though I understand the “anti-political-graft” sentiment of your idea, a life sentence just for drawing a salary seems a little bit of a stiff penalty, and I don’t know that you’d find over 500 people in the Union willing to be a representative in DC for as low of a salary as it would take to make your proposal work as originally written.
Consider it an incentive to donate to charity- a lot. Anyone who takes an elective office to get rich certainly does belong in jail and considering the scope for damage involved a life sentence for Reid/Pelosi/Franks-style corruption seems right on line with the severity of the offense.
The idea is to stop treating elected officals as superior beings and start treating them as what they have proven to be: a specialized form of contractor, one with a reputation for malfeasance and theft. You can hire them, but you don’t take your eyes off of them and you don’t cut them any slack.
It’s nice that Mister Not-The-Hill-To-Die-On said that… it would be nicer to see him lift a finger to back his words up.
I think we’ve got some budding legislators in this group.