> I wonder if it’s worth governments’ time trying to come up with automatically expiring bills for “emergency” uses such as these.
The Patriot Act has a sunset clause, but has been repeatedly extended, which no obvious sign of it ever not being extended.
The ability to change laws makes it easier for government's to sell these sorts of changes to their constituents ("it's only temporary") whilst knowing that it probably won't turn out to actually be temporary, because they can change something that is temporary into effectively permanent.
That can be fixed by making sunset clauses automatically require a few things:
1. Must be voted on alone. That is, no sneaking it into another bill, or into the budget votes.
2. Each renewal requires a higher percentage of yes votes than the last time until 100% is required. To my recollection, there's never been a time when the Patriot Act received 100% approval.
On its face, this sounds great. However, there is nothing to prevent a later amendment then removing one of these requirements, as unreasonable or outdated because of the new way the law is being used.
To law makers, nothing about a law is immutable. Which is the crux of the problem, really. You can't prevent bad actors from messing things up unless you don't do it in the first place.
There are benefits, clear and strong, for several of these laws when they are first prepared. It's the fact you can't rely on anyone down the track not to abuse it that's the problem.
The Patriot Act has a sunset clause, but has been repeatedly extended, which no obvious sign of it ever not being extended.
The ability to change laws makes it easier for government's to sell these sorts of changes to their constituents ("it's only temporary") whilst knowing that it probably won't turn out to actually be temporary, because they can change something that is temporary into effectively permanent.