I can see plenty of problems with that approach too, eg Murder never becomes permanent people people keep trying to shoehorn in a clause making abortion into murder. I've said it before and I'll say it again, you are not going to change human behavior just by rejigging the legislative system. You talk about 'things that no one would expect to be illegal' but all those laws got passed because for some group of people, they address a real problem. People like Silverglate cherry-pick weird stories that most people aren't familiar with to try and make it seem like the entire game is rigged. It's total BS. The average person is not committing 3 felonies a day. I would love to meet Silverglate some time and call him out on his bullshit.
>eg Murder never becomes permanent people people keep trying to shoehorn in a clause making abortion into murder.
I don't see how that's a real problem. Even assuming they can never once pass it unanimously, they're still going to renew it every time rather than allowing murder to become legal. Also, an amendment expanding the definition of murder to nontraditional entities is going to get killed if necessary to save the bill, and if the vote on the clean bill isn't unanimous then there are going to be Congress Critters who have to explain to their constituents why they voted against prohibiting murder.
As I see it the real trouble with this approach is that it encourages Congress to just reauthorize everything without a debate because there are so many laws they don't have time to do their jobs thoroughly. And that's kind of a different problem -- which is already a problem today, since they should be considering whether laws on the books should be repealed on a regular basis regardless.
But if the strongest argument you can make against something is "it might only help a little instead of a lot," it's maybe still the sort of thing we should try.
But if the strongest argument you can make against something is "it might only help a little instead of a lot," it's maybe still the sort of thing we should try.
That's not the argument I'm making. Don't put words in my mouth.
OK fine, suppose it's totally useless. It still doesn't seem to have any serious disadvantage over the status quo, which means we could still benefit by implementing it if only in order to test your hypothesis that it won't work.
I've already outlined what I consider the potential disadvantages. By all means see if you can get your state legislature to give it a whirl, that's what they're there for,
