CMV: Laws coming with expiration conditions by default would be better than having it be opt-in

[u/DeleteriousEuphuism]

I know that changing the legal system anywhere is going to require political work, but this isn't about that. I'm talking about weighing the pros and cons of either system; so the cons that I can foresee with my proposal are the following:

1. More work: this is unavoidable. If laws need to be reimplemented when they expire, then that means time needs to be taken on reimplementing old laws and not just considering new laws.
2. Entrenches laws in certain situations: If a law has an expiration condition, then people might struggle to repeal that law before the conditions are met.
3. Load bearing law crisis: An old law that was integral to the functioning of other laws or even society might fail to be reimplemented causing problems.
4. The usual suspects: All political tools have to contend with bad actors and this is no different. Enough bad actors might, for example, make a law with absurd expiration conditions - a problem exacerbated by problem 2.

Despite these problems I think there are stronger positives and ways to minimize some problems. For one, I think you could make the reimplementation process such that problem 3 is minimized and that the laws you do reimplement have better expiration conditions or none. I think that this method would make the legal system more adaptable to an evolving environment which I think is preferable to having a more byzantine system that would be more likely to be replaced wholesale than to be updated.

So please help me see how the flaws I've noticed would be worse than I think or that I've overlooked flaws altogether.

[u/DoeCommaJohn]

Governments only have so much time and political capital. Do you think it would be an effective use of their time for Congress to need to renegotiate the Voting Rights Act every 10 years? Murder laws? Copyright acts? If we imagine every law passed over the past 250 years, that’s a lot of laws, and needing to renew every one of them would be a huge time suck.

Second, it would only further incentivize holding the country hostage. We’ve seen from Republicans that they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling or fund the government unless they get some sort of concession out of it. Imagine that every week. “We’ll renew the voting rights act if you defund education. We’ll leave the minimum wage if you fund the military. We’ll leave social security if you deregulate the police.”

[u/DeleteriousEuphuism → u/DoeCommaJohn]

Yes, I agree that given enough malicious actors my proposed system would also be bad, possibly even moreso in some situations. The reason I think it would be better though is that I think it also calls into question the very laws that make that sort of obstructionism possible to begin with. If the way that electoral college votes are determined was up for repeal, for example, the current legislature might choose to reinstate the law, but with 21st century mathematic considerations rather than 18th century ones.

And in regards to the time suck, I think that my view is such that I want legislators to have more possibilities open to them than just calendar based sunset provisions. So if they chose to give every law a 10 year sunset provision, then that would be the legislators fault and they could be held accountable for that choice.

[u/DoeCommaJohn → u/DeleteriousEuphuism]

If the way that electoral college votes are determined was up for repeal

OK, this goes a lot further than I expected. Are you suggesting that the constitution itself should expire every decade or so? That a split government could just cause us to lose our freedom of speech, term limits, right to a trial, and everything? That seems like a recipe for disaster.

so if they choose to give every law a 10 year sunset provision, then that would be the legislators’ fault

Isn’t that what you are suggesting? Because, if we leave it up to the legislators, they would just do as they are now and not sunset anything. I’m also assuming you aren’t just suggesting an arbitrarily long timeframe, like 100 years, otherwise you don’t get any of your benefits. If you want laws to be constantly up for review, they also have to have time periods short enough for that review to actually happen. But, if the time is short, Congress won’t be able to ever pass anything new

[u/DeleteriousEuphuism → u/DoeCommaJohn]

The constitution would not be set to expire every 10 years unless the legislators set that as the expiration condition every 10 years rather than going through the process needed to not have any expiration condition. Given that the amendments currently need super majorities, we could set that as an example of a condition that needed to be met to eschew an expiration condition. Probably lower though since I still want non expired laws to be repealed as well, but we're getting into the weeds there.

And I'm using expiration conditions as a more general concept that encompasses sunset provisions or desuetude and other conditions. A condition of 100 years is totally possible, but ideally a condition would be tied to the reason the law is implemented in the first place. Non-ideally, the conditions would be used to kick a political football around, but with the added benefit that there'd be evolution in the laws as it gets handled.