The repealer
I think every government needs one of these: The Office of Repealer was created within the Office of Legal Services (OLS) by Chapter 475 of the Public Acts of 2013. The OLS Repealer accepts submissions from Tennessee citizens and entities for review of Tennessee state laws and rules believed to be anachronistic, obsolete, defective, duplicative, contradictory, unnecessary or incomprehensible.
July 5th, 2013 at 1:41 pm
And if Obama gets one, guess what HE’LL repeal!
July 5th, 2013 at 2:12 pm
House of Repeal! House of Repeal!
July 5th, 2013 at 2:55 pm
I don’t see an option for UnConstitutional.
July 5th, 2013 at 3:13 pm
Like the assault weapon ban of 1994, I think all Federal laws should have a 10 year sunset. If it’s a good law, it can be brought back after debate and revision. If it’s a bad law, it goes away without fanfare. Federal laws become fewer, Congress has less time to meddle in new things because they’re kept busy re-enacting old things.
July 5th, 2013 at 4:28 pm
“Defective”, huh? Boy, you could make a full time job our of submitting defective laws.
July 5th, 2013 at 5:04 pm
J.D. Haywood tried to get a bill passed in the US House in 1999 that stating that one year after the passage of a bill it would be reviewed to see if it was implemented as the members had intended. His point was every page of a bill ends up as five pages of regulations.
He couldn’t get any other sponsors.
July 5th, 2013 at 6:51 pm
If only… sigh… THOSE petitions would get a LOT of signatures!!!
July 5th, 2013 at 7:24 pm
The answer is a Bureau of Government Efficiency. Obama appointed all those czars without congressional approval. The next president can create BoGE by executive order.
BoGE would be staffed with the most bureaucratic of bureaucrats. It’s task would be to identify failed government programs, outdated programs, corrupt programs, overstaffed programs, redundant programs, pork and programs that actually achieved their purpose. Once such a program is identified, BoGE pulls their funding.
To be sure that BoGE does its’ job, BoGE will have no budget; it’s only source of income will come from the money taken from the programs it has shut down.
Employees will, of course, be known as “boogers” or “buggers”. A BoGE audit will be called “buggery” and a defunded program will be referred to as “buggered”.
To be sure, constitutionally mandated functions will be somewhat protected from buggery but everything else is fair game.
As the size of government shrinks, BoGE will reduce itself as the available funding declines.
July 5th, 2013 at 7:36 pm
We have an Office of Repealer already, and it consists of most of the Federal government.
They’ve been busy for years repealing the Constitution.
July 6th, 2013 at 9:17 am
What a great idea. I am not sure PA has this type of office but we have some very old law that could use this type of oversight. Thanks for the information. Nice blog too!
July 6th, 2013 at 9:31 am
Sounds like a superhero: The Repealer
I imagine a tough-looking farm kid with a super-powered bullshit shovel and a no-nonsense attitude.
July 6th, 2013 at 12:19 pm
deadcenter – yep, ten-and-out.
Sure, some problems (e.g. what to do with someone serving time under a law just dropped) but not more than repeated 1200-page unread bills, with 10,000 pages of unvoted regulations and penalties, etc.
July 7th, 2013 at 6:43 pm
“Federal laws become fewer, Congress has less time to meddle in new things because they’re kept busy re-enacting old things.”
You’d have to stipulate that they’d have to be re-passed individually, otherwise you’d have a vote every year that simply re-passed everything in some omnibus bill. Too much opportunity to simply sidestep it. I’m not sure an automatic sunset is useful for every bill, but having a curated list of laws every year that must be re-voted on (meaning that current members would have to take electoral responsibility for past laws) would be a great idea.
Hell, it might mean that congress actually knows what the current law is. Because nowadays they usually don’t have a clue.