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Legislative Review: Retirement of Law

Any legal code can have a legacy of statutes that were relevant in a previous era.  This allows older laws to exist, no matter how out of date, with modern laws.  Today you would expect the legislature to retire outdated laws.  It is possible that an older law has a sunset clause, though not many do.  Repeal of outdated laws are only made real when enough pressure is placed on the legislature to…

Legislative Review: Deficits in Law

As is the nature of things, there will be times when there are defects that are found in how a law works that must be corrected with revisions.  The heart of this proposalis effective legislation.  Natural laws such as gravity are made to last while written laws must be subject to periodic change.  The benefit of updating laws is that the flaws that are discovered can be corrected for with…

Legislative Review: Recent History

The California Coastal Commission is one of many agencies organized under the Natural Resources Agency along with similar bodies that are focused on regional or topical concerns which are of concern to more than just one county which leads to a uniform system of governance for the state at large.  A number of concerns about the structure of the executive branch would be resolved by this proposal.…

Legislative Review: Recent History

Continuing from the previous post, the proposed legislation will also gather information that reveals any Recent History of Enforcement or an Absence of Enforcement.  This is in addition to what was just gathered in the Present Effects.  This is more detailed as it presents the record of enforcement on a county-by-county basis.  Additionally, if there is an absence of any enforcement within any…

Legislative Review: Present Effects

The design of our legislative system was always meant to be circular.  It was supposed to be that the legislature drafted bills, the governor signed them into law, various departments did their jobs, the courts judged the actions of the people according to the law, and then the legislature was expected to maintain the laws as relevant and appropriate.  What seems to be happening is that a…

Any given bill passed into law today may include a sunset provision.  This will allow a law to have a natural end date if there is no one around to extend the law.  Usually, there is a politician that will bargain to keep an old law on the books.  It can be that a law is updated or in some way altered so that it can stay alive.  It should be that any law with a sunset deadline within a year get a…

California uses a “Jungle Primary” where the top two candidates advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation which can lead to seeing a general election ballot with two members of a single party running for the same office.  The Los Angeles Timessuggests a flaw in this system is that it supports Republicans over Democrats on account of the number of candidates each party will…

Efforts to reduce the influence of money in politics consistently causes the influence of money to become that much greater because of the benefits of buying a politician by way of campaign contributions.  The great flaw in all these efforts is that these contributions are made with the explicit intent of buying influence that can only be exercised by office-holders in a legislative system that…

Legislative, executive, judicial.  If you want only those three in that order, you only get a straight line of drafting, executing, and judging which was never the intended design of a government.  The practical effect of this is to limit the structure of government to only create and implement laws with no capacity for any process of review of updating to make laws current and relevant.  The…

Republican Form of Government

California has a flag asserting that it is a Republic with all the election trimmings to promote this idea.  A majority and a minority party play their part in a scripted series of interactions where the greater of the two parties do as they will and the lesser party yields as a matter of tradition.  Voters also have a tradition of placing marks on paper indicating a preference for elected office…

When the United States Constitution was drafted, the political parties were not yet founded.  In the time since, the parties have formed and become influential enough that there are now two major parties, a number of third parties, and many independent voters. The author of this post and owner of this blog is a registered independent.  The vast majority of office holders in America have one of…

Rights Preserved and Created

The arguments by the LGBT crowd of just wanting to be left alone were never about being left alone, but about changing the structure of longstanding traditions so that their minority status would be given at least equal standing with those that held back their rights for ever so long.  That fight is not over by any means, which leads to the next benefit the proposalwould offer.  If you can’t beat…