Hacker News

I've always wanted this. It's such an obvious idea when you're a software engineer.

> it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors

You’d just got a system of favors for who inserts what language. You’d hand tough edits to your safe-seat colleagues and insert messaging amendments designed to get voted down for own comms.

When a measure becomes a target yada yada.

(Note: this proposal is for the U.S. code. Not bills. Git for the USC works.)

99% of the legislation changes are made by 20 something interns, on behalf of someone.

Such a requirement would not do what you think it would. There would not be names legislator or even aids as commit authors. The commit authors would be members of the House Office of the Legislative Counsel[1].

The House Office of the Legislative Counsel is non-partisan, impartial, and confidential. Whether transparency has merit or not, tracking provenance would make the office partisan. Is more partisanship in government not a concern?

The second issue with transparency is that communication between legislators and legislative counsel member is subject to the attorney-client relationship. Breaking attorney-client privilege is a serious decision. Knowing how such a change would affect the organization and its members is not something to be taken lightly.

A more convincing argument for transparency would address impartiality and confidentiality. This is pretty clearly a Chesterton's fence type situation where advocating to change a system should anticipate criticisms. Addressing opposition preemptively is an implicit demonstration of knowing why the system exists which is table stakes for changing it.

1. https://legcounsel.house.gov/

> it benefits almost everyone

I want to see a practical benefit to maintaining this with public funds versus the usual redlines.

why not just do it?

Poland has an official, somewhat manual version of this - the ISAP system.

Actual bills are written in the form of patches ("§1. In the law X paragraph 5, the words "such and such" are replaced with "this and that". §2. The law X paragraph 4 is striked. §3. After law X paragraph 8, a new paragraph 8a is added that says "etc. and so on".)

After a patch or a collection of patches are passed, they are combined together and a unified version of the law is published. These documents aren't technically the law, they just show a snapshot of what the law is at the specific moment.

ISAP system is an online collection of all bills that were passed, plus crosslinks between laws that change/supercede/otherwise interact with each other, plus current and archival unified versions, plus related administrative orders and other miscellanious documents. Makes looking up laws and changes to laws very easy.

And the officially maintained website (that only tracks the final law changes instead of the whole process): https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/

https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/

> How does your MP vote on the issues that matter to you?

previously covered on hn:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8485809

https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/ is a good resource at a federal level, but I don't know of a state or local equivalent.

> In Australia, I spent a bit of time trying to work out how to find which politician voted for what (both at state and federal level), so that when elections come, you can single out the individuals who voted for what legislation.

That's an interesting project - I am guessing it's only targeting federal level, but could also include state level

The first problem I have in my mind is proxy votes, and votes that are made mandatory by the party they belong to - eg. a backbencher would struggle to go against the wishes of their party unless they felt it was worth risking their career over

> "A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.

https://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/hansard and (linked from that page) https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Chamber_docume... would likely be good places to start

Same. I don't know if it's the word choices or just me recognizing it as AI and subconsciously feeling cheated.

As an aside, my city FB group(small town, basically the local forum and news) has been absolutely flooded with AI 'flyers', and I have the same reaction. I can't put my finger on the exact reason, maybe the busy-ness, but they're repelling to my eyes.

Luckily after about 6 months of this now they're starting to get heavy pushback.

My brain instantly turns off from reading it too, you're not the only one.

Don't worry about that. Even if we only saw voted-upon revisions in the Git history, it will still be a huge improvement.

Version control for the public parts will make both public and secretive law-drafting better.

Why should any bit of the lawmaking process be secret?

Likewise, a younger, more idealistic me thought it'd be great to use a GitHub-esque platform for laws. Pull Requests to suggest laws, gated behind reviews/approvals, branches so each house could work on their own versions before finally reconciling and merging into the Code, literally.

Maybe at this point we should just git revert

Something akin to this is a big part of the products that companies like LexisNexis or Thompson Reuters charge your lawyers a whole lot of money for. Because for a lot of legal questions, you don't just need to know what the law says now, but what it said at the time of the incident in question. And every legislative body around the country (at least at the time I was working in this space a decade ago) publishes legislative changes in completely different and often times not easily parsable forms. Web scraping and PDF scraping was far more common than you'd think. Some state legislatures published changes in more reasonable forms, and some states contract their official legislative compilation to companies like LexisNexis or Thompson Reuters and work to publish an actual change stream with proper standardized references. There's a lot of manual work that goes into making stuff like this work, a lot of lawyers and other legal professionals manually reviewing that the right pieces were removed or added in the right places, matching up references to parts of the law that might have changed between the time the legislation was passed and the time the change was published and figuring out what order everything actually goes in. And the actual text of the law is only part of the equation. Legal decisions from courts can dramatically impact the reading of the law, or effect effectively strike laws from the books (even if the laws are technically still on the books, just not enforceable). So often the right way to represent a diff of two points in time depends on the question you're trying to answer.

You are correct the library of congress and the gpo do this.

Legislation you can generally access for free. Case law you often cannot.

> Unlike code, natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies,

In the interpretation of the law, yes, but that doesn't matter for version controlling the text of the law, and in that sense, you can absolutely manage the text pretty cleanly in git. Most laws are just text. Many bills are literal git-diffs, except in prose, which can make it hard to understand a bill.

> exception handling (hardcode-style responses)

This is basically non-sequitur (there no such thing as a "hardcode-style response" in git…), and again, I think you're misunderstanding the idea here.

> natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies

The complexity is in common law, not natural-language laws.

The U.S. Code and Code of Federal Regulations can be completely presented through a Git-like system. The complexity comes in when attaching court cases.

This brings us to my even more unlikely idea - when whoever wrote that line in the legislation dies or retires, the line enters a short review period where it's either renewed with a new author on the line to speak to it or is deprecated. This way someone would always be there to just answer for the intent. Also would help garbage collect legislation that is no longer useful.

Not that I've ever heard.

Why would one need a trustless distributed system to store document deltas published by an inherently trusted entity (federal government)?

Why only at first?

There's actually two kinds of changes here: changes to the law, and changes to your description of the-law-and-its-changes (metachanges). For example, if you make a mistake in recording a change to the law, you need to fix that (unlike eg a source repo where mistakes in a commit message are forever).

So to make this a git repo, I guess you'd make the snapshots be the law plus markup for all the changes, and the diffs are the metachanges. For each snapshot S, you could generate a git repo whose snapshots are the law and the whose diffs are the changes in the law (as described by S). However, this probably isn't the best way to query S.

Not really. It is arguing for version controlled legislation. So who’s responsible for what portions of literal laws and policy. I hope your "not clone-able" is in jest