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points by kelseyfrog 2 days ago | 0 comments

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/

[–] kfogel 1 day ago

Thank you for this informative comment, and I agree with the general idea in your Chesterton's Fence point.

When the HOLC provides wording, they do so in response to a request from an elected member or that member's staff, right? What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter whether provenance is found via the commit author or via some other change-associated metadata -- the key thing is making precise change provenance trackable and (perhaps after some predefined delay) public. This would mainly aid journalists.

Is the HOLC currently functioning as an anonymizing service for changes to in-progress legislation? And if so, is that by design, or more by gradual and organic evolution?

Fundamentally, if we can't get at that provenance information in a reliable way right now at all, then version-control-style tracking would be a pretty big qualitative change in how things are done: information that wasn't available, except through unofficial channels, would now be available (again, maybe with some time delay or whatever, but in the long run it would be available). On the other hand, if that information is currently obtainable but is just not easy to obtain, then this would be more of an incremental improvement: since journalists and others with the requisite know-how could get the information right now, but maybe have to jump through hoops to do so, this would just reduce the number or height of the hoops.

I don't know which of those two scenarios best describes reality, but maybe you do?

[–] JoshTriplett 2 days ago

> Whether transparency has merit or not, tracking provenance would make the office partisan.

Tracking who added what language is in no way partisan.

[–] pbhjpbhj 1 day ago

Agreed, that is just a factual error. One has to wonder about the motivation of that statement.

It's like the people that complain their favoured politician has more scrutiny on them when actually that politician just commits lots of crimes.

[–] kelseyfrog 1 day ago

You don't have to wonder. You can just ask. Why leave motivations to speculation when a conversation is possible?

[–] kelseyfrog 1 day ago

1. The public will view it that way.

2. It will create an incentive structure that will reflect the goals of political parties.

Transparency brings the office into the political sphere. Nothing in the political sphere escapes partisanship. It's pretty clear that no one knew this office existed before I brought it up and folks thought that lawmakers drafted their own bills. The fact that we're even now talking about it in terms of politics is evidence that it will devolve into partisan politics.

I get your instinct - transparency is in general a net good. But the more public an office is, the more it is drawn into partisanship.

Politics is especially prone to engineers disease and this is a great example of it. It assumes a technical solution in the spirit of transparency applies to complex human, social, and political domains where those frameworks do not neatly fit. When someone points out engineers disease, have some introspection before questioning their motives.

[–] franktankbank 1 day ago

Sponsor of change should obviously be shown as at least partial author of the commit. Tag of "new book of laws" should show as authors all who voted yes.

[–] kelseyfrog 1 day ago

That's entirely fair

[–] zoobab 2 days ago

The authors are lobbyists of big corporations nowadays.

[–] zoobab 1 day ago

This is why I believe we should do something else than elections of politicians.

[–] pbhjpbhj 1 day ago

Go on?

[–] zoobab 1 day ago

There are several alternatives, like for example a political party where 1000 random citizens are picked up for analyzing and voting on every file. Next file next 1000 batch of random citizens are picked.

We could also let people vote directly on their own laws without intermediaries.

[–] Gormo 1 day ago

Sounds like a sort of jury system added to the legislative process. That might actually be a workable idea as an additional safeguard/sanity check before bills can pass.