I’ve brought this up before.
Proposed legislation should be tracked with version control.
As I said in that earlier piece:
See, as it stands now it’s not uncommon for a law to be passed with no one able to say who came up with any particular piece of it. This is not good, since it allows legislators to slip in little time bombs and bits of legislative sabotage with complete impunity.
I said there that this is particularly a problem in California, but it happens pretty much everywhere.
This is more common than you may think.
And now we have a new example, from the federal Senate of all places.
Someone added an excise tax on solar and wind power equipment to the Senate’s version of the Big Bad Bill.
Someone.
But, gosh, they just can’t figure out who.
As described by The Fucking News:
And which senator did his bidding by implanting his gross seed in this bill act’s womb? Newsfucker, no one knows. It’s an immaculate deception, that took even Senate leaders by alleged surprise.
Seriously, read TFN’s discussion of it; it’s an absolute mystery.
And that shouldn’t be possible.
It’s stupid, it enables stupid shenanigans and makes everyone involved look stupid trying to find out how this mysterious attempt to utterly gut the U.S. wind and solar industries could have gotten into such an important piece of legislation that everyone’s studying so carefully.
Feh.
This nonsense shouldn’t ever be possible.
We have the technology, and decades of experience using it, to write traceable collaborative text.
It’s only possible to do this to legislation because the various rules committees want it to be possible, because someone benefits from it being possible.
And that sure as hell isn’t us.
Every word of every piece of proposed legislation should be traceable to a specific individual.
Every change made in every word of every piece of proposed legislation should be traceable to a specific individual, and should also carry a list of every legislator who approved or rejected that change along with an optional block of commentary from each about what it means and why they approved or rejected it.
We have well established software for this, and decades of experience using it.
There’s no excuse for this.
