Suggestion for Improvement
Feb. 8th, 2014 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plutherusEver since the whole debacle with the Monsanto Protection Act last year, and I learned that it's actually possible to have anonymous legislation pass into law, it's kind of annoyed me.
That, coupled with the Citizen's United ruling have exacerbated some issues that have bothered me for a while now.
So, here's a couple of suggestions for changes that might have some major impacts on fixing some of our major problems with the legislative process:
1. The authors of all legislation must be disclosed. Anyone who makes any changes whatsoever, even if it's just correcting the spelling or punctuation, of any proposed legislation, must be disclosed. If IBM can track the reason, author, and date of every single character in every piece of source code for every piece of software they have, there's no excuse for Congress, which outputs far less data, to do the same. IBM's a good example, since they have a tool suite for doing just this. I'll volunteer my time to set it up for them.
2. All contributions to all members of Congress must be public. If an organization gives money to a member of congress, all members of that organization, and how much they gave to it, must be public. You want to keep the membership of your organization secret? Fine, no problem. But you can't use their money to bribe senators, then.
3. It becomes illegal for any member of congress to sponsor legislation written by any organization that has given him any money. I.e., it is illegal to simply sell laws to the highest bidder the way it's way too commonly done now. If you want a law passed, and have millions of dollars, you will have to convince the American people that the law is useful and good rather than just paying your representative to introduce it next session.
That, coupled with the Citizen's United ruling have exacerbated some issues that have bothered me for a while now.
So, here's a couple of suggestions for changes that might have some major impacts on fixing some of our major problems with the legislative process:
1. The authors of all legislation must be disclosed. Anyone who makes any changes whatsoever, even if it's just correcting the spelling or punctuation, of any proposed legislation, must be disclosed. If IBM can track the reason, author, and date of every single character in every piece of source code for every piece of software they have, there's no excuse for Congress, which outputs far less data, to do the same. IBM's a good example, since they have a tool suite for doing just this. I'll volunteer my time to set it up for them.
2. All contributions to all members of Congress must be public. If an organization gives money to a member of congress, all members of that organization, and how much they gave to it, must be public. You want to keep the membership of your organization secret? Fine, no problem. But you can't use their money to bribe senators, then.
3. It becomes illegal for any member of congress to sponsor legislation written by any organization that has given him any money. I.e., it is illegal to simply sell laws to the highest bidder the way it's way too commonly done now. If you want a law passed, and have millions of dollars, you will have to convince the American people that the law is useful and good rather than just paying your representative to introduce it next session.
