Insert language you know will never get enough votes
Don’t strike out but add language to make it useless
Plus the bill sponsor often makes changes others ask for, so the true author isn’t noted
It would be a mess and ignored by the public after a while
This is often especially cynical because [popular thing x] is often something that neither party wants to pass. So a very recent example of this was an act against insider trading by politicians, that was bundled with a voter id law. Neither side wants to clamp down on insider trading from politicians, so the entire act was DOA. It was nothing but bread and circuses.
I do think there are some Markdown-based open source projects that might fit the bill.
Yet there is a demand for version control for nontechnical people. And I know this because I’ve seen enough files called “copy of important thing” or “important thing 2”.
Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job, not that legislation doesn’t have a commit graph. The latter, even if it existed, would not fix the former.
The general public isn't willing to pay for this, so it's very hard to do this. Especially given that most of this isn't exactly going to generate tons of views.
Let's be honest, in general, the public is very upset about all the injustice they perceive. But the public also lost all interest in the process, some can't even be bothered to vote once every other year....
It's too easy to blame others for your own inaction
> But the public also lost all interest in the process, some can't even be bothered to vote once every other year....
I highly recommend the first three chapters to anybody who thinks they don't need to understand their local politics.
However you are proposing that journalists as a homogenous group do some extra work. I think that's a great thing but I don't get why you say the press aren't doing their job when they are at an historical low of compensation and respect.
If sounds like you are outsourcing your rage at the legislature and the press and journalists are the problem?
Sticking to the FTA someone made a first step in version tracking legislative texts but you do not think they've done enough?
In the present day, mainstream journalists won't be meaningful advocates for democracy and the public interest any time soon. It's time to acknowledge that this idea is wishful thinking. The root cause is changes to the law like the Telecom Act of 1996 which allowed for the consolidation of old media under a few corporations.
For many years these mainstream journalists have been required to support corruption, cronyism, the centralization of power, and the increase of corporate power in order to retain their jobs. The law needs to be changed before they can become a net benefit to society again.
I'd actually argue that this is the wrong way around. Being able to git diff legislation is very good, but mainly for humans, who need tools to make work tractable.
An agent will use whatever interface is available, including no interference, won't give up due to the task being too onerous, and can be scaled by paying for more tokens. It could simply brute force diff the raw text, writing bespoke Python and regexes, etc.
LLMs make brute forcing intellect possible. It's humans who need finely crafted tools.
The problem is, barely anyone is willing to pay the press for doing this job.
Outrage farming and clickbait make money, honest reporting does not.
Of course a tool itself doesn't solve the problem. You need somebody to use the tool. But the tool makes it easier to solve the problem.
Well, it's practically impossible to get a person to do something when their paycheck depends on their not doing it.
I couldn't care less about crypto currencies, but crypto contracts had the potential to replace much (although not all) of the bureaucracy around governments and justice systems. I am very sad it didn't take off.
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.)
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.
Tracking who added what language is in no way partisan.
It's like the people that complain their favoured politician has more scrutiny on them when actually that politician just commits lots of crimes.
By this point "the public" just doesn't care for this sort of stuff, we just want (stabler, for those still employed) jobs and day-to-day life that is not expensive as hell anymore. What the middle-class elites now call "democracy" has just become a glasperlenspiel, i.e. nothing of real interest to us, the masses, just a social differentiator between said well-to-do middle-classes.
More generally, the sooner us, the masses, spell it out that democracy is well and truly dead the better, that way maybe we can do something to alleviate our situation, but I'm afraid that won't happen anytime soon.