Today I was reading an article about the update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which was recently passed by the house. There has been much criticism regarding this bill; it is commonly referred to a warrantless wiretapping program. The complexities of the issue aren’t something I have time to address here, but there is a caveat in the bill which caught my attention, and that is what I want to focus on.

The FISA bill has a “sunset” clause: if not explicitly renewed by congress, the law will no longer be in effect after a certain date. The expiration date is 180 days, or 365 days, depending on various factors. There are other laws in the past which have had this attached to certain provisions, notably the Patriot Act.

“Why shouldn’t all new laws have a sunset clause?”

But that made me wonder, why shouldn’t all new laws have a sunset clause? I think that could be an important step toward limiting governmental power. Personally, I think the first thing that should happen is to pass the “read the bills” act, requiring most of congress to actually read the bills in session before voting on them. I mean, duh. That congress hasn’t been doing this is just shy of criminal. Also, limiting bills to a single law or act is important.

Following those much more needed revisions, I think it would be a good idea to introduce sunset laws into most, if not all, legislation. This has never been done before (when it’s used now, it’s as a political tactic, not as a limiting-of-power measure), so finding the right balance between what laws should and shouldn’t expire might be tricky. We have a few options. Perhaps a passing a non-expiring law would require a stronger majority while an expiring law could pass with a simple majority. The expiring term should be practically limited, say to four years. Current laws could be grandfathered; obviously the Constitution should not expire.

The goal of this isn’t to make sure old or unpopular laws drop off the books, although this is a nice side effect. The true goal would actually be to make the government slower. The government is already about the least efficient body ever created, and while I don’t advocate waste, making the congress spend at least part of their time updating old laws is one way of ensuring they don’t waste time passing a lot of trivial and potentially harmful new ones. It would also force bad laws to be revisited. Currently, if a bad law is passed, it doesn’t get fixed until things become so bad that people are threatening violence. Otherwise, what are you going to do? It’s hard to repeal laws, as I’ve mentioned before. How much easier would it be to maintain a healthy set of laws if old ones automatically die? Certainly easier than what we have now.

A lot of people have been concerned about how large and powerful the United States government has become. The problem with limiting government is that the people in charge effectively have to limit themselves, which few willingly do. This is especially true with anyone who actually manages to get elected because all of them are already connoisseurs of waste. In order to limit the power of government, any sort of bill which would do this has to be presented in a more palatable way. A sunset-law law is less threatening than term limits or the appearance increased accountability, but it would accomplish the same thing.

-Ted