"... Think of what version control software could mean for the Congress [...]. If bills were created under a system where strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol.
At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process. Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made them. ..."
There's a good chance it could have the opposite effect. The public doesn't pay as much attention to the workings of the government as donors do.
It's essentially an extension of the Sunshine Act of 1976, which made congressional votes public. There were claims that before it was enacted, legislators were able to vote their consciences, but then lie to donors and tell them they voted for their interests instead of their constituents' interests.
Since it passed, the public has been paying attention, but not like the donor class has been. Something needs to be not only bad, but have some sort of novel or salacious quality to make the news. If it's not near an election, people forget, if they paid attention to begin with. Donors pay attention. Representatives know this.
Ultimately, the problem is the money in politics, but this sort of thing can exacerbate the effects.
is money the problem or just that most people don't care about most things, but a few people REALLY care about a few things? There's plenty of groups without much money that still gum up the works because they're persistent.
People worrying about money in politics are overemphasizing the instrumentality of money, rather than the underlying structural incentives that tend toward special interests dominating complex issues.
If money were removed from the equation, the concentrations of power, motivations to influence it, and asymmetries in those motivations will all continue to exist; political influence will just be exercised through other means, and some particular faction or class of people will still be at the sweet spot of having the greatest competence and the greatest motivation to apply those means.
A lot of people are reluctant to acknowledge it, but this is inherent to politics itself, and there is no straightforward way to fix it, other than to limit the reach of political power.
It's slightly more complex though isn't? Because the actual problem is how to limit the reach of political power while still having an effective government.
In a vacuum I absolutely agree with you. In fact my PoliSci 101 prof defined politics as “who has power and how they use it” but in a system like ours where money also is a form of power (or at least a force multiplier of power) unto itself, money helps concentrate political power into fewer hands and magnify the ways they can use it.
It certainly would be naive to think that simply “getting money out of politics” would “fix” things but it is still a desirable goal for anyone who, themselves, does not currently have extremely large quantities of money.
As long as there are people who allocate billions with a sign of the pen, with zero personal responsibility and skin in the game, there will be whole industries dedicated to swaying their hand.
I don't think this is necessarily a good policy. I'm saying it's obviously blatantly untrue to suggest that just because people will always want to corrupt public officials, that they will be equally successful in all possible universes.
It's also untrue to suggest that any intervention will necessarily create a worse outcome than the status quo.
We need to amend the Constitution to strike pardon power and give the Congress the power to pass property taxes (aka wealth taxes) and regulate donations to campaigns, candidates, parties and partisan causes.
We also need law establishing mandatory retirement for Congressmen and judges, including justices, and a system where each President appoints (with Senate consent) one and only one justice to SCOTUS. Finally, yes, pass McCain-Feingold, pass a SCOTUS ethics bill and make corruption charges easier to bring.
> 1) An 18-year (9*2) term is more compatible with age limits than a 36-year term
2) Each Senate class gets to participate in the appointment of one justice
I like No. 1.
No. 2 seems overcomplicated compared with staggering retirements in the way Art. 1 § 3 cl. 2 staggers the Senate. The Senate is also more diverse than the Presidency; limiting the latter would check against some dirty tricks.
I think everyone understands this already. But there's also a big difference between making it easy for industries to sway politicians and difficult. That's what actually matters.
To put it another way, I still put a lock on my door even though lockpicks exist. I still use passwords on my accounts even though people could guess or brute force them.
It's amazing how you've managed to position "politicians were pursuing their own hidden agendas and then lying about it" as a desirable state of affairs.
It sounds like they were defrauding people into giving them donations under false pretenses, and the transparency measures were effective at mitigating that.
There's quite a lot of strange bias in your comment: the unjustified disjunction between "constituents" and "donors", the concept of a "donor class" as some singular bloc rather than an arbitrary aggregation of anyone who donates on behalf on all sides of all issues, the idea that donations are more important than the actual votes, etc.
That seems like an assumption, and a counterintuitive one: wouldn't you expect someone getting "fleeced" by the political system to be motivated to pay attention due to that very fact?
If you have a system of open transparency, then everyone who is motivated to pay attention has the means to do so. If they're not paying attention, it means they're not sufficiently motivated, and are choosing not to pay attention, not being constrained artificially.
This seems to be converging to some sort of "false consciousness" argument, where someone speculatively projects motivations and intentions onto other parties, then criticizes those other parties for not acting in accordance with the motivations strangers have projected onto them.
Needless to say, these sorts of arguments are utterly disingenuous, and in this case, somewhat ironic, because the people arguing that outcomes should conform to their speculative ideologies -- even in defiance of what the public themselves are manifestly choosing -- are themselves special interests trying to exert their own influence over politics.
> It sounds like they were defrauding people into giving them donations under false pretenses, and the transparency measures were effective at mitigating that.
There are no pretenses in political giving (at least at the U.S. federal level), because it is illegal to tie a donation to a particular position, vote, or action by the politician. It’s called a quid pro quo and is the test for whether a donation is a bribe.
In the U.S. the political system is based on people, not positions or policy. Donations to a politician are to the person. It’s not a proxy for buying an outcome.
In practice, of course people are going to support politicians who they like and think agree with them. But under the law, a politician can’t rip you off by taking your money and then voting contrary to your desires.
Which makes the initial promise to vote a certain way in exchange for donations itself illegal. That seems fine. So what is the problem with transparency, again?
This subthread is a discussion about pertains to politicians misrepresenting their voting intentions in order to get donations. My comment was a response to an argument that allowing politicians to do this is a good thing because it allows them to vote their "consciences" while pretending otherwise to people donating to them.
Perhaps not precisely, but it is a proxy for attempting to influence an outcome.
> under the law, a politician can’t rip you off by taking your money and then voting contrary to your desires.
Isn't that in conflict with:
> it is illegal to tie a donation to a particular position, vote, or action by the politician.
Are you saying that if I give a politician money and express my desire that they are then legally bound to vote according to my desire? Sounds like buying votes; I'm pretty sure that's not condoned by the law.
In practice there is a donor class and constituent class who are largely not the same set of people. The point you’re missing is how the donor class is instrumental in influencing the actual language that goes into the laws, this happens peripheral to the democratic process. For example, a spending bill where the language favors one vendor over others because that vendor paid to submit their suggested language. This is not hypothetical btw.
I don't know what the answer to public votes is. I see the benefit in them voting their conscience. But I also see how they can vote against my interests and then lie through their teeth that they are helping me if I can't see their record.
But voting today is such a performative act for them. There are great pieces of legislation that can't pass because someone has labeled it as radical so one side or the other can't be seen with their name on it so they don't pass it even though they know it is good and would benefit their constituents.
There are a million frontends designed to simplify Git for non-programmers. In fact, lots of office software now has version management built-in. Very few people use it. This isn’t a technology problem.
To be fair, version control built into office suits are often hidden away or have other UX patterns that aren’t comfortable for nontechnical folk. So they either still get scared by it, or don’t even know it exists.
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”.
> 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”.
This demonstrates LACK OF demand for technical version control, since the system you describe has been used since forever and found to be good enough.
No. It demonstrates nontechnical people adapting the skills they’re familiar with to suit a requirement they have.
It doesn’t prove that they don’t want a better solution should it have the right UX. And, as I said in my original comment, the current UX for version control in documents both sucks and is often hidden away where people might not even be aware it exists.
Yes, it is, but the issue is ease of use for non-technical users.
I was trying to avoid naming any products on purpose, but, for example, there is a commercial product that is easy enough for most people and affordable that would work for this- and there are a few open source clones that come close.
The open source clones are not quite polished enough for non-technical users, but they are the closest thing I can think of, basically crossing over a wiki + Markdown for knowledgebase creation with Git-like versioning.
We don’t need version control for legislative bills. We need journalists that track down who tried to insert what, summarize it, and present it to the public with context. That would satisfy the oversight purpose without getting lost in technicalities.
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.
A revision control system is a tool the journalists could use to achieve this. Commits to the 'enacted' branch could have commit messges documenting the context (when, how, why, who). Unmerged branches could represent proposed but ultimately rejected (or still in progress) changes with the same amount of meta data.
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.
Until journalists can be paid under the table to mislead the public, the problem will persist. Almost anyone can be bought on a Friday night for the price of a few drinks and benefits.
I am confused. Someone put in place a system that would allow journalists or citizens to meaningfully engage with the law in a much better way than they can now.
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?
We need that too, but the ability to git diff changes to the law is a great win for democracy and transparency in 2026 because git is an interface that agents are experts at using. If you're a journalist, activist or anybody else doing the type of research you just described this makes it faster and easier.
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.
> because git is an interface that agents are experts at using
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.
I am sure with LLMs the time to craft those tools to fetch the data and put them back in a git repo (for example one repo per legislative project) would not be too hard to do.
> Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job
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....
In the 1920s the German speaking world got a book whose first three chapters just hammer in how important it is for the average citizen to take an interest in his local politics. That book was subsequently banned by almost every European country in the decades since. I'm the only person I know who has personally read it, even though it is one of the most derided books in history.
I highly recommend the first three chapters to anybody who thinks they don't need to understand their local politics.
I don't think that the problem with legislative transparency is that there aren't enough middlemen sitting between the public and the legislative process.
I'm personally not interested in being dependent on the press -- which is just other people pursuing their own interests and assumptions -- to interpret artificially opaque sources, if those sources can just be made accessible instead.
Having a dynamic and pluralistic press is a good thing, and we need more investigative journalism, to discover what isn't visible to the public, but I'm not sure there's a lot of value in the sort of interpretive journalism you're proposing.
Git does allow multiple contributors on each commit. Of course people can lie, but it's a matter of policy in the end. Make it a crime to not add all contributors to a diff.
Every system gets gamed, and so is the current one. The goal is that the people can more easily stay informed. Even with mixed authors problem you highlight would be still an improvement.
This is already regularly done. One side or the other will propose or amend a bill that they claim does [popular thing x] and then add in some clause that they know will get voted against, so they can then claim that [other side] voted against [popular thing x].
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.
The politicians wouldn’t have the option to game it if additional data is pulled in automatically like lobbying disclosure filings, public watchdog databases, etc. for the final overview. A swift turn from limiting the total sugar amount in soda would look quite bad if the politician got lobbied by Big Soda.
> it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors
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.)
It shows git-like diffs plus an AI summary of what changed. There is no author attribution though - I'm not sure there is a business use case for it, lawyers don't care about who wrote a specific law.
Bills are written in English but I'd view them as code. It's not interesting to track changes in code for outsiders. Sure, it's cool for programmers, but users of software do not care if you unrolled a for-loop and who did it. They don't even know what that is and the same holds for bills. We have journalists for that and nobody is willing to pay for that because nobody gives a shit about a functioning democracy. Now that's one hell of a problem git ain't going to solve.
The great promise of crypto-contracts was to be able to write rules as code and have them be deterministic (instead of requiring a judge to rule on it) and even have unit tests. Instead it seems we are moving towards a world where rules are written in English and judged by biased LLMs.
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.
That was the same for the software patent directive, we had leaks of amendments proposed by big companies, we could see that Members of Parliament were just copy pasting them.
Git commits get rebased, squashed, cherry-picked and edited retroactively, written during pair or mob programming sessions or rewritten during code review. And we also know that commit messages often suck. As a result, commits almost never tell you the full story about who exactly contributed, in what order or why.
The process is even messier when writing new bills. They get passed around between different departments, discussed & edited in various committees, etc.
Sure, you could force all participating parties to use git, prevent them from force-pushing or rewriting history even on their "feature branches", get them to sign their every commit, etc. But what you'd then likely just end up with is most negotiation & editing happening out-of-band.
Besides: At the end of the day it's the (majority of the) parliament that enacts a given law, so in my book they are all responsible, even if in practice laws get written by a small subset of people.
I'm blown away by the hand wringing of this. Someone would be forced to answer for the way they voted and inserted language. It makes it harder to do what you complain about because someone is going to take a hit. If its a little guy he might lose the next election. If its a big guy, eventually these things add up. Not sure what unintended consequences might appear. It sounds like you are resigned to the worst fate right now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"... Think of what version control software could mean for the Congress [...]. If bills were created under a system where strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol.
At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process. Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made them. ..."
(from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/business/media/23link.htm... )