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Source Control For Bills In Congress?

Posted by kdawson on from the real-subversion dept.

grepya writes "An article in Slate talks about the sneaky way a major change in the Patriot Act reauthorization bill was made by (possibly) a Congressional staffer without even his boss knowing about it. (The change increased the power of the Executive at the expense of the other two branches of government.) Now, I write software for a large and complex system containing millions of lines of code and I know that nobody could slip a single line of code into my project without my knowledge. This is because everything that goes into the build goes into a source control system, and email notification is generated to interested parties. This is for a body of work that affects perhaps a few hundred thousand people at most (our company and the combined population of all our customer organizations). Shouldn't the same process be applied to bills being debated in national legislatures that affect potentially hundreds of millions of people?"

2 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Re:alternatively... by DerekLyons · · Score: 0, Troll

    Absolutely. I was just discussing this with someone today - if the "readings" in Congress were mandatory and could not be bypassed by consent, we'd have a much better legal system for a variety of reasons - Congressional representatives couldn't claim ignorance, there would be an incentive to keep bills shorter, and an unexpected change would be noticed more readily.

    ROTFLMAO. As if someone would actually sit through the hours it would take to read (aloud) many of these bills - and even if they would, I doubt they'd notice a change of a few dozen words out of thousands.
  2. Re:Big Government by Jonny+do+good · · Score: 0, Troll

    the feds should only worry about military/national security (this would include highways), international trade, and disputes between the states.

    YES!!! Isn't this what the constitution says? I never read anything about federal entitlement programs in the constitution, yet every day they want to dole out more money to their own pet projects that they use soley for the purpose of securing votes. They don't get my vote when they pass these crappy bills, they make me look for a new candidate that claims to support the constitution. What ever happened to states rights and the idea that states would garner most of the domestic power and the federal government would handle international affairs and disputes between states? It seems lost to the few of us left that see through the BS the fed tells us they have to due for us. Leave me alone big brother and quite telling me what you can do for me other than take my moeny ion the form of taxes to waste of bridges to nowhere. I welcome the day that little brother steps up to the plate and fights big brother to regain their original levels of power.