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Comment by doezi

7 hours ago

Not really. It is arguing for version controlled legislation. So who’s responsible for what portions of literal laws and policy. I hope your "not clone-able" is in jest

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doezi

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JumpCrisscross  7 hours ago

> who’s responsible for what portions of literal laws and policy

This makes sense for bills. It doesn't for laws. Once a bill is a law, it's the will of the Congress.

  • dathanb82  6 hours ago

    That’s like saying that the code in a repo belongs to the whole team once a PR is merged, so it doesn’t make sense to track its provenance back to its original authors.

    • JumpCrisscross  6 hours ago

      > so it doesn’t make sense to track its provenance back to its original authors

      The legislative process is inherently collaborative in a way that's ordinarily undocumented. Who introduced an amendment and who supported it are entirely separate. Someone who introduced language can wind up not supporting it because of where the mix of trade-offs winds up.

      At the level of a bill, knowing who wrote language matters. At the level of law, you should only care who voted for it. (I'm not even tackling the inherent subjectivity in tracing e.g. language in the CFR to specific language in a bill.)

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