In a message entitled Re: Beer Escrow -- "There ought to be a _law_!!"
Tim May wrote:
> My radical view has become, over the past dozen or so years, that
> anyone who passes a law which is overturned should face consequences
> for the bad law. In many cases, death. In lesser cases, hard labor,
> earning their keep. In the least significant cases, expulsion from
> legislative and ministerial bodies.
My first impulse is to agree. However, the late Roman republic was
crushed under a morass of laws, and so it finally became the rule that
any Senator who proposed a law must appear with a noose around his
neck. If the law did not pass, he would be strangled on the spot. No
laws were proposed for, IIRC, decades. I don't recall the dire
consequences of this rule, but the decay of the Republic's real
holdings and problems with the legions would be an obvious guess.
Rather than go that far, I'd be satisfied with a law stating that any
legislator who voted for three separate laws which were later found
unconstitutional, even in part, would be immediately removed and would
be ineligible to hold any further legislative position. We could
expand that to the executive and judicial branches.
And to drift a bit farther off topic, I'd like to see *harsh*
consequences for anyone who participated in the execution of an
innocent man. This applies from evidence-planting pigs through DAs
who don't disclose crucial evidence all the way up to "actual
innocence" justices. Maybe not death for these offenders, but life
without parole should suffice.
--
Steve Furlong, Computer Condottiere Have GNU, will travel
518-374-4720 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
