“… It’s really difficult to restrain a legislature from something it really wants to do.” Yes, Madison’s angels, and all that 🙂 Or make it do something it really does not want to do, such as pass the Saves Act, even given Neo’s recent cautions on the difficulty of doing that under present circumstances.

” I think a different method of selecting legislators, so that they are closer to being ordinary citizens and not career politicians, would get us closer to being able to effectively sunset laws without perverting the intent, and probably would fix some other problems as well.” Yes, probably an essential element of all this. I have proposed alternatives for supermajority based term limits in the past. Finding a “solution” to avoid abuses of the Gerrymandering/ redistricting problem is another. But our founders understood human nature well enough to know that public virtue had to be preceded by private virtue in enough citizens to be able to also obtain that virtue in our representatives and judiciary. Has the march through the institutions and the indoctrination via the educational system really been THAT impactful on our communal virtue, or just on enough of the population (40%?) to impact wise (and serious) governance?

On “You can’t require that all laws sunset without amending the Constitution and you can’t change how people get elected without amending the Constitution.” My initial reaction was “that can’t be right, as we could pass laws controlling the need for sunsets, etc.” But I agree if you meant that for us to force or mandate sunsetting, then a constitutional change is probably necessary. Your past comments about the filibuster show how “flexible” our congress critters can be when it suits their purposes. On the mode of changing elections, were you thinking of the 17th Amendment or similar, or that the states control the details anyway, or ??

Did our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents feel as abused by the government and the politicians as we do? Progressivism started around the time my grandparents were born, but Marxism preceded even that. Yet in the main our antecedents proved Marxism to be wrong on history and human nature in the main. They worked through some rough problems of labor strife and child labor, women’s suffrage, etc., plus two major wars. I hope our generations are still able to rise to the occasion and return us to a rational and serious country again.
I blow hot and cold on that optimism, but I am bolstered by the posts and commentary here.

Yes, you’re thinking of the infamous “Green Card Spam” by lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel in 1994.

On April 12, 1994 (about 32 years ago), this Arizona-based husband-and-wife immigration lawyer team posted the same advertisement to over 5,500 Usenet newsgroups (an early internet discussion system often seen as a precursor to modern forums and email lists). The subject line was something like “Green Card Lottery — Final One?” and it promoted their paid services to help people apply for the U.S. Diversity Visa (Green Card) Lottery.

Yes, it was lawyers.

LOL. I have long thought it was a turning point when they started allowing lawyers to advertise. Before that they were “officers of the court”. After, it was clear they were in it for the bucks. Not that they weren’t before but at least there may have been a sense of shame. Ok maybe a little …

It is a good idea, but I think there is a practical barrier that there is a huge fraction of the laws that no one is ever going to want to sunset, for example laws against murder and things like that. Because there’s so many of them, there will be some process built that lets you grandfather laws in or batch process the renewal of the sunset provision, and that process will certainly be gamed and abused.

It’s really difficult to restrain a legislature from something it really wants to do. We’ve tried that, of course, and have had some success with the US Constitution. I think a different method of selecting legislators, so that they are closer to being ordinary citizens and not career politicians, would get us closer to being able to effectively sunset laws without perverting the intent, and probably would fix some other problems as well.

As long we’re waving magic wands anyway, that is. You can’t require that all laws sunset without amending the Constitution and you can’t change how people get elected without amending the Constitution. The sort of collapse that results in the US Constitution being replaced by something else is probably not going to favor the establishment of what we think of as “good government”.

In the end, pieces of paper do not protect us. It all comes down to the people in charge abiding by what the pieces of paper say. If you have any doubts, refer to the Soviet Union’s constitution or China’s and review the rights people have on paper vs the rights they have in reality. Excerpt below:

ARTICLE 124. In order to ensure to citizens freedom of conscience, the church in the U.S.S.R. is separated from the state, and the school from the church. Freedom of religious worship and freedom of antireligious propaganda is recognized for all citizens.

ARTICLE 125. In conformity with the interests of the working people, and in order to strengthen the socialist system, the citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed by law:

freedom of speech;
freedom of the press;
freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings;
freedom of street processions and demonstrations.

These civil rights are ensured by placing at the disposal of the working people and their organizations printing presses, stocks of paper, public buildings, the streets, communications facilities and other material requisites for the exercise of these rights.

President Trump 45 made a big show of that very thing, and IIRC a pretty decent start on removing outdated or ineffective (or Democrat favoring) regulations within his power as Chief Executive.
Another reason the Deep State had to shut him down: they LIKE it when
someone that they want to prosecute/persecute “commits three felonies a day.”

https://fee.org/articles/three-felonies-a-day-how-the-feds-target-the-innocent/

The now-iconic 2010 book by Civil libertarian attorney Harvey Silverglate gives examples from both parties of overzealous prosecutors.

If you have a big enough rule book, anyone can aspire to imitate Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the secret police, who bragged, “Show me the man, and I will find you the crime.”

When people do talk about Natural Law or Natural Rights, they often neglect to consider the roles of evolution, evolutionary psychology, or neuroscience. It becomes a subset of philosophy, which in turn also tends to add in elements of culture, which clearly vary from society to society. [It is late so I will skip an exercise to try to define which of our constitutional rights have a basis in our nature and most of the others that are based on legal theory and cultural experience.]

I suspect the better lawyers are also the ones who matriculated before, during, or after law school, at the school of hard knocks.

But really we ought to be considering means to mandate that ALL laws have a sunset to automatically and distinctly end their ineffectiveness at addressing their original goal if or when that happens. We have too many laws on the books, and a famous admittance that we are likely to be violating some federal law because of this excess and our ignorance.
The need to renew any given expired (or potentially expiring) law would (or should) force an evaluation of just how effective it really has been, or if changes and updates are also needed.