The Plain Writing Act of 2010 [pdf]

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-111publ274/pdf/PLAW-111publ274.pdf

by fsethi • 11 years ago

18 12 11 years ago

It took 2+ full pages to tell people to keep things simple. Awesome.

cpfohl• 11 years ago

You'll notice they explicitly don't cover regulations (like the one they were writing), probably because of the amount of legal precedent for nitpicking the exact phraseology of a given law or regulation...

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

You'll notice they explicitly don't cover regulations (like the one they were writing),

No, they were writing a law, which is different from regulation; law isn't covered, but not because it is explicitly excluded, but because its not included, at a minimum because it is written by Congress, and this only covers work product of Executive agencies.

But more importantly, they've specifically acted to make the law completely unenforceable (see Sec. 6.)

RankingMember• 11 years ago

The way some governmental texts are written, I wouldn't be surprised if they run the original text through an obfuscation find/replace algorithm that replaces words <5 letters with a similar word from a thesaurus with the maximum length available.

granos• 11 years ago

Those algorithms are called lawyers.

noahlt• 11 years ago

This is funny and ironic, but really it's no different than implementing Lisp in C. Naturally, the implementation language will not be as nice as the implemented language.

GeneralMayhem• 11 years ago

SEC. 6. JUDICIAL REVIEW AND ENFORCEABILITY.
(a) JUDICIAL REVIEW.—There shall be no judicial review of compliance or noncompliance with any provision of this Act.
(b) ENFORCEABILITY.—No provision of this Act shall be construed to create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable by any administrative or judicial action.

I'm not particularly familiar with the intricacies of self-regulation in the US government; if judges can't review whether an agency is following the rule, and individuals don't have grounds to force the matter because it's not a "right or benefit", does this mean that there's no enforceability at all, or is there some other mechanism not mentioned here that kicks in by default?

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

Its essentially unenforceable: the only avenue left is Congress using violations as motivations for future action, but Congress doesn't need a law for a basis of that. Its pretty much purely symbolic.

EvanPlaice• 11 years ago

I love sites like this because there's always that one person who can swiftly dig through all the BS and nail the point.

Thank you

irixusr2• 11 years ago

We also need a bill length vs. review time rule.

If a law is too long for a representative to have read it (Patriot act, ACA) then Congress should not vote on it until they've had enough time to read it.

I propose 10 days + (number of pages / 5) after it's been introduced to the public.

TazeTSchnitzel• 11 years ago

(number of pages / 5)

Five pages alone can require a lot of reading.

irixusr2• 11 years ago

Agreed, as anyone who codes and therefore understand how much understanding five pages of logic can be.

But bills often have more pages than days in an elected congress (two years is just over 700 days) so you have to divide out

The Plain Writing Act of 2010 [pdf]

Related Stories