Busy Beavers In Austin
January 18, 2004
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Posted by Aubrey Turner
I got an email forwarded to me with the story of a driver who got caught up in a new law which I had never heard of. SB 193 became law on September 1, 2003. It requires drivers to either move over to the next lane or slow down to a speed that is 20MPH under the posted limit when an emergency vehicle is on the side of the road with lights activated. On multilane roads I’d always moved over when possible just to avoid getting too close to the cop standing on the side of the road. However, I can see this law causing some pileups when someone in a 70MPH zone slows down to 50 and gets rear-ended.
This made me curious as to what else the busy little beavers were up to in Austin when they weren’t throwing tantrums and running off to other states. I found this page that lists all of the bills signed by the governor during the 78th legislative session (including all of the special sessions, which is why there are some duplicate bill numbers). There were 1625 bills signed during the last session. Let’s say that again: One thousand, six hundred and twenty five.
How does a citizen have any hope of keeping up with all of these damn laws? This seems to be the typical way that our legislature operates. They pass a bunch of bills and we only find out about them when we get in trouble for violating the new laws.
I hereby propose a new amendment to the Texas constitution:
At the end of each legislative session a summary of all bills signed by the Governor as well as the full text of each will be distributed to each registered voter in the state by the Secretary of State. No bill may become effective until at least 90 days after the Secretary of State has made notification as required by this provision.
Categories: Politics
Alternatively, a provision that any law not treating with death or treason have a ten-year expiration. That should keep ‘em so busy re-passing old laws they won’t have time to dream up new ones.
Remember, “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” so we are supposed to know all this stuff. So are LEO’s. And accountants. The IRS has admitted the Federal tax law is so complex their representatives must not be held to account if they advise a citizen incorrectly!
I like that idea. The legislature definitely needs something to keep it busy or otherwise it’ll just keep passing new laws that we have no chance of keeping up with.
I just got forwarded some information on SB 193 (basically a cut-n-paste of http://www.cowtownvettes.org/misc/TXLaw1.html) from a friend since I’m moving to Austin next month. 1625 is more than 5 bills per day. I wonder if you could do a page count, divide by the number of waking hours in a typical adult’s year, and see how many pages/hour we have to be reading.
I hear Texas is a Republican state? (Based on the new redistricting, it looks like it’ll stay that way for a long time, too.) I thought Republicans were for reducing the size of government?
I’ve come to the conclusion that Republicans don’t really have anything to gain by reducing the size of government. If government is smaller and has less power, then the power of the legislators is diminished as well.
Besides, if your only tool is a hammer then you tend to see all problems as nails. So, if your only tool is to write legislation…
A pox on them all.