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by DKnoll 2708 days ago
Why don't they use the Canadian National Research Council bulletin?

http://time5.nrc.ca/timefreq/bulletin_tf-b.html

In Canada if a budget isn't passed it triggers an election. We don't have government shutdowns.

4 comments

I like this idea a lot. I think the US, we like elections to come in certain cycles to give the incumbents enough time to actually accomplish something, but I have always admired the parliamentary system where you can call an election at various points.

I think the US Constitution either explicitly precludes this kind of system or could be construed to preclude it.

It’s been abused a lot to call elections when advantageous for the incumbent. A decade old law made for more regular term durations but there are still loopholes for the ruling party to unilaterally declare elections.

Failure to pass a budget is an automatic no confidence vote still which I think works very well.

An other method to get a budget passed is to allow any representative to submit a budget and let which ever budget has most votes pass. That is what Sweden use.
Portugal just uses the budget from the last year unchanged.
If you do, you probably should use https.

https://time5.nrc.ca/timefreq/bulletin_tf-b.html

There's probably some really weird MITM attack possibilities here if people have automated systems fetching and using these files. Also, following the link from the article, it would seem the US government's official source is unencrypted FTP?

Yes very true. In fact the NRC should probably set up an HTTPS redirect and HSTS.
No need. House seats are up for election every two years for this reason.
I guess the US government will reopen in 2020 then.