[9000]

> Politicians are good at getting elected, and OK at being, at least for some limited tenure, broadly receptive to some set of identifiable principles or goals that people vote for. But that doesn't mean they're good at drafting the actual laws, or, for that matter, recruiting and managing the people who are.

I understand that legislators are voted in as a popularity contest, and that new legislators especially may not be good at the craft of writing laws. However, I feel like if we can't even trust these elected officials to be able to recruit and manage capable individuals who can write good laws, how can we expect our elected officials to recruit and manage capable individuals who can critically evaluate proposed model legislation?

If we can, I don't see how the skill set of the legislator is substantially different in these two cases. If we can't, then we are essentially admitting that interest groups should be able to convince legislators to pass laws on merits other than the bill's quality. In that case, I don't know what role the legislators are even performing in this system.

In my view, the point of democracy and its ideals of equality (e.g. one person, one vote) are to protect less powerful classes from more powerful ones. If our solution to the problem of model legislation is to throw our own money in the other direction, we will just end up with rich groups fighting battles with each other with little oversight from the rest of the population.

[tptacek]

I guess I'm just not seeing how it was ever realistic to think that legislators and their staffs were going to be the best authors of bills (rather than the best arbiters of what bills to pass, where I think there's a clearer case that they're the best option out of a whole untidy mess of worse options), or why competition from outside sources of drafting legislation would be a bad thing.

[9000]

I don't think there is any reason to believe that legislators are the individuals with the most talent at drafting law. It's probably some academic or lawyer somewhere. But, I do believe that the process that gets legislators into that position is designed to provide oversight over them, and allow for a metric that can prevent the worst people being chosen. Just because someone better at writing laws exists, does not mean that we have a better metric of choosing them than the democratic vote. And for them to then shirk not just their duty to write the laws, but also their duty to provide meaningful oversight over the bills that do get proposed and passed, implies to me that there are real problems.

I have no problem with interested organizations writing draft bills and publicizing those. What I do have a problem with is politicians taking those whole-cloth and implementing them in law without consulting other stakeholders, especially when money or influence changes hands.