[cthalupa]

> What if legislators were required to wait one year before passing laws in response to a public event of some sort?

Someone discovers a way to bypass regulations and legislature and easily acquire the material needed to create a dirty bomb and sets one off. Now we wait 365 days to fix the loophole.

Pretty obviously an absurd extremity for that example, but I sure as shit don't want there to be that level of lag time on important things like that, and I imagine most people would also want to be able to move faster in situations where it is dangerous not to. How do we determine where that line is, what the exceptions are, etc.? What happens when we need an exception and didn't realize it?

[efitz]

The situation you describe is really contrived.

What happens in real life is that in emergencies, the legislature passes some “sentencing enhancement” that adds on a decade or three of prison time in the circumstance. Or they create a new bureaucracy that in the end just makes life worse for everyone, like the DHS and all the airport suckage that happened after 9/11 - if you’re too young to remember, flying on airplanes did not always suck.