[vkou]

Great. Now, define how we can determine if two bills are the same 'your law' (Who decides? Lifetime-appointed partisan judges? The old legislature? The new legislature? The executive god-king?).

... And then figure out how to prevent poison-pill sabotage, because the best way to prevent a legislature from ever passing becomes 'deliberately draft a really bad version of it, and have your party veto it'.

Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.

[kelseydh]

It's a reverse of what you're describing, but a similar mechanism like this in Canada is their notwithstanding clause.

If the Supreme Court of Canada rules a law unconstitutional, the government in power can overrule their ruling by using the notwithstanding clause. However, the notwithstanding clause override to keep the law in effect only lasts for five years. Subsequent legislatures have to keep renewing the override or the Supreme Court's ruling of unconstitutionality takes effect again.

[lmm]

> Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.

There's no option to do that though. To block something for 10 years you'd have to stiff it at least 3 times, 1 and 5 years apart (which would mean doing it across at least two legislative terms).

[vkou]

I don't think you understand how legislatures around the world work, if you think this wouldn't be gamed to absurdity.

Important bills generally don't go to a vote unless everyone involved knows exactly how many votes they are going to get. Your proposal won't actually stop anything that a majority wants passed from passing - as long as a minority can't get ahead of them by poisoning the bill.

Bills are not single-issue. Any bill - even the best - can be trivially tanked by attaching a bunch of awful garbage to it. You are giving a single person (or whatever the minimum quorum is for putting a bill to vote) the power to kill, for years, progress on any issue - by putting forward their own version that's saddled with crap.

This would immediately be abused to disastrous effect.

You will end up with a complete farce, with the minority trying to outdo itself by coming up with the worst possible bills imaginable, that happen to include slivers of a majority's agenda. It's completely ass-backwards way to approach any decisionmaking process - because you are effectively giving multi-year issue veto power to any member of a legislature that's willing to embarass themselves by proposing garbage (that they don't actually want passed).

Or, worse yet, the majority will take the bait, and pass the bad bill anyway (because if they don't vote for it now, they won't get the chance to revisit the issue for years).

[lmm]

If it was that simple then no legislature anywhere would ever pass any bill already. Evidently there are countermeasures to these things.