Lawyers are not necessarily dumb. But, they are all so busy “getting theirs” none of them even try to clean up the mess.

The lawyers have allowed the nit picking, sophism of a high school philosophy club to become the law of the land – mainly by default.

That’s the problem. Here the offices do only what the legislators tell them to do. In other countries, the government office works with the executive departments and the cabinet to present legislation for the public to consider and then for the government to present to the legislators to review, revise and adopt. It’s all about quality control for laws that govern everyone. It reduces or even eliminates earmarks and pet projects for a few legislators. In that world lobbying scandals are considerably less common.

Kestrel, I’m not unmindful of your point but you are not offering a real solution. Are you really suggesting we (who is we?) put limitations on the way legislature makes laws? How? You can only address one “purpose” per bill? Gosh, how do we decide that and how many lawsuits are we creating?

Democracies are imperfect. We pick bad leaders in many cases because we don’t spend the time and effort to pick the right ones. In the good ole days it was the same way… and probably worse. We can try new and innovative things to make thing better but, really, how much meaningful tinkering with our democracy in the last 100 years has been really effective? (Except Prohibition of course. That ruled.)

Alas, writing horrible and overly-complex laws seems to be a feature, and not a bug, of our current political class. Obamacare is perhaps the pinnacle of that (i.e., “we have to pass this bill to find out what is in it”). And let us not forget that poorly-drafted complexity creates jobs for the sea of administrators in our bloated federal agencies, thereby adding to the political power of the legislators who passed the bill.

I have taken law classes, and I once had a professor (moonlighting judge) complain that my writing was too concise.

He admitted I hadn’t left anything out, or reasoned incorrectly, but I was writing a paragraph and the other (beginner) students were writing a page and a half.

FYI

I worked for a large company that had its own legal department and BIG (dollar wise) contracts.

I read our biggest (dollar amount per year, indefinite) 180 pages and found more mistakes in logic, common sense, and fourth grade arithmetic than you would believe.

Circular references, agreements to agree, listing four possibilities then addressing only two, two PAGES of mathematics that I condensed into ONE LINE (OK, longish equation), references to non existent sections, etc.

The law department hated me. Fortunately, they had one lawyer who didn’t think he was god and he spent the next two years, renegotiating and cleaning up the mistakes I found in four days of reading the contract w a red pen in my hand.

Legal got so shirty I challenged them: I said I could write the same contract, correctly, easier to understand, more enforceable – in 8 pages. They didn’t accept the challenge.

Concise bills can be crafted to address complex problems if we limit illogical add-ons and kickbacks.