Lawmakers really need to learn to use version tracking properly. It's shouldn't be possible for a single line of text to make it into a bill without a digital trail leading back to whoever added it.
It's often not so much what's in the three thousand pages of filler and bumf, rather more what's in the several paragraphs that get the bulk of the rewrites and horse trading - that and the last apparently unrelated change that kicks a proprosed Bill over the line to pass.
Not how reconciliation-based negotiations work.
Behind every material lawmaker you’d have redlines circulating among their staff. Each industry group would have them circulating among its members. Each citizen group, too. These will be haphazardly combined among the groups, sometimes transparently, sometimes strategically. It’s still traceable. But not necessarily in one go, and probably only through a lawmaker who doesn’t want to look duped.
There was a good article on the immortality of Word recently that addressed this.
It looks like North Dakota uses a LegCo. If the edits were in the original draft, no lawmaker added them.
What systems are you thinking of?
I’ve provided private feedback on state and federal bills. I was, myself, soliciting feedback from friends and acquaintances. In some cases, that was a back and forth over text. Sometimes it was redlines. I consolidated that into an email that was sometimes a redline, sometimes a strike-this-add-that. If I were required to use a state-mandated version control system (a) I’d flip out at whoever required that and (b) just push the consolidated version once I was satisfied with it from my end.
Many other times, these bills are workshopped in person or—increasingly—over Zoom. Part of what makes that work is you can say something dumb, be corrected, and then not have that be part of any permanent record.
(Even if you disagree with the idea being implemented, that's different from pretending not to understand how it would work if it were implemented.)
Okay, take the workflow that I presented. I'm a private citizen. I'm not creating a log-in to some government git. I'm literally saying I think this law has this problem, and then I'm being asked to fix it. So I try to fix it, collecting the input I need to so, and then send back my recommendation. This simply isn't a flow that survives being overly formalised.
> that's different from pretending not to understand how it would work if it were implemented
I'm not pretending, I literally don't see it. We already have official committee versions, et cetera. What are you going to do, make it a prosecutable offense for two staffers to discuss a bill over coffee?
The top of this thread claims it's difficult to impossible to determine who made these contributions to this North Dakota bill. Maybe it is. I don't know enough about their legislative process to refute that. But I'm going to guess it probably isn't, at least to the point that you can figure out which LegCo version first contained these fake minerals, and who submitted that.
If someone takes your recommended draft and then records in a ledger somewhere which draft revision(s) you were working with to prepare your draft/proposed changes, and they store copies of all these drafts, then that's version control. It doesn't have to be Git (though, as the other commenter said, there's nothing mentioned so far that's incompatible with it), nor Mercurial, SVN, Perforce, or any other other existing version control system you've heard of, and you wouldn't have to be personally operating any of the clients that actually operate on the VCS's data model.
I’m a private citizen asking friends for their thoughts. One of them fixed the grammar in something wrote years ago. Would those edits need to be copied to a public ledger and identified?
Let’s go local. I’m right now working on getting Flock Safety out of my community. Part of that involves co-ordinating with members of vulnerable communities. I’m sure as hell not getting all of them to sign their names to a draft measure. Yet every single one of them have added value to the discussion and project.
This is the reality of negotiation, coalition building and reconciliation. Some of it is untraced for convenience. Some of it is hidden for corrupt purposes. And some of it is secret to give room for honesty and grace.
I have no doubt we could force lawmakers to use version control. I’m sure we could prosecute private citizens and NGOs for not using the sanctioned reporting system. I don’t see that being a step forward. And I don’t see it hampering to any degree the powerful and connected.
(You’ve argued this well, by the way, and I think my position has shifted from it’s impossible to it’s impossible without compromising what makes democracy work.)
It wouldn't hurt, but it also wouldn't be necessary.
> I’m sure as hell not getting all of them to sign their names to a draft measure. Yet every single one of them have added value to the discussion and project.
"Added value" is not the same as being the author of a draft that gets merged (in whole or in part, and with or without edits by the person who's integrating it).
> I’m sure we could prosecute private citizens and NGOs for not using the sanctioned reporting system.
I don't know what that means. As I said before, if you send your draft (or just the parts that you wish to "patch", i.e. a suggested change) to a public official (no matter what form, e.g. an email, even) who then chooses to integrate your suggestion, and they record both the provenance of the revision and what precisely is being revised, then that would satisfy the conditions of what constitutes version control.
> You’ve argued this well
I don't think so. I see this subthread as being tedious and unnecessary, and there's nothing particularly insightful in the things I've written here. It should have ended with the first commenter who explained that nothing about any of this is incompatible with version control, but it sounds—not just based on the remarks here, but similarly timed comments elsewhere—that you still don't grok what that really means.
Merged into what? There is no master draft. Just a bunch of drafts being circulated. I have no idea at what point my comments are submitted into a copy that winds up on the floor for a vote.
More to the point, the author of the draft may have nothing to do with my edits. If we’re skipping that, the entire exercise is performative.
> it sounds—not just based on the remarks here, but similarly timed comments elsewhere—that you still don't grok what that really means
How much language have you drafted that wound up in state or federal law?
This confident naïveté is part of the problem.
Give this another think-through.
> How much language have you drafted that wound up in state or federal law?¶ This confident naïveté is part of the problem.
Mr. Crisscross: There is no amount of experience or lack thereof that can invalidate basic mathematical truths that are known about graph theory.
> More to the point, the author of the draft may have nothing to do with my edits. If we’re skipping that, the entire exercise is performative.
I don't know what you're trying to say here.
Maybe that workflow is something we want to change.
Either way, if I thought I could actually influence legislation meaningfully, I'm prepared to create a git login.
Literally start with calling your representative.
> I'm prepared to create a git login
Easy to say if you’re in society’s mainstream. A lot harder for other folks.
Right now, I’d be worried about Government Git being trawled for anyone who did anything the administration finds objectionable.
One part, yes. The balance between compromise and partisan showboating shifts when everything is public.
But nine parts, it’s just not how multi-party devolved negotiations work. Everyone has their own preferred system, whether it’s Word redlines, in-person edits, text and e-mailed strike-outs or possibly a formal version-control system. They aren’t compatible and they don’t generally have to be.
[0] https://pyvideo.org/pybay-2024/automate-your-city-data-with-... "Automate Your City Data with Python"
Lawmakers have staff (and external interest groups) who build and shape the documents. We may optimistically presume that each lawmaker reads each change that they are proposing... but that's not true.
Counter-argument: there are GOPers afraid of standing up to Trump because they fear that doing so would trigger violence from MAGAland. E.g.
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/violent-threats-pile-u...
People used to vote for candidates in elections in public, and there was all sorts of intimidation and violence until secret ballots were rolled out.
I'm generally for political/politician transparency, but let's not ignore some of the trade-offs.
Why in the world would they want to do that? For you and the rest of the public to figure out who to blame for things?
It's not a matter of ignorance. Forcing them to use version control could be a good idea in theory. You can't force them to do anything though, because they make the rules.
You can track changes, and diff, and blame.
Wouldn't solve the corruption in this case but could definitely shine a light on it.
They use word processors to write the things, they could at least learn to turn on "track changes".
I genuinely do believe that a law that says "all laws must be able to show author tracking on a per-line basis" would improve democracy. Convince me otherwise!
In the same way that right now industry interest groups write up proposed laws and then hand them to a favored allied lawmaker to "introduce" the proposal for them, and so on?
I'd also add that Word could add first-class Markdown/.md support. Seems like a pretty natural direction to go in as AI-assisted drafting/editing becomes increasingly commonplace, and would further simplify the GitHub integration.
Why? Because:
1. They’d never enable it for the final bill and thus all prior changes would fall under legislative privilege and thus the public would never see it.
2. Government moves slowly and isn’t generally apt to adopt technology as rapidly as they should. The workflows would need to change significantly and that would be impossible/take an inordinate amount of time. But; see #1.
—-
I went through a long and arduous legal process as part of my divorce. While my attorney preferred sharing redlines, the other attorney never shared it back that way, or even in a Word doc; they always sent PDF images.
Based on how many times we redlined stuff and the other side would just treat it as if it hadn’t happened was absurd. If this sort of behavior is entrenched in the legal field, I can’t imagine it would ever work when attorneys, governments, and industry players are involved.
But you are right, and that's what I am saying. The government will never become better on its own. You would need to take its hand and keep holding it forever, or it will get lost.
Congratulations, you’ve transferred legislative power to the test administrator and granted them a de facto veto to boot.
Better: laws are subject to up-down popular veto. (Counterpoint: you’ll wind up with omnibuses.)
> The fake minerals are friezium and stralium, apparent references to Christopher Friez and David Straley, attorneys for North American Coal who were closely involved in drafting the bill and its amendments.
> Bjornson said a Legislative Council attorney flagged and removed a fictional mineral, “docterium,” earlier in the session from an unofficial draft of the same bill before it became part of the legislative record.
> Anderson recalls joking about finding docterium, a reference to Rep. Jason Dockter, during a committee hearing. The lawmaker said he noticed the term in an unofficial draft afterward and immediately asked Legislative Council to remove it.
While corporate authorship of bills is a concern, I don’t think this particular mishap is a direct result of that and in fact seems to have been an attempt to subtly criticize it.
In 2010 Arizona passed an anti-immigrant bill written by the private prison company Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic). We know it was written by CCA because they literally left the logo on the bill
In the interest of full transparency, it would be nice to stamp all laws with the logos of the companies that write them, so we at least know who our real legislators are for any given law.
> Establish new and enforceable rules to eliminate unjustified trade restrictions or unjustified commercial requirements (including unjustified labeling) that affect new technologies. https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/Summary_of_U.S.-UK_Nego...
I don't think laws would be much different.
I imagine this holds true (via chatting with insider friends) for many such "industries" including lawmaking, scientific/academic papers, industry RFCs, etc. More or less credential washing.
The closest I can think of is when jury instructions are issued. But in that, the two sides ultimately work with the court to hammer out the details of how those instructions should look. And often, they are based on a more or less standard template with minor revisions.
Generally speaking, an attorney can make a request for a ruling by the judge and the other side can oppose it. However, beyond just citing relevant case law there wouldn't be anything that could be copied verbatim by a judge.
There should be relevant court filings that show what you are saying happen. Do you have them?
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.589...
Go to https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71191591/abrego-garcia-... and search "proposed order." You will find like 20+ of them, they are basically complete orders where they wrote the judge name and everything, just left the signature blank.
For example, here's the proposed order to strike [1], and here is the Judge's order granting that strike [2]
It's definitely ignorance on my part. I didn't realize the motions filed by a party ultimately took the form of unsigned orders.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71191591/81/2/abrego-ga...
[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71191591/90/abrego-garc...
You'll have to sift through them because it happens some of the time not all of the time. The example I gave was how they did it, if you wanted a 1:1 example in that case of the judge just signing off verbatim below ought to fit:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.589...
and
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.589...
look identical to me, and if not damn near it.
> the winning attorney may have a good idea of where the judge stands, what the ruling would be and is also incentivized to stay on their good side.
You haven't seen many litigators at work. Their job is to "zealously" represent their client, getting as much as possible. The speculation about the rest is just hope, not due process.
this claim is utter fiction, your extraordinary claim requires evidence
It's literally a laundering scheme. The industry can't wine and dine and send bills over to the politicians directly so they create some "clean" middle men to make it all look legit at first glance.
Did this come out of the LegCo?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_Legislative_Assem...
Maybe they forgot to tack it onto 5000 pages of unrelated legislation at 10pm the night before the vote.
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That's the first time I've encountered this particular affront. Nasty stuff. We should not be giving them web traffic. https://northdakotamonitor.com/2025/12/19/north-dakota-law-a... is much better in that it actually has readable text on the page.
None of it makes any fucking sense. The fact things wrapped up in mega bills basically breaks any semblance of a democratic system; either you vote for the entire package, or the entire government breaks, or your competitor gets to slam you for hating on the children because you had to defund them in order to avoid doing some other terrible thing.
It means every lawmaker isn’t a geologist. That’s fine. It also means there clearly wasn’t enough public input from geologists that someone would have noticed a name they’d never seen in a group they were familiar with.
Fortunately archive.is uncovered the actual content: https://archive.is/TCjMy
> “It would be kind of embarrassing for the rest of the country to look at us and say ‘Really? Do you guys even know what you’re doing?’”
> Anderson said the amendments were prepared by a group of attorneys and legislators, including representatives from the coal industry.
So that is not embarrassing? You aren't embarrassed that ... you were clearly not doing your jobs, but just letting industry mark up the bill... And then didn't even read it?
Any embarrassment there? Any?
Bueller? Bueller?
If there is any embarrassment to be felt, it would be on the part of their constituents, who voted for this legislature and came out behind because of it. But I strongly suspect that they will re-elect the incumbents.
The Affordable Care Act was 906 pages long (nevermind the accompanying 11,000 some odd pages of regulations typically quoted).
You can bet very few Congress critters actually read all 906 pages.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (the year is part of the name) was over 5,500 pages long. Definitely none of the people in Congress bothered reading any of it- there wouldn't have been time to do so.
State level, though, is unacceptable. It's unusual for a state rep to have any sort of staff which means it is completely on them to read and digest a bill before passing it.
The much bigger issue is that we have corporate and advocacy group sponsored bills at both the state and federal levels. That simply should not be a thing. Several very red or very blue state ultimately work as incubators for these bills and they simply adopt them as is.
Comments to the law: feel free to explain the intentions, to improve the wording in future revisions.
A lobbyist presents a bill to a congressional sponsor, and the congress critter more or less forwards it to committee for vote. Perhaps a staffer or two skim it and suggest edits.
Exceedingly few bills are actually initially drafted by elected lawmakers.
HAHAHAHAHA LGTM SHIPIT!
Ie. In a court, a jury makes their decision about if the accused has broken the law simply on their recollection of the law.
In turn, this means all rules must necessarily be far simpler and less precise.
Lawmakers wouldn't write laws so much as advertise what they think the law should be, and if the population remembered and agreed with the new law then it becomes the law, since that would be what the courts are enforcing.
1. The Government of Canada has banned more than 2,500 makes and models of assault-style firearms since May 2020.
2. The 2020 Order in Council (OIC) banned approximately 1,500 firearms by name, expanded in 2024 and 2025. These are predominantly real-world firearms – AR-15 variants, AK-47 variants, the Ruger Mini-14, various shotguns, and many specialized rifles.
3. Critics have raised legitimate concerns about the ban’s logic – some firearms that were banned were “never designed for the battlefield, and never adopted by any military in the world, nor ever used in any battlefield” – but that’s different from being fictional.
4. Some rifles were banned “that probably came into Canada in insignificant numbers; indeed, there may be none of them in-country,” like obscure variants or rimfire lookalikes. Rare or uncommon isn’t the same as fictional.
Sources used:
https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/cntrng-crm/frrms/index-en...
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/sor-98-462/f... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_Canada https://ottawafirearmsafety.ca/firearms-ban/ https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/more-illogical-gun-bans-... https://www.chroniclejournal.com/news/national/fact-file-ame... https://rcmp.ca/en/firearms/firearms-reference-table
Also it's worth noting that when the ban list was overreaching and included some common and venerable semi-auro WW2 rifles that were a bit too powerful or their fixed-size magazines/clips were a bit too large (eg M1 Garand), the Canadian government backed off on those.
https://rcmp.ca/sites/default/files/dam/pfl-1229-a.pdf
#144117 on page 30 -- "AR15.com" "ARFCOM" listed as a 5.56mm semi-auto rifle.
That's a website. There is no such firearm, and arf15.com an American run organization does not hold a manufacturer FFL. Arfcom is a common short name for the message board.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AR15.com
They use to manufacture. Not much of a gotcha
Ask H&K for a list of the all the military rifles they ever made and dump it onto the list and you get some cool-looking failed experiments made to bid for a military procurement contract that have only been seen in Call of Duty.
#144117 on page 30 -- "AR15.com" "ARFCOM"
That's a website and the company registered under that name does not have an FFL to manufacture firearms. There is no such firearm.
https://www.mpnnow.com/story/news/local/victor/2013/12/08/bu...
Also not "multiple" and not "from a video game"