Even with good people, the process is still the problem

If only we had the right people in office, we could trust the government with broad authority over everything with minimal negative side effects. Why, bad legislation would get patched as soon as a member of Congress found out that it was "flawed..."

Granted, this is the kind of stuff that makes libertarianism look attractive. And it is doubly distressing that Congress doesn't appear eager to close the loophole in short order. Unintended consequences of legislation are inevitable -- the measure of good government is how politicians respond to them. Without the will to impose real oversight, acknowledge mistakes and fix them when they are discovered, and constantly strive to improve governance, we will be stuck with bad government. And that might be one of the most distressing results of decades of being told that government is the problem -- we hear a story like Hayes', and think despondently, you know, they were right, rather than squaring our shoulders and reapplying ourselves to the wheel.

Software development and the legislative process have a lot in common. Both of them work to establish complex rules for governance of resources and people. Compare the typical software development cycle, with the way that the legislative process usually ends up working:

1. Requirements gathering
2. Initial architecture work
3. Test plan is created
4. Working alpha release is developed and unit tested against most foreseen problems
5. Working sample sent to customer for more testing
6. Steps 4 and 5 are repeated until it is ready for a final revision

How the legislative process works, in a nutshell:

1. Legislator gets an idea
2. Legislator drafts a law
3. Other legislators either attack or defend it
4. Bill goes to committee
5. If it goes beyond the committee, it will go to the full house
6. If it makes it out of Congress, the President can sign it

Seems fairly similar, right? Well, let's look at the exceptions here that the legislators can get away with under the rules of the systems:

• If it doesn't pass in committee, just add it onto an important spending bill!
• If another legislator wants to sneak in their own legislation, they can add it to yours!

There is no rigorous legal analysis of every bill before it goes to a general vote by Congress. No one tests the law for unintended consequences, side effects or constitutionality. There are no checks and balances against a bill that is 110% total fail beyond the consent of the legislators, the courts' review authority or the willingness of the people to revolt.

To get the system to the point where it would start producing more reliably good legislation would take decades of extremely aggressive reforms, many of which would be attacked by people who would see them as attacks on Congress' authority (or checks and balances) or would have a partisan interesting in maintaining the status quo. The current legislative process is deeply flawed, so much so, that to reform it would be all but another way of saying "throw it out and start over."