Really interesting debate starting at the Washington Post and Atlantic web sites. It revolves around lawmakers who apparently don’t know what they’re legislating.<\/p>\n
In Virginia, the state legislators who wanted to determine the age of a fetus before an abortion had no idea their bill required an invasive ultrasound or what this procedure entailed. In fact, it is the insertion of a wand into a woman’s vagina. And it serves no medically required purpose.<\/p>\n
The bill was supported by a majority of law makers, who – as noted above – did not know what their legislation meant in the real world.<\/p>\n
After news reports and segments on Saturday Night Live, Rachel Maddow and the Daily Show, public outrage started to build. Now, the state legislature is revising their bill.<\/p>\n
A similar thing happened with SOPA\/PIPA, federal bills that would have altered the way everyone uses the Internet. And several members of Congress – from both major parties – smiled in front of cameras and microphones as they acknowledged they had no idea how the Internet worked. Which means, of course, they had no idea what effect their legislation would have.<\/p>\n
The Atlantic calls it “official recklessness”<\/p>\n
Local lawmakers have spent a great deal of time and effort promoting measures they either don’t fully understand or can’t reasonably believe are constitutional.<\/p>\n
Ignorance of the law may be no legal defense to you and me, but ignorance of the law among those who are passing the law surely is the definition of bad governance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Here’s the WaPo story<\/a> and here’s the Atlantic<\/a>‘s.<\/p>\n
But here’s my question:<\/p>\n
In this election year, how do we find out if candidates have the necessary knowledge – or at least a baseline level of curiosity – to govern appropriately?<\/p>\n
What are your ideas?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Really interesting debate starting at the Washington Post and Atlantic web sites. It revolves around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1915"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}