Why does Congress make laws that expire?

[netmouse]

This year we saw a lot of drama around whether or not Congress would renew an expiring ruling onthe interest rates for student loans. Then a line from an article on the recent Colorado Shooting caught my eye:

The AR-15 rife carried by Holmes, a civilian semi-automatic version of the military M-16, would have been defined as a “semiautomatic assault weapon” under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 — which expired in 2004. “The type of ammunition magazine Holmes is accused of using was banned for new production under the old federal assault weapon ban.” Though once it expired, “gun manufacturers flooded the market with the type of high-capacity magazines Holmes used Friday.”

If we at one point thought it made sense to ban assault weapons for private ownership, why was that ban part of a law set to expire? why not make laws and then, when and if someone decides they no longer make sense, let them repeal them or make new laws? Expiration dates on sseem rather arbitrary and therefore nonsensical.

Can anyone explain this to me?

Comments

[nicegeek.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, the votes might not be there to pass a permanent law, but by making some parts of it temporary, a bill's sponsors can bring a few more on board to get it passed. For examples on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum, consider the Patriot act, or the Bush-era tax cuts.

When a law is only able to pass very narrowly, that generally means that the country is conflicted about it; it's not universally accepted as a good law. But the way our legislative process works means that laws, once passed, have a lot of inertia; it takes a lot of effort to revise or repeal them even if they turn out to have been bad laws, especially if the special interest they favor starts lobbying to preserve them (think about farm subsidies).

I actually think that it would be a good idea if all laws automatically expired in, say, 20 years, unless passed by some level of supermajority. That way, outdated and controversial laws would get phased out over time unless agreement could be reached that they were really good ideas.

[ckd]

Interestingly enough, the lack of an expiry date was part of the legal reasoning striking down DOMA Sec. 3 in the First Circuit's decision in May!

Finally, it has been suggested by the Legal Group's brief that, faced with a prospective change in state marriage laws, Congress was entitled to "freeze" the situation and reflect. But the statute was not framed as a temporary time-out; and it has no expiration date, such as one that Congress included in the Voting Rights Act. See Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2510 (describing original expiration date and later extensions); City of Boerne, 521 U.S. at 533. The House Report's own arguments--moral, prudential and fiscal--make clear that DOMA was not framed as a temporary measure.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Weird experiments *should* have expiration dates; otherwise they become embedded, fossilized, relics of somebodies crazy ideas. If, after trying for a while, it's not clear something is a good idea, it's much more convenient to let it die quietly than to force Congress to waste the time to fight it through and repeal it.

[cos]

In this particular case, the sunset was put in the bill specifically in order to get enough support to pass it. So to find out why this law had a sunset, you'd have to examine the few legislators who were willing to vote for it with a sunset but not without. I suspect that you'd find a mix of political pressures and logic, and it might not be a consistent set of reasons from all of them.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I can't speak for Congress, and I see others have made this point, but a few years ago Brookline Town Meeting passed a bylaw with a sunset clause because the town wanted to see what the actual effect of the bylaw would be before voting to make it permanent.