Sunsets alleviate legislative dilemmas

Sunsetting—requiring that a statute expires on a specified date unless reenacted—can ameliorate the legislative dilemma caused by legislators’ incentive to act at an inopportune time in relation to a crisis. It puts into place an automatic, mandated reassessment of crisis-driven legislation and accompanying regulation, at a fixed point in time thereafter, when passions are less inflamed and far more information is available. Sunsetting has been used by Congress and state legislatures in the United States since the nation’s founding, although its use as a lawmaking strategy has ebbed and flowed over time. Sunsetting does not mean that legislation must disappear—only that it must be reenacted, perhaps with modification. In evolutionary biology, plasticity is the first response to a changing environment. Plasticity, however, has its limits, and there are costs to retaining the capacity for change. Thus, natural selection found reproduction, a fresh start in which offspring replace parents, with genotypes modified from the parental types through mutation or various forms of recombination. Recombination and reuse are also familiar tools in creating new legislation. Wilkerson et al. (1) explore this idea in depth, using “text reuse” methods to elucidate the evolution of policy ideas in legislation; and Li et al. (2) apply a similar approach to investigate bills related to the financial crisis in the first decade of this century.