All laws should have a sunset provision that they expire in ten years unless someone is willing to actively defend them and get them renewed. (2024) source Verified

I was also attracted to this idea in the past, but I think it has some fatal flaws. It invites the political brinkmanship negotiation that we see with the U.S. Debt Ceiling: "I won't vote for your great bill that is about to expire unless you agree to vote for my horrible bill that I want to be approved." The party willing to let human rights expire gets undue leverage in negotiation. Also, it is hard to plan as a business with the uncertainty that a law might or might not exist in the future. I think an underappreciated political reform is "One Bill, One Idea." Stop making bills into 1000+ page monsters that cover dozens of unrelated topics and include mandatory pork spending. Bills should be smaller, cover a singular topic, not include pork spending, and win or lose based on their own merits. Make the bills "as short as possible, but no shorter." Food for thought 🤔 (2024) source Verified

34. We support sunset provisions on all state laws except those against real crimes, such as murder, rape, assault, battery, and fraud. Laws that have outlived their usefulness should be allowed to die peacefully without further legislative action. source Unverified

The solution to this problem is to routinely include a sunset clause in legislation. When a new policy is introduced it will automatically lapse within a certain time-frame, no greater than 20 years. If the policy continues to make sense and has popular support then the legislation can be re-introduced. However, if the policy is no longer relevant or does not provide a clear benefit, then it can be allowed to lapse. source Unverified

10. We advocate a sunset law requiring an automatic end to most government offices, agencies, departments, laws, regulations, taxes, and expenditures within ten years if not reauthorized. source Unverified

Amend Missouri’s Constitution to require a ‘sunset clause’ for every new law. source Unverified

6. “Sunset Laws” We advocate a constitutional amendment requiring an automatic end to all government offices, departments, bureaucracies, laws, regulations, and expenditures every year. And unless individually voted on they would cease to exist as such. source Unverified

In India, there is no 'sunset' clause in any legislation and a law once enacted continues till eternity. No provision is made to lay down a specific time limit when the act would lapse, unless reviewed and re-enacted. And the manner in which most laws are enacted for political expediency, often without wider public consultations and scrutiny by select committees of Parliament, leads to a mockery of the justice system. (2021) source Unverified

Too bad the Durbin Amendment and other provisions of Dodd-Frank also don’t automatically sunset. For that matter, every law should sunset at some point, so a debate can be had about whether it is serving its purposes and the benefits outweigh the costs. And at CEI, it’s our job to ensure that liberty never sunsets, no matter which interest group’s ox is gored. (2013) source Unverified

On 10 May 2023, the government scrapped the proposed sunset clause, which would have automatically revoked most retained EU law at the end of 2023. […] We’ve welcomed this news. Since 2022, we’ve been advocating for the government to remove the sunset clause deadline of 31 December 2023 and publish a list of all affected legislation. While we welcome the removal of the sunset clause, we still have wider concerns about the act, notably on parliamentary scrutiny of future legislative changes. […] In areas such as employment law, workers could lose access to long-established rights that now form an integral part of Britain’s reputation as a fair society, such as holiday pay or protection against fire and rehire. (2024) source Unverified

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are supporting a plan to “sunset” Section 230. But without Section 230, Big Tech will shoot first, ask questions later when it comes to taking down controversial online speech. For marginalized users with little social power, Big Tech takedowns will be permanent, because Big Tech has no incentive to figure out whether it’s worth hosting their speech. We need your help to tell all U.S. Senators and Representatives to oppose the bill to end Section 230, and vote no on it if it comes to the floor. source Unverified

…promulgation of these rules, regulations, amendments, addendums that require every average American citizen to hire expensive accountants in order to just comply with the law. Money Magazine challenged 50 tax preparers to prepare the return for an average family of 4, the same return. Forty-eight failed to get the same answer. Only 2 were successful in completing the equation. Now, that should speak volumes, as the books do, about the complexity of the code. Every law we pass in Florida now has a sunset provision. That is a normal, standard operating procedure, because laws do not exist forever. I remember as a young person when rust would appear on my car and I would try to sand the rust and put bonding on it, and I was so surprised months later that rust reappeared. If we merely tinker with this, it will continue to haunt us, and I urge Members to support this bill. (1998) source Unverified

If a law is sound, it will be repassable after a period of time. It should not just go on unnoticed. (1995) source Unverified

I would not support sunsetting every provision of every law, for precisely the same reasons that you've just alluded to, that it gives us the opportunity for a big Christmas tree to be grown in the midst of Congress. In the context, however, of this vital issue, the balance between civil liberty and national security, one that I think is, frankly, the most important legal issue, domestic legal issue facing this Congress this year—more important than Medicare, more important than Social Security. The importance of getting it right and the importance of keeping Congress engaged is, in my judgment, sufficiently great that artificial mechanisms like the sunset are, I think, to be used cautiously, judiciously. Also, to be candid, I think on this type of provision, there's pretty unlikely there are going to be a lot of Christmas trees. As Patriot—as the next PATRIOT Act goes through, nobody's going to put a tax break on—I hope. (2003) source Unverified

Let me read from it: "All Federal legislation sunsets every 5 years. If the law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again." So every 5 years, you're going to have to vote on whether we're going to have Social Security anymore—you're—or cut it, whatever. Every 5 years. I mean, what is with these guys? Same with Medicare. In other words, it goes out of existence if we don't vote to keep it. Isn't that wonderful? And then along came Ron Johnson—[laughter]—Senator Johnson from the State of Wisconsin. He thinks waiting every 5 years to try to eliminate Social Security is too long. He thinks Social Security and Medicare should be on the chopping block every single year, along with veterans benefits and everything else in the Federal budget. If Congress doesn't vote to keep it, it goes away. It's gone. (2022) source Unverified

Thomas Jefferson rejected the tendency to “look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.” He argued “that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.” We need not go as far as Jefferson did in urging that “every constitution … and every law” should expire every 19 years. But our institutions do need to be significantly reformed to “keep pace with the times.” (2022) source Unverified

My general advice for the next president of the United States is that less government is better than more. Regulation of almost everything, at the federal, state, and local levels, is choking the economy. It’s choking business formation, and it’s choking listings of stocks on stock exchanges. The number of listed stocks has dropped by about 30 percent since 2000. All regulation should have an expiration date, so Congress can judge from experience whether the costs justify the benefits. And why stop there? Perhaps all or at least most laws should have expiration dates, and exceptions should be rare. I would like taxpayers to have more direct say (i.e., a menu of choices) in allocating how their tax dollars are spent. Lest this seem silly, we do it now, at least in part, with the charitable tax deduction. I think of that deduction as the Feds allowing me to allocate the tax I would otherwise be paying them to my favorite charities instead. This is better than raising taxes and having the Feds allocate the tax dollars to their choice of charities, which is basically the system in Europe. (2016) source Unverified

The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. [...] Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. [...] And the Constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them. (1870) source Unverified

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The Parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. (1791) source Unverified

Underlines that the Commission should prioritise the development of certain measures and should focus on the quality of legislation and better enforcement of existing legislation rather than on the number of legislative acts; underlines in this regard that costs should not be the decisive factor but that quality of legislation is the only appropriate benchmark and that the REFIT programme must not be used to undermine sustainability or any social, labour, environmental or consumer standards. Suggests that the Commission takes the introduction of ‘sunset clauses’ into consideration in time-limited legislative initiatives, on condition that this does not lead to legal uncertainty, and include if appropriate ‘review clauses’ in legislative measures to regularly reassess the continued relevance of legislative measures at European level. Stresses that a European standard generally replaces 28 national standards, thereby underpinning the single market and cutting down on bureaucracy. (2016) source Unverified

219. A ‘Sunset Clause’? This general approach does not mean that legislation for the recognition of Aboriginal customary laws should contain an express termination or ‘sunset’ clause. Such a clause might be appropriate with certain special measures of ‘affirmative action’, but this Reference is not concerned with issues of this kind. [...] The principal difficulty with such a clause is the apparent assumption that, at some fixed time in the (comparatively near) future, Aboriginal customary laws will cease to exist in recognisable form, or will cease to be worthy of recognition. In any event, as has been pointed out already, the Commission has no material before it which would enable it to make any such prediction or assessment. Careful drafting of legislation can ensure that Aboriginal customary laws can continue to be recognised where (and only where) it is relevant to the case in hand. (2010) source Unverified

They are a vital part of a ‘human-rights compliant’ COVID‑19 response, according to the United Nations. They are not, of course, a silver bullet to protect democracy from authoritarianism. Their effectiveness relies heavily on the quality of the review, and they are open to manipulation and constant extension. Sunset clauses are, nevertheless, an important litmus test for the sincerity with which a government is safeguarding democratic rights and principles and have been widely discussed and debated in recent months. (2020) source Unverified

One of the problems is we don’t set sunset provisions. Some regulations, some laws do have sunset provisions, but they say … it doesn’t mean it necessarily goes away, it just says, “If you don’t renew this in two years or five years, then it will sunset, it will go away.” That’s a technique that I think is especially appropriate when, again, we’re talking about innovative technologies. We’ve got laws on the books dealing with spam, dealing with computer security — they’re so outdated, they’re so obsolete, they can cause unintended harm because now they’re there, and they can be misused. source Unverified

In practice, the benefits from the sunset clause are twofold. First, such a clause allows the comprehensive evaluation of the transferred authority, minimizing the risk of any abuse. Secondly, such a clause sets the timetable, which promotes legal certainty. (2018) source Unverified

It may be too rigid. But I will tell you what I do see a benefit in that is closely analogous, is to take our look-back process not as a one-shot endeavor, but as a location for the creation of teams and institutions that are constantly, and not just because a President says so in a prominent document, but are constantly looking at rules to see if they should be eliminated. If you look at the plans, and we could certainly use your help on this, they say that this is a continuing endeavor. source Unverified

Temporary-effect legislation could be enacted in a way to achieve considerable stability and predictability if the Congress were to give priority to those attributes. [...] A temporary provision may be as effective or more effective than a permanent provision. Even if a provision is intended as a long term incentive, passage of a temporary law may not be much different from enactment of a permanent law that is frequently changed. (2007) source Unverified

This paper provides a descriptive, positive, and normative analysis of temporary legislation, statutes containing a clause terminating legal authority on a specified future date. Notwithstanding the fact that a significant portion of the legislative docket consists of statutes that terminate automatically absent affirmative Congressional reauthorization in the future, the political dynamics of such statutes remain significantly under-theorized. Yet, temporary statutes have a long and storied pedigree both in the United States and elsewhere. After a historical overview, the paper outlines the major conceptual features of temporary statutes and demonstrates the implications for allocations of power and responsibility within and among the three branches of government, with a particular emphasis on the political economy of temporary legislation. Lastly, using a mixture of theoretical analysis and a case study, the paper argues for greater reliance on temporary statutes as a mechanism for responding to newly recognized risks. (2007) source Unverified

I mean, it’s just a bad idea. I think it will be a challenge for him to deal with this in his own reelection in Florida, a state with more elderly people than any state in America. It is clearly the Rick Scott plan. It is not the Republican plan. (2023) source Unverified

Yeah. So, yeah, something needs to happen, or civilization’s arteries just harden over time. And you can just get less and less done because there’s just a rule against everything. So I think, I don’t know, for Mars, or whatever, I’d say, or even for here, obviously, for Earth as well, I think there should be an active process for removing rules and regulations and questioning their existence. If we’ve got a function for creating rules and regulations, because rules and regulations can also think of as like… they’re like software or lines of code for operating civilization. That’s the rules and regulations. So it’s not like we shouldn’t have rules and regulations, but you have a code accumulation, but no code removal. And so it just gets to become basically archaic bloatware after a while. It makes it hard for things to progress. So, I don’t know, maybe on Mars, you’d have, like, any given law must have a sunset and require active voting to keep it up there. I should also say, like — and these are just, I don’t know, recommendations or thoughts, and ultimately it will be up to the people on Mars to decide — but I think it should be easier to remove a law than to add one, just to overcome the inertia of laws. So maybe it’s like, for argument’s sake, you need like, say, 60% vote to have a law take effect, but only 40% vote to remove it. (2021) source Unverified

One interesting idea for democracies is that you put a sunset clause in every law, where after 4 or 8 or 10 years or something, unless people actively go to reinitiate it, it sunsets and goes away. It might be interesting to have other ways to keep the amount of bureaucracy and overhead low. It takes two-thirds to add a new law, but it takes only 50 percent or less to remove a law. I also think that a lot of laws — they have these issues where people want to add in all these additional special interest things to get the votes, to get it approved. You get these laws that are thousands of pages. They have all these special interests inserted. But if you had some rule that was, every law should only be two pages maximum, otherwise it can’t be a law, you break it down into these smaller chunks that would be, actually, the law itself, and not these massive things that people didn’t read before they voted on. (2021) source Unverified

The result is that we keep getting more laws. We do not revisit them. Government bills on the whole ought to contain sunset clauses. Every law should have a sunset clause that would require it to cease to exist after five years unless it was specifically reauthorized. That would mean that Parliament would spend a lot less time passing new laws because it would be too busy re-passing old ones. It would be good because it would be much easier for government to get rid of a law that had been a mistake if it could just quietly not re-pass it. It would be a lot easier than having to stand and say: “Gee, we goofed. We are sorry”, which is what it would have to do now. I am in favour of a sunset clause because I do not believe that we need a whole horde of laws, certainly not a whole horde of new ones. We need to get rid of some old ones. For instance, we were saved forever from scary guns that go bang by drastic gun controls in the 1970s. Now we are considering even more drastic gun control legislation. Should we instead be pondering whether to bother re-enacting the old law or whether the whole enterprise should be scrapped? (1995) source Unverified

Last night, Joe Biden rambled for a while, but it seems he forgot to share the facts: In my plan, I suggested the following: All federal legislation sunsets in five years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again. This is clearly and obviously an idea aimed at dealing with ALL the crazy new laws our Congress has been passing of late. Joe Biden is confused… to suggest that this means I want to cut Social Security or Medicare is a lie, and is a dishonest move… from a very confused President. Does he think I also intend to get rid of the U.S. Navy? Or the border patrol? Or air traffic control, maybe? This is the kind of fake, gotcha BS that people hate about Washington. I’ve never advocated cutting Social Security or Medicare and never would. I will not be intimidated by Joe Biden twisting my words, or Chuck Schumer twisting my words – or by anyone else for that matter. HOWEVER, Biden and Democrats did, in fact, cut Medicare just last year. They lie about it and the liberal media covers for them. If they think they can shut me up or intimidate me by lying… I'm here for it… I’m ready to go. I will not be silenced by the Washington establishment. (2023) source Unverified

An expiration date should be included in every law and regulation. (2021) source Unverified

A "sunset clause is a very appropriate remedy. But it's got to be enforced to mean anything. (2012) source Unverified

Sunset clauses have been used on occasion, but they are not the best way of proceeding. (2006) source Unverified

As Congress spends its time extending sunsets, a tool meant to stop procrastination is now used to make procrastination look like work. (2012) source Unverified

There should also be a sunset period defined—a time during which, barring Congressional action, the law will be removed from the books. source Unverified

Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. (1789) source Unverified

Whilst on occasion a sunset or renewal clause is deemed necessary, the Government believes this must be approached on a case-by-case basis. (2009) source Unverified

Congress could take on this responsibility if it followed a simple proposal: Every law should automatically expire after 10 or 15 years. (2010) source Unverified

My first thoughts lead me to view the doctrine as not in all respects, compatible with the course of human affairs. (1790) source Unverified

At both the state and federal level, every new law and regulation should have an expiration date. (2015) source Unverified