Own Private Idaho

A weird thing was done once in Idaho. All of the state's public regulations were set up so they have to be officially renewed by a vote of the state legislature each year.

This year, the two houses of the state legislature had a bit of a tiff over some inner workings of that mechanism, and thus they did not reauthorize any of the state's regulatory code. Meaning that on July 1, 8,200 pages of state regulations will go bye-bye. The governor of Idaho can opt to keep some of them, but only as emergency regulations in force until the legislature re-convenes in 2020. He could technically opt to keep none of them or propose his own, but has indicated he doesn't plan on that drastic step.

Now we're just talking regulatory codes, not legal ones. If you decided to knock over a liquor store in Boise on July 2, you are just as likely to draw the attention of Idaho's law enforcement community as before. So what the governor plans is to get input from the state agency heads about which regulations they need to keep and which they don't. Rather than an accretion of sometimes outdated codes and rules, everyone can redesign their regulatory structure from the ground up.

It's likely that few legislatures would enact sunset codes for regulations today, especially if they were the ones who had to renew or reauthorize them. That's work, and every day spent making laws is a day not spent putting the arm on people for money or campaigning. It may indeed be hard work to learn enough about how state agencies operate to discern what kinds of rules they need to function, but that's part of the job of legislating. The presence of national media outlets in Washington, D.C., may allow federal lawmakers to shovel all of their authority onto the executive branch in order to carve out time to appear on cable news, but taint happnin in the Boise statehouse.