I guess out of sight out of mind would apply here. Even if rubber stamped repeatedly maybe it will present an opportunity to catch the eye of some inquisitive type to ask why?

Why should those commissions be abolished? I've heard complaints about them, like I've heard complaints about every single regulating body in existence. but I haven't heard so many that it seems like they should be disbanded.

Aren't those commissions responsible for keeping the power on in Texas [0]? Didn't millions of Texans suffer significant cost, danger, and hardship and >100 Texans froze to death because of these commissions decisions to keep Texas' electrical grid isolated from the eastern and western power grids and to not address infrastructural issues discovered when the exact same problems were experienced in 2011? Weren't a lot of Texans each charged thousands of dollars for a month with very bad electrical service in the recent freeze?

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/15/texas-power-grid-win...

The reality of that catastrophe has very little to do with politics.

And those charged high rates agreed to variable pricing.

The ultimate reason why Texas had a problem was because of a nasty ice storm took out infrastructure.

> The reality of that catastrophe has very little to do with politics.

"Politics" means "the activities associated with making decisions in groups." Anything that impacts the lives of groups of people where people made decisions (like the decision to have an isolated electrical grid [0]) is politics.

I live in Chicago. We have far worse ice storms than Texas but we also see over weeks 100F in the summers. We realized that A) power is a critical utility that people need to literally live, and B) it's technologically unnecessary and economically irrational to let inadequate infrastructure cause mass casualty events and cost us $195 BILLION [1] in damage, contamination, and lost economic opportunity, so we made the decision to engineer a resilient power grid and we don't experience the kinds of massive, protracted failures that Texas keeps having, despite the Public Utilities Commission of Texas and the Texas Railroad Commission investigating the failures when Texas' grid went down for the same reasons back in 2011 [2]. By definition, that's politics.

> And those charged high rates agreed to variable pricing.

My power bill each month ranges from $100 to $150 and I just pay for what I consume. People in Texas were getting automatically charged rates as high as $11,000 in a month where they received terrible service. [3] It's just bullshit to say anyone agreed to that.

> The ultimate reason why Texas had a problem was because of a nasty ice storm took out infrastructure.

Failure here was and remains a choice.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection

[1] https://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/HSEM/2...

[2] https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/08-16-11-re...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-weather-texas-bills/t...

Btw, if you are interested in the history of the Texas Interconnect - the political and economic forces that got it to where it is now, NPR has a podcast series about it. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power...

Why was that infrastructure vulnerable to a nasty ice storm? It is possible to build infrastructure that can easily operate in those conditions.

From what I heard there were plenty of warnings, but EPCOT either refused to demand weather-hardening infrastructure, or did not have the authority to demand this hardening.

The year is 2053 and people are still trying to insert a once in a lifetime freak storm into every political conversation.

counterpoint: the good is not perfect therefore it is bad.

Counter-counterpoint: Claims that something is better than the alternative need to be supported with some evidence.

Sunset laws to do not magically improve the quality of the voting public or the quality of the elected representatives--and those are what ultimately decide the quality of the laws.

Furthermore, if we cite Texas, the evidence seems to be a negative correlation rather than a positive one.

(Side note: I'm actually in favor of laws having some form of trigger to cause them to disappear. Time, by itself, is generally insufficient, however. Laws should have a reason for going onto the books and when that reason is invalidated the law should be forced to be reauthorized with a different reason.)