There is one possible solution in the creation of a “college of scientists”, for particular sciences, whose sole purpose is to adjudicate efforts to legislate, based on scientific opinion.
But as has been nobly demonstrated in the last few years, scientists are terribly vulnerable to political and economic manipulation, and relatively speaking, there are so many scientists today with low standards and even lower ethics, that the imperative to corrupt such an organization would be easy to do.
So the other alternative, and a far more sensible one, is to make legislation far more difficult to pass. This was one of the major goals of the US constitution itself, to *prevent* new laws from being passed. To make the process inherently hard.
Legislators are fearful of this, because it makes their jobs far harder, but that is the intent of the idea. A legislator of any kind should be able to number the laws he promulgated on the fingers of both his hands, after a long and distinguished career.
Each year, besides maintaining the laws and systems of our nation, the US congress feels obligated to pass innumerable new laws. Often these are to the detriment of the people, and are half done as experiment, and the other half as largesse. In truth, the vast majority of these we could do without, as a nation, as a people, and as individual citizens.
During the Reagan years, the novel idea of “sunset laws” gave the congress pause to reexamine their legislation after a few years, to see if it had failed, and could thus be allowed to die, or if it should be extended. And while a good idea, it still meant several years of bad laws.
Now, the federal government has tremendous inertia, but such an idea as making State laws harder to pass would be both more practical, and far easier to bring about. Ideas could include:
1) Requiring public commentary on prospective new laws, after publishing projected costs and benefits.
2) Creation of a legislative committee to review scientific objections to prospective new laws.
3) Mandating that new laws indicate the itemized percentage of the public directly affected by the new law. (It is often far less than 1%.)
4) Identifying all lobbyists and their clients, who have expressed interest in the prospective law.
5) Strengthen the right to table a prospective law in committee.
6) Prohibit the use of the voice vote.