What a fix bill is

Three words get used interchangeably in ordinary conversation and mean completely different things here. Getting them straight makes the whole library legible.

	Who wrote it	Was it filed	Was it enacted	Where it lives
Problem law	Congress	yes	yes, it is in force	Problem Laws
Good law	a legislator	yes, somebody filed it	passed, voted down, or never allowed a vote	Good Laws
Fix bill	the movement	no	no	here

A fix bill is the only one of the three that nobody in government has touched. It exists so that the answer to "fine, what would you do instead?" is a document rather than a slogan.

The rendering rules that follow from that

• A fix bill page never shows a vote count, because there is no vote.
• It never shows a sponsor, because there is none. If one day somebody files it, that is a different record with a different status.
• Its status language is about drafting, never about passage.

Sections, not paragraphs

Fix bills are written in sections because that is the unit at which they can be criticised, adopted, or lifted into somebody else's bill. A legislator who wants three of our seven sections should be able to take three of our seven sections. Nothing about the format is precious.

The risks block

Every bill carries a risks block, and it is not decorative. Where a draft names living people — for example, naming proposed investigators — the risks block states plainly that naming somebody is a proposal about a role, not a claim about that person, that none of them has consented, and that the movement is not endorsing any individual by listing them.