Sunset provisions can function as hidden self-entrenchment duplicating irrepealability

Evidence

The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 provide another vivid illustration of the substitutability of formal and functional entrenchment. The tax cuts were enacted with sunset provisions, so that they would automatically expire in 2010.229 This raised no flags from a legal perspective; quite the contrary, sunset provisions are precisely the opposite of the kind of formal legislative entrenchment of which public law disapproves. Yet political observers noticed that the tax cuts, even while couched as temporary for purposes of facilitating enactment and disguising their likely budgetary implications, were in fact engineered to be self-entrenching. The reforms were “tailored to shape the politics of tax cuts down the line in ways that favored tax-cutters’ long term goals,” creating a political dynamic that would lead to their extension— essentially duplicating the effect of an unrepealable statute. Furthermore, linking legislative to electoral entrenchment, Republicans might well have expected that political support for the tax cuts would “provide a powerful motivation for the wealthy to bankroll Republican reelection efforts in the future.” Once again, the moral is that, even if the pathways of formal entrenchment are closed, there will often be a functional pathway that leads to the same destination. — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 380

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to institutional-persistence theorizing: here temporal limits (sunset clauses) invert into entrenchment devices, a mechanism case for the reader’s model of how rationalizing ideologies get durably embedded.
• XREF: connects to: Dead-hand control of the past pathologies applies equally to party and policy entrenchment — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 171; Some policies are self-consciously designed to entrench themselves and their creators.; Formal and functional entrenchment do not differ in harm or benefit (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• An irreversible visible act can lock in a commitment without legal enforcement #qualifies (0.80) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 241
• An irreversible threshold can be passed before it is consciously chosen #expands (0.75) — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 662
• Islamic belief self-enforced contracts, cutting transaction costs across the Sahara #qualifies (0.72)