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Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

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Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#21

Post by treetalker »

whimsicalism wrote: post #4

The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.

My pet view is that the fundamental flaw in the Constitution is its decreasing ability to enable coordinated change as population grows and more states enter the Union. Thus, change becomes progressively more difficult over time, whereas changes are increasingly necessary as time passes.

Yes, one of its main goals was to make change difficult. But political-party and legislator capture of the system has taken hold (easy example: representatives now pick their voters) and coordinating amendments we need is nigh impossible.

Periodic constitutional conventions would have helped.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#23

Post by ShroudedNight »

dawnerd wrote: post #12
monooso wrote: post #3

Not only that, the same bill includes a provision which allows "...eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the Biden administration's investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot." [1]. This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me. [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/deal-end-us-shutdow…

Always amazes me that we allow multiple bills to be packaged together. Needs to be one bill = 1 vote. Not hundreds/thousands of pages of bills no one will read all rushed through because funding.

Isn't it usually one bill, but an omnibus bill? My understanding is that the actual guard rail that the US congress has discarded is requiring that the contents of the bill be limited to the purview described by the bill's title.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#24

Post by alessandru »

jeffbee wrote: post #15
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.

[flagged]

many non-slavery parliamentary societies have bicameral legislature, why do you think that is considering they never considered counting their slaves...?

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#26

Post by runako »

monooso wrote: post #3

Not only that, the same bill includes a provision which allows "...eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the Biden administration's investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot." [1]. This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me. [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/deal-end-us-shutdow…

> This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me.

"Legislation" is the "bill," which is what makes this problematic. At a high level, the only thing that relates the first page of a bill to the 10th page of the same bill is the fact that they are both included in the same document. This is definitional stuff.

Congress could choose to appropriate funds for each department in a separate bill. One could then easily take the POV that it's swampy to tack on the education funding legislation to the defense appropriations bill.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#27

Post by teeray »

whimsicalism wrote: post #4

The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.

Liquid Democracy. If the people can delegate their vote, they should be able to claw it back if enough of them care on some issue.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#28

Post by jeffbee »

dawnerd wrote: post #12
monooso wrote: post #3

Not only that, the same bill includes a provision which allows "...eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the Biden administration's investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot." [1]. This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me. [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/deal-end-us-shutdow…

Always amazes me that we allow multiple bills to be packaged together. Needs to be one bill = 1 vote. Not hundreds/thousands of pages of bills no one will read all rushed through because funding.

To do so you need an effective bureaucracy to which the legislature can delegate authority, otherwise there are too many details to be passed in bills. But the revanchist Roberts court has said that bureaucratic powers do not exist, the executive can only do things that are expressly enumerated by Congress and Congress can delegate nothing.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#30

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

whimsicalism wrote: post #4

The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.

The Senate was absolutely one of the best features of government. Unicameral legislatures are uniformly godawful. In as much as it is imperfect, it is only so because Congress has become more unicameral-like... senators are little more than representatives that stay in office six years instead of two.
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