EU Council forces Chat Control via fast-track

You are talking about the "ordinary legislative procedure", and that's how that works, indeed. Where you're wrong is that you're assuming it's the only procedure ... so here are the "special legislative procedures":

Consent procedure: where we are now. Technically this bypasses the EU commission, and only partially the EU parliament (and, the part not said out loud, due to bypassing the EU commission makes country vetos null and void, which is important in this case, because reasons)

Consultation procedure: 2 variants, one with and one without the EU commission.

And this is not yet even diving into "tricks" territory. This is all relatively above board, open for all to see and you don't have to puzzle things together. It gets worse, of course, you see, in order to join the EU you have to agree to a particular rule: that international trade treaties take precedence over a country's laws (and due to how EU legislation works, that means over EU legislation too). Do I really have to explain how that can be abused?

If need be, the council can proceed entirely on it's own and force laws onto the entire EU.

Start here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/special-...

Sure, you are right, but that does not mean that the EU as such is totally innocent in this.

Most liberal constitutions of Europe operate on the principle that their governments cannot be fully trusted in execution of their power and need a lot of oversight from the people. This is a result of hundreds of years of bad experience with politicans who had too much power.

The EU is somewhat more idealistically built and thus easier to abuse as a loophole for pushing things that would domestically hit a lot of counter-wind - by the same governments that are domestically limited by their constitutional order, but nevertheless still full of power-hungry people who are seeking ways to increase their power.

Frankly, for me that means that the EU should be reformed to make that less easy, but a colossus of 28, soon-to-be-more countries is approximately as amendable as the US Constitution - theoretically, yes, practically, the hurdles are extremely high.

I don't think we can fundamentally solve the problem that politics attracts psychopaths. We can only limit their power, and that, as of now, works better on the national level than on the continental one.

> I think those people are largely in your imagination.

Nope, they are in this very thread, complaining about "unelected" officials.

Initially I dismissed this as a product of ignorance, but they keep repeating the same bullshit after being corrected. It is clearly bad faith.

> You seem to be assuming a whole lot of dark motives or unsavoury opinions in reaction to people simply saying the EU is not perfect.

That is not the argument. The EU is far from perfect, and if that's the discussion, I wouls have a lot of things to say about it.

> but I wonder what your political leaning is, just to understand where this aggressive defense of the EU is coming from.

I tend to see myself as left of center, although I did drift further to the left over time.

I am not from the UK to describe myself in in the UK political spectrum, although looking from the outside I have the impression Labour is largely ineffective and Starmer is (was?) running the government pretty much as the tories would have.

I am also not French. My understanding is that for French standards Macron is center-right?

Not sure if this answered your question.

you getting downvoted means you're right

The ordinary legislative procedure applies to both:

- Chat Control 1.0 (now expired): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

- Chat Control 2.0: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:52...

In both cases you can read "Acting in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure", and it's not possible to adopt a different one, since it depends solely on the appropriate legal basis for the act.

In fact, both are based on Article 114 TFEU, which reads: "The European Parliament and the Council shall, acting in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure and after consulting the Economic and Social Committee, adopt the measures for the approximation of the provisions laid down by law, regulation or administrative action in Member States which have as their object the establishment and functioning of the internal market."

> and, the part not said out loud, due to bypassing the EU commission makes country vetos null

The Commission is not an intergovernmental institution. The "veto rule" exists in areas where the Council - not the Commission - acts by unanimity, which is not the case for article 114 TFEU (and all acts under the ordinary legislative procedure, unanimity is present in (most) SLPs only).