CISPA is back with a new name

"Places online where you can expect privacy: Facebook"

I'd rather be spied upon by NSA any day over Facebook. Atleast then I know how my information is being used. But oh right, NSA doesn't have a website where you can show off your socio economic status.

This is the problem. It's less effort for them to keep bringing it back under different names/guises, than it is for the general public to continue fighting it, continue raising enough attention against it, etc.

People are lazy. You can rile them up to get critical mass for an action every now and then, but you can't sustain it forever.

This wouldn't be as big of a problem as it is for both the population who has to stay extremely vigilant (more than they want to) just so they don't pass something quickly and in secret/when no one pays attention (like at holidays), and also the Supreme Court wouldn't be barraged with bad laws from Congress (and these laws don't even reach them for decades sometimes), if US was using a Constitutional Court.

I think having a Constitutional Court that verifies every single bill that passes through Congress and administration, and has final say on whether a bill is going to become law or not, would be a decent solution for an out of control Congress and administration that don't even care if their laws are Constitutional or not anymore.

This is not to "replace" the Supreme Court, or any other Court. this is in addition to them. A Constitutional Court could filter out a lot of the bad bills, before they ever had to reach the Supreme Court for their unconstitutionality. With a Constitutional Court something like the Patriot Act or FAA might've never passed, and we wouldn't have to endure it for 20 years before it even reaches the Supreme Court, to decide its constitutionality.

But what happens if a Constitutional Court allows a "bad bill" to pass anyway, you ask? Well, nothing different than right now. It goes out there, and eventually someone sues over it, and it goes through the same process up to the Supreme Court, if it's that bad. The point of the Constitutional Court wouldn't be to "set a precedent" but to filter out at least 90 percent of bad/unconstitutional bills coming out from Congress. Other than that, everything else will work as normal.

The system is already used in many European countries, and I think it would work well for US, too. Without it a lot of EU countries would probably have a lot worse justice system, since they don't even have the precedent thing, which means that if a lot more bad bills were allowed to go through, they would have a lot more judges split on the decisions, and more unconstitutional laws would be allowed to continue for more years. But the Constitutional Court filters out most of those, so the judges can only be split on a few of the bad ones.

I'm skeptical that adding another layer for the bill to pass through will cause any meaningful improvement, unless there is some clever way to align the incentives of the individuals in the layer more closely with the people.

Just so you know, they're pulling the same kind of shit over here in the UK: "emergency powers" being pushed through with barely a debate by an unelected PM, his lapdog deputy in the Lib Dems, and a weak opposition, with tripartisan support thanks to the party whips. No one even really knows or understands what they're agreeing to, the "temporary" shouldn't fool anyone as it can be extended (and it would be an 'emergency' not to, wouldn't it?) - and the real kicker is that the "emergency" is the EU courts have ruled the UK's existing mass data retention laws contravene our human rights, so the UK Government's response is to… pass another mass data retention law as a matter of urgency, explicitly before ISPs start deleting (unlawfully collected) data.

What the fuck. Sometimes politicians just disgust me. We could use some help over here too - Pirate Party UK, maybe, or the Green Party?