>> But a grotesquely corrupt Congress means federal inquiries will likely go nowhere (also keep in mind looming Supreme Court rulings are poised to erode federal regulatory authority further). And any inquiries that do materialize will feature fines that are miniscule compared to the money made from the abuses.
Wow. That's a new low standard for journalism. Whatever happened to keeping opinions and news separate?
And no, modern Congress is not more corrupt than historical standards (which are extremely directly-buying-votes low), nor is reform unlikely.
It simply needs enough people to care about the issue and mobilize (see MA and CA efforts mentioned in the article!): kvetching on the web about the futility of action isn't going to help.
What we need is an journalistic investigation that shows how to buy the data on a specific Congressman's family, maybe a bunch of Congressmen from both parties. New privacy laws will get passed in seconds..
What are your expectations of clearly an editorialized news callout on TechDirt? Seeing someone else whinging off to complaining about CNN or something....this is bizarre.
No, TechDirt didn't hit a "new low standard", and the hyperbole is ridiculous and bizarrely opinionated.
People act like this is the end of the world for regulation but it isn't. Nor is getting rid of chevron deference a bad thing. SCOTUS' intent here is pretty clear. If congress wants to delegate a power to the executive then they must explicitly do so. And courts shouldn't take regulators at their word in cases anymore but actually test to see if what they claim makes sense or is in good faith, you know, like everyone else must do in court.
The actual issue relevant to this article is that America lacks any real overarching privacy law. We need one badly. Congress is unlikely to come up with one on its own. So people need to get active and lobby for one. We've made good progress with right to repair in the last few years so that shows doomerism is just that. Get off your ass and spread the word. Normies have been deaf to us saying this is problem for years. Maybe when you tell them that their insurance will go up every time they have spirited drive they will actually pay attention.
Sometimes the way that good things get done is bad, and we'd be better served by fixing the bad way than continuing to reinforce the duct tape over a broken underlying process.
Yes, that means things seem to go backwards in the short term, but creating better underlying processes (e.g. Congress being forced by voters to do its job, passing a federal US privacy law) removes impediments to really proceeding forward.
> Wow. That's a new low standard for journalism. Whatever happened to keeping opinions and news separate?
Part of why our societies are so fractured is because of the insistence to "separate" news and opinions. When journalists aren't pointing out how broken a system is in direct words and instead insist on reporting "both sides" no matter how fundamentally wrong one side is, the wide masses don't care.
> And no, modern Congress is not more corrupt than historical standards (which are extremely directly-buying-votes low), nor is reform unlikely.
"Corruption" doesn't only mean the ridiculous influence of money, it can also mean "a system that doesn't function as intended" - and the current US Congress is definitely at its historical low point at the moment, with the House GOP especially running on pure obstructionism. Shooting down their own Speaker for daring to cooperate with the government in passing a budget, and taking its sweet time to elect one twice is ridiculous.
To me, "fact vs opinion" and "equal viewpoints from all sides" are two different issues.
You can absolutely report the facts, and only the facts, that solely support one side.
At some point willful omission of counter-perspective/facts becomes its own bias, but I think that's a much lesser evil in modern times than commingling facts with opinions.
And agreed, re: Congressional inaction in the House, but that's also a consequence of the razor-thin majority that leads to minority-within-the-majority being allowed to hold votes hostage.
IMHO, House Democrats could have fixed that by supporting their centrist Republican colleagues in key votes (i.e. something like confidence and supply in more mature parliamentary systems), thus neutering extremist Republican members.
> IMHO, House Democrats could have fixed that by supporting their centrist Republican colleagues in key votes (i.e. something like confidence and supply in more mature parliamentary systems), thus neutering extremist Republican members.
Now, if one could trust the Republicans to return the favor in the future... that fundamental trust is something that has been broken decades ago, starting with Newt Gingrich, but even more so during the Obama terms, and now with MAGA holding the GOP hostage the House is all but broken.
So, why should the Democrats help the "reasonable" Republicans? Democrat voters won't like it (because why vote Democrat when the only things getting passed are Republican bills?), Republican voters will see it as a sign of "weakness", and "reasonable" Republicans will not reciprocate because they fear getting yeeted out of the party like Kevin McCarthy.
> So IMHO, Democrats should have unilaterally said "We will support Kevin McCarthy for speaker in exchange for X, Y, and Z."
That would have worked in keeping McCarthy as a Speaker, but there is no way the Democrats would have gotten X/Y/Z because any Republican that would have even hinted at following through with that promise would have faced getting ousted in this year's elections by some MAGAt armed with ridiculous amounts of campaign money.
The GOP, as it is, is fundamentally untrustworthy as long as MAGA and its supporters are not just willing but routinely doing anything they can to be as destructive as possible!
Have you not seen most mainstream news in the last several decades? I was watching CNN in the gym at the hotel on a business trip and maybe every fifth sentence was a snide judgement.
> Wow. That's a new low standard for journalism. Whatever happened to keeping opinions and news separate?
You seem to have some idealized view of journalism that has never existed. The fact that you linked to the nytimes...
> And no, modern Congress is not more corrupt than historical standards
That's a straw man. He didn't say congress was 'more corrupt' than before. He just wrote 'grotesquely corrupt congress'. You surely can see the difference. If not, you'd make an excellent journalist.
