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Comment by marak830 | Hacker News Reader

Look I'm an Aussie living in Japan, but I know what the EPA is.

Someone please tell me this won't pass. I really hope not, and I hope this is a moon shot of a bill, as I know how much my original country and my new country follow the US.

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Honestly you never know these days, but it's not a bill from an influential rep, has few cosponsors, and so far has no important movement, so right now it's unlikely. I suspect that the republicans in congress understand that the correct way to get what they want is to have the president order the EPA to roll back tons of regulations, not to literally undo hundreds of thousands at once without review.

Something many people (even Americans) don't realize about the US system is that thousands of bills get introduced every session that have zero chance of passing. They're just to score political points with the home crowd.

Ahh thanks for the reply.

This is noise. My understanding is all kinds of crazy bills like this get introduced all the time by backbenchers, but they almost always never make it past the first few procedural steps.

The page states:

> Mr. Gaetz (for himself, Mr. Massie, Mr. Palazzo, and Mr. Loudermilk) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Science, Space, and Technology, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned

If it actually gets traction in a committee, then that's a reasonable time to talk about it seriously.

Don't panic yet. There's all sorts of fun bills that get introduced, chances are slim for any one to make it into law

There's also this https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/899?...

I could get potentially get behind this one:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/25/a...

"To promote freedom, fairness, and economic opportunity by repealing the income tax and other taxes, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service"

Note: 36 co-sponsors, but this has no chance of making it into law either.

"Finally, the bill terminates the national sales tax if the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution (authorizing an income tax) is not repealed within seven years after the enactment of this bill."

So if the 16th isn't repealed, and the IRS no longer exists... does the US just stop functioning in 2024?

So... How does the fed continue to function?

It wouldn't, which would be the entire point.

Reduce government to the size that it can be dragged into the bathroom and drowned in the bathtub, as Grover Norquist eloquently put it, letting state governments and private interests fill the power vacuum.

Yeah, who needs interstates, foreign relations, and minority protections anyway?

Any authority not explicitly granted by the US Constitution to the Federal government lies first with the people, and second with the states. The Federal government is supposed to be the weakest and least privileged by design.

That may not be the most humane, egalitarian or efficient way to run a country at the scale of the US, but to many people that is the way it's supposed to work.

It’s a shame you can’t sort the resolutions by number of Cosponsors, as that’d give a much better idea of which are viable.

I don’t have a solid number, but I get the impression a resolution is essentially dead out of the gate, if the number of Cosponsors is <50. It does seem to be an easy metric to get a rough idea of which bills have legs, and which are fluff.

If the information is public, why can't it be scraped and sorted by a third party?

You can...the government even has code to help

https://github.com/unitedstates/congress

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/browse

I don't see a "filter by sponsor count" but you can at least see the number of sponsors. They have "secret sauce" sorting which tries to surface more important bills and presumably uses number of cosponsors as a filter.

I usually just look at the bill on Govtrack if I want to know what's going on with it.

I can't pass because you'd need 60 votes in the senate (which the Republicans don't have).

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