Why is congress trying to pass an obviously unconstitutional law? | Hacker News Reader

Why is congress trying to pass an obviously unconstitutional law?

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27 pointswallace_f18 comments

Why did this post get flagged? I though free speech issues were very pertinent to Hacker News.

A post below by kyrieeschaton critiquing the Israel lobby was also flagged. Her/his post just suggested the Israel lobby was involved in the process, and had nothing I'd consider offensive.

Without being inflammatory: HN is one of the most anti-free speech place on the net. Comments and articles pro free speech are regularly downvoted, flagged, deleted or shadowbanned.

where in the post did kyrieeschaton mention Israel. they didn't. they only used the phrase "Jewish Lobby". and in fact doubles down on it in their responses.

good question. Also how much karma does one need to vote for 'unflag'?

Wow I didn't know that -- that's ridiculous.

Imagine if it were any other country, friend or foe. A law against a person making his own financial decision against Canada, or China, or England, or Germany, or Turkey.

2 courts have ruled against this already: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/rights-protesters/laws...

Two courts have already ruled against states trying to do this. This article is about the Federal government trying to do the same thing.

Obviously, that doesn't make it any better. What it does make it is more stupid. Yes, the states ought to know better, but the US Congress really ought to know better. Do members of Congress not know what the First Amendment says? Do they not see how it applies to this proposal? Or do they simply not care? All those options are bad; I'm not sure which one is worse.

Why would so many people downvote this comment?

Akso HN just dropped the hammer and removed this submission from the front page (cant be found on 2nd, 3rd, 4th pages either)

The "hammer" is probably algorithmic, not a human conspiracy. The few comments already on this submisson strongly suggest there is large amounts of upvoting and downvoting going on without a similar amount of good commenting. HN's algorithms are designed to promote good conversation, not pile on the voting wars around contentious topics. It happens that politically charged topics frequently drive large amounts of knee-jerk angry voting responses not associated with equally rich conversations, so they tend to get algorithmically pushed down the ranking.

Disappointingly, the article never even attempts to answer the question, which really has a concise answer - the Jewish lobby in the US has an incredible amount of influence, and they are attempting to avoid their ethnostate being South Africa'd. Astonishingly, the word "Jewish" never even appears in the article.

> they are attempting to avoid their ethnostate being South Africa'd

What does being "South Africa'd" mean?

Boycotted, divested from, and sanctioned until the regime collapses.

Speaking of sanctions, despite this being a civil rights issue, HN just dropped the hammer and removed this submission from the front page (cant be found on 2nd, 3rd, 4th pages either).

My comment simply linking to the ACLU was also nuked.

The majority of American Jews are pro-two state (https://www.ajc.org/news/ajc-comparative-surveys-of-israeli-...). The pro-Israel lobby is mostly christians.

The first claim has nothing to do with anything I said.

The second is false; organizations like AIPAC and the ADL have by far the greatest influence on US Israeli policy and fighting BDS in particular, and are overwhelmingly Jewish dominated.

This was thoroughly documented by Mearsheimer and Walt more than a decade ago, and it's not like their influence has waned.

Mearsheimer and Walt disagree with you: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/books/review/Letters-t-1....

No, Mearsheimer and Walt are very careful to not use particular words. They choose to not use "Jewish lobby", with the fig leaf that at least some Christian Zionists are on the same page and not literally every Jew is, despite the objective content of their book supporting the contention that Jewish organizations are both the most prominent and have the core agenda-setting function.

Congress hasn’t cared about the constitutionality of new laws for a long time

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