It's even worse than that. They get other countries to make harsher laws than the US has, then when they try to pass similar laws in the US, they argue that it's just normalizing our laws with what other countries are doing...
My own country is an example. The government really likes to copy whatever it is developed countries are doing. Watching how other countries regulate stuff is a great way to predict what I might have to deal with in the future. We created our own GDPR after Europe did it. Telecommunications companies tried to lobby against net neutrality here citing the US as an "industry standard" example.