> government will never willingly give up power
Governments regularly do this. One of the greatest losses for privacy advocates over the last generation is this brand of nihilism making the issue electorally useless.
Governments regularly do this. One of the greatest losses for privacy advocates over the last generation is this brand of nihilism making the issue electorally useless.
And the original poster remains correct about power. Power is never willingly given up by an institution (it can, however, be given up by individuals, when they decide that there is something more important than power). That is why we (assuming USA, here) have divided government, so power cannot ever be concentrated in any one branch. In this case, the hearing on 702 is being held by one branch, congress, to decide whether to limit or expand the power of another branch, the executive. It’s an important distinction; without that separation there really would be no hope to restore basic privacy.
s/regularly/rarely
It's a generalization, there's always occasional exceptions to the rule.
The point is it’s not a rule. It’s a meme that results from misunderstanding the bureaucratic imperative and oversimplifying into a monolith the complexity of politics and power competition.
It’s incredibly wrong to say this. More modern states fail due to gridlock and fragility than violent coercion.
Individual actors rarely give up power without coercion. That doesn’t mean the system as a whole doesn’t ebb and flow as interests diverge and align.
* Trump's First Step Act. E.g., title III-- can no longer use restraints on prisoners during pregnancy-- and IV-- reducing mandatory minimums for drug felony convictions
* Trump's Affordable Clean Energy rule which removed caps on emissions
* Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act back in 1999
* Carter's Airline Deregulation Act back in the late 70s
* the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963
If I searched my memory for five minutes a day I'd have a list of hundreds by the end of a week.
I get that domain expertise doesn't magically apply outside a domain. But how is HN this special level of asinine when it comes to the simple history of legislation in the U.S.?
Reading the thread with your interlocutor is like reading someone claim that C only has global scope. What could they possibly have read to convince them of such a thing?
FISA is an example of what you are arguing against, unless you are arguing that is a net increase in power because the restrictions on government power came packaged with a government power to prosecute government agents who violated the new limits, which is kind of silly.
(You may be confusing the 1978 act with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, the War on Terror act undercutting the FISA limits, which is kind of like confusing the 18th and 21st Amendments.)
https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20190903_R43056_5083d3b...
The only time it slowed has been during brief gov shutdowns. As this report explains this includes plenty of non rules and administrative stuff and does count repeals but anyone who has followed Congress knows that the bulk of those bills is new spending and new rules imposed on civilians/business. It's rarely ever reducing the scale of gov.
And to repeat another post I made recently, the staffing and funding for US federal regulatory agencies has grown near exponentially since the 1970s (edit: or more accurately a consistent upward trendline)
https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/za...
More government agencies and employees create more rules. More rules almost certainly play into the growing complexity of both our society and economy.
Population growth is nothing new, its only the last 60-80 years that we've really cranked up the size of our government.
Not only is the population growing exponentially but one would reasonably expect the complexity of the overall economy would go up exponentially even with linear additions to the population (each new person is N new possible economic relations).
So this is still just putting the cart before the horse.
Ultimately my stance is the founders weren't perfect, their creation isn't some mystical perfect system handed down from on high [0] so we shouldn't weld ourselves into some imaginary form of what precisely they would or wouldn't want. They're dead it's our country now we have to live with it in a world they couldn't even imagine. Even the groups that do try to lay claim to the founders original vision are cherry picking their favorite version of the founders and their ideas.
[0] Remember their first try at it, the Articles of Confederation fell apart in 4 years and the Constitution was a broad overreach of the mandate that the convention was even convened for.
I would much rather see people participate in their own governance and take back control of the government peacefully before it is intolerable. However, history makes me fearful of a possible violent upheaval.
> If the government breaks their end of the deal all bets are off. etc etc
Those are all explicitly extra constitutional and the ones I euphemistically referred to. The methods for changing the constitution systematically within it's own rules are through Convention or Amendment.
> If ruled constitutionality is different than the people's understanding of the Constitution it creates a sense of tyranny
I'd be more charitable to the devolution of powers if the expressed preferred outcomes of that devolution of power didn't so often tend towards the repression of various groups. There's the OG slavery, segregation, voting rights, and the modern day antitrans/gay panics and to gut things like the voting rights act to prop up gerrymandered governments... but now we're tending towards topics that wind up [dead] due to flame wars.
If anything we should probably make it more lucrative so that the already well off aren’t the only ones who can afford to do it.
Biden made the bulk of his wealth only after being vice president and writing books / speaking. And he was a senator for multiple decades!
Being a federal senator is a middle class salary: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a31265187...
Presidents make ~$400k.
And before someone points out the "ancillary" financial benefits to being a legislator: (a) most of those are illegal if discovered & (b) typically the big money is made after retiring or losing office, by leveraging connections.
That said, I would be careful about conflating the volume of rules and staffing with power. The bureaucratic imperative will drive a bureaucracy to expand. But it also does that to others, the net effect being a lot of intragovernmental arguing that diminishes the state’s actual power.
That doesn’t make the bureaucracy less annoying. Just less powerful. In fact, part of the present problem stems from it being easier for politicians to create blocking bureaucracies than to liquidate the ones they don’t like.
You've got to be kidding me. Here's one: coordination. Everyone drive on the right. That wasn't done to make anyone more powerful; it was done to prevent stupid crashes.
Here's another rule: don't fly you plane past its spec. That isn't to oppress the pilot. It's because the plane wasn't designed to be flown harder.
You do get governments willing to give up power if you elect progressive democrats or libertarians. Republicans lie hardcore about wanting to do this though. Republicans used to be the party of federalism, now they’re the party of “unitary executive theory”
Anyone with the idea that governments never give up power is so pathetically unobservant that I honestly don’t want them voting in our elections.
I’ll pick a negative one: antitrust. Government retreated from its enforcement duty and powers for a few decades. In the vacuum, private interests asserted themselves.
This doesn't really count as freely joining, since half of them were forced to join by a bloody war.
In the South, do they generally consider themselves as forced to re-join the Union, rather than having been forcefully prevented from leaving?
I don't think it is revisionism and maybe I am wrong on this, but wasn't it the Confederacy who attacked the Union at Fort Sumter which kicked off the US Civil War?
It's my understanding the Union was more or less ambivalent to the Confederacy and figured they'd let things lie then the Confederacy attacked.
I don't know enough history to say whether the Confederacy was forced to re-join or whether the states asked to rejoin in light of their government collapsing (Davis fleeing Richmond, etc). My guess would be that it was more of a failed state situation where the US had dibs on propping it back up.
The "government" isn't a unified mind. It's a group of individuals looking to further their career and (rarely) pursue a cause they care about. If two governments merge their law-sets into one, they aren't losing anything - the people involved are simply being promoted and gaining a broader peer influence with more vertical growth opportunities.
A few times this year in the US at the federal level, for starters.
One could argue that every peaceful transition of power is the current government giving up power to the next government.
Even Roe v. Wade was a “giving up” of power by the federal government to guarantee a right to abortion nationally.
The power isnt the limitation. It's the ability to implement or remove a limitation. They havnt given that up.
Weed legalization (NYS doesn't count)
Gun laws
Also, the gun stuff is a huge win for reduction in state power.
We have a whole category for it in the US and one of the two major parties devoted to it: Deregulation.
To your point, I have no doubt that some deregulation has been spin for regulatory capture and/or anti-competitive behavior. Unfortunately, perhaps especially for the environment, that’s not an accurate summary of all deregulation, nor of the US conservative party’s official stance on regulation.