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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

That "suspends" should be understood as "continues to hold-hostage" / "renews as a time-bomb to screw over some other party".

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That isn't the reason. They sunset in the bill so it has a lower CBO score (which calculates costs out to 10 years). If you sunset in the bill after 5 years, even if you know it will get renewed, the apparent cost goes down. Get it?

The CBO score is a perfect example of the metric becoming the measure and teaching to the test.

"ThE tAx CuT pAyS fOr ItSeLf"

Removing it would make Congress less powerful, and we can't have that now can we.

If anything it has been the opposite problem, with modern congresses having been more than happy to delegate away their powers. You might have heard the recent tariff news for example.

Presidencies last 4-8 years, congressional careers last decades.

Avg for house is 12.5 and 8.5 in senate

Mitch McConnell has been serving in the senate since 1985. He's been a senator longer than most Americans have been alive.

I think the outliers are far more consequential than the averages in this case.

Since each person has one vote why would outliers matters? It doesn't seem that length of terms doesn't even help with leadership roles The Democrats minority leader is Hakeem Sekou Jeffries who was elected about 12 years ago and Mike Johnson has been in the house for 8~ years. There are R and D members who have been in the house longer.

* or whatever the threshold is

Modern being what? The main tariff laws in question happened 50+ years ago. The republicans in congress have been going out of their way to not interfere, but that's significantly different from creating new delegations.

How could Congress get less powerful than now?

That's how they like, more time to campaign and less work that may be impopular.

Thinking about it, the US government is going exactly the same way of the Roman republic.

> US government is going exactly the same way of the Roman republic.

We're gonna conquer and annex Egypt? What an awesome time to be alive!

That was the first imperial conquest. The republic had been gobbling up states long before that.

Egypt? No. But how about Greenland, Canada, and Panama?

Kayfabe

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