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Comment by shwaj | Hacker News Reader

Nobody’s talking about a blood oath to promise never to revisit the issue. But there’s a different between leaving the door open to future reconsideration, versus pushing consistently against the wishes of the public and only backing off temporarily for tactical reasons.

And for some reason, once these things pass, it’s a one way door. When does the US public get a chance to reconsider the Patriot Act?

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The US public reconsiders it every time it sends a new congress in. Congress can repeal it in any session, they don't need to wait for it to expire.

Like, that's just the nature of representative democracy.

Well yeah, it's exploiting a problem in representative democracy. That doesn't work unless people become single issue voters on specifically that matter, and in that case, you can just screw over the public with something else.

The practice deserves every bit of scorn it gets.

It's not a flaw in representative democracy, it's a flaw in America as a whole. Most recently the public looked at the options before them, and chose to send in a slate of absolute lunatics in.

When you can't even figure out that having blatantly and openly vindictive and corrupt people in government is a bad idea, the fact that they aren't annually revisiting some legislature that's an issue for the 5% of the population that is the tech crowd isn't the problem. Like, it's a problem, but but it's not the problem.

This thread is literally about Denmark and the European Union.

It is, but the sub thread is for whinging about the Patriot act and why a representative democracy never gets the chance to repeal it. (Wherein I argue that it has plenty of chances, it just isn't an important political issue compared to, well, everything.)

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