GOP: We are holding firm on a clean extension bill. We will shut down the government for the longest stretch in the history of the nation because we are so dedicated to our pure and honest principles.
Democrats: We will use the same leverage that GOP has used time and time again by forcing them to choose between nuking the filibuster or (in our case, this time) negotiating to preserve health care access for millions.
GOP: We will absolutely not preserve access to health care for a single person (ok fine: one person[1]), but we will reopen the government if you allow us to embezzle millions personally, and also extort the cannabis industry.
What actually happened is that a group of squishy Democrats and Angus King didn't actually want the filibuster nuked so when they realized Republicans weren't going to extend the ACA subsidies they called the whole thing off without even reading the bill they were going to pass.
The hemp ban isn't even the shadiest part, the self-dealing of allowing certain Senators who were connected to a putsch to loot the treasury is even more egregious.
This whole process has shown again that a democracy can only function if everybody or at least most politicians act in good faith and respect the rules . If you constantly ignore boundaries, the whole things falls apart. I honestly have no idea how the US can return to some level of sanity. It just gets worse and worse. Lots of energy is being wasted on posturing and coherent long term policy is basically impossible. I really worry where this is going.
Was there every a real clean bill offramp available early in the shutdown?
I think the Democrat's mistake was as much as they were backing a popular policy, they didn't have the "clean bill" high ground, the Republicans are less concerned with government services, and they were backed into an end date with Thanksgiving travel coming up, so it would always get earmarks attached.
What the Democrats got right was they wanted a fight, and at first, the majority was on their side.
8 individual Democrats. Don’t lump in the rest who held the line.
You are “both sides”ing this when the GOP is the only side that worked tirelessly to end healthcare subsidies and allow America’s poorest to go hungry.
8 individual democrats, the exact number needed for the vote to pass, all of whom are either out the door or safe from reelection in 2026. Quite the coincidence.
I wonder what those 8 got in return? They are going to take a lot of flack, they must have demanded something. You don't get anywhere in politics by being the type of person who would just offer something for nothing.
Those 8 people still needed to agree to change their vote and the responsibility is ultimately on them.
And this is yet another political trope: Democrats are always blamed for everything by everyone including their own voters.
Republicans have majorities in the entire federal government, but the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault because they wanted a bill with healthcare preserved.
The majority party isn’t blamed for failing to promote a consensus because they have R’s next to their names.
If the shutdown never happened and senate democrats just voted yes on the spending bill cutting healthcare they’d be blamed for rolling over to Republican policy and failing to use their filibuster to pressure Republicans to compromise.
When will anything be the GOP’s fault?
Are we forgetting that Donald Trump blocked SNAP disbursements that a court ordered him to restore? The GOP is going above and beyond to shut down the government more than it is legally supposed to be shut down.
The Democrats actually did some political good by putting a spotlight on the GOP’s quiet attempts to demolish social programs, and they pulled back as soon as they found out that our president was willing to starve poor people over the issue, something that a normal human with basic morals would never do.
Next time Democrats are in control and Republicans pull the same government shutdown strategy to block a Democrat policy initiative, it’ll magically be the Democrats’ fault because “they are in charge.”
By the way, zero government shutdowns under Joe Biden.
The fact that 8 individuals voted says nothing about how any of them actually felt. It's not a coincidence that none of them are up for reelection soon. This was all done with the blessing of leadership, they were just the sacrificial lambs.
In Nancy Pelosi's memoir there is a story about some red-state Democrat who came out publicly against Pelosi on some issue. Turns out the entire scheme was her idea- make the representative look good to his own state by throwing herself under the bus.
I'm not saying any of this is good or bad, but this is what politics actually is. A bunch of behind the scenes scheming to advance leadership's agenda. Not individual politicians voting for what they think is best.
While true, at least in the Senate there are questions as to whether those 8 were selected to fall on their swords by Democratic leadership because they either aren't running again or aren't up for re-election in 2026. These questions are coming from the progressive part of the party and progressive supporters.
“We will not extend taxpayer subsidies that Democrats set to expire at this point while they were in office, to continue masking the inflated cost of healthcare due to the atrocious ACA bill that Democrats forced on the country on party lines, to make the failures less obvious in the run up to midterms while Democrats hold hostage federal workers, military families, airlines, etc.”
Leftists hate our current healthcare so much that they openly celebrate the murder of a healthcare CEO, but then also screech when the GOP tries to end that system.
The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.
The senate kind of makes more sense the bigger the country is. You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit. This is also why they originally weren't directly elected.
When you consider that the OG federal government mostly dealt in issues that were common to the states or very clearly interstate the reason they chose the architecture they did for the senate seems even more sensible. They were meant to bicker about sending Marines to the desert and settling Ohio, not about how individuals could use certain plants (seems like a fitting example considering the source here) or the minutia of exactly what sort of infrastructure ought to get federal subsidy.
> You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit.
You can have a group of people that represent each state as a unit. Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though.
The federal government wasn't supposed to represent the people though for the vast majority of its function, it was supposed to essentially mediate interstate affairs and provide protection from foreign incursion.
The vast majority of what it does now, which acts on people rather than states, is a result of exceeding the powers constrained in the 10th amendment. The federal government is breaking because it is operating way outside of its design envelope.
I'm well aware of the reasoning for the design -- although I will point out that the notion of an extremely constrained federal government was controversial then, hardly consensus among the founding fathers.
But the design clearly is not fit for where our society is or the direction it is moving, people have much more affiliation with the national entity than with the state entity, and it simply does not make sense to have a pseudo-house of lords with actual political power in the 21st century.
If you are from a smaller state, you would think it would still make sense. Otherwise the rural concerns just get steamrolled by the urban concerns. The point still stands about trying to level out concerns between smaller and larger states, which is why it was created with years of debate and a majority even if it wasn't consensus.
Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair, would be unhappy if we transitioned to a system where all voters have an equal amount of political power.
This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones. Our current system is a crazy double standard, and inherently unfair.
"Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair,"
Who determines what is fair? Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation?
"This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones."
The urban ones have more power in the house as that chamber is designed to represent the people. The rural states have equal power in the Senate. It might just happen that there are more rural states (just as in the House some states happen to have more people).
You can't install solar panels in AZ without a permit and building plans and roof plans.
That's all well and good in the city, but here in bumfuck nowhere I built a house with no building plans or roof plans. Why exactly did the majority of city dwellers pass this law without even considering people like me in bumfuck nowhere, who have as much or higher utility for solar panels than even those in urban areas, need to have this regulation?
The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just did it. Now I can't install solar panels without producing a bunch of extra paperwork that city dwellers just assumed everyone already has on hand because in the city you're required to file those when you build the house. Due to that and other rules that are half-cocked consideration for rural counties that don't inspect literally anything else, they basically made it the hardest to put solar in the places where it is most practical and has the most impact.
Literally everything even vaguely construction-ish is rife with crap like this.
The worse part is that the city people don't even actively want it. They're just the useful idiots. The trade groups, the professional organizations, the big industry players, they push it. And that chunk of the electorate doesn't think about it, they just say "sounds good to me" because it's not relevant to them and sounds good at face value.
I don't have any specific ones that would be pertinent to this conversation without causing a flame war of some kind, but we can see the general difference based on county level urbanization as it correlates to party voting in the presidential election. Those rural concerns can also vary from one state to another (a core part of why the Senate was created).
I'm from an even smaller political entity than Wyoming, although we don't get any Senate representation at all. It would be beyond absurd to grant us equal voting power to California and obviously not a sustainable way of constructing a political system.
"Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though."
That's your opinion. The opinion of people in Wyoming is likely different. What the facts would show if you look into the history of why the Senate was necessary, it would show that smaller states wouldn't have joined, and would be justified in leaving. The real problem is that the scope of decisions at the federal level has gotten ridiculous due to "interstate commerce" and "taxes", so we now operate more at the federal level than the system originally intended.
Yes, in case you didn't notice, everything we are stating is opinions.
I absolutely reject the notion that the senator from Wyoming should have equal political power to the senator from Texas or California, I think it is absurd, I don't doubt that some people in Wyoming disagree.
I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal representation as the most populous state would still be a massive win for them and they would have almost certainly taken the deal at the time.
The goal isn't about guaranteeing that all states have X number of votes; the house and the senate vote separately on things. For a bill to pass the house and the senate requires:
1. A majority vote by the house whose members are allocated by population and therefore (ostensibly) represent the general population
2. A majority vote by the senate whose members are allocated by state and therefore (ostensibly) represent the will or needs of the states themselves.
As an example of why that distinction is relevant, consider Rhode Island. With a population of 1.1 million people, 100 reserved seats plus one seat per 500k would give Rhode Island 4 votes. Meanwhile, California's population of 38.9 million would give it 70 votes. That prohibits effectively representing Rhode Island as a state in any meaningful way.
As it is now, vote-by-population could allow a small number of states with the majority of population to out-vote the entire rest of the country, passing a law that states that all healthcare should be made free and the states have to pay for it themselves. Large states with strong economies and large tax bases might be in favor of that, but smaller and less populous states with weaker economies would go bankrupt.
Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can decide that the law is inappropriate or against their interests and vote against it.
The distinction I think that most people from outside of the US probably don't fully understand is that, unlike in a lot of countries, each state is its own economy, government, politics, etc. rather than one sort of unified government that covers the whole country. Many of them see the federal government as not much more than a necessary evil to help the independent-but-united states coordinate themselves and prosper together. I remember someone once saying that it used to be "The United States are..." and not "The United States is..." and that kind of gives you an idea of the separation.
The best comparison might be the EU, where you could imagine the large, rich countries with large populations wanting to pass a vote that the smaller, poorer countries might chafe against. Imagine an EU resolution that said that all countries must spend at least 70 billion euro on defense; fine for large countries like Germany which already do, but absurd for a smaller country like Malta. The senate exists to prohibit that sort of unfairness in the US federal government.
> The distinction I think that most people from outside of the US probably don't fully understand is that, unlike in a lot of countries, each state is its own economy, government, politics, etc. rather than one sort of unified government that covers the whole country.
This is exactly how I see how my country and EU works. I feel like this is something I am intimately familiar with.
> Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can decide that the law is inappropriate or against their interests and vote against it.
What mechanism causes the senate to be more resilient to those issues than a unified Congress?
Not as far as my limited understanding is, USA still has a Congress and a House, and the comment thread I replied was specifically about abolishing the Congress for a different solution. And as far as
I know USA has not abolished the Congress, right?
>Couldn’t it also work by guaranteeing each state X seats and then the rest Y seats are set according to census data on population?
Yes. If you call the "X" club the Senate and the "Y" club the House of Representatives, this is exactly how our bicameral legislature works.
edit: Their votes count for passage in their chamber, not equally weighted against eachother. If you mean Y seats equal seats by population but with a minimum X, then that's how the House works. Any proposal to make the senate proportional starts to ask why we're not unicameral because then you basically have 2x house of reps but with different voting district sizes.
Point is, they would not have different roles, but instead work as a single house which votes on issues and laws and then delegates the result to the executive branch. No dual ”clubs” or houses with separate votes or separate elections.
The UK House of Lords can't block legislation, only delay it and suggest changes to bills. It's also appointed for life, meaning the lords are immune to political pressures - they don't have to worry about doing something unpopular and getting voted out by the people they represent.
Canada's government, based off of the UK parliamentary system has a 'Senate' rather than a 'House of Lords'; it's still appointed for life and devoid of political repercussions, but unlike in the UK it is capable of blocking legislation entirely and sending it back to the House of Commons to be reworked (or given up on).
The US senate is another step difference from Canada's system, where the senate can (IIRC) prevent legislation like in Canada but the members are elected and are therefore subject to political pressures.
"The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people"
They are intended to represent the states. The whole point was so that smaller states aren't overpowered by the larger states. We simply moved from the governors selecting them to the people selecting them.
I understand the motive, I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does, and it fundamentally undermines the modern American compact. We simply do not live in a federation of states in the way that the EU, this was much less clear and more contested in the late 18th century.
"I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does"
But do you think the people in the less populous states feel the same? If we do remove the senate or make it population based, do you think people in those areas will feel represented if they're steamrolled by the urban areas? The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts. If you're never sided with but have a large number of like minded people, how do you think they will respond based on what history shows us?
> The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts.
People from small states will have a say. They will oftentimes be crucial votes. The point of democracy is not that some people get 10x voting power than others. The point of democracy is not that you are entitled to the swinging vote or disproportionate voting power.
I am from a place smaller than Wyoming that never got representation in congress in the first place. I understand how it feels to be unrepresented. Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here.
"Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here."
I'm pointing out the historical concern that is still valid today. The purpose of the Senate isn't to represent people, but to represent the states. The House represents the people and that already has the proportional representation you are seeking.
Compact is gone. They declared themselves domestic terrorists at their conventions, then once in power they declare anyone else are the domestic terrorists and start disappearing citizens without due process to other countries/cecot.
"Yes, what's more fair is for the smaller states to overpower the larger ones."
Not really. Each state has equal power in the senate. But the people in the larger states have more power in the House. It's not possible for a smaller state to overpower a larger one.
Senators represent their State government, not the people. Americans didn't even vote for Senators until sometime in the 20th century. Traditionally they were selected by the State legislatures. Similarly, the President is the President of the States, not the people.
If you don't have this then you don't have a Federal Republic.
The House of Representatives, on the other hand, is intended to represent the people.
Having the house capped is also ridiculous. My rep is also the rep for 750k+ other people. One person cannot represent a district that size appropriately at a federal level. They also cannot really respond to constituents properly either when they have that many.
For 2020 it was 761,169 and Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska have less population than that. They still get a Member and then they get two Senators. And they get three electoral votes.
Having representation based on land/physical space will increasingly be seen as absurd.
Maybe we will have “youth reps” in the future. Or reps based on other organizing group (hunters? Musicians?). The problem is…taxonomical? People won’t have to belong to a single group but can belong to several “unions”.
I never said we needed 5k, if you have to pretend I said something in order to make an argument, you don’t really have an argument. You also provided no evidence that 5k reps can’t run a country either.
The U.K. has more than triple what we have. If we had 1500 representatives, that’s roughly 1 per 225k people. Not a great number, but much more reasonable at least, and also much closer to what representation was when the House was capped.
Smaller districts mean not just more accountability, but more similarity within the district. Right now, my district is 95% rural and 5% a slice of a city. I live in the city part, therefore my rep doesn’t care about what I have to say, as my wants and needs are different than the rural population that makes up the majority of who vote for him. Smaller districts are harder to gerrymander like this, and they also mean your rep probably lives a life relatively similar to yours - drives the same highways, experiences roughly the same tax burden, shops at the same places, participates in the same events. This will not be true for every case, but it’s still a better situation than what we have now.
> This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false.
Design by committee is a well-known failure mode. I'd argue that once the size of the house (or maybe one party's seats) gets past Dunbar's number, the house becomes less effective.
I’d argue the opposite. Congress could use more members so that it can have more sub-committees to craft legislation with more detail and taking on a larger number of issues with more precision.
There could be sub-committees dedicated to a larger quantity of issues and addressing more industries.
Your argument would be like if you were expecting Apple to only hire 100 engineers to write software for the huge product line they maintain. Maybe 100 engineers is a good number to make one product, but Apple has a huge product line.
Sometimes you legitimately need more people in an organization.
And this reminds me of how flawed your argument is when we already have highly functional corporations that have hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of managers and we know they function. Dividing and sub-dividing work is how it all gets managed.
My pet view is that the fundamental flaw in the Constitution is its decreasing ability to enable coordinated change as population grows and more states enter the Union. Thus, change becomes progressively more difficult over time, whereas changes are increasingly necessary as time passes.
Yes, one of its main goals was to make change difficult. But political-party and legislator capture of the system has taken hold (easy example: representatives now pick their voters) and coordinating amendments we need is nigh impossible.
Periodic constitutional conventions would have helped.
This wasn't "suposed" to be an issue because the federal government was only really supposed to meddle in things that were obviously common issues or flagrantly interstate.
But now that it's in the business of taking everyone's money via income tax and then dolling it back out to the state to spend with strings attached (which is basically how the bulk of the non-entitlements, non-military money gets spent) the minutia of federal regulation matters far more.
There were already 25 states (50 Senators) by the time James Madison died in 1836. The original Constitution framers had already seen the explosive growth of the US during their lifetimes. So I can't imagine they didn't envision it.
Exactly! We are in a 'time to time' 200-year period of trying something other than equal-vote democracy, but ultimately it is not going to be sustainable.
The insane thing about the US is that 350M people are being represented. The government needs to represent a minority of people in order to become functional again.
The Senate was absolutely one of the best features of government. Unicameral legislatures are uniformly godawful. In as much as it is imperfect, it is only so because Congress has become more unicameral-like... senators are little more than representatives that stay in office six years instead of two.
WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the best features of government? In Britain, its name more honestly reflected the class it represents, House of Lords.
In Britain there is no Congress. The name of the House of Lords has nothing to do with the United States' Senate. If we are to believe that its form and function were inspired by some other nation's government, then let's talk about its true namesake: the Roman Senate.
I reject your Peel all apples because orange rinds are bitter! nonsense.
The Roman Senate was a unicameral form of government. Bicameralism principally comes from Britain, the country which we were formerly a colony of and which gave us our dominant language, legal code, ….
That said, again, WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the best features of government?
The senate was explicitly designed to provide a brake on the democratic aspirations of the lower classes by the founders.
American government is a system of baffles designed to frustrate democratic will and preserve the property and political control of elites.
The senate should be abolished along with the undemocratic supreme court (as currently constituted with lifetime appointments and the ability to overrule congress at a whim) and the imperial presidency.
To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes democracy.
>American government is a system of baffles designed to frustrate democratic will
The "democratic will", like the people who manifest it, is so bizarrely stupid that there are no insults strong enough to properly insult it. If it can be tolerated at all, then it is so only when there are brakes strong enough to slow it down and force it to think carefully.
>To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes democracy.
Why would I (or anyone like me) ever agree to a new constitution that someone like yourself approves of? The whole point of the constitution as written was that people like yourself couldn't easily come in and change all the rules when our vigilance relaxed a bit, but here you are not even trying to hide it: you want to change all the rules in one fell swoop. No thanks. Do it the hard way to prove to yourself (and the rest of us) that a vast majority want those changes.
I think senators should be appointed by the states again, repeal the 17th.
The senate makes perfect sense in the context of the fact that the slavery states wanted equal power but without counting their slaves as people. It should have been abolished during the Civil War.
many non-slavery parliamentary societies have bicameral legislature, why do you think that is considering they never considered counting their slaves...?
Bicameralism appeared very, very early on. There’s a well known case of a missing pig in 1642’s Boston (with a population of less than 2000 at the time) that finally solidified splitting the assembly into two chambers, and that debate has been going on for a while at the time already https://www.americanantiquarian.org/sites/default/files/proc...
Non-proportionately? For example the Netherlands has a senate but the weight of senators per province is set by population. They don't let Saba have equal powers with Utrecht, which is exactly what the American system does. Other Anglosphere countries — all of which have exceptionally bad forms of government due to the legacy of England and the early influence of the United States Constitution — have upper houses that do not have America's weird geographic correspondece.
There is a particular sort of partisan who loathes any process, procedure, or rule that acts as an impediment to his agenda. Never mind that, quite often, these same processes, procedures, and rules often act as impediments to his opponents when they are (temporarily) in the majority, he sees his faction as ascendant forever because the universe is designed to promote his peculiar idea of progress and thus there is no longer any need for those hurdles and obstacles. In hushed whispers he might even confess he thinks there never was a need, that those were put in place by his enemies to thwart his righteous cause.
Even the legal weed state senators were voting for this.
It is mostly about shifting profits from mom and pop, low regulation hemp industry to wealthy corporations that own dispensaries that have gargantuan regulatory costs that gatekeep out most the competition. This ensures profits are captured by the wealthy rather than small family type setups.
Wealthy former hemp companies will shift to the "legal" weed market, while the mom and pops will get completely wiped out.
Corporations are eroding democracy with their powerful lobbies. They have too much money and influence. And yet too much of the electorate has been convinced it's good for the economy to just let them and the super rich have free reign.
Cannabis needs to be reclassified. I think this is the right thing to do, actually, but only if it came at the same time as reclassifying. This is a drug market that should be regulated, but not class 1.
People upthread are arguing about the senate as a system, but how much does that really matter when wildly popular things, like legalizing marijuana, are not even considered by anyone in congress? A majority of Americans are in favor of this, and have been for over a decade.
That seems to be an alcohol industry complaint. That it isn't taxed and regulated like booze
Most US problems come down to inability of congress to just figure out basic stuff like regulating weed. Same with the getting rid of the penny, immigration, tariffs/executive power, doing a proper and legal DOGE etc. They mostly just sit on the sidelines of the big ticket items and focus instead on spending money in their own states.
You're making a different point than I am. Please go back and re-read my comment and see how it is different than the point you are making.
If you still don't think we are making different points, please go back and re-read my comment again, but slower. If that doesn't help, you may consider asking one of the popular LLMs.
Yes, in the sense that now it will be illegal to ship cannabis seeds interstate. Under current law, which doesn't expire for a year, cannabis seeds can be shipped legally interstate across the US as they don't exceed the THC content. Doesn't matter if it's a hemp seed or marijuana seed as both are hemp under the old definition in seed form as long as they're under 0.3% THC.
The passed legislation outlaws any seeds that can produce a plant that doesn't satisfy the new definition of hemp. It completely destroys the white market seed industry, on which the legal weed industry partially operates.
Also, prices will go up and quality will go down in the 'legal' weed market, as previously the hemp industry was a check on prices because you could get better product for cheaper than going to a dispensary and with nice lab tested COAs to see what you were getting.
That has never really been true whenever they get power. Just like states rights, the deficit spending and federal overreach stops mattering. It's just a matter of which part of the government Republicans want to grow and have the funding (ICE for example).
Republicans pretend to act principled when they're not the party in power. Amazing how that works.
I've been a regular consumer of the results of this since about 2020 when I discovered it.
It's been quite the journey watching the industry boom and evolve and get better and better.
I've seen an incredible incredible amount of ignorance on this topic.
Prior to this, I found 1 comment on HN mentioning this last night.
On reddit, it's not on the frontpage of r/politics, r/moderatepolitics or anything relevant.
I can find it on r/news but like every other thread not a single person is mentioning something very factual.
Rand tried to stop this provision in the Senate. 76/100 senators voted for this ban to remain.
76 senators from across the political spectrum, from every state have decided to secretly try to destroy a $30b industry, 300,000 jobs, and a lot of lives.
Contact your representatives and let them know this is BS. [1] When Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott was trying to ban that same "loophole" the business community had time to organize & lobby against it, but in addition, regular citizens sent in over 120k letters, there's footage of people moving boxes and boxes of letters into his office. [2] In the end, he folded and kept the law as it was despite a pretty big push from his party. Was that the reason he didn't end up acting on it? It's hard to know, but it definitely showed him public sentiment was against it.
Don't be apathetic! Letters & phone calls work best, but emails through their official contact page at least get glanced at by an intern.
This is a weird one. It absolutely should not be haphazardly added as a rider. The 0.4 per container is also insane. But, this really was an unintended loophole of the 2018 farm bill. Most plants grow THCa, which turns into Delta-9 when heated. They were ignorant and straight up forgot to specify anything except Delta-9.
Cannabis is a bioremediator and absorbs basically every environmental toxin from the ground (pesticides, heavy metals, etc.). Extraction (for CBD and THC oil) increases the concentration of any present toxins.
The only way you know of the problem is by thoroughly testing every batch. Pesticides that are safe at low levels can get concentrated and become really problematic at high levels.
States where marijuana is legal require all of this testing, so the products are much safer. Hemp-derived THC does not require these tests. (Same is true for CBD, but that's a while other conversation...)
Not only that, the same bill includes a provision which allows "...eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the Biden administration's investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot." [1].
This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me.
> This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me.
"Legislation" is the "bill," which is what makes this problematic. At a high level, the only thing that relates the first page of a bill to the 10th page of the same bill is the fact that they are both included in the same document. This is definitional stuff.
Congress could choose to appropriate funds for each department in a separate bill. One could then easily take the POV that it's swampy to tack on the education funding legislation to the defense appropriations bill.
Always amazes me that we allow multiple bills to be packaged together. Needs to be one bill = 1 vote. Not hundreds/thousands of pages of bills no one will read all rushed through because funding.
Isn't it usually one bill, but an omnibus bill? My understanding is that the actual guard rail that the US congress has discarded is requiring that the contents of the bill be limited to the purview described by the bill's title.
I guess technically yeah but they're usually bills that wouldn't have any chance of being law on their own. "I'll vote for it if you include this" kinda deals.
To do so you need an effective bureaucracy to which the legislature can delegate authority, otherwise there are too many details to be passed in bills. But the revanchist Roberts court has said that bureaucratic powers do not exist, the executive can only do things that are expressly enumerated by Congress and Congress can delegate nothing.
>To do so you need an effective bureaucracy to which the legislature can delegate authority, otherwise there are too many details to be passed in bills. But the revanchist Roberts court has said that bureaucratic powers do not exist,
And your way would be better? All laws defined and redefined by bureaucracies in committees behind closed doors?
That isn't how federal rules have historically been made, so I neither disagree nor agree with your misleading statement.
Federal rules are created collaboratively between executive agencies and the subject matter experts relevant to the regulation, then published in the Federal Register for public review and comments, then after feedback has been gathered, considered, and incorporated the final rules are promulgated. This process was created by Congress.
This nonsense of tacking bills onto other bills needs to end. As does this nonsensical fearmongering of Hemp and Marijuana. Absolutely none of it is actually evidence-driven from what I remember. I know the CDC has (had?) side effect stuff but I think it might be very heavily exaggerated.
Yep, it did. If I have the right bill (H. R. 5371), it's SEC. 781 if you want to see the actual text. (The table of contents is horribly bad though, and only covers divisions and titles and nothing beneath it though.)
is this the ongoing legacy of big pharma influence in government? there must be some reason why tapping this sign is not good enough for their purposes, maybe it’s too hard to enforce
is it conspiratorial to wonder that if enough of the owners are the same investment groups they can move alcohol industry pieces on behalf of other industries they also own, then they have token industries already tainted and ready to accept newly thrown tomatoes instead of the ivory ones
We need to be careful with that sentiment. It plays into the hands of those who want to give the President and the current Supreme Court all the power. Congress was set up in the Constitution to be the branch that represents the people. It's supposed to be fully independent and wield the most power.
You mean like the current president that has been skipping over congress for a number of things, and the supreme court that has been doing little to stop him? Our institutions aren't failing they've already failed.
These are all just symptoms. The underlying vulnerability is the median US culture, which permits venality, scamming, skuldugery, shenanigans and crime in its ruling class.
> And in a letter Monday obtained by MJBizDaily, representatives from major alcohol lobbies urged senators to thwart Paul’s efforts.
> His “shortsighted actions could threaten the delicately balanced deal to reopen the federal government,” a Nov. 10 letter from the American Distilled Spirits Alliance, Distilled Spirits Council, Wine Institute, Beer Institute and Wine America reads.
The wealthy weed stock / dispensary people wanted it as much as anything else. Note many of the senators voting against the amendment to fix it, were pro-marijuana senators from legal weed states.
Hemp was a way for mom and pops to get in the game because the regulatory overhead was much lower. They were small private operators that could enter with low start-up costs, in a free-market like environment.
No one could have seriously thought it was going to last. The likes of Philip Morris type enterprises who pay a gazillion dollars for state dispensary licensing, state chain of custody, zoning, permits, state testing, etc are not going to just let some guy in his basement start shipping out THCa hemp with nothing more than a couple hundred dollars in capital and a Square terminal, no they're going to call on their contacts to ban it.
History shows us time and time again the state will destroy the free market and create regulations that don't actually help people but rather ensure the barriers are such that their wealthy friends will capture almost all the profits.
This whole affair was Congress at its swampiest.
GOP: We are holding firm on a clean extension bill. We will shut down the government for the longest stretch in the history of the nation because we are so dedicated to our pure and honest principles.
Democrats: We will use the same leverage that GOP has used time and time again by forcing them to choose between nuking the filibuster or (in our case, this time) negotiating to preserve health care access for millions.
GOP: We will absolutely not preserve access to health care for a single person (ok fine: one person[1]), but we will reopen the government if you allow us to embezzle millions personally, and also extort the cannabis industry.
Democrats: Sold!
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/11/03/nx...
What actually happened is that a group of squishy Democrats and Angus King didn't actually want the filibuster nuked so when they realized Republicans weren't going to extend the ACA subsidies they called the whole thing off without even reading the bill they were going to pass.
The hemp ban isn't even the shadiest part, the self-dealing of allowing certain Senators who were connected to a putsch to loot the treasury is even more egregious.
The fact that all 8 are either retiring or not facing reelection in 2026 means that this was probably orchestrated by the minority leadership.
It’s exactly 8 senators, safe seats, no comments from Schumer. There is no coup.
I didn't say those 8 were the only 8 members of said group.
This whole process has shown again that a democracy can only function if everybody or at least most politicians act in good faith and respect the rules . If you constantly ignore boundaries, the whole things falls apart. I honestly have no idea how the US can return to some level of sanity. It just gets worse and worse. Lots of energy is being wasted on posturing and coherent long term policy is basically impossible. I really worry where this is going.
Was there every a real clean bill offramp available early in the shutdown?
I think the Democrat's mistake was as much as they were backing a popular policy, they didn't have the "clean bill" high ground, the Republicans are less concerned with government services, and they were backed into an end date with Thanksgiving travel coming up, so it would always get earmarks attached.
What the Democrats got right was they wanted a fight, and at first, the majority was on their side.
8 individual Democrats. Don’t lump in the rest who held the line.
You are “both sides”ing this when the GOP is the only side that worked tirelessly to end healthcare subsidies and allow America’s poorest to go hungry.
8 individual democrats, the exact number needed for the vote to pass, all of whom are either out the door or safe from reelection in 2026. Quite the coincidence.
I wonder what those 8 got in return? They are going to take a lot of flack, they must have demanded something. You don't get anywhere in politics by being the type of person who would just offer something for nothing.
You can blame Chuck Schumer, but I agree that it's wrong to blame the rest of them.
Those 8 people still needed to agree to change their vote and the responsibility is ultimately on them.
And this is yet another political trope: Democrats are always blamed for everything by everyone including their own voters.
Republicans have majorities in the entire federal government, but the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault because they wanted a bill with healthcare preserved.
The majority party isn’t blamed for failing to promote a consensus because they have R’s next to their names.
If the shutdown never happened and senate democrats just voted yes on the spending bill cutting healthcare they’d be blamed for rolling over to Republican policy and failing to use their filibuster to pressure Republicans to compromise.
When will anything be the GOP’s fault?
Are we forgetting that Donald Trump blocked SNAP disbursements that a court ordered him to restore? The GOP is going above and beyond to shut down the government more than it is legally supposed to be shut down.
The Democrats actually did some political good by putting a spotlight on the GOP’s quiet attempts to demolish social programs, and they pulled back as soon as they found out that our president was willing to starve poor people over the issue, something that a normal human with basic morals would never do.
Next time Democrats are in control and Republicans pull the same government shutdown strategy to block a Democrat policy initiative, it’ll magically be the Democrats’ fault because “they are in charge.”
By the way, zero government shutdowns under Joe Biden.
The fact that 8 individuals voted says nothing about how any of them actually felt. It's not a coincidence that none of them are up for reelection soon. This was all done with the blessing of leadership, they were just the sacrificial lambs.
In Nancy Pelosi's memoir there is a story about some red-state Democrat who came out publicly against Pelosi on some issue. Turns out the entire scheme was her idea- make the representative look good to his own state by throwing herself under the bus.
I'm not saying any of this is good or bad, but this is what politics actually is. A bunch of behind the scenes scheming to advance leadership's agenda. Not individual politicians voting for what they think is best.
While true, at least in the Senate there are questions as to whether those 8 were selected to fall on their swords by Democratic leadership because they either aren't running again or aren't up for re-election in 2026. These questions are coming from the progressive part of the party and progressive supporters.
“Preserve Access to Healthcare”
=
“We will not extend taxpayer subsidies that Democrats set to expire at this point while they were in office, to continue masking the inflated cost of healthcare due to the atrocious ACA bill that Democrats forced on the country on party lines, to make the failures less obvious in the run up to midterms while Democrats hold hostage federal workers, military families, airlines, etc.”
FIFY
Leftists hate our current healthcare so much that they openly celebrate the murder of a healthcare CEO, but then also screech when the GOP tries to end that system.
The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.
The senate kind of makes more sense the bigger the country is. You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit. This is also why they originally weren't directly elected.
When you consider that the OG federal government mostly dealt in issues that were common to the states or very clearly interstate the reason they chose the architecture they did for the senate seems even more sensible. They were meant to bicker about sending Marines to the desert and settling Ohio, not about how individuals could use certain plants (seems like a fitting example considering the source here) or the minutia of exactly what sort of infrastructure ought to get federal subsidy.
> You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit.
You can have a group of people that represent each state as a unit. Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though.
The federal government wasn't supposed to represent the people though for the vast majority of its function, it was supposed to essentially mediate interstate affairs and provide protection from foreign incursion.
The vast majority of what it does now, which acts on people rather than states, is a result of exceeding the powers constrained in the 10th amendment. The federal government is breaking because it is operating way outside of its design envelope.
I'm well aware of the reasoning for the design -- although I will point out that the notion of an extremely constrained federal government was controversial then, hardly consensus among the founding fathers.
But the design clearly is not fit for where our society is or the direction it is moving, people have much more affiliation with the national entity than with the state entity, and it simply does not make sense to have a pseudo-house of lords with actual political power in the 21st century.
If you are from a smaller state, you would think it would still make sense. Otherwise the rural concerns just get steamrolled by the urban concerns. The point still stands about trying to level out concerns between smaller and larger states, which is why it was created with years of debate and a majority even if it wasn't consensus.
Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair, would be unhappy if we transitioned to a system where all voters have an equal amount of political power.
This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones. Our current system is a crazy double standard, and inherently unfair.
"Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair,"
Who determines what is fair? Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation?
"This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones."
The urban ones have more power in the house as that chamber is designed to represent the people. The rural states have equal power in the Senate. It might just happen that there are more rural states (just as in the House some states happen to have more people).
What "urban concerns" and "rural concerns" are we talking about, specifically?
One in my state is solar panel legislation.
You can't install solar panels in AZ without a permit and building plans and roof plans.
That's all well and good in the city, but here in bumfuck nowhere I built a house with no building plans or roof plans. Why exactly did the majority of city dwellers pass this law without even considering people like me in bumfuck nowhere, who have as much or higher utility for solar panels than even those in urban areas, need to have this regulation?
The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just did it. Now I can't install solar panels without producing a bunch of extra paperwork that city dwellers just assumed everyone already has on hand because in the city you're required to file those when you build the house. Due to that and other rules that are half-cocked consideration for rural counties that don't inspect literally anything else, they basically made it the hardest to put solar in the places where it is most practical and has the most impact.
Literally everything even vaguely construction-ish is rife with crap like this.
The worse part is that the city people don't even actively want it. They're just the useful idiots. The trade groups, the professional organizations, the big industry players, they push it. And that chunk of the electorate doesn't think about it, they just say "sounds good to me" because it's not relevant to them and sounds good at face value.
I don't have any specific ones that would be pertinent to this conversation without causing a flame war of some kind, but we can see the general difference based on county level urbanization as it correlates to party voting in the presidential election. Those rural concerns can also vary from one state to another (a core part of why the Senate was created).
I'm from a smaller state and I don't think it makes sense. I'll take tyranny of the majority over tyranny of the minority any day of the week.
I'm from an even smaller political entity than Wyoming, although we don't get any Senate representation at all. It would be beyond absurd to grant us equal voting power to California and obviously not a sustainable way of constructing a political system.
DC?
yes
"Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though."
That's your opinion. The opinion of people in Wyoming is likely different. What the facts would show if you look into the history of why the Senate was necessary, it would show that smaller states wouldn't have joined, and would be justified in leaving. The real problem is that the scope of decisions at the federal level has gotten ridiculous due to "interstate commerce" and "taxes", so we now operate more at the federal level than the system originally intended.
Yes, in case you didn't notice, everything we are stating is opinions.
I absolutely reject the notion that the senator from Wyoming should have equal political power to the senator from Texas or California, I think it is absurd, I don't doubt that some people in Wyoming disagree.
I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal representation as the most populous state would still be a massive win for them and they would have almost certainly taken the deal at the time.
But would they continue to take the deal is the real question.
The only reason we have the US is that we rejected this notion.
(Non-American here).
Couldn’t it also work by guaranteeing each state X seats and then the rest Y seats are set according to census data on population?
For example a single house with 100 reserved seats, and on top of that one seat per 500k citizens?
The goal isn't about guaranteeing that all states have X number of votes; the house and the senate vote separately on things. For a bill to pass the house and the senate requires:
1. A majority vote by the house whose members are allocated by population and therefore (ostensibly) represent the general population
2. A majority vote by the senate whose members are allocated by state and therefore (ostensibly) represent the will or needs of the states themselves.
As an example of why that distinction is relevant, consider Rhode Island. With a population of 1.1 million people, 100 reserved seats plus one seat per 500k would give Rhode Island 4 votes. Meanwhile, California's population of 38.9 million would give it 70 votes. That prohibits effectively representing Rhode Island as a state in any meaningful way.
As it is now, vote-by-population could allow a small number of states with the majority of population to out-vote the entire rest of the country, passing a law that states that all healthcare should be made free and the states have to pay for it themselves. Large states with strong economies and large tax bases might be in favor of that, but smaller and less populous states with weaker economies would go bankrupt.
Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can decide that the law is inappropriate or against their interests and vote against it.
The distinction I think that most people from outside of the US probably don't fully understand is that, unlike in a lot of countries, each state is its own economy, government, politics, etc. rather than one sort of unified government that covers the whole country. Many of them see the federal government as not much more than a necessary evil to help the independent-but-united states coordinate themselves and prosper together. I remember someone once saying that it used to be "The United States are..." and not "The United States is..." and that kind of gives you an idea of the separation.
The best comparison might be the EU, where you could imagine the large, rich countries with large populations wanting to pass a vote that the smaller, poorer countries might chafe against. Imagine an EU resolution that said that all countries must spend at least 70 billion euro on defense; fine for large countries like Germany which already do, but absurd for a smaller country like Malta. The senate exists to prohibit that sort of unfairness in the US federal government.
> The distinction I think that most people from outside of the US probably don't fully understand is that, unlike in a lot of countries, each state is its own economy, government, politics, etc. rather than one sort of unified government that covers the whole country.
This is exactly how I see how my country and EU works. I feel like this is something I am intimately familiar with.
> Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can decide that the law is inappropriate or against their interests and vote against it.
What mechanism causes the senate to be more resilient to those issues than a unified Congress?
Done!
You abolished the senate?
this is essentially how the electoral college functions
Not as far as my limited understanding is, USA still has a Congress and a House, and the comment thread I replied was specifically about abolishing the Congress for a different solution. And as far as I know USA has not abolished the Congress, right?
Senate and House - congress is both bodies. My point was merely the additive scheme you described is how electoral college votes are allocated.
What problem does the Congress solve in the democratic process which happens elsewhere where there is no such thing?
>Couldn’t it also work by guaranteeing each state X seats and then the rest Y seats are set according to census data on population?
Yes. If you call the "X" club the Senate and the "Y" club the House of Representatives, this is exactly how our bicameral legislature works.
edit: Their votes count for passage in their chamber, not equally weighted against eachother. If you mean Y seats equal seats by population but with a minimum X, then that's how the House works. Any proposal to make the senate proportional starts to ask why we're not unicameral because then you basically have 2x house of reps but with different voting district sizes.
Point is, they would not have different roles, but instead work as a single house which votes on issues and laws and then delegates the result to the executive branch. No dual ”clubs” or houses with separate votes or separate elections.
This is how my country works.
So the senate is sort of a house of lords?
There are similarities, but not quite.
The UK House of Lords can't block legislation, only delay it and suggest changes to bills. It's also appointed for life, meaning the lords are immune to political pressures - they don't have to worry about doing something unpopular and getting voted out by the people they represent.
Canada's government, based off of the UK parliamentary system has a 'Senate' rather than a 'House of Lords'; it's still appointed for life and devoid of political repercussions, but unlike in the UK it is capable of blocking legislation entirely and sending it back to the House of Commons to be reworked (or given up on).
The US senate is another step difference from Canada's system, where the senate can (IIRC) prevent legislation like in Canada but the members are elected and are therefore subject to political pressures.
"The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people"
They are intended to represent the states. The whole point was so that smaller states aren't overpowered by the larger states. We simply moved from the governors selecting them to the people selecting them.
I understand the motive, I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does, and it fundamentally undermines the modern American compact. We simply do not live in a federation of states in the way that the EU, this was much less clear and more contested in the late 18th century.
"I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does"
But do you think the people in the less populous states feel the same? If we do remove the senate or make it population based, do you think people in those areas will feel represented if they're steamrolled by the urban areas? The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts. If you're never sided with but have a large number of like minded people, how do you think they will respond based on what history shows us?
> The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts.
People from small states will have a say. They will oftentimes be crucial votes. The point of democracy is not that some people get 10x voting power than others. The point of democracy is not that you are entitled to the swinging vote or disproportionate voting power.
I am from a place smaller than Wyoming that never got representation in congress in the first place. I understand how it feels to be unrepresented. Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here.
"Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here."
I'm pointing out the historical concern that is still valid today. The purpose of the Senate isn't to represent people, but to represent the states. The House represents the people and that already has the proportional representation you are seeking.
Compact is gone. They declared themselves domestic terrorists at their conventions, then once in power they declare anyone else are the domestic terrorists and start disappearing citizens without due process to other countries/cecot.
Yes, what's more fair is for the smaller states to overpower the larger ones. Hooray for the Senate!
"Yes, what's more fair is for the smaller states to overpower the larger ones."
Not really. Each state has equal power in the senate. But the people in the larger states have more power in the House. It's not possible for a smaller state to overpower a larger one.
Senators represent their State government, not the people. Americans didn't even vote for Senators until sometime in the 20th century. Traditionally they were selected by the State legislatures. Similarly, the President is the President of the States, not the people.
If you don't have this then you don't have a Federal Republic.
The House of Representatives, on the other hand, is intended to represent the people.
Having the house capped is also ridiculous. My rep is also the rep for 750k+ other people. One person cannot represent a district that size appropriately at a federal level. They also cannot really respond to constituents properly either when they have that many.
For 2020 it was 761,169 and Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska have less population than that. They still get a Member and then they get two Senators. And they get three electoral votes.
Yeah, it's pretty messed up.
Having representation based on land/physical space will increasingly be seen as absurd.
Maybe we will have “youth reps” in the future. Or reps based on other organizing group (hunters? Musicians?). The problem is…taxonomical? People won’t have to belong to a single group but can belong to several “unions”.
But 5,000 representatives can't run a country, either.
I never said we needed 5k, if you have to pretend I said something in order to make an argument, you don’t really have an argument. You also provided no evidence that 5k reps can’t run a country either.
The U.K. has more than triple what we have. If we had 1500 representatives, that’s roughly 1 per 225k people. Not a great number, but much more reasonable at least, and also much closer to what representation was when the House was capped.
Smaller districts mean not just more accountability, but more similarity within the district. Right now, my district is 95% rural and 5% a slice of a city. I live in the city part, therefore my rep doesn’t care about what I have to say, as my wants and needs are different than the rural population that makes up the majority of who vote for him. Smaller districts are harder to gerrymander like this, and they also mean your rep probably lives a life relatively similar to yours - drives the same highways, experiences roughly the same tax burden, shops at the same places, participates in the same events. This will not be true for every case, but it’s still a better situation than what we have now.
China has almost 3,000 house members. The UK has almost 1,500 parliament members with a far smaller population.
The US also has state representatives in every state.
This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false.
Even a modest increase in representative count would go a long way to make America more democratic and lessen the impacts of gerrymandering.
> This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false.
Design by committee is a well-known failure mode. I'd argue that once the size of the house (or maybe one party's seats) gets past Dunbar's number, the house becomes less effective.
I’d argue the opposite. Congress could use more members so that it can have more sub-committees to craft legislation with more detail and taking on a larger number of issues with more precision.
There could be sub-committees dedicated to a larger quantity of issues and addressing more industries.
Your argument would be like if you were expecting Apple to only hire 100 engineers to write software for the huge product line they maintain. Maybe 100 engineers is a good number to make one product, but Apple has a huge product line.
Sometimes you legitimately need more people in an organization.
And this reminds me of how flawed your argument is when we already have highly functional corporations that have hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of managers and we know they function. Dividing and sub-dividing work is how it all gets managed.
My pet view is that the fundamental flaw in the Constitution is its decreasing ability to enable coordinated change as population grows and more states enter the Union. Thus, change becomes progressively more difficult over time, whereas changes are increasingly necessary as time passes.
Yes, one of its main goals was to make change difficult. But political-party and legislator capture of the system has taken hold (easy example: representatives now pick their voters) and coordinating amendments we need is nigh impossible.
Periodic constitutional conventions would have helped.
This wasn't "suposed" to be an issue because the federal government was only really supposed to meddle in things that were obviously common issues or flagrantly interstate.
But now that it's in the business of taking everyone's money via income tax and then dolling it back out to the state to spend with strings attached (which is basically how the bulk of the non-entitlements, non-military money gets spent) the minutia of federal regulation matters far more.
I can’t imagine the framers of the Constitution envisioned having 50 states, either.
26 Senators is a substantially different shape of legislative body than the current 100.
There were already 25 states (50 Senators) by the time James Madison died in 1836. The original Constitution framers had already seen the explosive growth of the US during their lifetimes. So I can't imagine they didn't envision it.
> Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.
"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
Exactly! We are in a 'time to time' 200-year period of trying something other than equal-vote democracy, but ultimately it is not going to be sustainable.
Liquid Democracy. If the people can delegate their vote, they should be able to claw it back if enough of them care on some issue.
The insane thing about the US is that 350M people are being represented. The government needs to represent a minority of people in order to become functional again.
That said I bet the Senate exists in 500 years.
The US will not see its quadricentennial without a new constitution.
Ideally yes, but I think we could just continue to ignore it like we've done in earnest since FDR
Things would work if we weren’t so damn tribal and if extremists on both sides weren’t the ones defining the discussion.
Here is a video for us: https://youtu.be/mRtGg9F5xyA
The two-party political system is the most successful sham that the US's aristocratic class has managed to pull off in the last 100 years.
(A close second is the intense tribalism fueled by hot-take-heavy social media.)
The Senate was absolutely one of the best features of government. Unicameral legislatures are uniformly godawful. In as much as it is imperfect, it is only so because Congress has become more unicameral-like... senators are little more than representatives that stay in office six years instead of two.
WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the best features of government? In Britain, its name more honestly reflected the class it represents, House of Lords.
In Britain there is no Congress. The name of the House of Lords has nothing to do with the United States' Senate. If we are to believe that its form and function were inspired by some other nation's government, then let's talk about its true namesake: the Roman Senate.
I reject your Peel all apples because orange rinds are bitter! nonsense.
The Roman Senate was a unicameral form of government. Bicameralism principally comes from Britain, the country which we were formerly a colony of and which gave us our dominant language, legal code, ….
That said, again, WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the best features of government?
The senate was explicitly designed to provide a brake on the democratic aspirations of the lower classes by the founders.
American government is a system of baffles designed to frustrate democratic will and preserve the property and political control of elites.
The senate should be abolished along with the undemocratic supreme court (as currently constituted with lifetime appointments and the ability to overrule congress at a whim) and the imperial presidency.
To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes democracy.
Lets hear it for Tyranny by the Masses!
>American government is a system of baffles designed to frustrate democratic will
The "democratic will", like the people who manifest it, is so bizarrely stupid that there are no insults strong enough to properly insult it. If it can be tolerated at all, then it is so only when there are brakes strong enough to slow it down and force it to think carefully.
>To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes democracy.
Why would I (or anyone like me) ever agree to a new constitution that someone like yourself approves of? The whole point of the constitution as written was that people like yourself couldn't easily come in and change all the rules when our vigilance relaxed a bit, but here you are not even trying to hide it: you want to change all the rules in one fell swoop. No thanks. Do it the hard way to prove to yourself (and the rest of us) that a vast majority want those changes.
I think senators should be appointed by the states again, repeal the 17th.
It was setup to represent states. The House represents districts of people.
Yes, I understand the system and the original reasoning very well, it's explained in detail in the Federalist papers. I'm saying it is a bad one.
The senate makes perfect sense in the context of the fact that the slavery states wanted equal power but without counting their slaves as people. It should have been abolished during the Civil War.
many non-slavery parliamentary societies have bicameral legislature, why do you think that is considering they never considered counting their slaves...?
Not a historian, but some possibilities:
- some governments were explicitly modeled on the US system
- others were influenced by the US system as they moved from e.g. monarchies
- most countries have some sort of caste system that established interests want to preserve
Bicameralism appeared very, very early on. There’s a well known case of a missing pig in 1642’s Boston (with a population of less than 2000 at the time) that finally solidified splitting the assembly into two chambers, and that debate has been going on for a while at the time already https://www.americanantiquarian.org/sites/default/files/proc...
Non-proportionately? For example the Netherlands has a senate but the weight of senators per province is set by population. They don't let Saba have equal powers with Utrecht, which is exactly what the American system does. Other Anglosphere countries — all of which have exceptionally bad forms of government due to the legacy of England and the early influence of the United States Constitution — have upper houses that do not have America's weird geographic correspondece.
There is a particular sort of partisan who loathes any process, procedure, or rule that acts as an impediment to his agenda. Never mind that, quite often, these same processes, procedures, and rules often act as impediments to his opponents when they are (temporarily) in the majority, he sees his faction as ascendant forever because the universe is designed to promote his peculiar idea of progress and thus there is no longer any need for those hurdles and obstacles. In hushed whispers he might even confess he thinks there never was a need, that those were put in place by his enemies to thwart his righteous cause.
I suggest you check out the debate over bicameralism when this was chosen. It was not just slaves stats that wanted a senate.
Even the legal weed state senators were voting for this.
It is mostly about shifting profits from mom and pop, low regulation hemp industry to wealthy corporations that own dispensaries that have gargantuan regulatory costs that gatekeep out most the competition. This ensures profits are captured by the wealthy rather than small family type setups.
Wealthy former hemp companies will shift to the "legal" weed market, while the mom and pops will get completely wiped out.
76/100 senators voted to keep this provision.
Both Senators in California, my state, voted for the ban. Neither has explained why.
I'm not sure how this relates to the above comment.
EDIT: I'm assuming this is to point out it's a bipartisan effort. Well, yes, there isn't exactly a pro-people party.
It says that weed supporting stats voted for this. They did.
Corporations are eroding democracy with their powerful lobbies. They have too much money and influence. And yet too much of the electorate has been convinced it's good for the economy to just let them and the super rich have free reign.
Alcohol lobbyists did this. Amazing swamp :(
I was really stupid to think Republicans wanted a clean CR and Democrats wanted to help people with insurance.
Both sides wanted to slip in something their lobbyists wanted, and they did it. Win.
Cannabis needs to be reclassified. I think this is the right thing to do, actually, but only if it came at the same time as reclassifying. This is a drug market that should be regulated, but not class 1.
People upthread are arguing about the senate as a system, but how much does that really matter when wildly popular things, like legalizing marijuana, are not even considered by anyone in congress? A majority of Americans are in favor of this, and have been for over a decade.
That seems to be an alcohol industry complaint. That it isn't taxed and regulated like booze
Most US problems come down to inability of congress to just figure out basic stuff like regulating weed. Same with the getting rid of the penny, immigration, tariffs/executive power, doing a proper and legal DOGE etc. They mostly just sit on the sidelines of the big ticket items and focus instead on spending money in their own states.
During every GOP administration at any state or local level, you can be sure that two things will happen:
- individuals will lose some freedoms
- the most powerful companies will get more freedoms
76/100 senators voted to keep this provision. 39/50 states sent requests to Congress to have this banned. It is a bipartisan effort.
Yes, none of this is in conflict with my message.
Blame everybody who is responsible, please.
You're making a different point than I am. Please go back and re-read my comment and see how it is different than the point you are making.
If you still don't think we are making different points, please go back and re-read my comment again, but slower. If that doesn't help, you may consider asking one of the popular LLMs.
Each and every character inserted in a Bill must have an owner: who inserted that character.
Google Docs can do this. Why can't the Congress??
I agree with the sentiment in general, but in this case it seems extremely well known:
https://www.lpm.org/news/2025-11-11/mcconnell-paul-clash-ove...
I feel like I am missing something here, and it is around it being called "hemp".
Does this actually have any impact on legal dispensaries, their products, farms, etc?
Does this make it harder to eventually de-schedule pot.
Yes, in the sense that now it will be illegal to ship cannabis seeds interstate. Under current law, which doesn't expire for a year, cannabis seeds can be shipped legally interstate across the US as they don't exceed the THC content. Doesn't matter if it's a hemp seed or marijuana seed as both are hemp under the old definition in seed form as long as they're under 0.3% THC.
The passed legislation outlaws any seeds that can produce a plant that doesn't satisfy the new definition of hemp. It completely destroys the white market seed industry, on which the legal weed industry partially operates.
Also, prices will go up and quality will go down in the 'legal' weed market, as previously the hemp industry was a check on prices because you could get better product for cheaper than going to a dispensary and with nice lab tested COAs to see what you were getting.
The party of small government strikes again.
76/100 senators voted to keep this provision in the bill.
That has never really been true whenever they get power. Just like states rights, the deficit spending and federal overreach stops mattering. It's just a matter of which part of the government Republicans want to grow and have the funding (ICE for example).
Republicans pretend to act principled when they're not the party in power. Amazing how that works.
I've been a regular consumer of the results of this since about 2020 when I discovered it. It's been quite the journey watching the industry boom and evolve and get better and better.
I've seen an incredible incredible amount of ignorance on this topic. Prior to this, I found 1 comment on HN mentioning this last night. On reddit, it's not on the frontpage of r/politics, r/moderatepolitics or anything relevant. I can find it on r/news but like every other thread not a single person is mentioning something very factual.
Rand tried to stop this provision in the Senate. 76/100 senators voted for this ban to remain. 76 senators from across the political spectrum, from every state have decided to secretly try to destroy a $30b industry, 300,000 jobs, and a lot of lives.
If you're anywhere near Cherokee, North Carolina ... it's definitely worth the drive / prices.
These natives certainly know what they're doing with their dependant-domestic sovereign nation.
Contact your representatives and let them know this is BS. [1] When Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott was trying to ban that same "loophole" the business community had time to organize & lobby against it, but in addition, regular citizens sent in over 120k letters, there's footage of people moving boxes and boxes of letters into his office. [2] In the end, he folded and kept the law as it was despite a pretty big push from his party. Was that the reason he didn't end up acting on it? It's hard to know, but it definitely showed him public sentiment was against it.
Don't be apathetic! Letters & phone calls work best, but emails through their official contact page at least get glanced at by an intern.
[1] Find and contact elected officials https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials
[2] 120,000 Texans send letters and petitions against THC ban to Gov. Abbott https://www.kut.org/politics/2025-06-03/austin-tx-thc-ban-la...
Citizens United
The more money you allow in politics, the more politics becomes about money.
This is a weird one. It absolutely should not be haphazardly added as a rider. The 0.4 per container is also insane. But, this really was an unintended loophole of the 2018 farm bill. Most plants grow THCa, which turns into Delta-9 when heated. They were ignorant and straight up forgot to specify anything except Delta-9.
Cannabis is a bioremediator and absorbs basically every environmental toxin from the ground (pesticides, heavy metals, etc.). Extraction (for CBD and THC oil) increases the concentration of any present toxins.
The only way you know of the problem is by thoroughly testing every batch. Pesticides that are safe at low levels can get concentrated and become really problematic at high levels.
States where marijuana is legal require all of this testing, so the products are much safer. Hemp-derived THC does not require these tests. (Same is true for CBD, but that's a while other conversation...)
There is pretty extensive testing throughout the industry. Small hemp farms don't want to murder their customers or themselves.
Not only that, the same bill includes a provision which allows "...eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the Biden administration's investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot." [1].
This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/deal-end-us-shutdow...
> This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me.
"Legislation" is the "bill," which is what makes this problematic. At a high level, the only thing that relates the first page of a bill to the 10th page of the same bill is the fact that they are both included in the same document. This is definitional stuff.
Congress could choose to appropriate funds for each department in a separate bill. One could then easily take the POV that it's swampy to tack on the education funding legislation to the defense appropriations bill.
Always amazes me that we allow multiple bills to be packaged together. Needs to be one bill = 1 vote. Not hundreds/thousands of pages of bills no one will read all rushed through because funding.
Isn't it usually one bill, but an omnibus bill? My understanding is that the actual guard rail that the US congress has discarded is requiring that the contents of the bill be limited to the purview described by the bill's title.
I guess technically yeah but they're usually bills that wouldn't have any chance of being law on their own. "I'll vote for it if you include this" kinda deals.
To do so you need an effective bureaucracy to which the legislature can delegate authority, otherwise there are too many details to be passed in bills. But the revanchist Roberts court has said that bureaucratic powers do not exist, the executive can only do things that are expressly enumerated by Congress and Congress can delegate nothing.
>To do so you need an effective bureaucracy to which the legislature can delegate authority, otherwise there are too many details to be passed in bills. But the revanchist Roberts court has said that bureaucratic powers do not exist,
And your way would be better? All laws defined and redefined by bureaucracies in committees behind closed doors?
That isn't how federal rules have historically been made, so I neither disagree nor agree with your misleading statement.
Federal rules are created collaboratively between executive agencies and the subject matter experts relevant to the regulation, then published in the Federal Register for public review and comments, then after feedback has been gathered, considered, and incorporated the final rules are promulgated. This process was created by Congress.
Or, updated: https://hightimes.com/news/politics/trump-signs-shutdown-dea...
Surely we must be ignoring the rules...
This nonsense of tacking bills onto other bills needs to end. As does this nonsensical fearmongering of Hemp and Marijuana. Absolutely none of it is actually evidence-driven from what I remember. I know the CDC has (had?) side effect stuff but I think it might be very heavily exaggerated.
This is from 3 days ago. Did this part of the bill actually make it in? Like, asking for a friend, maaaaaan.
Yep, it did. If I have the right bill (H. R. 5371), it's SEC. 781 if you want to see the actual text. (The table of contents is horribly bad though, and only covers divisions and titles and nothing beneath it though.)
is this the ongoing legacy of big pharma influence in government? there must be some reason why tapping this sign is not good enough for their purposes, maybe it’s too hard to enforce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act
Another comment pointed to the alcohol industry:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917173
is it conspiratorial to wonder that if enough of the owners are the same investment groups they can move alcohol industry pieces on behalf of other industries they also own, then they have token industries already tainted and ready to accept newly thrown tomatoes instead of the ivory ones
One thing I think most Americans can agree on is that Congress is utterly useless.
We need to be careful with that sentiment. It plays into the hands of those who want to give the President and the current Supreme Court all the power. Congress was set up in the Constitution to be the branch that represents the people. It's supposed to be fully independent and wield the most power.
You mean like the current president that has been skipping over congress for a number of things, and the supreme court that has been doing little to stop him? Our institutions aren't failing they've already failed.
These are all just symptoms. The underlying vulnerability is the median US culture, which permits venality, scamming, skuldugery, shenanigans and crime in its ruling class.
I was reading about Austria recently. It's a nice place, but it turns out they have their far-right Nazis in rural areas too. It's pretty common around the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban%E2%80%93rural_political_...
I think the world is still figuring out how to deal with this. The German firewall looks quite promising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_against_the_far-right...
our congress has been intentionally rendered non-functional by people who are open about the fact that they want the president to be a dictator.
edit: as always, downvotes are invited to rebut. as always, they will not.
And you're being downvoted by folks who know your statement is true yet they don't care. Well, they don't care right now.
thank you for acknowledging. I know what it means when my comment has a negative score but all the replies are supportive.
it's not their problem until it is eg. snap
The comment by one supporter during the first term's shutdown shows everything
> “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be”: a Trump voter says the quiet part out loud
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...
The alcohol lobbyists did this.
> And in a letter Monday obtained by MJBizDaily, representatives from major alcohol lobbies urged senators to thwart Paul’s efforts.
> His “shortsighted actions could threaten the delicately balanced deal to reopen the federal government,” a Nov. 10 letter from the American Distilled Spirits Alliance, Distilled Spirits Council, Wine Institute, Beer Institute and Wine America reads.
https://mjbizdaily.com/trump-backs-hemp-thc-ban-included-in-...
The wealthy weed stock / dispensary people wanted it as much as anything else. Note many of the senators voting against the amendment to fix it, were pro-marijuana senators from legal weed states.
Hemp was a way for mom and pops to get in the game because the regulatory overhead was much lower. They were small private operators that could enter with low start-up costs, in a free-market like environment.
No one could have seriously thought it was going to last. The likes of Philip Morris type enterprises who pay a gazillion dollars for state dispensary licensing, state chain of custody, zoning, permits, state testing, etc are not going to just let some guy in his basement start shipping out THCa hemp with nothing more than a couple hundred dollars in capital and a Square terminal, no they're going to call on their contacts to ban it.
History shows us time and time again the state will destroy the free market and create regulations that don't actually help people but rather ensure the barriers are such that their wealthy friends will capture almost all the profits.
Both senators from NY, Washington, California, and Illinois voted for this.
That’s my guess too. Here in Canada, certain alcohol sales have been in decline since legalization. Not surprising.