Not to disagree with the principle, but it's somewhat opaque as to what your point is.
I've hazy memories as well of reports that payphones were being more surveilled (a camera placed nearby, for example), or tapped / monitored more than other phones, particularly if in areas with other known issues. Nothing that's turning up in DDG searches though...
This is what always happens when governments enforce laws like this, victims and innoncents always suffer as result.
Its happening in finance where criminals groom dumb teengers for laundering money, or eldery's bank accounts they obtain via installing remote software.
So lets add 1 more reason for criminals to steal phone.
Edit: This is also happening in crypto world where criminals perform fake KYC. I guess with age verifications, this crime will increase in demand multiplefold and the last defense ID will be obsolete after data leaks and the fraud happening around it.
Anyone still has any doubts? Or is it to ... protect the children?
AT&T's efforts to thwart effective government regulation and mitigation stand out especially. The industry oranisation ATIS (<https://atis.org/>) has been central to blocking any effective action. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Telecommunication...>.
The other ones are simple and/or deluded and think these sorts of policies won't ever come for _them_. (To their credit, under the current regime they're actually correct about that to a certain extent.)
You can't make the desk clerk in a ghetto cell phone store care.
I say this speaking as someone who has a T-Mobile account under the name George Washington with a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania address.
I guess a lot of people weren't around to see civil libertarians screaming about the effect of the USA Patriot act in 2001.
> Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project
Oh, come on, Jay, this should have been on your radar for 25 years.
(NB: the notion of having to register to read content strikes me as equally reprehensible as requiring KYC for access to the telephone network.)
I don't see the issue here and I am surprised that this wasn't the case in the United States.
However since it is now trivial to communicate encrypted with so many other devices, I don't see the point now. This would have been a "good" thing back in the 90'.
If phones could reliably tag an incoming call as "ID provided" or not, then people who cared could screen calls appropriately, and people who wanted to protect their identity could still have a phone.
Or if you get fed up enough you just start blasting FM transmissions without a license..... Keep the burst short enough while your mobile and don't make the transmitter obvious and you could probably get away with it for short SMS comms.
Or just use something like lora or meshtastic/meshcore
Wait. In the US don't they not even have an ID standard? The homeless person probably doesn't have any valid ID and neither do members of several other disenfranchised groups, right? So now they're not allowed to have cellphone service?
If you really need a burner you can still get one - there are people who activate SIM cards in bulk using their ID and resell them without collecting IDs. The practice itself is either gray area legally or straight up illegal depending on the country
My carrier added 10 CHF credit to my prepaid plan for the trouble.
It's still fairly easy to buy a Lycamobile SIM/number that was enabled with a fake or stolen ID. Consequently some banks and services ban entire number ranges, which is not only ineffective but also affects people who committed the sin of keeping their first phone number even after moving to a proper postpaid plan...
Something about no taxes without representation
They have to have your residential address for "emergency reasons" which is fairly defensible at least
In the name of “national security” and “protecting the children” and all.
The real issue is whether government's should have the right to metadata or the content of remote communications.
Government's don't claim the right to monitor face to face communications so why should they have the right to do so for remote communications.
Not true in most EU countries if you just go into one of those shady shops nearby train station and ask friendly, while the shop is empty, if he could sell you a SIM thats already verified.
Context: Voter ID Laws may seem like a good idea, but they’re actually pretty terrible! On the surface, these laws appear to be a reasonable way to stop people from pretending to be someone else when they vote. But the reality is that this kind of voter fraud almost never happens!!! Instead Voter ID Laws primarily prevent the poor, the elderly, and people of color from voting. They way they’ve disenfranchised people of color is part of a very long history of voter suppression and is a classic example of structural racism.
Which, often, does not include exclusively people who think "Voter ID is racist" as plenty of unhinged libertarians hate make great points about why you shouldn't want the government to have access to 100% of your daily data points 100% of the time.
That said, I don’t think its a problem whatsoever and we shouldn’t have laws restricting it.
Some of the LTE tablets even powered up and put you into a walled garden with data (heh, DNS tunneling worked out of it) to let you sign up for a mobile plan out of the box.
When I did some activations with PagePlus with an actual dealer-level account, it cost me nothing to activate a 'customer' handset and the only info I had to provide on the activation screens was the phone's serial number and the requested ZIP/area code for activation.
And fine, okay, the FCC will force American telecoms to require IDs, but nothing's stoping Redtea Mobile's foreign eSIMs from roaming into the US for data connections. You're just one eSIM global roaming provider away from bypassing all of it!
It seemed to me like they wanted to make sure they could tie the phones to an individual through activation.
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express
Ran a quick search and found a whole bunch of news articles, but nobody includes info that makes it easy to route your comment. Feels like the beginning of Hitchhiker's Guide:
> It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/26/2026-10...
(Why is it called a 1 pager you ask? Because your elected officials won't read more than that.)
I made a grand total of one hill visit.
I told them I'm tired of repeating the same things over and over, and if you make my interns come back here ever again, I'll see to it if you're lucky you only lose your seat, not face a mob outside your window, and when that happens lose my fucking number because I'll be sitting by the TV with popcorn.
Exactly that happened, a few years later.
Whether you're a public interest lobbyist or just another activist, we need to be more willing to TELL congress things. Not ask. Not lobby. TELL THEM.
We need to remind them that the Soviets raced to Berlin to seize brains like ours, that we will flourish whatever regime is in power, and that you can ignore us at your but we, the hackers, will no longer grovel before narcistic neurotypicals to stop misunderstanding on purpose.
Politics is like poker -- soft play is unethical.
Play to win.
Because the pushback works, for a spell.
While there is ~zero chance that commenting can help you, it absolutely is used against you as their lawyers sharpen their claws by crowdsourcing possible sources of challenge and use your comments to predict them and determine how to undermine such positions.
The companies paid to flood the FCC with fake comments get to do it as long as they're willing to give the government a cut of the action (https://www.engadget.com/new-york-ag-fines-companies-that-sp...)
It'll only stop when the people hiring those companies to spam the FCC end up behind bars.
Even EU countries seem to require an ID now. When I traveled to France and Belgium in 2024, I bought a French tourist sim card, and the carrier kept sending me some rather insistent messages that my line would get disconnected if I don't upload my passport in 30 days.
You can only use specific applications downloaded from walled gardens. You cannot write and execute arbitrary code.
If you are an engineer, all code must be generated via LLM and it passes through some verification through a centralized security and compliance authority on the way to you. You must be fully licensed.
This will be, the end of malware.
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/st...
I think he's wrong that DRM violates the 4th Amendment, I contend that it is - first and foremost - a violation of the 3rd Amendment.
Guess these guys are going to make more money in the near future.
I gave them a google voice number and apparently that satisfied them. Then lost access to the google voice number because I never used it for anything else.
Not because Claude banned my account (but they did that too), but because OpenAI one day decided I needed a phone number to login, and then proceeded to reject my real one.
it's not a bad idea from the POV of said "rulers" - more surveillance and control on the population is desirable (to them).
Which is explicitly against the 14th amendment.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
A previous job of mine was software developer for a state motor vehicle agency. I had to read far too many state & federal laws/regulations to make the boat/vehicle registration system compliant.
They’re essentially daring the public to resort to violence and frankly, it’s getting exhausting.
Why follow the law when the president will pardon you and the Supreme Court has said he also won’t be held accountable for basically anything.
I welcome the reasoned responses that think this administration isn’t actively flaunting our laws. How’s that war powers act coming along?
Everybody had to go to a store and have their ID read by the system, and if they didn't, the phone number would be shut down.
Unsure how that worked for MVNOs though.
Now I live in the USA and am well-familiar with the spam calls. I wonder if this new rule will reduce/prevent them. I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.
That being said, many countries across the world already do this to eliminate burner phones. And many messaging apps require a phone number anyways so this basically locks down anonymous messaging through a phone.
It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.
Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.
I need to know whether these other countries are rich western europe before I know whether to agree with you or to cook up some snide rebuttal.
Joking, obviously. And by "joking" I mean mocking a specific type of person and set of beliefs that is who is a) bad b) too common around here.
Also, apparently ends there, too.
matrix, wire, deltachat, threema, maybe jabber/xmpp (depends on their support of encryption). any others?
Your bank already knows everything about you; why not your operating system, too?
Soon your ISP will only let you online if your OS sends them the "right" information: your government ID.
We should also abolish cash while we're at it. The government needs to know every purchase you've ever made, no exceptions.
Of course, then we should tear down used bookstores. They're the biggest risk of all. Anyone can walk in and pick up pieces of paper that teach them dangerous ideas. Other religions. Philosophies. Poetry. How to make things.
What we really need is a nation of drones walking to and fro in the image of our rulers, thinking their thoughts, practicing their religions, and parroting their words. It's the only way to be truly safe.
Just putting it out there on how quickly this tech turned against the population.
>Scan this QR code to install the app to cross the border.
Would this be a national border? I haven't traveled internationally for a while, but this would be quite troubling.
>Install the app to board the bus.
Is there no option to pay without an app?
>Install the app to get your filing status with department xyz.
Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?
If I had my physical credit card with me I think it would largely be viable, the main issue would be if I had to meet up with friends it would be incredibly difficult without being able to contact them. Public wifi these days has almost vanished so it's difficult to connect to the internet without cellular access now.
they call that "anarcho-tyranny"
This is similar to the situation that already exists for PSTN voice comms currently: Whatsapp, Signal, Jitsi, or similar voice- or video-messaging systems. They'll run over an arbitrary network, through VPNs, etc.
Mind, the major comms-apps/social networks might have their own ID requirements forced on them, but there's far less a capability to keep people from defecting from these.
I continue to think that global PSTN networks are pretty close to general collapse, given spam, robocalls, harassment, tracking, and similar forms of abuse. Millennials & GenZ are already notorious for their reluctance to make or take phone calls.
<https://theconversation.com/young-people-hate-making-phone-c...>
I heard something similar about Russia after recent changes actually, it could as well be impossible for non-residents so tourists just stick with international roaming and public wifi. IIRC there's a catch-22 situation where you need a Gosuslugi (online government services portal) account to buy a sim, but you need a Russian phone number to sign up for one. As a citizen, you just need your ID (internal passport).
Until they lose an election using "think of the children", they'll always continue to use it. In terms of political weaponry, it's currently unstoppable.
Canada isn't the only country in which foreign cards don't work everywhere, and it seems like it's rarely tested
Much of EU requires ID for some time now. France is a bit strange, requires registration after 23 days or something. Germany, Italy, Spain it's basically impossible.
The US is rather unique in that it does not require registration.
EU countries have had these requirements for years and years and never moved to actually enforce them.
I don't see the connection. This is also how it works in China, which means... when you grab a SIM card at an airport kiosk, they take a picture of your passport. You obviously have your passport with you, because you just arrived in China and haven't left the airport yet.
What part of that isn't also true of Australia?
Also, if you have restrictions of speech in the country, it's great way to de anonymize any speech government says is illegal.
This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
~5 years ago there was a big push (in the USA) to try and solve it with STIR/SHAKEN but I've not been involved or paid attention since then, so don't know if anything came of it. It's a legitimately hard problem to solve though. Lots of engineering and backwards compatibility technical problems, but also political, logistical and commercial issues are abound. You've also got some turtle issues too; it's attestation all the way down.
That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones / disposable sims. Even for legit use cases, this path is often way easier/cheaper than go through official channels.
Use cases range from carrier-NAT proxies at < $1 per GB to text message spam.
If anyone's eager to do podcast archaeology, IIRC one of the angles was investigating dead government agency phone numbers, and some lady entrepreneur in the 80s. Might have been Reply All, but the market regulation angle makes me think Planet Money.
of course, politicians exempt themselves from the spam call category. Political speech is the most important speech!
~~I _think_ this is the one.~~
God I miss this podcast.
Edit: this IS the one.
The Thiels of the world are already past wanting an obedient consumer.
They don't need us for the utopia they imagine for themselves.
- There are networked webcams everywhere: DoT cameras, 18 wheeler fleet cameras, traffic cams, etc.
- Local PD doesn't want to make a deal with Flock
- For average jane and joe citizenry: great, no Flock in town!
- For ongoing negotiations with Flock and the PD: ok, sure, kick us out of town. But we'll just pull the 18wheeler feeds with the vendor we have an agreement with, as they roll through town. Or the DoT feeds via the State contract we have or the...
- As such, negotiations could land as does local PD at least want the control of the feeds already going through their town with each Sysco big rig delivery?
Very, very tricky terrain to solve.
Why do you think all the rich people (and by extension the oligarchy running this country) are pushing Crypto?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/school-shooting-...
You get better deals with local carriers if you actually use the potential of eSIM, which is to be able to switch ! Every other carrier in most parts of the world now supply eSIMs that you can sometimes activate from home before your trip
Canada has Lucky Mobile, central Europe has A1 mobile, France and Portugal have Lycamobile, Italy has Windtre, UK has no service,...
Getting a SIM is typically the thing on which you can save 20$ just by asking a local person
I do wonder though how you hallucinated me as a Bolshevik sympathiser.
Except, they totally want to make a deal with Flock. If not Flock, another similar vendor.
I left prime running a bunch of 80s comedy films in the background as I cleaned my house on the weekend. And so much of the "situation" end of sitcom relies on people having prearranged things beforehand and just happening to arrive on time.
A couple of SMS's and every situation would be resolved.
I'm sure the cops can get that info, but its mostly to enforce the "only one free register per year". Anyone can buy a phone with cash and use a prepaid sim with zero ID needed.
But when your child is late to school but they won’t allow you in until you scan the QR code and fill in a form? Do you stand and wait hoping to be noticed? Hoping to tailgate somebody with a phone? Just head home?
The school also sends general communications only by app.
Though I've seen, plenty of times, smaller places have a "public" wifi with a password, and the password is just written on a piece of paper somewhere. That must technically violate that law. But you know, laws in Russia...
Government offices in many developed countries don't realistically answer the phone any more. You either use the official app on your phone, or you log into the official website using strong authentication that requires a phone. A luddite workaround might be a registered letter by post, but you might wait a long time for an answer.
My local system is completely cashless. You can pay by phone, credit card tap or with a reloadable transit card. To my knowledge, the only way to reload the card is to use their app or travel to a handful of authorized agents to have them reload your card.
I can call my government office and wait on hold for an hour, ultimately probably needing to schedule an appointment in person to handle my issue or I can install an app and have my issue resolved in a few minutes. Which option do you think most people choose?
That's good to know. Me and my family will definitely never be visting the philippines. My phone doesn't have mobile data enabled at the provider level. Would have been an award search for Wifi.
>My local system is completely cashless. You can pay by phone,
It's baffling to me that anyone would want to link payment to their phone. This is one of the least intelligent self-owns of the last decade.
>or I can install an app and have my issue resolved in a few minutes. Which option do you think most people choose?
I take your point but I'd say that most people don't put much value on their freedom if they'd trade it for a couple of hours of convenience.
Yes.
> Is there no option to pay without an app?
No option.
> Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?
The time I saw this, the non-app option was waiting in line for several hours.
Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KOI8-R
> Kill switch, as always with APT28 malware, is setting the host language to ru_RU.KOI8-R (LANG environment variable). That disables the spread mechanism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48460507
Note: KOI8-U is Ukrainian and would still trigger the worm/trojan/malware.
https://www.tieto.com/en/cases/telecom/global-anti-fraud-mod...
I believe some travel eSIMs are actually issued from outside the country you're going to.
If they want to know what tourists are posting about their country that's good enough.
Rights for everyone are achieved through blood and toil, and if you truly want a right to anonymity and the digital tools necessary to achieve it, you will need blood and toil. Until then, we'll have to squeeze through fast developments that governments have yet to address.
Carriers and carriage service providers (CSPs) must help law enforcement and national security agencies.
...
You must verify a customer's identity before you activate a prepaid mobile phone service. You can do this when the customer buys the service or when they try to activate it. The Determination on identity checks for prepaid mobiles lists the ways you can check a customer's identity.
[] https://www.acma.gov.au/support-law-enforcement-and-security...
A burner phone is a phone number whose owner is not officially registered somewhere as the owner.
A spoofed phone number is a false declaration that you're calling from number XXXXXXXXXX when in fact you're calling from YYYYYYYYYY.
You might notice that there is absolutely no relationship between these two ideas. You can be registered and lie about your phone number. You can be unregistered and not lie about your phone number.
>>> I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.
>> This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
> That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones
This is total nonsense. A phone farm that doesn't spoof caller ID isn't presenting false caller ID.
Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
> Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
Sounds like you went to a carrier boutique and not one of the million independent shops.
I thought about getting a SIM when Germany was about to introduce ID requirements. I quickly realized this being a moot point.
Not that we didn’t get anything in return but the idea that the worlds foremost military industrial complex just gave this to the world because they loved us is laughable.
And as you said, ones marketed as "China travel SIMs" are typically issued from Hong Kong. Interestingly, Hong Kong also has an ID rule (though it allows self upload of ID anyway), but it exempts these roaming-only cards. If you want the card to work in HK, and it is issued from there, you must scan your passport to activate it.
Sorry about that.
One alternative is that Trump can do it at will. Or, to add a few more steps, Trump can fire the FCC head at will, replace him with a lackey, and then do it at will.
And according to the Administrative Procedures Act, which provides substantial guardrails and checks on agency authority.
This doesn't sound to me at all like how a democratic country is supposed to function. It feels like you're describing China rather than the US.
> Trump can do it at will.
Which is also not how our constitution is supposed to work. The executive branch (which includes both the president and his appointees) is not supposed to be able to make laws, only execute on existing law.
Yes, I know this is how the system works these days. I'm just lamenting how it went so wrong...
There is a family of interesting theories, or perhaps if you prefer, simply a way of looking at history in which you don't consider the "United States" as a single governance structure that has existed back to 1776, but as a series of related, but distinct entities with distinct "social contracts" (a term laden with some philosophical baggage, here I just use it in a very general sense of what people expect from each other in various roles), and distinct theories of governance. While the later entities wrap themselves in the 1776 flag the current ruling structure is quite different from that era. From this point of view you can even go back and include the Continental Congress as the starting point of the "United States" and gain some insight into the way governance can fail as well.
I mention this because it may help free your mind up to consider how the systems really work today beyond the at-times jingoistic "Democracy!". There's a lot of flexibility in how you approach this because it's all opinion anyhow, but there is a strong case to be made that this is the "technocrat" era, in which the executive branch has been given a lot more power both by design and by the stresses of history to give more power to "experts" to deal with the radical changes the world has undergone. I think I can say something generally politically agreeable by pointing out that Congress doesn't seem to be particularly good at handling the world right now; how much worse off would it be if we still "representatives per person" numbers from 1776 and had a Congress of many thousands?
The de facto rules haven't really matched the de jure of the 1776 governance in a long time.
I am trying to keep this as neutral as possible. I have as many opinions as anyone else, but I'm just bringing up the general idea. I think it's probably good to initially just ponder based on one's own understanding of history and match it against your own ideas before you find other people handing you a theory on a platter. There's time enough for that.
Though in this particular case, unless this is based on a change to the law it seems like an overreach by the FCC.
That's false. You've put your own words into their mouth to create a "sounds like China" strawman.
If you thought the political apparatus was willingly going to leave the reigns to "apolitical specialists" rather than ruthlessly consolidating it toward the hands of the most power hungry self-dealing monsters that can command the executive branch then obviously you have not been living in in reality. Of course by the time the blindfold has been removed, the power is already largely consolidated.
One of the things that appeals to voters is the argument that too many decisions are made by unaccountable bureaucrats. Trump has been as effective at fixing this as with "drain the damp," and our elected officials clearly haven't been great about writing policy either. But one of the grievances that gets people to vote is "look at all this shit that some guy in Washington just decided."
Unelected—often unappointed—bureaucrats have never had more power in the U.S. government than they have today.
If everyone ignores it then what's the fuss about?
Isn't this the argument against unelected rulemaking?
Suppose administrative agencies worked like this: They draft rules and then periodically submit them to Congress who decides whether to enact them. For uncontroversial changes this is essentially a rubber stamp, Congress defers to the experts' recommendations and passes the proposed rules. But now if the administrative agency tries to make a major policy change, it can't go through without Congressional approval, and Congress is fully within their authority to reject or amend the proposal.
What advantage is there in giving the unelected bureaucrats the authority to change the rules without approval, except to Congress in dodging accountability for what happens?
That's why these minutiae are delegated to agencies. But Congress can step in at _any_ point and override the decisions of individual agencies. The rulemaking process is also _extremely_ slow on purpose, giving Congress plenty of time to act.
[1] The Congressional Budget Office is an example. (https://www.cbo.gov/)
[2] Laws have to go through a committee process before going to the floor; with more bodies, the committees could handle more work. Expanding the House would also make each seat less of a prize, reducing (but not eliminating) the impulse to gerrymander. Such an expansion would probably need to be accompanied by a serious conversation with the Capitol architect.
An example that comes to mind is the prosecution of Tate Adamiak. One of his machine gun charges was for having an improperly demilled machine gun parts. The parts were demilled under pre-2001 import standards, and the parts were imported pre-2001, and legally imported and sold through a licensed FFL on gun broker. Magically at some point the rule changed and the letter of law never did, and magically the parts weren't parts but actually a machine gun... this bound as law. I think he'll be released in about 15 years.
If you break a rule you get fined. If you break a law you can go to jail. (Congress can delegate regulation around crimes to an agency, but the crime generally has to be substantially described by statute.)
The truth is the rulemaking and delegation stuff has strayed so far from the legal fiction as to be almost completely unrecognizable from the thin veil authorizing it.
That's a distinction without a difference when talking about the kinds of ruinous fines government agencies levy and how equivalently ruinous lawyering up to fight them is.
Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures because six figures is years of discretionary income to most people.
Isn't that actually a major cause of the trouble? You expect Congress to deal with more and more complexities but limit the number of people (i.e. experts) who are members of it, causing them all to be generalists and moreover to have to spend more of their time campaigning rather than debating because the value of each seat is higher and correspondingly so is the effort someone will put in to take it from you and the proportion of your time you have to spend merely defending it.
Meanwhile people feel that their vote doesn't matter because a member of Congress now represents almost a million people and then ordinary people can neither affect the campaign nor get the ear of their own representative.
Suppose it actually had ten thousand members. Then they would be ordinary people. The members who are doctors would understand both medicine and medical bureaucracy. The members who are engineers would understand technology. Instead of them being lawyers whose first job is campaigning.
No matter what solution you try to apply to that problem, it's not going to be solved. Try to split the legislative branch into interests so that we don't need the full branch to vote? Massive problems. Try to create a culture where Congress defers to the interest groups who know? Massive problems. A pretty solid case could be made that we've simply scaled past what a legislative approach can reasonably address.
One of the reasons I tried to write my post neutrally is that the whole situation is pretty complicated. Less neutrally, I'm fairly aware of the issues of the technocratic state and its "experts" who really aren't but get given what is basically stolen valor. On the other hand, pointing out problems is easy, trying to propose solutions is much harder. To be honest I just keep coming back to, cultures get the government they deserve. If a culture views governance as primarily about duty and obligation and honor, the structure probably doesn't matter much. If a culture doesn't view it that way, you're going to get corruption and abuse. And unfortunately, while this is a continuum it isn't balanced; to get good government requires a very positive and widespread commitment to those ideals. It doesn't take much deviation at all before you get pretty widespread corruption. It doesn't need a culture that actively values power and what it can bring you, it just takes less than massive, widespread agreement that power is more duty than privilege. If the US ever had that culture, which is debatable but possible, it really doesn't anymore.
I thought that's how it originally was supposed to be. You were supposed to be represented by a peer, not by a career politician.
And then of course, we have fun gerrymandering, where unelected officials will draw random lines to see how they can eke out more votes for their guy. Redistricting is important to do but I'm not convinced any redistricting committee in the US does it with the people's best interest at heart.
Why must congress do more? Most of this stuff would be state issues if not for the absurdity that is current commerce clause interpretation.
The problem is that our government is now so large and complicated that it's simply no longer possible for Congress to effectively set policy for all of it. (This would be true even if they weren't so polarized.) So instead they just keep delegating more and more power to the executive branch.
The Administrative Procedures Act, Congressional Review Act, and the recent overturning of Chevron are all good checks on executive/agency power here, but I don't think any of them solves the fundamental issue that the executive branch was simply never designed to wield this kind of power. I'm not really sure what the right solution is.
Another example, if you survey basically any multi-party European state such as Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and so on purely on economic policies, you'll overwhelmingly find people supporting much more progressive taxation and in general more socialist economic policies. I'm talking large majorities. Including nationalization of many institutions and so on. Yet their governments have done the direct opposite for decades. Not very representative.
The better representation you're talking about is very surface level, for everything that matters the outcome is that favored by big capital.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/04/most-peop...
Do we though? When there is a lack of consensus on what federal law should be, those are exactly the times the federal apparatus should be silent and leave it to the states.
This is just dodging the question of why can’t Congress do its job.
Which of these are the things where gridlock is happening? In which administration did Lockheed go poor because no defense budget was passed in the entire term?
And Congressional stock trading is exactly the sort of thing that should be regulated by the states, since the federal members of Congress have an obvious conflict of interest. Meanwhile if California says it's illegal to trade stocks on insider information then US Senators from California who do insider trading should be in an orange jumpsuit.
Martin Gilens and Benjamin page published an article that uses data to come to this conclusion about the public's influence on American policy:
"The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."
Iskander De Bruycker and Marcel Hanegraaff authored a recent study, focusing on the EU, in which they "demonstrate that interest groups with more economic resources are generally more influential, but only if their policy positions are congruent with a public majority." Sorry this one is paywalled. Such is the state of academic publishing. :(
[0] https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
[1] European Journal of Political Research , Volume 63 , Issue 1 , February 2024 , pp. 26 - 44 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12582
Have you petitioned to have the rule revisited? I’d imagine this is the right political climate in which to do it.
We have an overreaching regulatory state. I agree with you on that. But trying to ram everything through the Congress just means we get a President who is a king, because the complexity of administering a large, modern economy is simply not one that can be centrally deliberated in the way legislative bodies work.
I don't see how requiring Congressional ratification for rule changes would grant the president more power than he has now. Currently the primary checks are procedural limitations; but were Trump a better, more well organized leader these procedural checks wouldn't pose much of a hurdle at all.
If you want a more technocratic administrative state, the agencies would require more autonomy from the president than they have now, but things are moving in the opposite direction both as a practical matter and constitutionally.
A modern economy has a million small emergencies every day. Given the choice between dysfunction and autocracy, humans routinely choose the latter. So every time an emergency emerges that Congress takes too long to act on, and where the President steps in, the window shifts power to the executive.
Criminal versus civil is a distinction with massive difference.
> Most people receiving these fines happily spend a month in prison for six figures
Most civil monetary penalties are for reporting and filing violations to the FEC, HHS or FinCEN; submitting false information in a Medicare/Medicaid claim [1], grant, contract or bid; or violating consumer protection, employer, OSHA, environmental or patient care laws. The “you” is probably a corporation. And I’m not sure anyone would rationally escalate a fine for e.g. submitting a contract bid with outdated information into a criminal conviction.
[1] https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/enforcement/types-of-civil-monetar...:
And the sky is purple. See, we can both make baseless assertions. You can say it all day long. Doesn't make it true. At the end of the day the executive agencies are unilaterally costing people money that's on the same order as real deal criminal fines for comparable conduct. The word "civil" doesn't change that anymore than it changes the true nature of civil asset forfieture.
>Most civil monetary penalties are for....
They're for things where they generally could never hope to convince a jury the fines are reasonable for.
You list broad categories because when people dig into the nitty gritty of it they find it unconscionable. Municipalities threatening landowners hundreds of dollars per day multiplied by years for not having the proper permit to clear vegetation on their own land. OSHA fining businesses thousands because unsupervised line employees were doing dumb shit they were told not to that only endangers themselves. And then these people have to lawyer up and defend themselves for more thousands because the fines are always way higher if you don't. All at the literal whim of an enforcement official.
All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have. The government, federal or otherwise, is not supposed to be able to meaningfully punish people (even corporate people) without the consent of the people (i.e. a jury). The way civil process cuts the judiciary out entirely is worse still.
Just declaring "well it's civil" because the accused's name isn't going on a naughty list and jail isn't a potential penalty doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit to argue in front of the arbitrary kangaroo process owned by the same agency that issued the fine (of course you can sue if you want but the enforcement agencies avoid creating situations where that's practical).
Juries don't determine sentencing, either. The Seventh Amendment has broadly been interpreted to preserve jury trials for most civil liability, including from the federal government.
> Municipalities...
Not federal!
> All of this civil enforcement stuff is basically BS end runs around the rights that people (even legal fictions of people) are supposed to have Not a federal issue!
...do you know the difference between a civil and a criminal case?
> doesn't change the fact pattern of serious fines being issued
Straw man. Nobody argued civil penalties aren't serious.
> without the accused party having any real rights of due process beyond hiring someone who knows their shit
...how do you think criminal proceedings work?
This is a wild conversation. I've gone from being somewhat sympathetic to your argument to now wondering if that entire platform is baseless. (I'm increasingly convinced we need a principles of law course mandated in high school. It doesn't even need to be a full year. But our republic suffers when folks don't understand the basics.)
They do in some states but that's beside the point. Juries are people from outside the legal system who will balk if things get too unreasonable. That is one of their primary value adds to the system.
>...do you know the difference between a civil and a criminal case?
That's entirely my point, the government is imposing the same penalties (fines) on people they do for criminal matters but without any of the protections. You can drive drunk, get caught and be out substantially less money (and enjoy your rights along the way) than if you sink sonotubes for a shed too close to a stream and get caught. Heck, there's not even a statute of limitations for many civil enforcement things.
Just because government and those like you who simp for it wave around the word "civil" (or it's relative "administrative") like a magic want doesn't actually change the fact that people are being punished in the same manner they would in criminal law situations but without any of the protections.
I'm not arguing that the laws and jurisprudence haven't been twisted to enable this. I'm arguing that it's no less of an affront to everyone's rights than the civil asset forfeiture people do when they take stuff and then say "well we're actually charging the money and therefore..."
>Not federal!
The municipalities states and feds behave the exact same way and leverage most of the same legal precedents. The feds also deputize states who deputize municipalities to do their enforcing for them in many cases. Like the EPA isn't gonna shoot you're dog or whatever. Your local DEP or whatever will shoot your dog or whatever on their behalf.
>Straw man. Nobody argued civil penalties aren't serious.
I meant serious as compared to something "unserious" like a $20 parking ticket.
>...how do you think criminal proceedings work?
Do you? You can tell the police to fuck off and come back with a warrant. You can not talk to them and the burden of proof is on them. Try that with the SEC or the EPA or the FCC and see where it gets you.
Once you get into an actual court things are much, much more comparable. But criminal matters more or less go straight to court. Administrative matters you're usually forced to go rounds (and your lawyer is billing you the whole time) with some internal kangaroo pretend oversight system (much has been written about ICE's for example) before you get to say a word in front of a real judge who doesn't get his pay stub on their letterhead.