Oregon Senator Seeks To Block COICA 81
jfruhlinger writes "The COICA copyright bill may have sailed through committee, but that doesn't mean it's a done deal. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, calling it the 'wrong medicine' to block copyright violations, is threatening to put a hold on the bill, which would block its adoption through at least the end of the year."
It's awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
when the the person you sent emails to about an issue does what you want.
Re:Oregon voters... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Once he gets what he wants (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oregon voters... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm glad he's doing this, but this exemplifies how insane Senate rules and traditions are - all it takes is one Senator to stop anything. It was bad enough when Senators had more discretion, but nowadays you have Senators putting holds on everything and filibustering every single bill that comes through the Senate. It's ridiculous.
Re:Oregon voters... (Score:4, Interesting)
it takes 41 of 100 senators to make it work.
if 3/5 th's bring it to an end via Cloture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloture [wikipedia.org]
so one senator can threaten it.. he needs 40 others behind him to ensure it.
Re:He's a Democrat (Score:3, Interesting)
It's they who are pouring billions into campaign coffers
Hardly, and that's the crux of the problem: congresspeople work too cheap. It doesn't take billions of dollars to get the laws you want, only a few million, in many cases only a few hundred thousand, or even just a nice house. Maybe, if we raised the price of our elected officials into the billions, bribing them wouldn't be seen as so cost-effective. It would also be much harder for corporations to hide their "contributions" from their stockholders and campaign-finance regulators.
Re:Oregon voters... (Score:3, Interesting)
How long have you lived in Oregon?
I lived in the Portland area when Wyden first ran for the Senate ( I still live in the PNW) and he was a complete idiot as far as I was concerned. He couldn't find countries on a map of the world that were in the national news on a daily basis, and on which he was expressing public opinions as to what the US needed to do there. I mean, how can you form an intelligent opinion of what our national policy should be when you know so little about an area that you don't even know where it is, let alone what the historical conflicts were between the different cultures in that area? To me, he was in so far over his head on the issues that he made himself look completely incompetent, and I've never seen anything from him since that has changed my opinion.
I don't know why he took this stand, but I'd bet his understanding of the issue is very thin, and his stand on IT issues as a whole is self-contradictory. IMO, he most likely got this one right by throwing darts blindfolded at a board or from a coin flip.
BTW, I was a Democrat when I lived in the Portland area.
Re:Oregon voters... (Score:3, Interesting)
Last night's Jon Stewart was talking about this very thing.
The author he was interviewing was basically making the case that our system is broke, but not because of the overreach of government (a case against tea party/conservative anti-regulation).
At one point, Stewart said, (paraphrasing) "So basically you are saying that politics has been so perfected that governance is impossible"....
The spirit of the rules themselves aren't necessarily broken, but they have been around so long, that every single way to abuse them is well documented, and now in use each election cycle. And a party pushes the rule boundaries each year, the other party responds the next year with another stretch of the limits of those rules.
The rules need to change. Historically the senate was supposed to be a place where proposals went to die. A moderating effect on the house, whereby only the most sensible bills would pass. But now we see every single bill dying in a political game, and it is pretty obvious that those rules need to change.
I would rather see the senate rules changed to allow passing bills by a simple majority (thereby letting the electorate truly get whatever populist fad is raging that year) than see all progress stopped. I'm sure we would see horrible sessions, with horrible consequences, but maybe....just maybe, that would wake the average citizen up and we'd start taking voting a little bit more seriously.
Of course, this is all tied in with the average citizen's ability to get to the truth. And I don't have high hopes for that given the amount of money flooding political campaigns (Citizen's United scotus ruling, for example).
In an ideal world, major campaign finance reform would take place first.