This bill has a very-low likelihood of moving forward. It is a political statement. Its sponsor's might be dumb enough to actually want it, but I suspect they are just trying to score points and get media attention.
Bills like this that would cause a huge change all at once are generally not intended to move forward legislatively. They’re introduced to be fodder for political activity like awareness campaigns, fundraising, or GOTV.
There is absolutely no chance that this bill will pass.
Crazy bills championed by people that either don't understand them, or are just posturing are semi-common. Just because it has been proposed, doesn't mean anything.
This is a messaging bill - a bill designed to tell something to a constituency, rather than to become law. - It is jockeying to cultivate influence. The idiocy contained within the bill itself probably doesn't even have the sincere support of the signatories... If it is politically aggrandizing, then the text doesn't matter too much.
This is a shitty bill. But the chance of it becoming law is very low. Various leaders from this party have been (very half heartedly) trying to pass it for a decade. If passed it would fail (in dozens of ways). And the problem is more useful to scare voters and whip votes than solving it would get them actual benefits.
This is just the bill going from one committee to another (with some extreme additional parts the other committee will take out, likely leading to deadlock)
This is inevitable whether this bill passes or not. There's simply too many political points to score here and little downsides as far as the government is actually concerned.
These acts often get introduced just so the sponsors can say they introduced a bill.
(This is why, for example, people introduce bills right before going home to stump, knowing it will achieve nothing, but enabling them to say "Because i care so much about you guys, i just introduced a bill in congress to fix this!")
According to the article (I haven't checked congress.gov yet), said bill hasn't even passed committee yet. As foul as the proposal is, this isn't indicative of a regression or collapse of the legislative process.
My understanding of politics is that bills like these tend to have expiration dates so politicians are on a perpetual cycle of gathering funding/PR for the same issues repeatedly. So while the end result may be good, the reason it's even under discussion is a bit sad.
This seems to be a proposal in the early stages of winding through the bureaucracy, and hasn’t been approved by any real policymakers yet. I wouldn’t put too much stock in it at this point.
This is just the first in a long list of "messaging" bills that will come from a very slim Republican House, because there is Democratic control of the Senate.
They know it won't become law. The point is to rile up the media, get hits on cable news, fund raise, and generally be useless as a governing body. This is what both parties do when they are out of power, and I would say is what they _prefer_ to do. It's easier than governing, makes them money, gets them media attention, etc.
Both parties here in the US _want_ to be minority parties so that they can behave this way and assume no actual responsibility for anything.
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