Blowies For Billionaires Bill *Also* Makes Trump King And AI Ungovernable!
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Much has been made of how the Big Beautiful Blowjobs for Billionaires bill is the largest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich of all time. Which it is! But also in this 1,082-page treasure trove of goodies are two sections that fulfill the wildest dreams of a certain aspiring dictator and his technocrat henchbuddies: stripping power from the judiciary and mandating an AI dystopia that could effectively make government services cease to function, among other terrible things!
Let’s not snooze on those parts.
First, there’s the Take The Judiciary’s Power To Check The Government part, Section 70302, which is on page 562, if you care to follow along at home. This prohibits the judiciary from enforcing contempt citations against the regime unless a plaintiff posts some undefined amount as bond at the outset of the case.
But, and, ALSO, the new rule would be retroactive to the dawn of time. So not only would, say, families of oops-deported migrants have their lawsuits dropped and have to re-file them after putting up some amount of money for the privilege of asking the government to quit breaking its own laws, all of the cases where the government had ever been the defendant would be invalidated. School desegregation orders, for instance. Every case ever where the government was found in contempt would be dropped, then have to be re-filed and start its journey through the court system all over. It’s a complete bulldozer to the separation of powers. Which is the entire point, of course!
Courts have so far ruled against the administration 177 times: firings, department dismantlings, budget freezes, birthright citizenship, DOGE, the environment, press access, deporting people with no due process, etc., etc. All of those lawsuits would simply go away, and have to be re-filed in what would then be a clogged-to-the-gills federal court.
And there’s the AI part, which is section 43201, which starts on page 291. This sets aside $500 million to modernize federal systems “through the deployment of commercial artificial intelligence, the deployment of automation technologies, and the replacement of antiquated business systems in accordance with subsection (b).”
This would legitimize DOGE’s ongoing deployment of an AI chainsaw inside of government systems to delete whatever, currently the subject of a few dozen lawsuits, including two at the Supreme Court right now.
Assuming that “AI” isn’t just what DOGE plans to blame for its mistakes, reminder that AI is not some kind of omnipotent genie, just a powerful microchip that can do multiple functions at once. And AI systems have an insanely high error rate: Columbia Journalism Review found AI news search engines “cite incorrect news sources at an alarming 60% rate.” More often wrong than right!
As hard as programmers have been trying, they have not been able to keep AI from making things up between 3 to 27 percent of the time. Even if AI “only” mistakenly deletes 3 percent of Social Security recipients because it has decided they’re dead, that is more than 2 million people! And then when those people call up to complain, guess who they get? The chatbot! Because all of the government workers are fired! Want to sue the government about it? Good luck affording a bond with that check you did not get!
Private companies have been increasingly abandoning their AI initiatives, because while AI is useful for some tasks, sorting through confident-sounding confabulations to weed out the mistakes also makes more work. But if the aim is not to be accurate, and instead dodge calls from the bill collector like some kind of Trump company construction site, while blaming some robot, it will be a Godsend for that!
And there’s more! The budget bill makes it ILLEGAL for states to try to regulate AI or any kind of “automated decision” system in any way for 10 years! We repeat, in any way! Can perverts get the AI to manufacture deepfake child pornography? State can’t make a law against it! Can the AI hoover up copyrighted works and spit them back out? Sure! Can a politician make a deepfake video of their opponent eating dogs, cats, and babies? Why not? Use it to deny health insurance claims? Already happening! The nefariousness and mischief a lawless robot could get up to is only bound by your imagination!
Obligatory “you can’t disconnect me, Dave!”
There’s more than 500 proposed state laws regulating the use of AI, and they’d all be blocked by this bill.
Unknown when the Senate will be voting on this flaming paper bag of dogshit.
Sen. Ron Johnson says he has enough votes to hold it up, not because it will transform our country into a dictatorial hellscape of robot overlords, but because he wants more cuts, of course.
They’re terrible people! Spread the word!
[Campaign Legal Center / New York Times / The Verge / Axios ]
PREVIOUSLY!
OT: Passed my GI with flying colors and no sedation / pain meds!
This is the big one, folks. This is what millions of Americans voted for to get us to this point. They want to codify the pricktator as President for Life so once and for all they can smash those vulnerable minorities that they believe are getting a free ride on the 'gummint' on 'their tax dollars.'
The only thing that will save us is internal squabbling as to how much to turn the screws to regular Americans and make them suffer. Make them bleed. Torment those vulnerable minorities.
And yeah if the inability to sue and have judicial review is over, that also means there's really no point to Congress either. The American system of government is a three-legged stool and it relies on the checks of the three.
Of course it should also be pointed out that if the judicial branch is made irrelevant, ANY of us who do not have rights from the start (like yours truly) are endangered. People like me weren't intended to have rights when the USA was established. And when we go retroactive, who knows what could be rolled back? Nothing's off the table really except rollback of rights for those who always had them in America.
Every last bit of this was warned about in the Harris/Walz ticket, from the top down. There were great policies proposed (because policy proposals are only demanded from Democrats) that would've continued the great aims of the Biden/Harris administration.
But this is what Americans wanted. There wasn't the clout to be had in listening to Harris and Walz. There wasn't the clout to be had in carrying on the great things Biden did...he is Old after all.
Now all that remains is to see whatever Non-Minority Young Bro Penis Democrats select as their sacrificial lamb in 2028.
Of course, there's also the work that needs to be done for the midterms. A whole lot can change with even just a modicum of oversight from Congress, if we put in the work and elect a Democratic majority. It really, truly matters who is in office, and don't let people get clout off telling you otherwise. We see this every single day.