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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

I think the way they are going about it is counterproductive to actual privacy reform.

Basically they are associating privacy rights with abortion which will make this bill a dead end in the Senate. No Republican can sign onto this bill without being accused of supporting abortion.

Given the filibuster in the Senate, this bill is more about messaging and fundraising than actually trying to pass a bill.

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I completely agree. I get where they are coming from, but this is a great way to loose the current bipartisan momentum against big tech, and change it into another wedge issue.

> No Republican can sign onto this bill without being accused of supporting abortion

This framing may be what it takes to get Arizonans and West Virginians to support a limited lifting of the filibuster.

West Virginia is one of the most conservative states. It is a huge anomaly that they actually have a Democratic senator. There is no way Manchin tries to lift the filibuster for anything supporting abortion. Actually, I would guess he rather likes the filibuster as it keeps him from having to actually vote on a lot of controversial issues.

Abortion rights are privacy rights. If you don't have a right to bodily autonomy, then the rest of them are just vigorous handwaving.

Gun rights are privacy rights. If you don't have a right to self defense, then the rest of them are just vigorous handwaving.

This technique of taking something controversial and pretending it is not, doesn’t actually win over anybody.

I'm not trying to win anyone over. The Supreme Court didn't strike down just a woman's right to bodily autonomy. They argued that people do not have the fundamental right to privacy, and state governments who want to know every single little thing that you do online are going to use this decision to argue that they should have access to your data without a subpoena or your consent, so I do hope that you are aligned with your political betters.

Here I was thinking the NSA showed us this years ago.

Bodily autonomy is a fundamental human right. "Gun rights" aren't human rights, and in most of the western culture are considered a rather silly idea.

So should the same bill also make vaccine requirements federally illegal?

“Bodily autonomy” is a vague and nebulous concept. And it’s also another way to show one’s bias because to a pro-life person abortion is a violation of the unborn child’s bodily autonomy.

You wouldn’t talk about being able to commit murder as an exercise of bodily autonomy on the part of the murderer. And again to someone pro-life that’s going to be directly analogous to how they view abortion.

> So should the same bill also make vaccine requirements federally illegal?

Yes, you should not be physically forced to get vaccinated against your will. I think we can all agree to that.

Doesn't matter how they view abortion. We already know how they regard fetuses. They are non-persons except in this narrow context according to their own lawmakers for the purposes of waging a culture war that literally didn't exist until Republicans made protecting segregation a part of their party's platform in the late 70s and tied abortion along with it as part of their "moral majority."

When's the last time someone received extra child-care benefits for a fetus? How about SNAP benefits? When's the last time you were able to claim a fetus on your taxes in anti-choce states? Seems awfully strange that people who claim they care so much do so little.

>Given the filibuster in the Senate, this bill is more about messaging and fundraising than actually trying to pass a bill.

Based on previous actions, should the Rs take control of the Senate, they will remove the filibuster. And if they then lose control, they will take a page out of Wisconsin's playbook[0] (ultimately unsuccessfully[1]) and put it back before the Ds take control again.

[0] https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/national/gop-controlled-s...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/03/21/705536383/wisconsin-governors...

I don’t think they will actually remove the filibuster.

Most of the things Republicans care about such as cutting taxes and confirming judges can be done without the filibuster (see reconciliation and how the filibuster is no longer for judges).

For the Democrats, much of what they want to do is vulnerable to filibuster, so the Republicans will act like the legislative filibuster is sacrosanct, since it doesn’t really birth them and cripples the Democrats.

Those are fair points. And you may well be right.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Reasonable summary. D's don't seem to understand how power games are played, leading to a lot of discourse like this:

  D: You said X and did Y, you are hypocrites
  R: Yes
  D: I hope people voote harder for us next time
  R: LOL

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