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Comment by shagymoe | Hacker News Reader

>Eleven people voted against the bill, I wonder what their motivation was.

The bill seems to be mostly about military funding: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/7776...

The bit about shark fins is somewhere around page 4 thousand.

Yes, it's the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed once per year to fund the U.S. military. Because the NDAA is considered a "must pass" bill, it's used as a vehicle to pass a bunch of other legislation (all bundled into the same bill). There's only limited opportunity to debate or offer amendments. The NAY votes likely had nothing to do with the shark fins.

A bloated and excessive NDAA gets bloated further still. And Congress wonders why so many have so little faith in Uncle Sam.

But hey. The sharks are safe.

When one of the two major parties runs on the platform of "government == bad," we shouldn't be surprised when they try to make the government as unproductive as possible.

That's a different issue. This is both parties "conspiring" on an excessive DoD budget and then both actively partaking in the adding on frivolity. And then the POTUS gladly signs off.

This is the Politics Industrial Complex at its finest.

There is no conspiring, there is no conspiracy. There is, however, a must-pass bill which can bypass some political roadblocks, so common-sense riders get attached to those bills.

If we had a functional government, this could have been passed with the regular Senate rules. We don’t, so it gets attached to something that’s going to pass anyway, because no one is gonna fight on behalf of sharkers.

You'll find the bits about The Politics Industrial Complex interesting. Perhaps not a "conspiracy" per se, but the game tilts itself in favor of itself. That being normalized doesn't make it right.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/im-your-biggest-fan/

Members of both chambers of Congress have a near 100% reelection rate. The only time a politician is replaced is if they decide to retire or their own party doesn't support them in the primaries. Even if Americans really have "so little faith in Uncle Sam" they definitely don't show it in the voting booth.

> they definitely don't show it in the voting booth.

It's a demonstration of that lack of faith that they see the candidates, then rationally decide their time would be better spent doing anything but voting.

Maybe it’s time to become single issue shark fin voters.

Props for looking beyond the headline. I am only about 1/5 through and have 4 pages of notes so far (many of which are "things to expect context-free outrage bait headline/talkshow topics to focus on". We'll see how it goes.

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