Europe’s Unelected Machinery Overruled Its Own Parliament Twice In One Morning Last Week
Alexander Muse – Imagine Congress votes on a bill. The nays win, 314 to 276. Now imagine the speaker announces that the nays actually lost, because under an obscure rule the nays needed not a majority of votes cast but a majority of every seat in the chamber, including the members who stayed home that day.
The bill survives. It becomes law over the objection of the people’s elected representatives. Americans would call that a constitutional crisis. In Brussels, on July 9, they called it a Wednesday.
The measure in question is a surveillance program its critics call Chat Control. It allows technology companies to run automated scanning software across the private messages of ordinary Europeans, hundreds of millions of people suspected of nothing, looking for illegal material.
Alexander Muse – Imagine signing a contract to sell your house. The buyer takes the keys on closing day, moves in, and starts using the place. Then, six months later, you discover the buyer never actually transferred the money. Worse, the buyer’s lawyers have quietly rewritten the purchase agreement to add an expiration date, so that if you complain, the whole contract simply dissolves and the buyer keeps the keys for free. You would not call this a misunderstanding. You would call it a swindle, and you would expect the law to give you your house back.
John Waters & Ross Calvin – You know about the annual meeting in Davos, where anonymous shareholders and genderless bureaucrats mingle at private chalets. Like knowledge deities, they take a bird’s eye view of the global situation and ponder how to extract more riches for a privileged few.