I'm a big fan of the idea of judicial review. When congress exceeds the bounds of their constitutional authority, somebody needs to be around with the power to stop them, without burning down the capitol building.
The trouble with judicial review is that it is an unsupported mod, hacked into the system post release, and it's actually pretty buggy. Any time a judge refuses to enforce an unjust law, he's technically exceeding the bounds of his own constitutionally granted authority.
There's nothing wrong with that, but there are a lot of judges who are trying to abuse this mod to cheat. Take Joel Rosenburg's fight against Minnesota judges, over court orders banning weapons, in situations the law explicitly allows them, among other shady practices.
To the judge who signed this order: Perhaps there do need to be different regulations about civilians carrying firearms into city hall, sir, but for you to take on the power of a one man legislature and simply speak a new set of rules into existence is unacceptable. Are you a judge or a king?
The icing on the cake is that this is just one battle in a larger battle, over how much power a judge should hold over your life. Here's hoping that Rosenburg's fight is the pivotal battle that turn the tides of war.
What is congress doing in the face of such unmitigated bullshit? They're considering giving federal judges the power to censor the internet. Seriously, what are they thinking?
In my previous post, I said that COICA is a bad and sloppy law. This is why. It's a nebulously written piece of legislation that gives judges the power to strike from the DNS any website "dedicated to infringement." Now the heart of this law is the intent of making enforceable the DMCA, and as much as I detest the DMCA, I can't fault the good intentions behinds cutting off the supply of hacked .exes for pirated games.
However, depending on the version of this law that gets passed it could be used to shut down sites that speak out in favor of piracy, at the request of any videogame publisher who cares to lodge a complaint. Even if they never actually manage to shut anyone down, the potential cooling effect could do tremendous harm. If a website could be shut down for criticizing copyright laws, is Google going to let guys like me keep using their Blogger service, when it means risking the entire Blogger system could end up on the blacklist? It's never good when one of the things a law suppresses is the right of the people to discuss that same law.
It's not just America either. England and Japan are enacting new censorship laws right now too. The boogeyman used to declare this move necessarily in these cases is the availability of porn to children. Now, I don't believe children should be looking at porn, and maybe it's about time Japan got some broadcast regulations (the fanservice has been getting more obtrusive in recent years), but this thing in England is just bullshit.
The English government will draw up a list of websites that local ISPs will be obliged to block, unless the customer specifically requests the entire list be unblocked. The people of England can read whatever they want, so long as they are willing to go on record that they want porn piped into their houses. This is a system of information restriction with built in issue clouding.
It's a trap, baited with the promise that the UK can somehow track down every porn site on the internet and add it to a handy list. Even if they could accomplish such a feat, the cost of keeping such a list up to date would be absurd. It's much more cost effective for the taxpayers to monitor their child's internet access, or get some blocking software on their own end.
"Oi! Mind yer own business, yank!" I hear you cry. It is my business; regardless of how this turns out, there's bound to be someone on this side of the pond, who thinks it could be made to work here.
In any country in the world, you will always find rats in the government, and as with any rat infestation, the best solution is to not leave out a single crumb for them. If these laws pass, you can expect the precedent to be used to put forward even more restrictive legislation.
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