From the arguments I've read against this, I think not enough emphasis is being placed on the strongest one:
In the modern world online access is as necessary as water, power and phone service. No one would suggest forcing the power company to cut service to a customer over trivial civil law matters (which is what copyright is) that are completely unrelated to the company or the service it provides. No one should suggest cutting internet access either.
I guess ISPs in the US don't want to use that argument due to the regulatory implications (the common carrier classification thing)? But someone should be making that argument to the court.
The strongest argument comes from Viacom v Youtube. If Viacom itself is unable to identify which videos are infringement or not how is a Youtube supposed to be able to?
Or to put into different terms. If a copyright holder historically has asked an ISP (Google eventually become one) to un-takedown content as it wasn't actually infringing; why should the ISP be liable for not-proven-in-court activity by customers?
There might be a First Amendment argument for internet access. Congress shouldn’t have the power to force or coerce an ISP to disconnect someone from the internet. (Doesn’t take too much imagination to come up with a partisan copyright troll.)
It's becoming less and less possible to live without every year. More and more government services over here can only be accessed online. And the private industry has been happily gutting offline or in-person services for a long time. If you still want access to everything, you better be ready to pay huge premiums just to be able to do things the old-fashioned way of having humans perform tasks for you. So if you're poor, you basically have no choice but to be online.
Yeah, was thinking that. Do we cut off power to a home if it’s repeatedly used for growing weed? If no, then we definitely shouldn’t cut off internet over something even more trivial.
Yep, internet is a utility, like a toll road (most highways in many countries).
If you shoplift, should you lose your highway sticker?
Somehow the intrnet is this 'magical place' where real world analogies don't work for many people,... surveillance related stuff being the worst offender.
Of course public transportation in some parts of the US is so bad a car is almost necessary, despite being a privilege. I’m not saying it shouldn’t remain a privilege, but for many losing their license or not having a functional vehicle would mean almost certain financial ruin.
Keep in mind that you can still drive with a revoked license.
Trivially, there's the you can just do it illegally. But also pretty much every state allows you to get a "Hardship" license [1] which basically means you're not responsible enough to drive but also you can't live without driving so we're letting you drive to work/store.
In your specific context, the following doesn't directly apply, but the statement that driving is a privilege is frequently made here, often as a whole truth and not merely legal truism. It is a prevarication at best, to argue this beyond a purely legal premise, however.
To think that the entire nation would immediately collapse irreparably if this trivial "privilege" were removed, kinda suggests a problem with this factoid as a general view.
I am aware that for some individuals driving is entirely unnecessary. Some individuals don't have homes. I hope that for however anti-automobile one might rightfully be, the reality of this is still clear.
Not driving licence, the toll-road sticker. Vignette in many countries. It's usually tied to the vehicle, and it indicates that the yearly highway toll has been paid, and you're allowed to use the paid-highways.
If you personally did something, then you personally are responsible for that something that you did. Not your families car.
The only thing similar I’ve heard of in the US is vehicle registration fees and stickers (that usually go on the license plate), but these vary state by state and are not tied to any toll road or the like.
Every toll road I’ve ever been on in the US you have to pay each time you use it. These days most states use the same transponder system where your vehicle is detected by that device when you enter the toll road or by license plate readers.
I’ve never heard of a general “yearly highway toll” anywhere in the US.
Over here (central europe), many countries have yearly (monthly, weekly) tolls. You used to get a sticker to put on the windshield (now it's mostly digital, tied to the licence plate), and you can drive on any highway within the country for a week/month/year. No slowing down or stopping to pay, on the other hand, you either have to buy it in advance or stop at the border or the first gas station in the country and buy it there.
We had a huge reducation in traffic deaths due to that (because people use the highway more than before, even for just "one exit", since you don't have to stop and wait in line to pay anymore).
Should the phone company be liable for their customers performing a copywrited song on the phone? Why should an ISP be required to surveil their customers but not the phone company? When my dish washing machine can take voice commands does it get deputized by the copywrite police too?
Since phone (and internet) is not mail, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that "no law of Congress can place in the hands of officials connected with the Postal Service any authority to invade the secrecy of letters and such sealed packages in the mail; and all regulations adopted as to mail matter of this kind must be in subordination to the great principle embodied in the fourth amendment of the Constitution" is completely irrelevant /s
i.e. they were more about generating bogus notices based upon no real evidence, and didn't even try ensuring they had court worthy evidence before sending notices
If that's the case, then how is that ignored when other, similar firms had their operators sanctioned and thrown in jail for doing the same thing?
Sorry, I should have clarified. In the context of interacting with ISPs, the most important detail about Prenda is that the law firm lied to ISPs that they represented copyright assignments.
So, I think the GP comment brings up Prenda because these cases force an ISP to police its users and also to carefully validate legal forms from copyright holders. That’s a lot of work to run a series of tubes.
So, specifically with Prenda, those copyright assignments presented in court were forged. Shell companies listed on those documents were also concocted with forged signatures. Should an ISP be expected to investigate claimed copyright assignment, including shell companies; or should Prenda prove that small civil stuff like this needs strong legitimacy or it will attract fraud?
Can't the same question be asked on any other illegal activity done over connection. Say wire-fraud? With many computer crimes it gets even more questionable. Should internet connection of some cloud hosting company be terminated if their connection is used for attacking other systems?
Surely this ship sailed a long time ago. This is just throwing money around to find someone to blame for piracy despite the fact that piracy is both inevitable and highly incentivized by the claimants.
With the current US Supreme Court, I wouldn't be that sure. And, depending on how they decide, it won't be just content disappearing because of excessive DMCA notices, your internet connection itself might be gone because someone didn't like what you downloaded (or watched) yesterday...
I feel like someone in the Ars newsroom mixed up their headlines. I thought I was about to read an article about protecting user privacy. What I read instead is an article about to billion-dollar giants having a pissing contest over the oh-here-we-go-again piracy argument. Did Lars Ulrich secretly write this?
>this will be a disaster. ... use unproven allegations to deplatform people.
At the risk of veering spectacularly off topic...
Considering Trump and many others went (and go) through exactly that and masses of people cheer(ed), I'm curious if your conviction (which is correct, by the way) holds steady regardless of who benefits.
Things like innocence until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt can't be had specifically, it's all or nothing universally.
This article is about people potentially losing their internet access because a media corporation decides to accuse them of something. It isn't about an internet site choosing not to broadcast them, which could be done at any time.
You're talking about someone who lost access to twitter and facebook after using them to stage a violent coup to overturn the united state election for president. That's a pretty high bar to lose your ability to access two websites.
I can't believe anyone would try to compare these two things as having anything to do with each other.
First, copying anything availible to a "civilian" on the interenet is not piracy
as it can be done without any breaking or
tunnling,etc, and it is absoltlely clear that copying is bieng be done in complete inocence, click ,save, and it just works.
Second, until all digital "property" can be bought, sold ,returned, insured against
loss..... or theft,loaned out, rented out,
it is not real property, and is not subject to the laws governing property, The idea of siezing real property to somehow protect one, of an infinite number
of digital copys, is beyond comprehension.
And now faced with the fact of not bieng able to identify, where or,when,or what, was taken, they suggest that based on there general unsubstantiated susspision,
cutting someone out of the global comunication system?
The real question, is how is this bieng given a hearing?Not good, not good at all.Face up folks, they want to smash the internet, and bring back cable.
Boomer noise.
Why don't the copyright holders go directly after the violators of the copyright? Why do they need the extra judicial policing by Cox?
Answer: because they want to shift the enforcement costs to Cox.
If a copyright violation cost them $150,000 as they allege, it would make economic sense for them to go after individual violators. But it doesn't.
Let me ignore for a moment the legal problems with copyright infringement allegation notices.
ISPs should not be liable for copyright infringement by users, and cutting off internet access for copyright infringement should not be a legitimate legal remedy. The internet is increasingly essential for applying to work, working, applying to colleges, completing secondary and tertiary education, and interacting with governments at all levels. The internet is also a crucial tool for expression protected by the First Amendment. Cutting off internet access would be an illegitimate penalty for defamation, and would be an illegitimate penalty for copyright infringement. Violations of civil law cannot override the First Amendment. In particular, copyright can't override the First Amendment: the authority of Congress to pass copyright laws is in the pre-amendment portion of the constitution, and the copyright laws themselves are federal statutes (which yield to the Supremacy Clause).
Now what about when someone sends notices alleging copyright infringement by an ISP's users (where by ISP I mean providers of access to the internet, rather than owners of websites)? First, such notices have no affirmative statutory basis and were given legal weight by a mistaken court decision [1]:
> The first safe harbor, codified at Section 512(a), applies to providers of “Transitory Digital Network Communications.”[24] Examples of these intermediaries are the companies that provide internet access generally, or what we refer to as “ISPs,” including broadband ISPs like Verizon and Cox.
...
> The third safe harbor, codified at Section 512(c), applies to service providers that enable information to be “stored at the direction of users.”[27] When people speak of the “DMCA,” they are often referring to this safe harbor and the many internet services it covers, such as social media sites or YouTube, where users have published, or “stored,” some “information” they have expressed.[28] Most notably, this safe harbor, which is the most complex of the four in terms of its criteria, includes the requirement that providers abide by a “notice-and-takedown” system.[29] Under this system, the putative copyright holder or its agent sends a “notice,” which is sometimes colloquially referred to as a “takedown demand,” to the service provider alleging that some material a user has posted violates their copyright.[30] Having now been put on notice of potential infringement, the service provider must then act to quickly remove the allegedly infringing material to avoid sharing in liability for it.
...
> In addition, Cox effectively created a new requirement for the 512(a) safe harbor for providers to receive and respond to takedown notices that the statutory text had never before required. Takedown notices are entirely products of the 512(c) safe harbor.[76] While the takedown notices described in 512(c) are also used in the context of the 512(b) and (d) safe harbors, the 512(a) safe harbor makes absolutely no mention of them.
Second, the Section 512(c) safe harbor still violates the First Amendment by design [1]:
> the DMCA requires the intermediaries to apply this censorship without there ever being a judicial finding that the speech or speaker activity was even wrongful.[7] Mere accusation is enough to force the intermediaries to take action, lest they lose access to the protection of the applicable safe harbor and find themselves staring down a potentially expensive infringement lawsuit. Thus, the safe-harbor system creates a situation where non-wrongful and constitutionally protected speech ends up being removed by the intermediary service it was expressed on because the law has established a mechanism to penalize these services if they do not.
...
> If there is to be an obligation for a provider to act, that obligation should be triggered only after there has been a judicial finding of infringement, and not just when there has been the mere suggestion of it.
Hey Hollywood, time to bring out the strippers for Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh (also he likes beer, lots of beer), and I guess some preacher to explain to ACB how ISP is helping the distribution of porn, so need to be punished.
Ah, Post-11/6 America, what a lovely place to birth this boring joke. And it had to be birthed, anything else would be illegal.
Looking at this another way, this case is a call-for-solicitor-general. Trump will pick John Sauer for SG because Sauer wrote a chapter of Project 2025.
A generation ago, the Contract with America arrived with Republican electoral gains. These manifestos are important because otherwise individual Republicans don’t have both the skills of governance and populist appeal.
It’s interesting that Project 2025 argues that its social points necessitate a more powerful executive. Like a Minister of Health rather than a supervisor of the department distributing advice on maybe improving medical regulations please.
From the arguments I've read against this, I think not enough emphasis is being placed on the strongest one:
In the modern world online access is as necessary as water, power and phone service. No one would suggest forcing the power company to cut service to a customer over trivial civil law matters (which is what copyright is) that are completely unrelated to the company or the service it provides. No one should suggest cutting internet access either.
I guess ISPs in the US don't want to use that argument due to the regulatory implications (the common carrier classification thing)? But someone should be making that argument to the court.
I do not think that is the strongest argument.
The strongest argument comes from Viacom v Youtube. If Viacom itself is unable to identify which videos are infringement or not how is a Youtube supposed to be able to?
Or to put into different terms. If a copyright holder historically has asked an ISP (Google eventually become one) to un-takedown content as it wasn't actually infringing; why should the ISP be liable for not-proven-in-court activity by customers?
There might be a First Amendment argument for internet access. Congress shouldn’t have the power to force or coerce an ISP to disconnect someone from the internet. (Doesn’t take too much imagination to come up with a partisan copyright troll.)
> online access is as necessary as water We have paper money and also can work and buy stuff offline.
I would say online access is as necessary as a car. Possible without but less flexible.
It's becoming less and less possible to live without every year. More and more government services over here can only be accessed online. And the private industry has been happily gutting offline or in-person services for a long time. If you still want access to everything, you better be ready to pay huge premiums just to be able to do things the old-fashioned way of having humans perform tasks for you. So if you're poor, you basically have no choice but to be online.
Yeah, was thinking that. Do we cut off power to a home if it’s repeatedly used for growing weed? If no, then we definitely shouldn’t cut off internet over something even more trivial.
Don't give them ideas!
Yep, internet is a utility, like a toll road (most highways in many countries).
If you shoplift, should you lose your highway sticker?
Somehow the intrnet is this 'magical place' where real world analogies don't work for many people,... surveillance related stuff being the worst offender.
Driving licence is a bad argument because there is public transportation service. If you're reckless or have other issues the licence is revoked.
Of course public transportation in some parts of the US is so bad a car is almost necessary, despite being a privilege. I’m not saying it shouldn’t remain a privilege, but for many losing their license or not having a functional vehicle would mean almost certain financial ruin.
Keep in mind that you can still drive with a revoked license.
Trivially, there's the you can just do it illegally. But also pretty much every state allows you to get a "Hardship" license [1] which basically means you're not responsible enough to drive but also you can't live without driving so we're letting you drive to work/store.
I do love how NH calls it a “Cinderella license”.
[1]: https://www.intoxalock.com/knowledge-center/difference-betwe...
Unfortunately this is largely not the case in North America, there is no reliable public transit outside of urban areas.
One, they didn’t say DL.
Two, DL is a bad example because in America driving is legally a privilege, not a right.
In your specific context, the following doesn't directly apply, but the statement that driving is a privilege is frequently made here, often as a whole truth and not merely legal truism. It is a prevarication at best, to argue this beyond a purely legal premise, however.
To think that the entire nation would immediately collapse irreparably if this trivial "privilege" were removed, kinda suggests a problem with this factoid as a general view.
I am aware that for some individuals driving is entirely unnecessary. Some individuals don't have homes. I hope that for however anti-automobile one might rightfully be, the reality of this is still clear.
Sure. But we do forfeit licenses. We don’t do that punitively for water or electricity.
Not driving licence, the toll-road sticker. Vignette in many countries. It's usually tied to the vehicle, and it indicates that the yearly highway toll has been paid, and you're allowed to use the paid-highways.
If you personally did something, then you personally are responsible for that something that you did. Not your families car.
The only thing similar I’ve heard of in the US is vehicle registration fees and stickers (that usually go on the license plate), but these vary state by state and are not tied to any toll road or the like.
Every toll road I’ve ever been on in the US you have to pay each time you use it. These days most states use the same transponder system where your vehicle is detected by that device when you enter the toll road or by license plate readers.
I’ve never heard of a general “yearly highway toll” anywhere in the US.
Over here (central europe), many countries have yearly (monthly, weekly) tolls. You used to get a sticker to put on the windshield (now it's mostly digital, tied to the licence plate), and you can drive on any highway within the country for a week/month/year. No slowing down or stopping to pay, on the other hand, you either have to buy it in advance or stop at the border or the first gas station in the country and buy it there.
We had a huge reducation in traffic deaths due to that (because people use the highway more than before, even for just "one exit", since you don't have to stop and wait in line to pay anymore).
Should the phone company be liable for their customers performing a copywrited song on the phone? Why should an ISP be required to surveil their customers but not the phone company? When my dish washing machine can take voice commands does it get deputized by the copywrite police too?
Since phone (and internet) is not mail, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that "no law of Congress can place in the hands of officials connected with the Postal Service any authority to invade the secrecy of letters and such sealed packages in the mail; and all regulations adopted as to mail matter of this kind must be in subordination to the great principle embodied in the fourth amendment of the Constitution" is completely irrelevant /s
Isn't the place which the ISPs were receiving notices from, one of the ones that was actually just Copyright Trolling?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_troll
i.e. they were more about generating bogus notices based upon no real evidence, and didn't even try ensuring they had court worthy evidence before sending notices
If that's the case, then how is that ignored when other, similar firms had their operators sanctioned and thrown in jail for doing the same thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law
With the second link (Prenda), I haven’t heard if those trolls actually had contact with the copyright holders.
Of course they had contact with the copyright holders. Prenda was the copyright holders; that's the only reason they got in trouble.
Sorry, I should have clarified. In the context of interacting with ISPs, the most important detail about Prenda is that the law firm lied to ISPs that they represented copyright assignments.
So, I think the GP comment brings up Prenda because these cases force an ISP to police its users and also to carefully validate legal forms from copyright holders. That’s a lot of work to run a series of tubes.
They did represent copyright assignments. They owned the copyright. What do you think the ISPs needed to know?
So, specifically with Prenda, those copyright assignments presented in court were forged. Shell companies listed on those documents were also concocted with forged signatures. Should an ISP be expected to investigate claimed copyright assignment, including shell companies; or should Prenda prove that small civil stuff like this needs strong legitimacy or it will attract fraud?
Can't the same question be asked on any other illegal activity done over connection. Say wire-fraud? With many computer crimes it gets even more questionable. Should internet connection of some cloud hosting company be terminated if their connection is used for attacking other systems?
Surely this ship sailed a long time ago. This is just throwing money around to find someone to blame for piracy despite the fact that piracy is both inevitable and highly incentivized by the claimants.
With the current US Supreme Court, I wouldn't be that sure. And, depending on how they decide, it won't be just content disappearing because of excessive DMCA notices, your internet connection itself might be gone because someone didn't like what you downloaded (or watched) yesterday...
I have a feeling piracy is way down from the heyday of the 2000s-2010s.
> despite the fact that piracy is both inevitable and highly incentivized by the claimants
And also it doesn't harm sales: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35701785, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15309950
I think road construction companies should be liable for terrorism, since terrorist sometimes use roads.
And car manufacturers and gas stations
I feel like someone in the Ars newsroom mixed up their headlines. I thought I was about to read an article about protecting user privacy. What I read instead is an article about to billion-dollar giants having a pissing contest over the oh-here-we-go-again piracy argument. Did Lars Ulrich secretly write this?
Oh Ef, might be time to check the prescription on my glasses again. I misread "piracy" as "privacy" in the headline. Apologies to Ars (but not Lars).
Still, are we able to have an honest conversation about one without closely examining the other?
I misread it the same way.
If ISPs are responsible for piracy though, they could be for privacy as well!
Sony winning this will be a disaster. Media companies will use unproven allegations to deplatform people.
What you want to say is that it will be made easier than it already is.
>this will be a disaster. ... use unproven allegations to deplatform people.
At the risk of veering spectacularly off topic...
Considering Trump and many others went (and go) through exactly that and masses of people cheer(ed), I'm curious if your conviction (which is correct, by the way) holds steady regardless of who benefits.
Things like innocence until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt can't be had specifically, it's all or nothing universally.
This article is about people potentially losing their internet access because a media corporation decides to accuse them of something. It isn't about an internet site choosing not to broadcast them, which could be done at any time.
You're talking about someone who lost access to twitter and facebook after using them to stage a violent coup to overturn the united state election for president. That's a pretty high bar to lose your ability to access two websites.
I can't believe anyone would try to compare these two things as having anything to do with each other.
Should gun and bullet manufacturers be liable for school shootings too?
Cox is asking for clarification: are they responsible for policing content:
1. When it has economic value and some content creator has emailed Cox about torrents on an IP (Sony says Cox profits through subscriber fees)
2. When it arrives in a forum and hurts someone’s feelings (Cox enjoys safe harbor at the moment)
How about a full-length movie with a separate riff track and maybe superimposed robots in the audience?
First, copying anything availible to a "civilian" on the interenet is not piracy as it can be done without any breaking or tunnling,etc, and it is absoltlely clear that copying is bieng be done in complete inocence, click ,save, and it just works. Second, until all digital "property" can be bought, sold ,returned, insured against loss..... or theft,loaned out, rented out, it is not real property, and is not subject to the laws governing property, The idea of siezing real property to somehow protect one, of an infinite number of digital copys, is beyond comprehension. And now faced with the fact of not bieng able to identify, where or,when,or what, was taken, they suggest that based on there general unsubstantiated susspision, cutting someone out of the global comunication system? The real question, is how is this bieng given a hearing?Not good, not good at all.Face up folks, they want to smash the internet, and bring back cable. Boomer noise.
Depending on how this goes (presumably anti-consumer/end user, given that "the business of America is business!"), it may be time to invest in a VPN.
Why don't the copyright holders go directly after the violators of the copyright? Why do they need the extra judicial policing by Cox?
Answer: because they want to shift the enforcement costs to Cox. If a copyright violation cost them $150,000 as they allege, it would make economic sense for them to go after individual violators. But it doesn't.
Let me ignore for a moment the legal problems with copyright infringement allegation notices.
ISPs should not be liable for copyright infringement by users, and cutting off internet access for copyright infringement should not be a legitimate legal remedy. The internet is increasingly essential for applying to work, working, applying to colleges, completing secondary and tertiary education, and interacting with governments at all levels. The internet is also a crucial tool for expression protected by the First Amendment. Cutting off internet access would be an illegitimate penalty for defamation, and would be an illegitimate penalty for copyright infringement. Violations of civil law cannot override the First Amendment. In particular, copyright can't override the First Amendment: the authority of Congress to pass copyright laws is in the pre-amendment portion of the constitution, and the copyright laws themselves are federal statutes (which yield to the Supremacy Clause).
Now what about when someone sends notices alleging copyright infringement by an ISP's users (where by ISP I mean providers of access to the internet, rather than owners of websites)? First, such notices have no affirmative statutory basis and were given legal weight by a mistaken court decision [1]:
> The first safe harbor, codified at Section 512(a), applies to providers of “Transitory Digital Network Communications.”[24] Examples of these intermediaries are the companies that provide internet access generally, or what we refer to as “ISPs,” including broadband ISPs like Verizon and Cox.
...
> The third safe harbor, codified at Section 512(c), applies to service providers that enable information to be “stored at the direction of users.”[27] When people speak of the “DMCA,” they are often referring to this safe harbor and the many internet services it covers, such as social media sites or YouTube, where users have published, or “stored,” some “information” they have expressed.[28] Most notably, this safe harbor, which is the most complex of the four in terms of its criteria, includes the requirement that providers abide by a “notice-and-takedown” system.[29] Under this system, the putative copyright holder or its agent sends a “notice,” which is sometimes colloquially referred to as a “takedown demand,” to the service provider alleging that some material a user has posted violates their copyright.[30] Having now been put on notice of potential infringement, the service provider must then act to quickly remove the allegedly infringing material to avoid sharing in liability for it.
...
> In addition, Cox effectively created a new requirement for the 512(a) safe harbor for providers to receive and respond to takedown notices that the statutory text had never before required. Takedown notices are entirely products of the 512(c) safe harbor.[76] While the takedown notices described in 512(c) are also used in the context of the 512(b) and (d) safe harbors, the 512(a) safe harbor makes absolutely no mention of them.
Second, the Section 512(c) safe harbor still violates the First Amendment by design [1]:
> the DMCA requires the intermediaries to apply this censorship without there ever being a judicial finding that the speech or speaker activity was even wrongful.[7] Mere accusation is enough to force the intermediaries to take action, lest they lose access to the protection of the applicable safe harbor and find themselves staring down a potentially expensive infringement lawsuit. Thus, the safe-harbor system creates a situation where non-wrongful and constitutionally protected speech ends up being removed by the intermediary service it was expressed on because the law has established a mechanism to penalize these services if they do not.
...
> If there is to be an obligation for a provider to act, that obligation should be triggered only after there has been a judicial finding of infringement, and not just when there has been the mere suggestion of it.
[1] https://www.rstreet.org/research/jawboning-in-plain-sight-th...
Hey Hollywood, time to bring out the strippers for Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh (also he likes beer, lots of beer), and I guess some preacher to explain to ACB how ISP is helping the distribution of porn, so need to be punished.
Ah, Post-11/6 America, what a lovely place to birth this boring joke. And it had to be birthed, anything else would be illegal.
I have a hard time imagining that Thomas wouldn't be an enthusiastic supporter of porn distribution.
Looking at this another way, this case is a call-for-solicitor-general. Trump will pick John Sauer for SG because Sauer wrote a chapter of Project 2025.
A generation ago, the Contract with America arrived with Republican electoral gains. These manifestos are important because otherwise individual Republicans don’t have both the skills of governance and populist appeal.
It’s interesting that Project 2025 argues that its social points necessitate a more powerful executive. Like a Minister of Health rather than a supervisor of the department distributing advice on maybe improving medical regulations please.
[dead]