Here's what dismays me about this. We killed it once. It's back again. Let's say it's bad and we want to kill it, and we succeed again.
What's to say it won't come back again? How long do we have to keep doing this dance? Even if it is worth killing every time, will our attention spans be long enough to keep fighting it every single time for the decades that may still come?
A complete answer to this question is really nothing less than a comprehensive study of the entire field of political science. The reality is that you have two choices: you either defer your right of governance to someone else and just stop caring, or you will never be free of this.
No victory is eternal. There is no such thing as victory.
In a sense, this is actually why it keeps coming up. The reality of governance is such an immense expanse of tedium that a great many people buckle under it and try to imagine themselves as heroes or rebels or old wise men. They go looking for enemies where there are none and make them up to fight, making meaning where none was needed before.
In any case, the answer to your question is, "Until you're dead, and someone else will have to keep it up after that."
It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.
The new (shortened) "version" is somewhat more pithy, and far more easy to distribute. So maybe someone other that Curran deserves some of the credit.
I wrote "unknown" as the quote is often mis/attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but the evidence is not strong here.
Yay. You understand why this whole process is futile. This bill isn't the problem. This bill is a symptom of the problem. The problem is not going away. The problem is the U.S. federal government.
It is an out of control machine of death seeking to criminalize as much behavior as possible.
The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate. They have the most weapons.
This kind of thing will not end until the government collapses in on itself or people have an entire paradigm shift in the way that they think of their relation to their fellow person.
I actually think that it's a pretty good characteristic of the US government that unpopular proposed laws have to be re-proposed rather than rammed through without any debate or legislative process by some sort of dictatorship.
What's to say it won't come back again? How long do we have to keep doing this dance? Even if it is worth killing every time, will our attention spans be long enough to keep fighting it every single time for the decades that may still come?