The Bill Is Dead! Long Live the Bill

Pro tip for Congress-watchers: If you spend your time trying to make sense of every fool thing Congress proposes, considers, debates or collectively pontificates about, you will eventually lose your goddamn mind.

I know this because, believe it or not, there was a time when I didn’t see things that aren’t there, hear sounds nobody else can detect, or for no apparent reason, dress up like Ben Franklin every time I go to Olive Garden.

Unfortunately, the formerly sane me was lost when I began tracking every change to 18 U.S.C. 2257 that Congress and the DOJ came up with and worrying constantly about whether those changes would somehow land me in prison if I misplaced a scan of some 43-year-old MILF’s ID without realizing it, left up her content on a site then got raided by the FBI, or whatever far-fetched scenario my brain would cook up on a particularly sleepless night.

At the peak of my madness, every time I finally thought I had a handle on what the 2257 regulations say, Congress would upset the apple cart by fiddling around more with the statutory language, or the DOJ would promulgate a new version of the regulations and I’d be right back where I started – namely, next to my refrigerator, tucked into the fetal position, slowly draining a bottle of benzodiazepines into my gullet.

Eventually, I wised up and decided to just keep my records in a way that I knew I could find any ID I needed to at a moment’s notice, should that knock on the door ever come, and began ignoring everything I heard and saw about changes to 2257, new bills kinda/sorta related to 2257, new lawsuits challenging the law being filed, appeals filed after every major ruling in those lawsuits and all the rest of that noise.

By then, it was too late for me, of course. My mental health had already been degraded by a combination of stress, illicit drugs and bad television to the point where my only remaining career option was freelance writing, which in my case is less an occupation or vocation than it is an undiagnosed personality disorder.

I did at least learn a few things along the way of descending into madness, though. One of those things is this important lesson: Every time a new Congress is seated, you can count on more than a few of the bright bulbs who occupy the House and/or Senate to propose an abysmally bad bill in the months ahead.

The other thing you can count on, thankfully, is that a lot of those abysmally bad bills will never make it past the “self-congratulatory press release” phase of their existence. And while that’s good news, it’s also important to remember a lot of these bills are like movie zombies, in that just when you think they’re dead, you remember that a zombie can’t die because it’s already dead, and pretty soon you find yourself running from a rapidly decomposing Senator who keeps muttering about his unyielding hunger to feast on your brain and/or unnecessarily restrict your ability to express yourself on the internet.

Along these lines, while we’re all happy to hear the Stop Internet Sexual Exploitation Act (“SISEA”) didn’t make it past the aforementioned self-congratulatory press release stage of development, it’s fairly likely the measure will rear its ugly head again, in some form or fashion. The good news is, unless Congress amends SISEA considerably from the form it was introduced in, if it ever does pass, it will likely do so only to find itself eventually relegated to this list – which as you can see is a long, ever-growing list of laws shot down as unconstitutional by the American judiciary.

By the way, if Congress gets you down by mulling some unconstitutional trash fire of a bill, reading that list of laws that have been tossed by the courts can be quite soothing to the nerves – especially if you augment the effect by downing a few benzodiazepines as you scroll along.

Bill photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels