Funny you bring up U.S. v. Lopez. The language the Supreme Court used to overturn the law allowed Congress to quietly enact a substantially identical law that could stand against constitutional challenges (under current precedent). And of course, you have to remember Gonzales v. Raich which cemented the idea that the federal government has nearly unlimited power under the commerce clause.

IANAL, but here's lawprof Orin Kerr in 2005:

The federal government has the power under Supreme Court precedent to regulate quite a bit, especially this stuff which really DOES directly affect interstate commerce.

Asking legislators to actually understand every nuance of every bill is naive. Laws refer to other laws, and constantly amend bits and pieces of legislation.

Legislators have a choice on where to put their bills, on a spectrum between "spell everything out explicitly" and "let the bureaucrats work out the details." If I pass a law authorizing the FCC to determine its own procedures for allocating wireless spectrum, no amount of reading of the law will be able to predict who gets what frequency block. On the other hand, too much micromanagement of details means you add complexity to the point where it's unreasonable for legislators to understand every facet of every bill. That's actually where we are with the huge pieces of legislation that go through our Congress. But making things "simpler" won't necessarily be better.

And before you object on libertarian grounds that Congress shouldn't be passing legislation like that anyway, the problem still exists in normal criminal law. Making murder illegal is easy. But what should the burden of proof be? What should the alleged criminal's state of mind be? How much room for interpretation should judges and juries get? You'll still have to find a spot on that spectrum between spelling out every possibility (probably a futile effort) and giving other actors a lot of wiggle room. Each side of the spectrum presents its own problems.

Besides, reading a pending bill is about as useful as reading source code for software. It's sometimes helpful, yes, but it is by no means sufficient to understanding what's in the bill - especially when the "meat" of the legislation/program often refers to another law/program.

Instead, legislators should be asked to understand the main mechanisms of bills. What kind of rules it establishes, what kind of organizations it creates, what kind of funding will be required and what the source of the funding will be, etc. That is what I expect of my elected representatives.

Doesn't sound like the cop had probable cause in the first place. I'd hope that it's difficult for the cop to convince a judge to issue a warrant based on this scenario.

Talk to your commo guys. It varies from domain to domain, but when I was in Iraq and now back in garrison it was no problem to get approval to install, and an SA/local admin willing to install firefox on all the military networks.

Well - Cato isn't very influential on, say, civil liberties, criminal law, or the war on drugs. But their free market talking points ARE picked up by mainstream Republican commentators, strategists, and the politicians themselves. The Republican participants in health care town halls are using libertarian rhetoric on that particular issue. Sure, they're no AEI, but they still have quite a bit of influence among conservative circles.

PDF is terrible for small screens. Although the text can be zoomed and/or reflowed, it's still a pain in the ass to read text that has been formatted for A4 sized paper on a 6 inch display. It's better to have a dedicated ebook format where the formatting metadata is designed specifically with these displays in mind. And of course, ePub, while it allows for DRM (just like PDF), doesn't require DRM. PDF is a great standard for what it's used for - not necessarily ebooks for dedicated ebook readers, though.