Back in May, I wrote a piece titled Will Congress Legalize Mark Zuckerberg As Your Therapist?, pointing at a piece of legislation included in Trump’s flagship tax bill that would bar states from regulating artificial intelligence and automated decision-making systems. Such legislation could stop attempts to ensure that therapy chatbots disclose they are not human, or blocking rent-fixing algorithms, or rules that mandate health providers allow customers to talk to human beings in customer service, or prohibitions against the use of AI models to advertise to gambling addicts. But mostly, it was a bill to ensure that no one would block big tech players from doing whatever it is they want to do.

Well we got some good news. Last night, that provision was stripped out of the bill by a 99-1 vote. It was killed by a combination of the Democratic caucus and Republican Senators Marsha Blackburn and Josh Hawley, and Trump advisor Steve Bannon.

So what do we learn from this episode? First, we need public financing of elections. It’s become increasingly clear that financial dependencies make it almost impossible to make good policy. There were probably two dozen Republican Senators who would have opposed this provision openly if they didn’t have to rely solely on corporate funds for elections. In truth, this provision never should have been proposed in the first place, let alone have a bitter fight waged to block it. But the financing for elections creates awful incentives.