Comment by tomhow

Aha, OK. I see what's going on. For reasons to do with a yak-shaving process that was required for our HN moderation software to work, I use Chromium, and it seems that requests from Chromium user-agents are blocked on that server, perhaps due to a presumption that they're bots.

But yes, as tptacek points out, proposed legislation is off-topic here, unless it's effectively certain it will pass.