Slavery was a controversy from the beginning that finally bubbled over into the Civil War. It was not, as this question seems to imply, a near universally approved of practice where a few just didn't happen to need slaves.
That doesn't justify allowing it for almost a century. The US was comparable to the rest of the West, in this regard. The final abolition of slavery in Britain wasn't until 1833.
I think what gets most people is the double standard.
IP should either exist for everyone (which would cripple LLM providers) or no one, in which case the Pirate Bay and shadow libraries should be fully open.
I think it's been pretty well established that most legislators do not take the time to understand the details of bills prior to voting.
Moreover, these articles refer to an attempt to question how grant money already given (and presumably spent) was used.
Scrutiny is an inherent part of the powers of the purse. I.e. "we gave you $100 million to provide disaster relief, economic development in our sphere of influence, etc - what did you do with it?"
It's fair to want to retain the spending being questioned, but Congress is explicitly responsible for this function.
Congress does not, by and large, get down to that level. They are typically approving a line time that encompasses a form of lump sum (i.e. "$100 million to NSF across these categories").
Defense spending would typically be a gruesome bidding process.
But either way, your proposal must at some point speak to something a generalist would understand. And that is how it should be - anything else is taxation without representation.
Deep expertise is not a blank check for funding. There is only so much money to go around and at some point you have to articulate your value to those paying for it (in this case, the tax payers and their representatives).
Yes, this means a high level summary generally focused on ends rather than the gory details of the means.
An expert acting in good faith should be able to provide this or, in the spirit of the Feynman technique, I would argue they aren't much of an expert at all.
I was discussing this recently and I compared it to the Lord of the Rings. Both authors are writing novels in complex constructed worlds. Where they strongly differ is how they handle this. Tolkien mixes in a lot of explanation. The history of the Ring is told twice, once in Hobbiton and once in Rivendell and both times we receive the background information as explained to an audience surrogate character (Frodo).
Herbert goes the opposite way. He simply starts using terminology and referencing entities and histories as though you already know them. You pick it up by osmosis (and newer editions of the book, like the one I read, have a large glossary in the back to simplify matters), but never really get a thorough explanation of the world we are in. I think this is one of the reasons that the Dune Encyclopedia was so popular early on.
It's telling that Tolkien never really worked on the Middle Earth guidebooks, but Herbert did.
That doesn't justify allowing it for almost a century. The US was comparable to the rest of the West, in this regard. The final abolition of slavery in Britain wasn't until 1833.