Dead Laws and the Empty Theater of Power

A frontal critique of Uruguay’s Parliament, legislative inflation, institutional simulation, and the risk of lawmaking without thought in the age of artificial intelligence.

DEAD LAWS AND THE INANITY OF THE PALACE
Chronicle of an Institutional Hoax
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

Parliament has become a hornet’s nest that does not even disturb, with its litany, a sleeping people.
The conviction that anyone is fit for any position has turned the Legislative Branch into something “national and popular”; exposing to the world a tragicomedy with unpresentable actors, absolutely removed from the interests of the street, who, once elected, propose listening to the people in order to build a plan tailored to them.
Uruguay suffers from a legal pathology that the political class strives to hide under the carpet of rhetoric: legislative hypertrophy with zero compliance.
We live in a country that boasts of its “respect for institutions”, while its National Registry of Laws has become a cemetery of varied intentions and sterile texts.
It is an open secret, but no less scandalous for that: thousands of laws in force are, in practice, nonexistent.
As early as 2011, from the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies, Lacalle Pou commissioned a diagnosis of this normative contamination, yielding a terrifying figure: almost half of our legal order is inapplicable.
What was the left’s response?
Silence and paralysis.
The party system opposed declaring that legislative clinical death.
They prefer the lie of a law in force that is not obeyed to the honesty of a necessary repeal; that is the very definition of institutional decadence.
The Aristocracy of Ignorance and the “Professional Legislator”
The problem begins in the very genesis of the legislative candidate.
We are witnessing a grotesque paradox: on the one hand, a supposed “professionalization” of those who perpetuate themselves eternally in their seats, believing that seniority is synonymous with suitability.
They are mistaken.
They have not become better legislators; they have become experts in the art of corporate survival.
They have turned the Palace into a private club of privileges and trips, completely disconnected from elementary legal technique, aborting what the Constitution commands: to defend the general interest.
And to disguise that emptiness, they resort to the idiocy of useless rituals.
They summon ministers to the chamber periodically, not to seek the truth or demand accountability, but to comply with a choreography of hollow gestures that do not change the citizen’s reality one bit.
The “summons to the chamber” has been degraded: it is no longer an instrument of oversight, it is the perfect excuse for the legislator to escape from home and from real obligations long enough for a little mischief, to be seen on television; a media performance without substance.
It is the theater of the absurd financed by the taxpayer.
The renewal of absent brains
Every five years, the system “oxygenates” itself with 75% new faces who arrive with extremely limited training, no legislative technique, but with a master’s degree in militancy in pursuit of the utopian promise.
They are the unknown nominees of the day, with no training whatsoever for the task, but who vote or remain silent, in pure gatopardismo: they renew themselves to ensure that nothing changes.
They promise to serve everyone’s interests when, in reality, their arm is “in a cast”; they come only to serve as a cog in their political corporation.
It is a cycle of planned betrayal: they know, before taking their seat, that they will not fulfill what they promised, because their loyalty is not to the Constitution, but to the “apparatus” that allowed them to escape irrelevance, obtaining resources to seat them in their office, impose a secretary on them, and add flatterers.
The aggravation in the age of AI: Toward the Parliament of Automatons
This moral and technical degradation reaches a dangerous abyss with the irruption of Artificial Intelligence.
We are orphaned of critical capacity and technological knowledge.
The contemporary legislator, who can barely stammer concepts from the nineteenth century, now finds himself before a tool he does not understand and that exposes him in his emptiness.
If we once had parliamentarians who understood the technical architecture of that simpler State, today we have a generation whose only training is the slogan and loyalty to the owner of its political corporation.
We will see —we are already seeing— laws drafted on the basis of plans designed by algorithms or marketing advisers, voted by legislators who do not read them and who would not know how to distinguish a general principle of law from a carnival regulation.
It is the absolute capitulation of human intelligence before digital bureaucracy!
While the world discusses agentic governance and algorithmic transparency, our parliamentarians remain entangled in petty politicking, incapable of legislating rigorously about the future because they have not finished understanding the past.
The decadence of the division of powers is total: parliamentary initiative has disappeared.
We have a Parliament that is a smoke factory, populated by figures who have replaced the study of Law with the aesthetics of grotesque image and the greed of clinging to office.
If we are not capable of cleaning up the trail of dead laws that suffocates us, it is because the system prefers the darkness of confusion to the order of freedom.
It confuses controlling the Executive with the farce of requesting investigative committees, or summoning ministers to the chamber without ethical, moral, or political consequence, which, except for journalists, is olympically ignored.
The final version of a carnival troupe with the liturgy of the Legislative Palace stage; also competing to spend obscenely, while poverty knocks at the door.
It is the end of Law as a guarantee and the beginning of the norm as simulation in the service of a caste that has renounced thinking!

Dead laws.
Empty control.
AI without judgment.

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