It‘s very simple. The EU was originally a market union, which every member state profited from. For some reason, the EU has been adopting more and more powers completely unrelated to international trade, and it shows because you will never get 27 different nations to agree on controversial issues.

And this is why I don't think that the ability for a few states to group together and ignore the EU's rulings is an automatically bad thing. States know that this protects them from becoming the US and losing most of their sovereignty.

Hungary and Poland both joined when the EU was in its current form - they knew what they were getting into. It's not liked they joined the EC or ECSC and just got pulled along for the ride into the EU's current state.

Generally these sorts of organizational problems are resolved by having different thresholds of consensus required for adopting different kinds of policies. Majority, super-majority... Consensus minus one, on the other hand, is another way of saying 'Impossible'.

> Consensus minus one, on the other hand, is another way of saying 'Impossible'.

No it isn't. Some 30% of decisions are made unanimously in scotus, and this is hardly an outlier. Requiring unanimous consent makes things way slower, yes, but it doesn't prevent them. Not all organizational changes need to be controversial. Several conservative programming languages did well by requiring unanimity in initial years - only adding what all could agree was good. It only requires those members to exercise good judgement.

Seems to me that the environmental cost of mining is certainly related to international trade

And selling fresh milk to your neighbor is related to 'interstate commerce', and regulated by the federal government.

Once you start looking for tenuous connections, every human activity can be subsumed under trade. It's a wildcard.

It depends on what you think the design should have been. Some might look on and say that the ability for states to group together and not permit what they view as an overbearing ruling as a feature. Others would call it dissent.

On the other hand, EU states retain their national sovereignty, and could leave the EU if they disagreed with the EU that deeply, which the UK has currently done. The ability for states to group together and buck rulings, in a sense, makes it less likely for states to leave the union entirely. This ability may also have helped convince states to join the EU in the first place.