That was a House vote. They’re in the Senate.

They’ve built conspiracies about child predators up to the point where it’s a foundational principle of the movement for many. They make movies about pedophile hunters and spread conspiracies that inspire people break into pizza stores with rifles. Maybe this is a coordinated threat to Trump to get him to bend on tariffs and deportations, maybe they just didn’t realize the themes they were using to rile them up actually stuck and wasn’t something they were going to reverse course on when it became politically inconvenient.

I don’t think it was to protect Trump. I think it was still the normal sort of selfish legal maximization. The story is that he couldn’t answer about his times being with both Trump and young girls without incriminating himself, which implies that when they were both together with young girls, something illegal happened.

The answer really should have been “fuck the consequences” from the start. It wasn’t justified before because there could be diplomatic and economic fallout, but we’re now in a political environment where the previous protectors of the status quo are willing to push toward that result and the lie at the core of a lot of MAGA is bucking their leadership to push in the same direction, so even if they haven’t both become better people en masse, they might get there anyway.

If they (the whole Republican caucus) supported him, they could have stayed open and voted it down. Nothing that’s happened has advanced their position. The committee vote wasn’t improved by Trump and Johnson becoming weaker. You’re too deep in the grand conspiracy theory to actually capitalize on changes in the political landscape. In your eyes, every development at every point in time is just another example of the enemy winning, so whatever happens must be what they want and it must be moving you further from your goals. But there’s no winning with that mindset. You’ll never see when there is an opportunity to rally workers to contact representatives in a newly chaotic political environment where they’re off balance because the previous status quo of blind loyalty to leadership is in doubt.

They’re not your friends and the game isn’t won, none of this is a development that means we can all just sit back and wait for success, but being at maximum doom all the time means you’re not prepared to take advantage of their weakness.

It’s derailed their propaganda machine. No one thinks Trump’s going to be arrested in the White House, but this is the first issue that’s put a wedge between Trump and Congress (and where it hasn’t between Congress and their base). As long as this runs, Trump isn’t the golden leader of the unified conservative team and individual reps have to fear whether loyalty means they’ll lose their job. Which then empowers local campaigns to block bills.

If you think a House committee passing a bill out to the shut down House (not even an actual full House vote) was going to trigger something if only people weren’t distracted by scandals, you’re delusional. The media aren’t riding Epstein to stealth a fucking Education and Workforce committee vote.

You think this is a distraction? The most damaging scandal for the billionaires’ president is actually a secret plot so we should just ignore it and focus on an unspecified not-damaging story?

These memes about media manipulation by mastermind powers puppetting everything often just seem like an excuse for perpetual inaction. It’s the lefty version of the liberal “keeping our powder dry”, where no current conflict is ever worth engaging in because somehow action is always playing into the opponents’ hands and the savvy move is either inaction or refocusing on something else without traction.

The only way the United States can maintain its core function of managing immigration is to have private prisons in New Jersey?

Yeah, anything MTG puts forward that isn’t already supported by Republicans is likely pointless nuttery (the supported stuff is dangerous nuttery). But more generally, these people all know when a bill is going to be 50/50 and when it’s going to get 400 no votes.

That’s not to say representatives never should be judged for their votes on doomed bills, but their vote should be in the context of it just being a statement itself, and with MTG writing the amendment, the statement is a muddled mess.

No she isn’t. That vote means she does not want to support the totality of the messaging amendment, which includes saying offensive weapons are fine, the priority is America First, and that an antisemite should be lead writer on bills on Israel. You guys are acting like this was a real bill that just needed political support to pass and not voting for the Jewish Space Lasers lady’s bill just supercedes every actually meaningful public statement on the issue she’s made.

Executive orders don’t apply to anything beyond the executive. These spineless organizations just preemptively deferring to the whims of a tyrant don’t deserve to represent the United States.

Those good people theoretically have control of their own local security forces and support from their local community. They need to be willing to start using them to contain unlawful actions by the feds. Require license plates on all vehicles, ban masks during arrests, create local regulations about inspections of all buildings housing detainees. Federal agents can be arrested, and even if they’re released later, that’s still disrupting the free for all they have now.

And even a little support from local authorities can multiply the abilities of individual citizens to resist. If police will protect protesters rather than run crowd control against them, or the city drops some concrete road barriers at a detention facility out of code, then the feds don’t have the equipment and manpower to deal with a crowd.

They’re all stuck playing by the old systems while the administration doesn’t give a fuck.

I think they need to start thinking in terms of power politics rather than lawsuits. The Supreme Court isn’t going to save them. Start instituting local laws and regulations that make the ICE bullshit difficult. Install allies in the local and state police forces so you can believe your laws will be followed by them.

Someone with power is going to have to say ‘no’ and back it up, not call a point of order and ask the court to scold them officially.

I don’t remember it being bad before lemmygrad got defederated from most instances. Plain ml used to just be the demonstration instance while lemmygrad was the ideological one. But once they got blocked from a lot of the Lemmyverse more and more .ml accounts are being associated with weird tankie stuff.

She’s also specifically antisemitic. The real kind, not the AIPAC definition.

Sure, but this bill was never actually going to do that. If this was an actual bill that could be passed, fine it doesn’t have to be perfect to be worthwhile and it doesn’t matter who introduced it. But this wasn’t that. It was purely a statement bill, and that statement is colored by who wrote it.

The only point to using military bases to house detainees is to stealth enroll warfighters into guard duty. It’s not like coopting a prison where there’s already structures and facilities useful for detainment. There’s going to be protests at the base entrance that will likely block it, then what are the guards going to do? What tools are they going to use against massed American citizens to keep it secure and clear?

That’s the company line, but they’re finding big pieces in fields in Canada.

We have black widows. But the real curse a Hawaii resident would send to someone is the giant centipede. They’re mean and painful. Both of those species are introduced though.

Hawaii didn’t vote for this.