GOP introduces bill that would send anyone convicted of unlawful activity on a campus since Oct. 7th, 2023 to Gaza.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15286301
"A group of Republican lawmakers introduced a bill on Wednesday which would send “any person convicted of unlawful activity” at a college or university, to do community service in Gaza for six months."
"Strangely, the bill appears to refer to any “unlawful activity on the campus of an institution of higher education beginning on and after October 7, 2023” but does not specifically mention the ongoing student protests, rendering it stupidly broad."
"Ogles spoke with Fox News about the bill, saying that, “If you support a terrorist organization, and you participate in unlawful activity on campuses, you should get a taste of your own medicine. I am going to bet that these pro-Hamas supporters wouldn’t last a day, but let’s give them the opportunity.”
Most people don't last long in death camps.
They're basically admitting it's a death camp.
More wood for the fire, please
No, they wouldn't last a day, neither would any other civilian there. That's the problem, good job proving their point.
Imagine claiming to support freedom while also supporting anything even remotely as ghoulish as this.
Remember, we’re paying them to draft this legislation.
Check the election calendar for your state and vote them out!
https://ballotpedia.org/Elections_by_state_and_year
That's the worst part. This has no chance of passing, this is just bad theater. Bad theater that you and I are funding.
Like a community funded production of Dance of the Vampires.
If I did my job this poorly I would be fired. Two tiers.
Remember folks, a protest vote against Biden just puts us one step closer to fuckery like this actually happening.
And a vote for Biden does nothing to change it since Biden is already Gestapo ing the students.
We live in a 2-Party system. Let me guess: You already vote, donate, and volunteer to abolish it, and are leading a grassroots effort for voting reform.... Right!?
You only live in 2 party system because you keep screaming that you live in a 2 party system.
Keep endorsing your own oppression. The perfect slave.
No, we have a 2 party system because the existing law is inherently biased against 3rd parties thanks to our use of the electoral college/FPTP, lobbying, and lack of election finance regulation/enforcement.
It is a built in feature to our current laws.
Maybe learn how the world works. It could help you in life, because clearly, you're not even close to reality .
I don't know, man. I used to vote nothing but third party, yet here we are. So I kinda feel like the third party voters are the ones who keep doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes. Ross Perot was a character, though. But of course he still lost anyway and my vote did fuck all. Until Fascism is back out of fashion, I'm going to vote straight ticket dem. Eliminate the existential threat and then we can worry about the little stuff.
I can relate. I voted for Nader when Bush stole the election in 2000. I spent that entire term wondering how much better Gore would’ve handled 9/11 response and retaliation. It was the last time I let my vote go uncounted.
Being registered as Independent or Green Party is practically disenfranchisement. Now I periodically change my registration from Democrat to Republican, depending on which primaries I’m more interested in participating in.
Genocide, Climate catastrophe, Internment Camps at the Border, Police and state racism... All the little stuff.
Instead of holding the Dems accountable and offering them to win you back by actually adressing issues, you give them a free pass not to adress any issue you care about. They care about losing power. They don't care about what you want. Threatening to take away their power is the only thing that makes them listen to you.
None of that shit matters if we go the route of the Nazis. Because we will do so much worse.
Putting Trump in charge doesn't hold Democrats accountable. It would move them further to the right, which is the exact opposite of you want. They don't care about disinterested non-voters, they only care about courting those that do show up to vote.
Change needs to come from within. Organize within the DNC. Primary their candidates. That's how you get people like AOC elected. Once the primaries are over, there's no shot at moving them further left.
There is still 5 months until the election. 5 months in which the current DNC leaders can be pressured to change course.
Don't buy their bullshit that you have no power over them. I fully agree with you to organize though. Make your voices heard with them, but tell them fair and square that there is no vote for genocide supporters.
There's no incentive for them to change course now. That ship has sailed. They know the alternative is Trump and that's objectively worse.
During primaries, you have power. There they can be voted out without Trump's spectre looming over the election.
If people say: "Stop the genocide, or we will not vote you" there is plenty of incentive to change course now. But people arguing the opposite, claiming it is pointless and that the people have no power are diminishing the power of the people. This is why the DNC is pushing this narrative so heavily. They want you to be demotivated and feeling powerless. It is the same strategy like with the oil companies and climate change.
As a gay man, let me make it clear: letting non-Democrats get into power does not do anything to hurt the politicians and does everything to empower those who would have me and people like me in the LGBTQ+ community dead. A vote that puts Trump in power - whether directly or indirectly - is a vote for the continued genocide of American minorities.
Are the Democrats not politicians then? Are they not seeking power then? Also what makes you believe that now they support a genocide against brown people and in four years they wouldn't support killing LGBT+ ?
247 years.
A two party system is the natural result of the American voting system. A first past the post voting system will always eventually lead to a two party system. If you want to avoid that eventuality, you need to use a different voting system.
Notable that the founders didn’t think there would be parties. That was naive and they would have gone about it differently if they knew better.
lol you should work to change the world. That starts with understanding how it works
So, no. You do nothing to improve the world and are just angrily yelling into the void... Thanks, adult toddler.
A child's take on game theory.
I wonder what you would say after looking up how many third party candidates successfully gained enough EC votes to be president?
Can’t win an argument with a fucktard.
Biden still runs internment camps at the border. Biden builds the wall that Trump was ridiculed for by the Dem supporters. Guantanamo is still open...
You play this game one round at a time. They play this game ten rounds ahead. And that is why you lose every round, thinking you had won it.
Thanks for the thoughts, bothsideser.
Way to not engage with the points i made. Scared of not having any arguments?
It is boring correcting, over and over, things which redcaps have deliberately distorted.
"Why did Biden obey the law with money that was already allocated to the border wall prior to his administration? Both sides."
"Why did Obama only release like 200 Gitmo prisoners instead of all? Shouldn't he have put the remaining 50 directly into US cities so he could close it all the way? Both sides."
Yawn.
Engels said, in a letter to Marx, the US "[c]onstitution…which makes it appear as though every vote were lost that is cast for a candidate not put up by one of the two governing parties." (Engels to Frederick Adolph Sorge, December 2, 1893, in Marx and Engels on the United States (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979), p. 333.)
We need to work to change things, but this is not new, and you are not smart for thinking that you have moved past it. Sure, if everyone agreed to vote for a single third party, it could happen. That's not going to happen though, at least for the president. Even people voting third party can't really agree on which one, diluting votes even further. Third party may work for some local elections, but not the president. Not yet at least.
From the table on Wikipedia, the record by percentage of EC votes is 24% (72/303) in 1860. By a former VP, not a Jill Stein.
Splitting the vote in PA that year made Lincoln's win a certainty. Nice that a spoiler candidate worked against the pro-slavery regressives of the era.
Their party split when the national convention didn't agree they'd abide by the SCOTUS ruling on States' Rights, LOL, absolute shitheads. And then they also did an insurrection.
And by repeating this mantra you protect the system and the systems parties against change. From a mass psychological point this is brilliant and the same play that the Sovjet Union and other regimes played and play. Break peoples spirit so they defend their own opression as they cannot envision anything outside of it.
I propose a law that says any rep introducing or supporting performative, moronic legislation that wastes my tax dollars gets to have their balls kicked off. Who’s with me?
Now hold on just a minute there. They can have their balls or ovaries kicked off. Inclusivity, y'know.
For sure but in this instance the assholes in question are male. In the name of inclusivity, I'm happy to discuss alternatives for women as I'm not sure ovaries can be kicked off.
Just wait til MTG and BoBo get to the party.
Anything's possible, with enough enthusiasm!
I have a compromise- male, female or nonbinary, we just bash them in the kneecaps with a tire iron.
Hmmm I like the idea, but we want to stop them from breeding.
Uranium underpants could do wonders there
Guillotine too.
All of them are old. It's too late for that.
Unfortunately not for the ones still able to make swimmers.
I propose we kick off clits n dicks instead.
If this passes, you do have to have your balls kicked off, though
I disagree. In the long term, IchNichtenLichten's proposal would save so much time and money - through the mere threat of a ball kicking - that it would fail to meet its own second criteria.
"Don't like the death camps? Well, we'll send you to death camps and see how you like them then!"
The concept already seemed like something from a Futurama episode, and this fake quote cements it
Why wouldn't they last a day in Gaza, Andy?
Why wouldn't they?
Right like that's kind of the entire point of these solidarity encampments; it's a statement that we should not be subjecting humans to those conditions
I mean, they probably know there's no chance in hell of that bill gaining traction let alone passing (for so many reasons ‡). It's all performance / pandering to their base in an election year.
The scary takeaway should be that's what the Republican base wants to hear.
‡ The fact that you can't just "deport" a citizen to a random country is the least of the things logically wrong with this bill.
Can we get a bill started that says if you support any war, you have to be enlisted to fight on the front lines of it?
I stand by the fact that there would be way fewer warhawks if they had to put their money where there mouths are.
Cowardsw
Yeah, that one I could get behind.
100% of the population must vote to go to war or not.
Everyone is notified beforehand that a vote of Yes is also immediate enlistment into the military for the duration of said conflict.
No more shouting "hell yeah turn the middle east into a parking lot" from the comfort of your armchair or lifted pickup.
That would be great if we could get most governments to pass the same rule. If adversarial governments aren't restricted by the same rules then it tips the power balance in a way that favors foreign warhawks.
I feel like enough people would be willing to step up and defend their own country.
Defensive wars almost always have high approval ratings.
This is America though, we will end up tearing ourselves apart from the inside, no outside entity has the power to wage wars over an ocean to invade us.
We are naturally in one of the most defensible spots, with both mineral and arable resources
I'll 100% grab a rifle to help defend my neck of the woods, but no way in hell am I supporting an offensive war.
Never Again Volunteer Yourself, but in a defensive war it's no longer capitalism and the military industrial complex you're "defending", it's your neighbors.
It'd be nice if they stopped wasting money on things that they knew were unconstitutional though.
"Arooo, that may be so. But I know a place where the Constitution doesn't mean squat!"
I think we should always take these bills as serious attempts to accomplish what they say. Anything else gives them cover, like:
https://piped.video/watch?v=VYHGnsOwHvI
Next year they could pass this and the Supreme Court could approve it. Imagine still believing in guardrails...
Just wait until next year. I wonder if you're post will seem silly or prophetic.
As with any statement I make when I make fun of Republicans, I sincerely hope it turns out to be silly.
The left need to stop being scared of guns, stop voting for useless gun control measures that only restrict control in their own district and do nothing to reduce crime (meanwhile right wing districts allow you to buy an arsenal of nice ergonomic firearms that can allow even a morbidly obese diabetic to accurately shoot the dick off a fly, delivered to your front door like Amazon), start forming left wing LGBTQIA+ friendly militias and train to protect themselves.
We can do that, or hope the boot lickers and cops don't persecute us. Which is the same as sending hopes and prayers on Facebook.
How can anybody believe that more guns is the only possible solution for everything?
If your only tool is a hammer, every screw starts to look like a nail.
It’s another tool for the toolbox. How can being more prepared with a more diverse set of tools be bad for any situation? Right now the only tool seems to be posting outraged comments on the internet.
Ding ding ding. Authoritarian governments never disarm the right. The police have shown that they won't protect you, if they're not actively joining in on it.
We protect us.
Protest against genocide? Straight to genocide. Be against genocide? Believe it or not, straight to genocide.
So people who are anti-genocide should be genocided?
Gotta fight fire with fire
-Republicans, probably
So when do we get to start calling these guys nazis? Cause I'm pretty sure that calling to send dissenters to camps, where a concentrated ethnic group is actively having genocide committed against them, is some nazi shit.
You don't need permission.
I’ve been doing it since 2016
Sooooo... these geniuses are proposing to send people who are already (and justifiably) not very fond of Israel on an actual state-funded six month fact-finding mission to witness the horrors caused by Israel for themselves?
Better make sure they don't have smartphones on them... otherwise, they might just record enough Israeli war crimes to fill three TikToks.
No Mr. Bond, they expect them to die.
Not if they ban tiktok too ;)
What terrible, awful people these conservatives are.
I had to triple check this wasn't an onion article. This seems too stupid and horrible to be real.
And yet...
The real magic with the Onion is how they are able to satirize Repubs before the Repubs do the thing. The articles are no longer fiction, they are just early.
This is so old. "If you love communism so much, move to Russia" said every right wing asshole to the boomers when they were kids a half century ago. Yawn.
The new twist is it's now, "if you hate it so much, we'll move you there!".
What a great use of their time. Vote these chucklefucks out already.
Does that mean "any" person? So all police officers that broke the freedom of speech ammendment have to do 6 months of community service as well? And those nut jobs that attacked peaceful protest camps and clubbed students over the head?
Hopefully not... Israel has enough genocidal white supremacists.
Concussions can make you more conservative so of course head injury is a priority
This is a clown doing a performance. It's a bunch of hateful horseshit to feed the ever rabid base.
And yet, another clear as day example that this election is literally the fight against fascism.
Lemmy is full of bad faith arguments about both sides, genocide Joe, etc. Always trying to frame it away from the very obvious truth.
The obvious truth is, that the Dems can end this genocide, force Israel to hand over all its war criminals and establish a Palestinian state. and gain all the support for it. The fact that they rather want a genocide to continue shows you that they rather want Trump to win, than to not take AIPAC money.
And they successfully gaslighted the people into believing it is their fault, instead of the fault of the leaders that can end this genocide right fucking now.
Wait, will that include Matt Gaetz?
College. Not kindergarten.
Apparently, in the very clear minds of Republicans, if you got busted drinking at a college party at any point after Oct 7 2023, that's sUpPoRtInG hAmAs nOw and you deserve to be deported to Gaza.
...Guess RFK's not the only politician with brain worms
Wait, this isn’t the Onion?
It feels Kafkaesque. "Hello, I'm against genocide. Do I stand in line to be labeled a terrorist simp? Should I stand in the Nazi line? Just wondering what label I'll need to own."
Thanks for wasting even more of our tax dollars on these publicity stunts
I honestly thought this was the Onion. Strange timeline. Bring Harambe back.
Fucking hell, they are CARTOONISHLY evil.
Oh, fuck you, you posturing GOP crybabies. Also, do you clowns realize that by using a trip to Gaza as punishment, you’re acknowledging that the conditions are unfit for the citizens who live there, many of whom are innocent?
This is the problem. They have decided that they are guilty of being Palestinian, a crime worthy of death.
Such a serious and intelligent political party. Yes, let’s give them lots of money and let them run things.
Can we get an uno reverse on this?
Any federally elected politician who does not
schoolacknowledge the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and that that crisis is the direct result of actions taken by the Israeli government should also serve 6mo service in Gaza.E: a word
Not serve and not 6 months either.
Well dump their ass there, no questions asked, and we won't be back.
That is really messed up of the GOP.
Why don’t we introduce a bill that would send any politician convicted of being GOP to Russia for free labor?
This has to be satire.
Illegal on its face.
So, I think that this is just political showboating (though I don't approve of legislators doing this, normalizes it), but to take it more seriously....
My kneejerk reaction is that it'd be unconstitutional, but I'm not sure, upon further thought.
So, there are a couple isssues that I see.
Can you send an American citizen abroad as a form of punishment?
There's the question of whether this violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
So, exile is definitely unconstitutional. You can't simply kick an American citizen out of the US and keep them out, and there's case law supporting that. You can't take their citizenship away as punishment; that's an Eighth Amendment violation.
But...you can draft people to the military, and compel people to go abroad. Sentencing someone to six months of service is sort of like that. I don't know whether there's case law as to whether that can constitutionally be used as a punishment, however. And I don't know whether it's constitutional to compel someone to enter a non-US legal jurisdiction as a punishment, because I can imagine a lot of ways in which one could avoid constitutional restrictions if one could, as part of a sentence, just move someone out of the legal jurisdictions where those restrictions apply.
My guess is that this might be permissible, but I can't think of actual examples where something like this was done.
Ex post facto laws
The second is whether it amounts to an ex post facto law. Generally-speaking, you cannot make something retroactively-illegal, nor make the sentence more-severe.
I'm pretty confident that this would violate the ex post facto restriction, as it specifically applies to past actions as well as future. It might be possible to provide for making doing community service in Palestine as an alternative sentence for someone convicted of a crime that occurred in the past, to let someone convicted opt in to a new form of punishment rather than the one that existed at the time that they committed the crime. But this is a mandatory punishment being added. Note that this is specific to the portion making it retroactive. Generally, if a law is severable -- that is, the remainder of it can reasonably stand on its own -- part of it being invalid doesn't make the whole invalid. My guess is that the retroactive portion of such a law would fail the ex-post-facto restriction, but due to severability, it could still be applied to people who commit a crime moving forward, so would remain partially enforceable.
Safety
Gaza probably isn't all that safe, and some of the issue with being sent to Gaza might be physical risk. That might run afoul of the Eighth Amendment as well.
So, we do have the death penalty -- someone can explicitly be condemned to death. But aside from that, going from memory, there are some constitutional requirements for the conditions in which prisoners may be kept. You can't just say "you're going to prison for an N year sentence" and make the prison environment have a 50% mortality rate.
googles
Yeah, there's Eighth Amendment criteria on prison conditions:
https://www.ce9.uscourts.gov/jury-instructions/node/165
I'm not sure exactly the legal rationale there. It may just be that you cannot have the executive treat a sentence of prison as something akin to a death sentence, can't basically "upgrade" the severity of a law. It might be okay to do if the legislature's intent is for the sentence to be dangerous. Could be an issue or not.
Restriction on speech
The First Amendment generally does not let the government criminalize speech. It's possible to a very limited degree, but compared to virtually all other countries, the US Constitution has a very low tolerance for this.
So, I thought "okay, that's a sentence for a non-content-neutral speech restriction", so it'd violate the First Amendment. But...I'm not totally sure about that. Because in this case -- and I haven't looked at the bill text -- they aren't actually criminalizing anything new. The only association with content is the time, that there are currently protests on a particular topic happening. Like, if you were convicted for something unrelated to Israel-Palestine, it'd still apply (and in fact, the article authors complain about this). So I don't think that it raises First Amendment issues.
That being said, my guess is that there's some level of sufficiently-close association where linking a crime or punishment to speech even if the link isn't explicit probably does violate the content-neutral restriction. Like, you can't go out and come up with criteria that just happens to only punish the people involved in certain speech. But my guess is that this wouldn't reach that level, given how broad it is.
Overall
My guess is that the ex post facto portion would be struck down as unconstitutional. But I'm not at all sure that the remainder wouldn't stand, were we to hypothetically assume that it actually were passed and signed into law.
Assuming the US military is even deployed to Gaza, they generally don't want people pressed into service. The all-volunteer thing works pretty well for them. If anyone did get sentenced to this, the military would probably give them some shit duty stateside, or in Europe, or even just picking up trash in Gaza if Congress really forced it.
The requirement isn't that people serve in the military -- it's community service, not military service. I'm just using the military as an example of a situation where Congress can compel people to go abroad (albeit not as a punishment).
Performative nonsense. Even plenty of Republicans would vote against this.
Had to look at the link quite a few times to make sure I didn't eat the onion. These kinds of things are just getting more and more common
Can I introduce a bill to ship this republikkklown to Gaza?
How liberally fiscally irresponsible of them.
Just so people don't panic this is blatantly illegal at least for US citizens.
Exile then?
curious, where is this cross posted from?
It was originally posted in World News, but was (rightfully!) removed for being internal US news and not world news. I screwed up - I think when I read anything about Gaza I start thinking about how it relates to the international war at large. Clearly though this story doesn't belong there, and hopefully it fits here.
no worries, it was blacked out so I thought maybe it was some community I was banned from somehow. You’re good, thanks for sharing.
This is what you're voting for, people! Never forgive. Never forget. We cannot let this happen.