- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.org
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.org
- news@lemmy.world
Many of Trump’s proposals for his second term are surprisingly extreme, draconian, and weird, even for him. Here’s a running list of his most unhinged plans.
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Ok that escalated. Starts with usual giving himself powers stuff but ends up with Federal “freedom cities” and flying cars.
Freedom to do what, murder LGBTQ+, lefties, people of color, and so forth? Because that’s what I have to assume he means by “Freedom.”
Given the libertarian influences, I’d assume they’re supposed to be hyper-privatized free trade zones or special economic zones. That means low or no taxes, hardly any regulations, unhinged capitalism for everything.
It’s the same bullshit libertarians have been praising for decades now and that’s been tried and failed again and again. Remember that crypto cruise ship?
Probably freedom to just sit there empty. He wants to build them from scratch.
This sounds oddly familiar to other stories we’ve heard before.
Freedom to have every facet of your existence regulated to a homogenized set of conservative social values while also being totally free of any corporate oversight at all.
Not sure who wants to actually live there. Conservatives like two places: cities that exist because educated, largely liberal, people create jobs she money, or the country where they can leach off the cities to fund their infrastructure without any of the social costs that come with it.
Freedom cities sound like freedom fries.
I remember back after 9/11 and France called us on the bullshit… the state legislature voted to call them freedom fries in the capital cafeteria. (I was in highschool and lobbying for some environmental stuff. My former math teacher was our rep, so, we went to lunch and talked about things.)
In any case, those fries were not free, and they weren’t fried. (Orida frozen… stuffed in a microwave…)
Also? As a side note, the reason flying cars are not a thing is because nobody has found a way to make free energy yet- anything that flies has to expend energy to counter gravity- on airplanes, the wings push air down and it moves forward. In things that hover it’s either the rotors/fans/jet engines pushing air.
That expenditure just doesn’t exist on normal ground vehicles.
@FuglyDuck that’s so funny, I was literally telling people the freedom fries thing was real earlier today! Someone younger than us had thought it was just a myth or satire.
(Over here - sorry not sure how to link it via your instance but you get the picture).
Yeah. I remember being incredulous when I saw the menu, me and the other highschool kid. The Rep explained that they actually passed a bill for that to be renamed; in this tone of voice dripping with sarcasm. I’m not sure if it happened federally or in other states, but it happened here- it only applied to the state capital cafeterias, though.
Wikipedia seems to think it happened in many places. I don’t think people realize how bizarre some of that stuff was.
Yeah.
It was bizarre. The US lost it’s damn mind and went full on crazy. I remember asking what Iraq did and getting called a traitor. (They were mostly Saudis? And Saudis funded?)
I also remember bejng asked why I wasn’t joining up… like, dude, let me graduate highschool first…
Knowing now that Bin-Laden had been in Pakistan and we kinda knew almost where for a long time really makes the Iraq invasion so much worse.
I went and protested it in Copley Square the night before we invaded Iraq. I’m glad I did it, but it seemed to do fuck all. Possibly lead to Barack Obama’s presidency, which I’m happy about, but that in turn may have lead Trump’s as well.
I can’t help wonder how different the world would have been with Gore as president. Even social media may have been regulated differently with a moderately (or even slightly) tech savvy administration, though that’s probably a stretch.
Edit: Wft autocorrect; Batak Obamass? Really?
I can’t help wonder how different the world would have been with Gore as president. Even social media may have been regulated differently with a moderately (or even slightly) tech savvy administration, though that’s probably a stretch.
I can’t even imagine. I think 9/11 would have still happened… I don’t think they’d have caught it; and I don’t think we’d have just… not responded.
I can’t help wonder how different the world would have been with Gore as president. Even social media may have been regulated differently with a moderately (or even slightly) tech savvy administration, though that’s probably a stretch.
It’s not a stretch. The antitrust lawsuits brought by nine states and the Justice Department against Microsoft was made to simply go away under the Bush administration. Our technology would probably look very different today without Microsoft’s monopoly, and without that who knows what the rest of the map would look like?
@nilloc I went and protested too, there was a big march in New Zealand and we stayed out of the “coalition of the willing” who invaded. We were lucky we had a very strong centre-left leader at the time.
The Gore alternate timeline is interesting. Would we have had less pollution by now?
Yikes. The pressure must have been really intense. I’m in NZ and I lost a bunch of US internet friends (some I’d met irl) for not being enthusiastic about attacking Afghanistan.
In the immediate family, it wasn’t too terrible. It was a certain uncle, that I never speak to any more thinking I should be signing up. (he’s as deep into MAGA world as anyone, the only reason he wasn’t at Jan 6 was he’s too broke to go.)
Most everyone else kind of would just… not talk about it? By the time i did graduate, all the fervor wore off into a kind of … refusal to accept we’d been lied to? I dunno weird times.
I will say this. It definitely colors my understanding of what’s going on with Palestine. Seems to be that history is rhyming again.
Wikipedia is correct. I was 34 on 9/11. There was so much of this crazy bs. The freedom fries thing was rampant. I lived a few blocks from a mosque, and sadly there were several threats, picketers and vandalism for several years.
just checked with one of my teenagers, confirmed they didn’t know freedom fries. which makes sense of course, but i took it for granted they must have heard - it was such a bizarre thing to me at the time!
In NZ we have these things called Afghans (an iced biscuit/cookie with cocoa and coconut) and we would joke that if the US had them they’d have to rename them.
Trump is already disqualified from holding any office, let alone that of the President, under section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4591133
Page 17:
V. The persons who framed Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment regarded the President of the United States as an officer of the United States
The President of the United States was among the officials who took the oath to the Constitution that under Section Three triggered disqualification for participating in an insurrection. As noted in the previous section, the persons responsible for the Fourteenth Amendment sought to bar from present and future office all persons who betrayed their constitutional oath. “All of us understanding the meaning of the third section,” Senator John Sherman of Ohio stated, “those men who have once taken an oath of office to support the Constitution of the United States and have Fourteenth Amendment distinguished between the presidential oath mandated by Article II and violated that oath in spirit by taking up arms against the Government of the United States are to be deprived for a time at least of holding office.” No member of the Congress that drafted the the oath of office for other federal and state officers mandated by Article VI. Both were oaths to support the Constitution. Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky saw no legal difference between the constitutional requirement that “all officers, both Federal and State, should take an oath to support” the Constitution and the constitutional requirement that the president “take an oath, to the best of his ability to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin declared that Congress need not pass laws requiring presidents to swear to support the Constitution because that “oath is specified in the constitution.”
In fact, the exact question of whether the disqualification from public office covered the Presidency came up at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was being drafted: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/lsb/lsb10569
Specifically:
One scholar notes that the drafting history of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment suggests that the office of the President is covered:
During the debate on Section Three, one Senator asked why ex-Confederates “may be elected President or Vice President of the United States, and why did you all omit to exclude them? I do not understand them to be excluded from the privilege of holding the two highest offices in the gift of the nation.” Another Senator replied that the lack of specific language on the Presidency and Vice- Presidency was irrelevant: “Let me call the Senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.’”
I’ll highlight that last bit again:
Another Senator replied that the lack of specific language on the Presidency and Vice- Presidency was irrelevant: “Let me call the Senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.’”
That is from this paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3748639
Some people seem to have a lot of trouble with figuring out what “or” means, in a list of things.
That doesn’t EXPLICITLY say they can’t be President. - a Judge in Colorado who probably would also rule the framers PROBABLY meant AR15s in the Second Amendment despite it not being explicitly said.
Yes, actually, that’s exactly what it means. He broke his oath of office. He is not fit to hold any public office including that of the President, and he is barred from holding office by the Constitution of the United States. Period dot, and of story.
The courts, so far, don’t agree. Unfortunately.
Incorrect. The judge in Colorado ruled he broke his oath of office and engaged in an insurrection, which is what makes the ruling so coo-coo bananapants.
There are people in powerful positions who may try to interpret this as favorably to Trump as possible to let him off the hook for it, holding as much integrity for themselves as they can while still achieving the goal. Are you sure it will hold up? I’m not, unfortunately.
Not with the conservative shills on this Supreme Court, no. Not when it really counts. This is the product of several generations of conservative activism to stack the courts with partisan judges for conservative causes.
I can’t really find fault with the ruling. The amendment specifically calls out very important positions like senators and representatives, and even electors for POTUS…but they just plumb forgot the even more important position of POTUS? It’s really hard to believe.
I don’t know why they would exclude the POTUS, and few want trump off the ballot more than me, but the argument that the POTUS is not included is very reasonable.
The text literally says “any office”. Not sure what you’re talking about here.
So why do you think they left POTUS out of the list when they listed out other important positions? Why not just say “any office” is that’s all inclusive?
Read the excerpt, then go read the rest of the paper at the link. The context of why is in the other sections, before and after 5 which I quoted above.
I read the excerpt, and it makes no mention of why they explicitly call out senators but not the post, and vaguely referencing a 55 page paper just leads me to believe you have no explanation.
If this is not the case, could you put the argument in your own words?
Oh, by all means. You see the President has to take an oath of office to defend the Constitution, and the Framers thought that nobody in their right minds could be stupid enough to think that the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t apply to the Office of the President, or the person holding that Office, because the Fourteenth Amendment applies to whether people who break their Oaths of Public Office get to hold Public Office. To wit, they do not. Not unless a quorum of the sitting government says they can with a vote to that effect, anyway.
As such, it was obvious to the Framers that this would also bar someone from the Presidency. As it says in the context I asked you to read.
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It’s fine if you feel that way personally, but it doesn’t matter; that’s not part of the requirements for triggering Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Read the text.
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I agree that “we all know he did it” is a terrible reason to take procedural action of any kind, but again: your personal feelings don’t change the fact that the text doesn’t lay out any way to actually execute Section 3, it only states the requirements for triggering it. Go ahead and quote those requirements, verbatim and in full. I’ll wait; you will find they don’t say anything about being convicted of anything.
I’m not saying that it wouldn’t set a dangerous precedent, only that the reasons given for throwing out these cases are so flawed they’re not even specious, they’re just plain wrong.
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Maybe I’m not articulating MY point well enough. If someone breaks their oath of office (and by the way that has indeed now been found to be a fact in a Court of Law), they cannot be trusted to keep their oath of office. This is not my opinion, this is written into the Constitution of our country.
The ruling in Court is necessary, of course, for the reasons you have given. But Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment does not require it. The text of the Amendment says nothing about convictions. That is what I am saying. If you think it does, show me the text. If you can’t quote me the text that says a conviction is required, then you still haven’t understood my point.
Edit: bolded the part where I acknowledge what you are saying is correct, because that is important text you should pay attention to.
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