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.”
Such a serious and intelligent political party. Yes, let’s give them lots of money and let them run things.
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.
You only live in 2 party system because you keep screaming that you live in a 2 party system.
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 .
Man who says we need to continue doing what has been done for the last 100 years claims this time it’s gonna be different.
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 practical disenfranchisement. Now I periodically change my registration from Democrat to Republican, depending on which primaries I’m more interested in participating in.
and then we can worry about the little stuff.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Sure, if everyone agreed to vote for a single third party, it could happen. That’s not going to happen though
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.
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.
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.
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. However, 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.
Protest against genocide? Straight to genocide. Be against genocide? Believe it or not, straight to genocide.
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!”.
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.
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?
Concussions can make you more conservative so of course head injury is a priority
So all police officers that broke the freedom of speech ammendment have to do 6 months of community service as well?
Hopefully not… Israel has enough genocidal white supremacists.
So people who are anti-genocide should be genocided?
Gotta fight fire with fire
-Republicans, probably
Performative nonsense. Even plenty of Republicans would vote against this.
Why don’t we introduce a bill that would send any politician convicted of being GOP to Russia for free labor?
Exile then?
I honestly thought this was the Onion. Strange timeline. Bring Harambe back.
This has to be satire.
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
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
