Republicans in the House gave “recon” tours to constituents.
Ayanna Pressley’s office had all of its panic buttons ripped out.
AOC did an Instagram livestream describing her close call and saying she thought she was going to die. She would not shelter in place with Republican colleagues because she thought some of them might also be out to get her.
House Republicans are upset that metal detectors were installed outside the chamber and some refused to go through them.
The fallout from this will take years to sort through.
Nicole
How about a return of the Fairness Doctrine, so that FOX News has to devote an equal amount of time to telling us Republicans aren’t human and that our sole desire in life should be to pwn them?
Ugh. These people. I know McConnell is making little meepy noises that maybe he’s cool with Trump going, but I really think the Dems should demand Cruz’s and Hawley’s resignations, too.
Chetan Murthy
We need a name for the events of 1/6 that causes Americans to buy into the patriotic side of things. I think “American Epiphany” is such a name. It needs to be accurate, be positive in outlook, and I guess, it doesn’t help if it captures a little of the religious angle, “christian nation” that we are, and all. And it isn’t snarky or passive-aggressive, so maybe will be acceptable to more people.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone 😊😊😊
Happy Impeachment Day 👊
dmsilev
Let’s take a page from one of the fathers of today’s GOP:
“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Republican Party?”
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Nicole
@rikyrah: Good morning! Happy SECOND IMPEACHMENT DAY OH LOOK WHO’S THE ONLY LOSER TO GET IMPEACHED TWICE?
trnc
I don’t suppose there’s a chance that anyone convicted of sedition loses their citizenship? If not, someone should introduce that law. Even better if we can figure out how to deport, but I’m sure no one else wants them.
WereBear
@rikyrah: Happy happy joy joy!
Chetan Murthy
@trnc: It’s a satisfying idea, but we wouldn’t want to spread it thru the world: there are already enough stateless people, after all. And why should we foist our problems on others? We need to take care of ’em ourselves, eh? I’m happy with them losing their necks, and retaining their citizenship.
BlueGuitarist
@Nicole: lost popular vote twice and impeached twice !!
Bruce K in ATH-GR
I’m against stripping citizenship, because that’s a cudgel that can be used by the sort of bastards who say that only citizens have a right to stuff like habeas corpus and jury trials. (Some things aren’t rights held by citizens, but obligations the government owes to everyone, citizen or no.)
I’d go further and say that they shouldn’t even be stripped of the right to vote – if only because I think all US citizens should have and retain the right to vote in all elections from their 18th birthday to the day they die, without exception.
Now whether they should be scheduled for a shot in Terre Haute, that’s another discussion.
trnc
@Chetan Murthy: Fair enough as far as deportation goes, but I have no concerns about turning someone into a stateless person as a direct result of a crime they committed. I’m all for most felons getting their right to vote restored. The insurrectionists should not.
Gin & Tonic
@trnc: I really don’t think we want the US to become one of those countries that can revoke citizenship, especially of people who were born here.
Subsole
@trnc:
The only countries that want them are countries eager to hurt us. Some are ex-mil, and not just e-1s.
One Snowden is enough.
Fuck ’em, they can stay right here and watch as we pull their proud towers down brick by brick.
I’m totally cool with stripping their vote, though.
Chetan Murthy
@trnc: As you can tell, I have no love for these miserable wretches. But I would beseech you to please read a bit about “statelessness”. I think you’ll find that the history of statelessness is one we want to avoid. Yes, in this particular case these people deserve it. But when we start using it as a cudgel, then so will other countries, and they’ll use it on innocents. And those innocents …. well, it’ll be bad. Just as it has been in the past. I mean, part of what makes the oppression of Palestinians so horrific, is that so many of them are stateless: they are born and grow up in refugee camps located in countries where they are not afforded citizenship. We shouldn’t help normalize that sort of treatment of people.
trnc
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
That would be my main reason for stripping citizenship.
I’d prefer loss of citizenship to the death penalty. I’m not morally opposed to it for really heinous violent crimes, but definitely not for the guy who stole the lectern.
dr. bloor
Sherrill better have all of her fucking ducks in a row to make that accusation, and to make it stick.
trnc
@Chetan Murthy: I understand your point, and I do want the US to be used as an example again one day. Ultimately, loss of the right to vote was the main thing I had in mind, so I’d be happy enough with that.
Obvious Russian Troll
I would also prefer that loss of citizenship not be used as a cudgel against people who were born in the US. It will inevitably be abused by later administrations.
ICE has already been deporting American citizens.
sab
@WereBear: I wake up happy every day knowing that you and rikyrah are in the world.
I would also include the former Iowa old lady, but I can’t spell her surname and she probably couldn’ t spell mine even if she knew what it was.
mali muso
@rikyrah: Happy Repeachment Day!
(nomenclature swiped from John Scalzi)
Nicole
@BlueGuitarist: Yes! In a particularly rage-filled moment last year I told my husband I wanted my headstone to say, “Here lies Nicole, who wants you all to remember that Hillary won the popular vote.”
Marcion
All this inside help and they still failed so miserably???
God, if Trump was actually competent….
Gin & Tonic
@trnc: Hell, why stop there? Why not confiscate their property and bulldoze their house? You know, to set an example.
Matt McIrvin
@trnc: Stripping citizenship from convicted seditionists (since it’s a way to permanently disenfranchise people, even in the absence of felony-disenfranchisement laws) would be used against us en masse the next time a Republican administration has the opportunity. Bad idea.
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin: Are we planning on storming the capitol in the future?
Matt McIrvin
Note, Donald Trump has been really keen on the idea of stripping citizenship from all manner of people, like flag-desecrators. We don’t even want to take a step in that direction.
NotMax
@Gin & Tonic
Yup. Second class status is inimical to the very concept of America. Because the ideal in spirit has not been wholly honored in our history ought not be a rationale to either continue or expand imperfection in practice.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Wanna bet they object because them going threw one would result in a real life version of the metal detector scene from This is Spinal Tap?
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: There’s a long history of defining down sedition, going back to John Adams’ worst policy. The Capitol insurrection plotters were obviously guilty by any reasonable definition. But I’m against anything that allows politicians to craft their own electorate by redefining crimes and selectively prosecuting people–it creates a powerful bad incentive to put as many of your political opponents as possible in the disenfranchised group. That’s why I’m against felon disenfranchisement even for people who committed the worst crimes, like mass murderers. And similarly, I don’t believe that even the worst criminals against the state should have their citizenship stripped.
Chetan Murthy
I feel like noting again that stripping seditionists of their citizenship is normalizing “statelessness”. In this world, almost all the *rights* people enjoy come about via their citizenship. Said differently, people depend on -nations- to defend them in the world: a person without a nation is much more vulnerable. We should not help to normalize this condition.
Matt McIrvin alludes to the Palestinians, but we shouldn’t forget that statelessness was used as a weapon by the Nazis against Jewish people, too, and that this was one of the major reasons for a worldwide push to eliminate this loophole in laws.
I seriously do recommend reading about this (it was an eye-opener to me when I did so a while back, when the Trumpists were talking about “denaturalizing” people): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statelessness
NotMax
Sigh.
MSNBC is not shy about plastering graphics on the screen during this coverage but apparently one clearly identifying who is speaking is deemed unnecessary.
AWOL
@NotMax: NBC News gave all their money to white supremacist “news” person Megyn Kelly. Their broadcasts are so low-budget I’m surprised they can even afford graphics.
Omnes Omnibus
@trnc: No. Just no. Let’s not aid and abet the right in its quest to eliminate birthright citizenship.
ETA: And, for naturalized citizens, only fraud in application process should permit such a drastic result. Citizens are citizens.
Hoodie
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, that’s a profoundly dumb idea. Beyond that, I don’t get the necessity for stripping citizenship. Creative and motivated prosecutors can put a lot of these clowns away for decades and it’s hard to imagine circumstances where they’d be more motivated. The US attorney and FBI agent who spoke yesterday gave a glimpse of the mountain of bricks that can fall on them. They’re going to be in the sights of a new AG that helped deliver Timothy McVeigh to Jesus.
I think a lot of folks (particularly privileged white folks like a lot of these rioters) don’t grasp how much they are spared from the exertions of the state due to the discretion of cops, prosecutors, judges, etc. I remember an in depth news story a few years back in which a Baltimore cop talked about how he could cite or arrest someone for a half dozen crimes for simply walking down the street. Of course, that’s the shit that folks like black males have to deal with on a daily basis. There are some white folks about to learn a hard lesson, unless the state has degraded to such a point that we’re like some 80’s vintage narco state. I don’t think we’re there, yet.
Uncle Cosmo
IIRC it was in junior high when we were assigned to read “The Man Without A Country.”
Update that by sentencing {insert seditionist’s name here} to an orbital or lunar habitat. Resupply with consumables regularly and provide exercise equipment for maintaining bone/muscle density, but deny him/her the pleasure of company or communication with the homeworld. I doubt anyone could endure that for more than a few years.
Soprano2
@Chetan Murthy: I think this is the best argument for birthright citizenship. From what I’ve seen a portion of the unrest in European counties is from 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants there who are not able to get citizenship in those countries, but also aren’t citizens of any other country. If we started having a complicated method of awarding citizenship, we would start to have that same problem in a generation or two. No, thanks.
Omnes Omnibus
@Uncle Cosmo: No.
Woodrow/asim
Stripping Citizenship plays right into White Supremacist hands — I cannot empathize enough that it’s a piss-poor punishment for anyone with money, just as a starting point.
Specifically: As someone else said, Trump and a number of his hangers-on have wanted to hack away Citizenship, esp. Birthright Citizenship, for a long time. I wrote about this here, as one data point; making it possible to take away citizenship is an ugly step towards allowing entire groups of people to lose their citizenship — or never have it granted, upon birth.
AVOID.
Wapiti
@Uncle Cosmo: Solitary confinement is often effectively used as torture, because, as you say, people can’t handle it. So no.
david
@Nicole: Would never survive a court challenge.
Reagan and Clinton did so much to destroy the news environment. Rescinding the Fairness Doctrine, lifting the ban on foreign ownership of US airways, removing restrictions on non-local ownership of local media. A two-decade assault on the media that transformed it from mom-and-pop providing a valuable public service to its home markets to an international corporate profit-center for hedge funds and bullhorn for right-wing propagandists.
billcoop4
Fairness Doctrine as I recall did not apply to Cable TV, but only to broadcast TV. You’d have to do a lot more to have it apply to Cable (and streaming).
BC
indianbadger
I posted this on the other thread. This accusation by Rep. Sherrill is probably what the spokesman is talking about when he says, “extraordinary in scope”.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/politics/justice-department-capitol-hill-attack/index.html
Gin & Tonic
@david:
For what portion of the US’s history has the media been correctly described this way? A couple of gentlemen named Hearst and Pulitzer might like a word.
Gin & Tonic
@billcoop4: Correct, because broadcast TV utilized a shared, finite resource (RF spectrum.) Since cable is not a finite resource (in theory) any view can (again, in theory) be opposed by another view without govt intervention.
Obdurodon
The idea I keep coming back to is that the antidote to authoritarianism is democratic institutions, not anarchy or authoritarianism of a different color. As emotionally satisfying as it might be to suspend or bypass some of those institutions (believe me I know the appeal), this is actually the time to let them work the way they were designed to. Constitutional protections, including due process and immunity from bills of attainder, should still apply. We should pursue these people aggressively, but legally.
That said, I have no problem e.g. with shutting down their communications mechanism. The first amendment doesn’t even apply to many of these actions, since they’re being undertaken by private parties. Where it does nominally apply, it still admits many exceptions and I believe stopping an insurrection is a pretty good one. When in something akin to a war, cut the enemy’s lines of communication. No hesitation at all on that one. And we should absolutely use our own freedom of speech to condemn insurrectionists, to call for them to be shunned by businesses or removed if they’re already in government, etc. – so long as we don’t stoop to inciting extra-legal harm.
Matt
@Obvious Russian Troll: Ah yes, because if nobody uses it the next
Republicanfascist president will certainly also decline to use it.I’m not sure it’s a good idea personally, but “what if bad people use it someday” is a terrible argument. They’ll do whatever they can get away with, as we’ve seen the last couple years…
terry chay
@Matt McIrvin: Convict these people of felonies and they’ll become advocates against felon disenfranchisement. Until they move to restore those rights, they will be disenfranchised and will find it difficult to find a job just like all the minorities they passed and supported the laws to f–k with in the first place.
Two fer.
I don’t understand the person asking for stripping the citizenship rights. No need to change the laws, just enforce the current ones to maximal effect. If those laws are too onerous, then these people of privilege will want them to be changed. after all, if they weren’t of privilege, they would have never gotten this far and, when they fear for its loss, they are the most sheepish of all.
They didn’t think they’ll lose it which is why our country should use the laws to make an example of them. When the laws are applied equally, there is a forcing function to fix them to be equitable. When they are not, it comes back worse.
Geeno
The problem with stripping citizenship is the same as the problem with the death penalty. There exist crimes for which that is proper, BUT as soon as it is allowed for one crime, the qualifications for it will keep getting loosened until it’s being used on “people we don’t like” for any god damned reason we can come up with.
These are truly slippery slope problems.
Obdurodon
@Geeno: No offense, but I’m really not a fan of slippery-slope arguments. Or maybe this is more of a “growing pool” argument, as it’s less about one action leading to another than to the same action applied more broadly. I prefer to think of actions being right or wrong on their own merits, perhaps according to the situation but absolutely not the identities of those involved. In this case, I happen to believe that capital punishment is wrong, even for horrible people. There are situations where killing can be justified, such as the exigencies of war, but the slow and deliberate process of law is not one of them.
lowtechcyclist
@billcoop4:
You are correct that the Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcast TV. But I think all you’d have to do to apply it to cable is to just say it applies to cable.
Web-based media (streaming, etc.) would be a whole ‘nother thing. I don’t think there’s a good way to do that.
The theory behind broadcast regulation in general and the Fairness Doctrine in particular is that broadcast spectrum (a) belongs to the public and (b) is scarce; there isn’t anywhere near enough of it for everyone to have their own TV or radio station.
The argument for getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine, which I regard as a major but quite deliberate error, was that now most people have access to cable TV, which (then) had dozens of channels (hundreds now, of course), so there are enough channels to assure that all points of view get represented.
Needless to say, that’s not how cable TV has worked out – and the underlying principle that Joe or Jane Citizen can’t have their own TV channel is just as true of cable as it is of broadcast.
And while the cable TV cables belong to a private company rather than the public, they’re essentially a monopoly resource and should be regulated as such. So IMHO at least, there’s no reason not to apply the Fairness Doctrine to cable.
The Internet, however, is a different animal. Any of us can have our own website, and AFAIK anyone can do podcasts and whatnot for people to listen to. While I’m open to arguments to the contrary, AFAIAC this really cuts the legs out from any regulation argument that I can see.
I do think, though, that areas of the Internet that seem to naturally gravitate towards having a single dominant player need regulation of some sort. As long as Facebook exists, for instance, setting up a rival to Facebook isn’t going to go anywhere, because that’s where everyone already is. This gives Facebook an enormous amount of power, and it needs to be regulated somehow. (I have no deep thoughts of how this should be done.)
One last note: the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time requirements were two different things. The Fairness Doctrine dictated that if a broadcast station was going to get into opinionating, contrary points of had to be given representation, but there were no specific requirements in terms of how much time they needed to be given. Equal time requirements had to do with political campaigns; you couldn’t interview the candidate for Party A without giving equal time to an interview of the Party B candidate.
That’s a quick summary that elides a lot of details that I’ve mostly forgotten in the past few decades, but it’s good enough for the moment.
Scout211
This investigative report and analysis by USA Today reporters of what went wrong, moment by moment is chilling. They have a timeline (that even now is being updated) of the many failures on that day by law enforcement and government officials. The report includes many videos I had not yet seen (including one showing the rioter throwing the fire extinguisher that hit Officer Sicknick in the head). Chilling.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2021/01/13/capitol-riot-law-enforcement-failure-analysis/6601142002/
Just Chuck
So with the Fairness Doctrine, every time they show a Neil DeGrasse Tyson special, they’ll be required to also give a flat-earther a platform? How about vaccinations?
Obvious Russian Troll
@Matt: As I said earlier, ICE is already abusing this. It hardly makes sense to give the anti-immigrant crowd yet another precedent to when we should be keeping them from doing it now.
This makes as much sense to me as sending them to Gitmo for detention without trial. It’s not something we as a nation should be doing. It’s something we should be eliminating in order to live up to our ideals as a nation.
Existing punishments are already quite enough, thank you. Jail time, baby.
I will add that many of these people have enough money to cause trouble from outside the country if they don’t go to jail, and of course many of them will come back illegally. You’d have to throw them in jail for a few years to prevent a good chunk of them from coming back immediately.
lowtechcyclist
@Just Chuck: I believe I used the word ‘opinionating’ above.
Back in the day, no opposing viewpoint needed to be given air time when Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley were presenting the news, because they were presenting matters of fact, as best as the facts could be determined.
Presumably Neil DeGrasse Tyson is doing the same.
Starfish
@Chetan Murthy: I agree with you, and I think a lot of people here are spouting off on a topic that they have not studied in detail.
There are a lot of rights stripped off of stateless people, and they get abused because they have no state to protect any of their rights.
Itinerant Geographer
Never mind, shoulda read the thread first.
J R in WV
@billcoop4:
My viewpoint is that Cable networks receive their programming through the sat networks, which all transmit via licensed frequencies up to and down from the sats in orbit.
We just need to tighten up and reestablish the fairness doctrine to apply to all signals sent from or received by devices within the American nation. I don’t care about how programming is exchanged with subscribers any more. It has to be honest, fair, and balanced.
If it isn’t, it is propaganda intended to undermine our national way of life, and should be shut down. It is slow-motion subversion, sedition, non-violent insurrection, and the purveyors should be charged with being the hosts of foreign interference in our affairs.
Arrested for subversion. Would we have allowed Fox News to undermine our government in the era 1938-1945? We are at war right now with Russia and other foreign powers, it just isn’t using tanks and machine guns, and Faux News is working for the other side! Take them out of the national information sphere!