1) How do we prevent a second Heritage Foundation, and a whole party going completely rogue abusing every loop hole in the book?
2) How do we fix the house to ensure proper and proportional representation?
3) How do we reduce the number of far right wingers in the armed forces and law enforcement?
4) How do we address partisanship in the supreme court?
There are many vulnerabilities that led to the current situation, so we need a plan for the future. I do not even think there is a left wing or neoliberal version of the heritage foundation that has been as effective as them. But perhaps I am a prisoner of the moment.
In the world of “what could have been” I remember Pete’s primary campaign was originally focused on democracy reforms in the nation to fix the structural issues that you are highlighting here. For example he wanted to expand the Supreme Court to 15, five each Democrat and Republican aligned justices and five voted in with a two thirds majority of the others. Not that that is definitely the right answer, but I think it was asking the right question for what priorities need to be for the next admin and moving forward.
I wonder what may have happened if he made that his brand rather than painting himself as the “young moderate” candidate once he gained in the polls and thought he actually had a shot.
It would have failed probably, I mean in 2020 HR 1, the very first bill introduced, was nothing but democracy reforms and we simply didn't have the votes. Not like the Biden admin didn't think it was important.
Not sure where I read it, but long, long ago, there was an article that said when Obama came into office, he put two ideas on the board: government reform, or healthcare reform. He knew there would only be time and political capital to solve one issue, and he went with reforming healthcare.
I'd love to find a deep dive into what ideas and to what extent there was brainstorming around the government reform idea.
Fr though, if Dems get an actual trifecta again, there's no fucking around. It is clear that Dem voters are extremely active right now, hence the absolute blue wave that happened and is still happening in special elections. Harness that not just against Republicans, but also against Dems who won't stand with the party's goals for whatever reason. It's really clear Dem voters hate that whole thing now seeing Schumer's popularity.
No more Manchin and Sinema antics. They can whine like Murkowski but when the time comes, you better goddamn fall in line.
I see this as a possibility, but the idea that ICE or other federal agents are just going to start arresting Democrats in the runup to important votes, or in the middle of a campaign also seems a real possibility.
You're never going to have Senate majority of all AOC's... or even all Mark Kellys for that matter. There will always be Manchins and Sinemas so long as the Dems are a grand coalition based party.
The key is to have so many Manchins and Sinemas (in light red / purple states) that they can be played against each other. They only get away w/ their BS when they are the deciding marginal votes.
The problem is that you used to be able to bride a senator by giving their state a bunch of pork in some bill. Now the individual senators are trying to enrich themselves instead of their constituents. Sinema is going to lead a comfy life doing speaking tours and sitting on corporate boards for 0 work all because she did what she was supposed to do.
But the thing they want isn’t to be able to represent their constituents. You can’t play them against each other if some of them are committed to special interests instead. Having a centrist in the pocket of big oil wouldn’t have helped in playing against Joe Manchin because he’s in the pocket of big coal and their interests are aligned against pro environment policy.
I am baffled that you're trying to beat money in politics using market logic. Have you heard of laws? That's how we set the right incentives for normal people to discourage egregiously destructive and antisocial behavior. People who act like Sinema need to spend the rest of their days in prison. That's how you set the right incentives.
Manchin and Sinema were made personal and it's understandable why. It's an affront to our democracy how blatantly especially Sinema betrayed her constituents for bribes.
But Manchin and Sinema were a systemic issue. If it takes just one person to block any law in the biggest economy and most influential country on earth, and that country has zero anti-corruption laws, there is just too much money coming down on one person. Someone is going to say yes.
This will keep happening until we enact anti-corruption laws and put these people in jail, both for offering and for accepting bribes. Especially if majorities are as razor-thin as Biden I.
For dems to ever get a trifecta they have to be competitive in conservative states in order to win enough Senate seats. In order to be competitive in those seats the dem candidate has to be able to distance themselves from the national party when the national party's position is toxic in their state. It's much better for dems to have a Manchin who votes with them 80% of the time on tough votes than a republican who votes with them never.
And how do we do any of this stuff with an absolute maximum of 55% of active voters on-side? Rebuilding the republic is infinitely harder than destroying it.
Adopt Australian style voting laws, and include a no-confidence box if people don't like the candidates. If the no-confidence vote wins, parties are forced to find better people.
Also, run better people to begin with. I know...they are unicorns...but still. The amount of antipathy held by the American electorate towards both parties is incredibly high, and this needs to be addressed before meaningful forward progress can be attained and sustained.
Ok, Australian-style voting laws. Great. What’s the plan for getting a supermajority of Congress plus enough states to ratify a constitutional amendment? We can’t even mount a serious effort to fix friggin Citizens United.
I think stacking the Supreme Court is important and good but probably not a prerequisite for reforming the House (expansion and proportional representation can be done with a simple bill) or reducing right-wingers in the armed forces or LEO (the Court has ruled that the President can fire whoever the hell she wants for any or no reason). I also think they can and should pass laws to reform the Supreme Court in other ways, beyond just stacking it.
You may very well be right! But rather than preemptively surrender, the next Democratic president should do as much as they can with their expansive new powers, and challenge Roberts and co. to follow their own rules or contort themselves into knots trying to thread the needle.
Again I am fully in favor of reforming the court (up to and including packing it) for many reasons, including precisely that one.
My point was merely there are many other things that are worth doing, too, and a lot of them stand at least a nonzero chance of working even in the absence of court reform. We shouldn't, under any circumstances, throw our hands up and say, "Roberts might strike this down so why bother?"
“Stack the Supreme Court” means expanding the size of the court so you can fill the new seats with people on your side and give yourself a majority
The Republicans played pretty dirty with Garland / Coney Barrett, but they haven’t stacked the court. They’ve just put ideologically sympathetic justices in when vacancies have arisen, which is essentially how the court has always worked
Your definition (which had already begun being used ITT by others, FWIW) is for packing, not stacking. The GOP already stacked the Court when they let Scalia's seat sit vacant for a whole year while Garland waited on a vote that never came just so that Obama wouldn't get a final appointment, *& then* reversed their position on election-year appointments 4 years later to ensure ACB was seated. So, now, we'll gladly be packing, in response, as the Roberts Court has ensured its own demise just as much as the Hughes Court did before the Switch in Time to Save 9 by upholding New Deal law
And again the question is ask. What than when (not if) Republicans win a trifecta and decide the stack/pack the court in reverse and weld power from the executive? Shouldn't the goal be to put in place guards that eliminate the power the president and SCOTUS has instead of just using it for your own side? If its the case that Democrats just want their own Trump, our nation really is lost.
Small brain: nuke the filibuster & pack the Supreme Court
Medium brain: reduce the size of the Capital to an area encompassing only the core Mall-adjacent federal buildings, & then grant the rest of DC + PR statehood
Student notes in law reviews are anonymous, so we have no idea who wrote this at Harvard Law back in Jan. 2020, but they clearly already understood the assignment about just what MAGA was & to put it *under* the jail all the way back then!
I do remember reading about that, and I'd be on board. I think Newsom if he knew he had enough political support for that would actually go through with it, because he's that slimey. Do I think he'd turn on his on a whim if the political winds shifted? Yes. Sometimes you need a mercenary though.
They didn’t expand the court unilaterally and add seats to change the composition of the court. If the Dems do so, i don’t see why the Republicans wouldn’t follow suit when they are next able. And I don’t see how ruining an institution as important as SCOTUS would be good for our Republic in the long run.
The institution will be ruined when the American people, Democrats and Republicans regard it as a partisan institution and refuse to comply with their orders.
We aren’t there yet, but we will be if either side decides to unilaterally change the composition of the court for partisan politics.
Removing SCOTUS as a legitimate way to resolve constitutional crises is ensuring that the entire system falls apart.
The SCOTUS has historically always been a partisan institution. There is very little evidence that the SCOTUS has ever been a non-partisan entity. The whole "balls and strikes" is a whole load of fantasy horse shit made up in the 90s to make America's justice system look glorious.
Every single era of the SCOTUS was flagrantly partisan.
Marshall Court (Flagrantly partisan)
Taney Court (I don't really need to explain)
Chase, Waite, Fuller courts (All mega pro business, pro segregation)
Lochner Era Courts (straight up judicial activists but Conservatives)
Warren Courts (straight up judicial activists but Liberals)
Modern Era Courts (Mostly conservative courts who were put into place as a response to the Warren Courts).
The American people, Democrats, and Republicans all still regard the court as the legitimate arbiter of constitutional disputes. Everyone is still complying with their orders.
Escalating the situation by unilaterally expanding the court will lead to the court losing more legitimacy and we will be without an institution that is regarded as that legitimate arbiter. Having no institution filling that role will lead to a collapse of the Union.
There should be bipartisan reform to de-politicize the court - not partisan action to further its politicization.
The only reason that the current regime is marginally complying with their orders is because the're only issuing the feckless orders, not the ones any legitimate constitutional authority should be issuing. We don't have birthright citizenship right now because the supreme court refuses to act to dismantle an executive order trump declared months ago.
The court lost all legitimacy the day it ruled on Trump v. US. The regard of the ignorant masses is meaningless, and arguably worse than their disregard. If Democrats taking charge of the situation and fixing it is seen as an escalation than so be it.
> How do we reduce the number of far right wingers in the armed forces and law enforcement?
We fundamentally alter lib/prog culture to revitalize concepts of honor, "protect and serve," patriotism, respect, and sacrifice.
We endorse these as career paths for young liberals and progressives. The college educated very much included. Not to fix them. Just to join them and be a good officer by their lights.
you can't do that without trust in institutions though. Ideologues will only take part in institutions if they trust that they go along with their beliefs. It's a chicken and egg problem.
Go the hard road and try and get people on board to fix those problems which will likely meet resistance all over the place from Republicans who have never been playing by the rules....
OR
Recreate Lelouch Vi Britania in the form of a Democrat and go fucking full rogue executive and become the Liberal Diety Incarnate and abuse the bounds of the executive branch to the point that Republicans cry uncle and finally decide to vote with Democrats to finally fix all the loopholes they've been abusing.
We've already tried 1. We already know no one has the stomach for 2, except MAYBE Gavin Newsom, who might just be slimey enough to do it.
Not to out myself as a pedestrian Destiny quoter, but you can't outlaw breaking the law. You can try to strengthen the institutions, but Trump had enough of the institutions behind his back to rearrange them to his will for most of the things he did. It might have caused a little more of an upset initially, but it wouldn't have been much more of a guarantee than the official process should have been already.
I think the best way you fix this is by getting it in Conservatives' brains that they want something better than what they voted for, and should be more careful about shit-stained red flags when they're being waved in their faces next time. People will continue to vote Republican, and while they probably won't have the majority in 2028, it will come back, and they need to support sane options by then.
Obviously not saying you shouldn't also try to establish a more reliable separation of powers, I just think that should be the second bullet point on the list.
The problem is that a lot of this comes down to a game theory problem where one side keeps mashing defect, wrt republican lawbreaking. That's not really viable long term. You have to do something to establish deterrence.
Except if conservative beliefs are fine with walking lock step with fascists, and obeying their whim so they can get their pet policy adopted, how do you mesh that with the alternative viewpoint.
That level of political cynicism, and opportunism at the cost of the republic, is not something that can be countered by just pointing out Trump and MAGA's idiotic moves.
Then it certainly won't be countered by administrative red tape.
If you're going to make the claim that conservatism is inherently evil, you'll have to propose a better solution than outlawing it.
Are you basically saying you must convert them from conservatism rather than only converting them from Trump? Do you think I'm against converting them from conservatism? Do you think converting them from conservatism is equally feasible to converting them from consequence-blind populism? Do you live in reality, or do you just want to talk about how the world would be better if everyone was nice?
Biggest one is end the filibuster and force congress to be in charge of things. The more we can strip power from the executive the less abuses there will be.
Oh want to create another ice. Force a hundred angry cat to agree on how it works.
Also pack the Supreme Court and create some new thing in government that allows congress to control an agency directly.
You see the enlightened centrists here posting nonsense like “sounds like a good way to start a civil war “ as if that ship hasnt already sailed because what else do you call withholding federal funds, sending US troops into blue cities, murdering and disappearing civilians, and telling your supporters to attack and intimidate democratic politicians
It's my dream honestly. But I feel like the moderates, centrists and mainstream Dems don't have the same appetite for violence and determination that the right wingers do.
Easy. Charge all major conservative media outlets for acting as unregistered foreign agents in their spreading of Russian disinformation. The republican base is now gone, people become normal again
I'm already there, though my single issue is accountability. There must be consequences. These people don't have morals or principles, they only understand power. Punish them and take away their power, and they'll start to consider coming around.
I’ve complained about Newsom a lot on this sub but if he actually runs on abolishing ICE, I will be defending his ass strongly to everyone I know and take back some of my previous statements
Tbh, I think the thing that works in his favor is people acknowledging he's shitty, but is the one taking this seriously. It's easier to embrace sleaziness than to manufacture a clean record.
Abolish ICE is going to be another Defund the Police and Medicare for All sloganism that Democrats fell into in the 2020 cycle and still haunts the party to this day.
Much of the overreach after the 2020 cycle is why the current Administration is in power now.
It feels good to the base but doesn’t actually address policy issues.
Immigration enforcement isn’t going away and some organizations will have to do it in some form. ICE having its share of problems isn’t controversial but just saying slogans without a politically palatable plan is a recipe for disaster.
We won in 2020 despite defund and MFA (also MFA is not that unpopular and Biden did not run ok it either). The reason the administration is in power is inflation, were there some things Dems should have done better of course, but the main issue was prices going up.
I’ve made clear I don’t believe in immigration enforcement, but if we are going to have it ICE is possibly the most evil form of it. We don’t need people treating their neighbors like enemies of war and attacking Home Depots. Someone suggested increasing federal police power, closer to other countries and giving them more power over immigration which might work better. But when hire people specifically caring about immigration control, you are hiring a shit ton of bigots who just want to brutalize minorities. I watched them kill people 5 miles from me for no goddamn reason and they bastarda been on the force since the Obama years. So yes, ICE must be destroyed
Newsom is a sleazy, corrupt (nowhere near Trump levels but still), playboy, whose only sincerely held belief seems to be that he should get as much media attention as possible.
But if gavin thinks that putting Stephen Miller in the electric chair will get him on the front page of the New York Times, he'll probably pull the handle himself.
I think whoever he has manning his social media is savvy enough to correctly advise him personally pushing Miller into Alligator Alkatraz's titular alligator pit on TV would poll better by .3% for the irony factor but otherwise you're on the money for his ruthlessness
LBJ also morally bankrupt, opportunistic corrupt scumbag, but is also the most successful legislative president not named FDR. Sometimes you need a piece of shit more than a Boy Scout.
That's the thing. He's absolutely morally bankrupt, and absolutely sleazy.
At this point though you need someone who is willing to at minimum bend the rules to fight back against a group that is outright burning the house down.
I've said it before, but the next president is fucked, regardless. 4 years is never enough time to clean up after a republican president, but especially so this time. It's never gonna be enough, so honestly, I'd rather it be someone I don't even like. This time, anyway.
If there is enough political rigor behind the president to make real changes then I think it is possible to undo a lot of this shit and still make positive changes that aren't just recovering from this mess. A large amount of Trump's actions have been executive orders that can be undone without any approval from congress.
You can't really 'undo' the destruction of USAID, it took a few months to tear down but will / would take years to rebuild.
Same with the federal worker purge they did. You can fire all the Trumpist cronies and rank-and-file goobers he installed, but many of the progressive people he fired will never ever come back, unless on terms and salaries the government would never pay. And even if you got some of them back, the new people need to be reintegrated and team reconstituted.
I think the last year proves that actually you can accomplish a hell of a lot in one year, let alone four. Yes, it's easier to destroy than to build, but there are still plenty of lessons to be learned from the experience...and also there's going to be a need for a bit of destruction.
Whichever Dem gets elected absolutely needs to come in with a P2025-style handbook for how they're going to remake the government in their first 100 days. They need to have a mountain of executive orders predrafted and ready for the autopen like Trump did. They need to be ready and willing to do a purge of loyalists. On the legislative side, they need to have a big old stack of bills ready to sail through committees and get to floor votes by Summer 2029.
Which is why one of the main goal of the first term needs to be to make sure MAGA can’t take power again, at least not for a long ass time. And not that weak ass shit Biden did where he naively thought just making things better for people and trying to not be overly partisan would be enough. Like actually prosecuting people, blowing up the filibuster to pass stuff like anti-gerrymandering laws, putting pressure on tech/social media companies to actually deal with disinformation, on top of actual serious fixes for concerns like affordability, etc.
For me he's the slimiest of opportunists. He's only peddling this line of attack cause he thinks it's an effective lane to make himself a special candidate.
He's right and the only one doing it so he's the only port in this storm, but I want to vote for someone who hates the GOP as much I do. Not someone pandering to me over it.
I think at that point its not so much he was sitting down with Bannon, its Bannon sitting down with him. Newsome didn't have as much of a presence back then and it was before Republicans were super unpopular.
He also doesn't need to sit down and talk with people who were going to vote for him anyway, despite some complaining on the internet the actual leftists do generally seem willing to vote, he needs to talk to the people who would have otherwise voted against him but might change their mind.
I'm tired of having that circular conversation and have enough going on in my private life I don't have the capacity to put up with it again, sorry.
To give you the summation and my only word on this, his first instinct at the start of the 2025 wasn't to fight the new Trump admin, it was to pivot right and find every right-wing influencer he could get or give a podcast slot to so he could agree with them that trans rights have gone too far and humor transphobic arguments. That, along with other policy disagreements soured me on him considerably.
And to save you the time and energy, no, I do not consider the bills he signed last year or his TDOR post a counterargument to this.
Honest to god, one of the things that's brought me around on him is people being more open about him being sleazy. It helps to not have that Buttigiegian "Our perfect boy can do no wrong" parasociality.
I’ll support him but I’ll never truly support him because immediately after the 2024 election he tried getting buddy-buddy with right-wing fascists because that’s how he was reading the tea leaves back then.
He thought becoming at least somewhat amenable to Nazi fascists like Charlie Kirk and his audience was the key to a successful presidential run in 2028, so that’s what he did. Now, he’s correctly identified that the key to winning the incoming Dem primary is by being the biggest hater of MAGA, so that’s what he’s doing.
But I don’t think he actually feels that way. He didn’t feel that way immediately after the election like I did. After like three straight months of Trump on the campaign trail calling black immigrants savages and promising to crater the economy.
Newsom’s current attitude of being the crusader against MAGA is not genuine. So I have no way of knowing whether that attitude will change the moment he calculates once again that being more conciliatory towards the right is better for his political career.
I’ll support him but I’ll never truly support him because immediately after the 2024 election he tried getting buddy-buddy with right-wing fascists because that’s how he was reading the tea leaves back then.
If you transcribed his podcast but didn’t say it was Newsom, no one would even think it was a Democrat, certainly not a Democrat with a spine.
He was as weak in messaging than anything we’ve seen even from Schumer, because he was sprinting to the table with the fashy right to show them that he was one of the “cool” Dems. He was not trying to court Kirk’s audience, or if he was, he was doing an abysmal job at it.
Yeah he tried something, it didn't work and he course corrected.
Dems hysterically hyperventilating over every mildly controversial statement/ interview hasn't worked out so great for them either, though many seem impervious to correcting that.
It’s pointless to hope for this kind of redemption. The only regime capable of doing that is one autocratic and unaccountable enough to inevitably repeat the same crimes. The best we can hope for is living like Italians in 1946.
"Abolish ICE" is not "let's not have immigration laws;" it's "let's not have this specific agency of secret police doing immigration enforcement." The masked goons with guns going around killing moms in their cars, hanging out around schools, and asking people for their papers please are the problem.
Immigration law should be boring, orderly, and bureaucratic.
Sure and I'd agree that the agency needs massive reform. Personally, I have serious issues with masked, unidentified law enforcement performing random raids in our cities. And, "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Now!" isn't a catch slogan for the Twitter activist class either, I get it.
But we should take the lesson from the Defund the Police movement seriously when it comes to radical sloganeering that is later rationalized away with obtuse academic language. If you're explaining, you're losing.
The average person will not pay enough attention to get past the slogan’s initial impression.
This WILL be interpreted as abolish immigration enforcement by millions of voters. You will never get a chance to explain what you really mean to the low information voter.
"Do we think Americans have more love for the people murdering random citizens, abducting community figures from their homes, who are most frequently compared to the Nazi SS and Gestapo, or their cop cousin who they think is alright?"
My single issue is hanging all the traitors, I swear to god if we get a trifecta in 28 and slap them on the wrist and we end up right back here in 32 I’m gonna become the joker. History clearly shows letting people off lightly after coup attempts never comes back to bite oneself /s
Dems need to be clear that although they want to abolish ICE, they will replace it with a new immigration enforcement agency. But ice definitely needs to go. It's likely they recruited a bunch of proud boys, militia members, neo nazis, etc.
Why does the US need a separate agency for everything? In Canada, Border Services issues a warrant for the arrest of people who are breaking immigration laws then local police execute the warrant.
I agree with you, but open borders polls at like 20% or something. It's morally and economically right, but we're just too stupid and racist for it to happen any time soon 😔
Some type of immigration enforcement is necessary. The problem with Ice is it’s rotten to the core. Its powers are far too broad and its ranks are filled with hick thugs. It should be an abolished and a new immigration enforcement agency established with more limited powers and staffed by qualified professionals.
The public is so fickle on this issue, it's probably best politically to remain ambiguous. All it takes is some terrorist attack or some heinous crime by someone overstaying a visa and you'd find yourself backpedalling before an election.
One of my most downvoted comments ever on reddit dot com was in this very sub flippantly (but I meant it) saying “I’m a single issue voter. I won’t support someone with an R by their name.” Shit was probably like 2017? I guess. Now look at this pinned post.
What does he mean by abolish ICE? Is he talking about ending customs and interior immigration law enforcement or is he proposes we go back to INS and Customs agents being separate?
Also a single issue voter now, but MY single issue is punishment of this Administration per the law. Promise to hold them genuinely accountable to the law, and you have my vote.
If they're going to paint abolishing ICE as abolishing immigration enforcement, we might as well say "hell yeah", go all the way and actually push for justice instead of meeting in the middle with "actually some exclusion and legally distinct classes of person are fine if enforced Properly"
The Biden admin made a pretty good attempt at reform but it got shot down for political reasons. They killed the solution they were asking for because the problem was more profitable for them in the short term. The R’s are likely to do that with any issue. It’s going to take a fuckmongous blue wave to legally achieve any kind of meaningful reform.
This is what happened with Biden because he became beholden to activists and got a border crisis
The "border crisis" exists because we have created a secondary class of person that is not protected by the same rights and does not have access to the same institutions as we do, simply due to the circumstances of their birth. The problem is the border. Open the border, stop having it be closed.
Yes, but he has the easy pivot of "Then they shot American citizens in the face and I changed my mind". He'll catch a little deserved flak from the left for not getting around to this position fast enough, but no one outside the DT will actually give a shit.
Hey I would be thrilled to be wrong and have him abolish ice and I'll vote for whomever has the best chance of ousting the current regime... I just doubt Gavin will do anything about it.
Don't get me wrong, I trust him as far as I can throw him. But the most visible frontrunner openly promising top-to-bottom prosecution helps lock that as something other contenders have to make a stance on.
Key changes to ICE under the second Trump administration include:
Expanded Enforcement and Arrests: ICE has dramatically expanded its interior enforcement operations. The daily rate of arrests has more than doubled in some regions, with a surge in community-based enforcement (arrests on streets, at homes, and workplaces) rather than primarily at jails.
Shift in Priorities: The administration has moved away from prioritizing immigrants with serious criminal convictions and is increasingly arresting individuals with no criminal history. Data shows that a large majority of those detained currently do not have criminal convictions.
Increased Funding and Staffing: The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" provided ICE with a substantial increase in funding for custody operations, quadrupling its annual detention budget. The agency is on track to hire 10,000 new officers by the end of 2025 as part of a major recruitment drive.
Record Detention Levels: The number of people in ICE detention has reached historic highs, with facilities often exceeding capacity, leading to reports of overcrowding and poor conditions.
Leadership Overhaul and Agency Collaboration: Nearly half of the top leadership positions at ICE field offices have been replaced with personnel from Border Patrol, an agency often criticized for a more aggressive culture. Other federal agencies, including the FBI and the Postal Inspection Service, have been directed to support ICE's immigration enforcement efforts.
Procedural and Policy Changes: The administration ended programs that allowed some migrants to legally schedule asylum appointments and is actively working to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of people. New directives allow for raids in previously considered "sensitive locations" like schools and hospitals.
Tactics and Force: There have been numerous reports of aggressive tactics during raids, including the use of unmarked vans, masked agents, and excessive force. At least four people have been killed by immigration officials during enforcement actions in the second term so far.
I never liked them, but as with most things It's definitely gotten way worse. I don't remember the random indiscriminate violence, prison colonies, and concentration camps for starters.
I can definitely agree that it has gotten way worse as funding has increased and the administration changed to one more openly interested in enacting an ethnic cleansing
Most people in law enforcement are natural assholes. But the current bunch has finalised its transformation into brown shirts. They need to be purged and replaced with new assholes that know there are limits to their power.
Under Obama and Biden, ICE was much more pragmatic and humane.
Running on abolishing ICE would be paraded as open borders and playing into Trump and Fox news that the democrats want every boogeyman immigrant in (tren de Agua, MS13, erc)
Outside of reddit, abolishing ICE isnt going to fare well with voting public. Its a hill that the democrats will die on unless you’re in the deepest of the bluest of blue.
Even Mamdani walked back on defund the police, a nationwide messaging on weak borders will prove fatal for democrats.
Abolish CBP too. Regular cops obviously have issues too but we do need law enforcement so it's a trickier problem to solve. But an easy first step is to get rid of the gangs of masked kidnappers.
Most dem candidates share like 90-95% of the same policies anyway and all would be better than Vance or Rubio, so whichever candidate runs on throwing all these people in jail has my vote whether it’s him, AOC, or someone else
You’re gonna be very disappointed when whomever wins the primary pivots to a new bullshit general election talking point about how ICE agents need more funding and training.
I think it would be really neat if there’s a bill passed in the next couple of years that says if you accept a bribe whilst in or about to take office you, your companies, and the person who bribed you all have to pay 3x the bribe amount to the federal treasury.
This is the bare fucking minimum. If a candidate isn't willing to dismantle the fascist secret police, how am I supposed to trust them on any other policy?
More than that:
1) How do we prevent a second Heritage Foundation, and a whole party going completely rogue abusing every loop hole in the book?
2) How do we fix the house to ensure proper and proportional representation?
3) How do we reduce the number of far right wingers in the armed forces and law enforcement?
4) How do we address partisanship in the supreme court?
There are many vulnerabilities that led to the current situation, so we need a plan for the future. I do not even think there is a left wing or neoliberal version of the heritage foundation that has been as effective as them. But perhaps I am a prisoner of the moment.
In the world of “what could have been” I remember Pete’s primary campaign was originally focused on democracy reforms in the nation to fix the structural issues that you are highlighting here. For example he wanted to expand the Supreme Court to 15, five each Democrat and Republican aligned justices and five voted in with a two thirds majority of the others. Not that that is definitely the right answer, but I think it was asking the right question for what priorities need to be for the next admin and moving forward.
I wonder what may have happened if he made that his brand rather than painting himself as the “young moderate” candidate once he gained in the polls and thought he actually had a shot.
It would have failed probably, I mean in 2020 HR 1, the very first bill introduced, was nothing but democracy reforms and we simply didn't have the votes. Not like the Biden admin didn't think it was important.
http://congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1
Not sure where I read it, but long, long ago, there was an article that said when Obama came into office, he put two ideas on the board: government reform, or healthcare reform. He knew there would only be time and political capital to solve one issue, and he went with reforming healthcare.
I'd love to find a deep dive into what ideas and to what extent there was brainstorming around the government reform idea.
I’d rather not have the Court designed around having two different jurisprudence.
Fr though, if Dems get an actual trifecta again, there's no fucking around. It is clear that Dem voters are extremely active right now, hence the absolute blue wave that happened and is still happening in special elections. Harness that not just against Republicans, but also against Dems who won't stand with the party's goals for whatever reason. It's really clear Dem voters hate that whole thing now seeing Schumer's popularity.
No more Manchin and Sinema antics. They can whine like Murkowski but when the time comes, you better goddamn fall in line.
Fr dawg i don’t want to hear anything about Muh swing voters, you are a dem and you ought to vote as the party does
I will vote how the Baileys tell me to tyvm
It will never cease to amaze me that Xi Jinping is actually acquainted with a real, Midwest, American couple and Schumer has the Baileys.
Yeah exactly if you don't wanna fall in line, feel free to run as an independent.
Trifecta should be possible with these midterms, we just need newsom to lock in for 2028 and gather support from non engaged well enough
Tbh seeing breakneck elections in states like Tennessee and South Carolina is pretty crazy, so sky's the limit tbh
I see this as a possibility, but the idea that ICE or other federal agents are just going to start arresting Democrats in the runup to important votes, or in the middle of a campaign also seems a real possibility.
You're never going to have Senate majority of all AOC's... or even all Mark Kellys for that matter. There will always be Manchins and Sinemas so long as the Dems are a grand coalition based party.
The key is to have so many Manchins and Sinemas (in light red / purple states) that they can be played against each other. They only get away w/ their BS when they are the deciding marginal votes.
The problem is that you used to be able to bride a senator by giving their state a bunch of pork in some bill. Now the individual senators are trying to enrich themselves instead of their constituents. Sinema is going to lead a comfy life doing speaking tours and sitting on corporate boards for 0 work all because she did what she was supposed to do.
Like I said, you just need to create a competitive market of centrist grifters instead of being at the mercy of a monopoly.
But the thing they want isn’t to be able to represent their constituents. You can’t play them against each other if some of them are committed to special interests instead. Having a centrist in the pocket of big oil wouldn’t have helped in playing against Joe Manchin because he’s in the pocket of big coal and their interests are aligned against pro environment policy.
But the alternative to them isn't typically a rank and file Democrat, but rather a Republican.
Lobbyist markets aren't that different from pork markets.
I am baffled that you're trying to beat money in politics using market logic. Have you heard of laws? That's how we set the right incentives for normal people to discourage egregiously destructive and antisocial behavior. People who act like Sinema need to spend the rest of their days in prison. That's how you set the right incentives.
I mean sure, fine. No argument against that.
But to make laws you gotta command a super majority in the Senate.
Manchin and Sinema were made personal and it's understandable why. It's an affront to our democracy how blatantly especially Sinema betrayed her constituents for bribes.
But Manchin and Sinema were a systemic issue. If it takes just one person to block any law in the biggest economy and most influential country on earth, and that country has zero anti-corruption laws, there is just too much money coming down on one person. Someone is going to say yes.
This will keep happening until we enact anti-corruption laws and put these people in jail, both for offering and for accepting bribes. Especially if majorities are as razor-thin as Biden I.
And if they don't, what do you think the Democratic Party can actually do about it?
For dems to ever get a trifecta they have to be competitive in conservative states in order to win enough Senate seats. In order to be competitive in those seats the dem candidate has to be able to distance themselves from the national party when the national party's position is toxic in their state. It's much better for dems to have a Manchin who votes with them 80% of the time on tough votes than a republican who votes with them never.
And how do we do any of this stuff with an absolute maximum of 55% of active voters on-side? Rebuilding the republic is infinitely harder than destroying it.
Adopt Australian style voting laws, and include a no-confidence box if people don't like the candidates. If the no-confidence vote wins, parties are forced to find better people.
Also, run better people to begin with. I know...they are unicorns...but still. The amount of antipathy held by the American electorate towards both parties is incredibly high, and this needs to be addressed before meaningful forward progress can be attained and sustained.
Ok, Australian-style voting laws. Great. What’s the plan for getting a supermajority of Congress plus enough states to ratify a constitutional amendment? We can’t even mount a serious effort to fix friggin Citizens United.
We stack the Supreme Court. That’s how
I think stacking the Supreme Court is important and good but probably not a prerequisite for reforming the House (expansion and proportional representation can be done with a simple bill) or reducing right-wingers in the armed forces or LEO (the Court has ruled that the President can fire whoever the hell she wants for any or no reason). I also think they can and should pass laws to reform the Supreme Court in other ways, beyond just stacking it.
They are not bound by precedent and will contradict themselves again to stop a Democratic president.
You may very well be right! But rather than preemptively surrender, the next Democratic president should do as much as they can with their expansive new powers, and challenge Roberts and co. to follow their own rules or contort themselves into knots trying to thread the needle.
And what happens if we don't have a backup plan for when they do nullify everything? Waste another term?
Again I am fully in favor of reforming the court (up to and including packing it) for many reasons, including precisely that one.
My point was merely there are many other things that are worth doing, too, and a lot of them stand at least a nonzero chance of working even in the absence of court reform. We shouldn't, under any circumstances, throw our hands up and say, "Roberts might strike this down so why bother?"
Wouldn’t the Republicans just do the same thing in response when they get a majority again?
So what they’ve already done?
“Stack the Supreme Court” means expanding the size of the court so you can fill the new seats with people on your side and give yourself a majority
The Republicans played pretty dirty with Garland / Coney Barrett, but they haven’t stacked the court. They’ve just put ideologically sympathetic justices in when vacancies have arisen, which is essentially how the court has always worked
Your definition (which had already begun being used ITT by others, FWIW) is for packing, not stacking. The GOP already stacked the Court when they let Scalia's seat sit vacant for a whole year while Garland waited on a vote that never came just so that Obama wouldn't get a final appointment, *& then* reversed their position on election-year appointments 4 years later to ensure ACB was seated. So, now, we'll gladly be packing, in response, as the Roberts Court has ensured its own demise just as much as the Hughes Court did before the Switch in Time to Save 9 by upholding New Deal law
And again the question is ask. What than when (not if) Republicans win a trifecta and decide the stack/pack the court in reverse and weld power from the executive? Shouldn't the goal be to put in place guards that eliminate the power the president and SCOTUS has instead of just using it for your own side? If its the case that Democrats just want their own Trump, our nation really is lost.
Just stack the courts and make DC/Puerto Rico a state.
Small brain: nuke the filibuster & pack the Supreme Court
Medium brain: reduce the size of the Capital to an area encompassing only the core Mall-adjacent federal buildings, & then grant the rest of DC + PR statehood
Galaxy brain: same as Medium, except admit each of DC's 127 remaining neighborhoods as an individual new state so that Dems can unilaterally reform the Constitution at-will with the votes of just 7 current blue out of 178 would-be total states https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/pack-the-union-a-proposal-to-admit-new-states-for-the-purpose-of-amending-the-constitution-to-ensure-equal-representation
Student notes in law reviews are anonymous, so we have no idea who wrote this at Harvard Law back in Jan. 2020, but they clearly already understood the assignment about just what MAGA was & to put it *under* the jail all the way back then!
I do remember reading about that, and I'd be on board. I think Newsom if he knew he had enough political support for that would actually go through with it, because he's that slimey. Do I think he'd turn on his on a whim if the political winds shifted? Yes. Sometimes you need a mercenary though.
They didn’t expand the court unilaterally and add seats to change the composition of the court. If the Dems do so, i don’t see why the Republicans wouldn’t follow suit when they are next able. And I don’t see how ruining an institution as important as SCOTUS would be good for our Republic in the long run.
The institution is already ruined. Robert’s ensured its demise.
The institution will be ruined when the American people, Democrats and Republicans regard it as a partisan institution and refuse to comply with their orders.
We aren’t there yet, but we will be if either side decides to unilaterally change the composition of the court for partisan politics.
Removing SCOTUS as a legitimate way to resolve constitutional crises is ensuring that the entire system falls apart.
The SCOTUS has historically always been a partisan institution. There is very little evidence that the SCOTUS has ever been a non-partisan entity. The whole "balls and strikes" is a whole load of fantasy horse shit made up in the 90s to make America's justice system look glorious.
Every single era of the SCOTUS was flagrantly partisan.
Marshall Court (Flagrantly partisan)
Taney Court (I don't really need to explain)
Chase, Waite, Fuller courts (All mega pro business, pro segregation)
Lochner Era Courts (straight up judicial activists but Conservatives)
Warren Courts (straight up judicial activists but Liberals)
Modern Era Courts (Mostly conservative courts who were put into place as a response to the Warren Courts).
Dawg where have you been the last 16 months? The supreme court made trump a king.
Dudes still pretending the Supreme Court isn’t already a partisan institution.
The American people, Democrats, and Republicans all still regard the court as the legitimate arbiter of constitutional disputes. Everyone is still complying with their orders.
Escalating the situation by unilaterally expanding the court will lead to the court losing more legitimacy and we will be without an institution that is regarded as that legitimate arbiter. Having no institution filling that role will lead to a collapse of the Union.
There should be bipartisan reform to de-politicize the court - not partisan action to further its politicization.
The only reason that the current regime is marginally complying with their orders is because the're only issuing the feckless orders, not the ones any legitimate constitutional authority should be issuing. We don't have birthright citizenship right now because the supreme court refuses to act to dismantle an executive order trump declared months ago.
The court lost all legitimacy the day it ruled on Trump v. US. The regard of the ignorant masses is meaningless, and arguably worse than their disregard. If Democrats taking charge of the situation and fixing it is seen as an escalation than so be it.
This is such an online take. Its at a low point, but it's far from "ruined"
> How do we reduce the number of far right wingers in the armed forces and law enforcement?
We fundamentally alter lib/prog culture to revitalize concepts of honor, "protect and serve," patriotism, respect, and sacrifice.
We endorse these as career paths for young liberals and progressives. The college educated very much included. Not to fix them. Just to join them and be a good officer by their lights.
you can't do that without trust in institutions though. Ideologues will only take part in institutions if they trust that they go along with their beliefs. It's a chicken and egg problem.
I too would like to fix all of our problems in one election.
Most important election of our lifetime
You can either..
OR
We've already tried 1. We already know no one has the stomach for 2, except MAYBE Gavin Newsom, who might just be slimey enough to do it.
Not to out myself as a pedestrian Destiny quoter, but you can't outlaw breaking the law. You can try to strengthen the institutions, but Trump had enough of the institutions behind his back to rearrange them to his will for most of the things he did. It might have caused a little more of an upset initially, but it wouldn't have been much more of a guarantee than the official process should have been already.
I think the best way you fix this is by getting it in Conservatives' brains that they want something better than what they voted for, and should be more careful about shit-stained red flags when they're being waved in their faces next time. People will continue to vote Republican, and while they probably won't have the majority in 2028, it will come back, and they need to support sane options by then.
Obviously not saying you shouldn't also try to establish a more reliable separation of powers, I just think that should be the second bullet point on the list.
The problem is that a lot of this comes down to a game theory problem where one side keeps mashing defect, wrt republican lawbreaking. That's not really viable long term. You have to do something to establish deterrence.
You can't hold them back with deterrence forever, you need a more fundamental solution, which is in their beliefs.
That’s fundamentally a culture issue. If we can’t agree freedom and the rule of law is good liberalism is doomed.
Might as well start learning mandarin.
Except if conservative beliefs are fine with walking lock step with fascists, and obeying their whim so they can get their pet policy adopted, how do you mesh that with the alternative viewpoint.
That level of political cynicism, and opportunism at the cost of the republic, is not something that can be countered by just pointing out Trump and MAGA's idiotic moves.
Then it certainly won't be countered by administrative red tape.
If you're going to make the claim that conservatism is inherently evil, you'll have to propose a better solution than outlawing it.
Are you basically saying you must convert them from conservatism rather than only converting them from Trump? Do you think I'm against converting them from conservatism? Do you think converting them from conservatism is equally feasible to converting them from consequence-blind populism? Do you live in reality, or do you just want to talk about how the world would be better if everyone was nice?
Biggest one is end the filibuster and force congress to be in charge of things. The more we can strip power from the executive the less abuses there will be.
Oh want to create another ice. Force a hundred angry cat to agree on how it works.
Also pack the Supreme Court and create some new thing in government that allows congress to control an agency directly.
Also being back the State Guard for all blue states
Blue states secede
Yup.
You see the enlightened centrists here posting nonsense like “sounds like a good way to start a civil war “ as if that ship hasnt already sailed because what else do you call withholding federal funds, sending US troops into blue cities, murdering and disappearing civilians, and telling your supporters to attack and intimidate democratic politicians
It's my dream honestly. But I feel like the moderates, centrists and mainstream Dems don't have the same appetite for violence and determination that the right wingers do.
Fix the House? Not that other, more powerful chamber of Congress where a minority of citizens have a stranglehold on nearly all legislation?
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION you say?
Sounds like a job for the greatest liberal think tank lobbyist organization, arr/neoliberal.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good
Easy. Charge all major conservative media outlets for acting as unregistered foreign agents in their spreading of Russian disinformation. The republican base is now gone, people become normal again
FIRE helps people gain US citizenship
Soon 7 billion Americans inshallah
Federal Immigrant Recruitment Embassy.
Someone come up with a better acronym. That's all I could come up with in 30 seconds
Federal Immigration Rights Enforcement, an army of lawyers ready to help people with the system
Yeah yours sounds better
Not just lawyers, but armed protective services trained to ruin the day of any nativist or xenophobe.
Bunch of buff fire fighters beating up fascists? Those tickets would sell like hotcakes
Winning by being Financially Independent and Retiring Early?
Face Infamy, Republican Enemy /s
Hey they should make a song about this
I'm already there, though my single issue is accountability. There must be consequences. These people don't have morals or principles, they only understand power. Punish them and take away their power, and they'll start to consider coming around.
I’ve complained about Newsom a lot on this sub but if he actually runs on abolishing ICE, I will be defending his ass strongly to everyone I know and take back some of my previous statements
Tbh, I think the thing that works in his favor is people acknowledging he's shitty, but is the one taking this seriously. It's easier to embrace sleaziness than to manufacture a clean record.
See: Trump
I wasn't going to be the one to say it.
Basically the Clinton strategy. There were political cartoons about voters saying “I’m for the scumbag”.
George Carlin even had a joke that the reason he won was because he could admit he was a piece of shit while Dole claimed to be a honest man.
This is one of those things you don't run on - you just never say you won't do it... because of the implication.
I am going to demand it so that we don't elect someone who implicitly promises it but won't go through with it.
Abolish ICE is going to be another Defund the Police and Medicare for All sloganism that Democrats fell into in the 2020 cycle and still haunts the party to this day.
Much of the overreach after the 2020 cycle is why the current Administration is in power now.
It feels good to the base but doesn’t actually address policy issues.
Immigration enforcement isn’t going away and some organizations will have to do it in some form. ICE having its share of problems isn’t controversial but just saying slogans without a politically palatable plan is a recipe for disaster.
We won in 2020 despite defund and MFA (also MFA is not that unpopular and Biden did not run ok it either). The reason the administration is in power is inflation, were there some things Dems should have done better of course, but the main issue was prices going up.
I’ve made clear I don’t believe in immigration enforcement, but if we are going to have it ICE is possibly the most evil form of it. We don’t need people treating their neighbors like enemies of war and attacking Home Depots. Someone suggested increasing federal police power, closer to other countries and giving them more power over immigration which might work better. But when hire people specifically caring about immigration control, you are hiring a shit ton of bigots who just want to brutalize minorities. I watched them kill people 5 miles from me for no goddamn reason and they bastarda been on the force since the Obama years. So yes, ICE must be destroyed
I will not vote for anyone who doesn’t run on abolishing ice and prosecuting the criminals who were a part of it.
ICE and the DHS at large are barely past drinking age. They are not some crucial bedrock of our life or government.
Also, unrelated, but Medicare for all is nationally, and across party lines, very popular.
[deleted]
trump won in 2024 because of inflation not 2020 culture war (when he literally lost)
Fucking hate the man but if he's the only one promising top-to-bottom jail time, I will swallow my pride 10 times out of 10.
Newsom is a sleazy, corrupt (nowhere near Trump levels but still), playboy, whose only sincerely held belief seems to be that he should get as much media attention as possible.
But if gavin thinks that putting Stephen Miller in the electric chair will get him on the front page of the New York Times, he'll probably pull the handle himself.
I think whoever he has manning his social media is savvy enough to correctly advise him personally pushing Miller into Alligator Alkatraz's titular alligator pit on TV would poll better by .3% for the irony factor but otherwise you're on the money for his ruthlessness
Yeah, whoever is running his twitter account is who I really want as president.
Gruesome Newsom strikes again
LBJ also morally bankrupt, opportunistic corrupt scumbag, but is also the most successful legislative president not named FDR. Sometimes you need a piece of shit more than a Boy Scout.
That's the thing. He's absolutely morally bankrupt, and absolutely sleazy.
At this point though you need someone who is willing to at minimum bend the rules to fight back against a group that is outright burning the house down.
I've said it before, but the next president is fucked, regardless. 4 years is never enough time to clean up after a republican president, but especially so this time. It's never gonna be enough, so honestly, I'd rather it be someone I don't even like. This time, anyway.
If there is enough political rigor behind the president to make real changes then I think it is possible to undo a lot of this shit and still make positive changes that aren't just recovering from this mess. A large amount of Trump's actions have been executive orders that can be undone without any approval from congress.
Yeah, but all anyone cares about is grocery prices. None of that will matter to your average voter.
You can't really 'undo' the destruction of USAID, it took a few months to tear down but will / would take years to rebuild.
Same with the federal worker purge they did. You can fire all the Trumpist cronies and rank-and-file goobers he installed, but many of the progressive people he fired will never ever come back, unless on terms and salaries the government would never pay. And even if you got some of them back, the new people need to be reintegrated and team reconstituted.
It might not be enough to fix everything, but it could be enough time for revenge.
revenge might just be a decent enough deterrent god knows Republicans werent scared at all of the Garland.
It would be the first time any of them have ever faced consequences for their actions
I think the last year proves that actually you can accomplish a hell of a lot in one year, let alone four. Yes, it's easier to destroy than to build, but there are still plenty of lessons to be learned from the experience...and also there's going to be a need for a bit of destruction.
Whichever Dem gets elected absolutely needs to come in with a P2025-style handbook for how they're going to remake the government in their first 100 days. They need to have a mountain of executive orders predrafted and ready for the
autopen like Trump did. They need to be ready and willing to do a purge of loyalists. On the legislative side, they need to have a big old stack of bills ready to sail through committees and get to floor votes by Summer 2029.Which is why one of the main goal of the first term needs to be to make sure MAGA can’t take power again, at least not for a long ass time. And not that weak ass shit Biden did where he naively thought just making things better for people and trying to not be overly partisan would be enough. Like actually prosecuting people, blowing up the filibuster to pass stuff like anti-gerrymandering laws, putting pressure on tech/social media companies to actually deal with disinformation, on top of actual serious fixes for concerns like affordability, etc.
Would you explain why you hate him?
mid at best on policy
For me he's the slimiest of opportunists. He's only peddling this line of attack cause he thinks it's an effective lane to make himself a special candidate.
He's right and the only one doing it so he's the only port in this storm, but I want to vote for someone who hates the GOP as much I do. Not someone pandering to me over it.
So your accusation is that he secretly doesn't hate MAGA that much??
Yes. He wanted to cuddle them up all nice and tight right after the election.
Based on what exactly?
Jerking off a bunch of right wingers as soon as the election was over. If you sit down with bannon and let him have his fun you are a fuck.
I think at that point its not so much he was sitting down with Bannon, its Bannon sitting down with him. Newsome didn't have as much of a presence back then and it was before Republicans were super unpopular.
He also doesn't need to sit down and talk with people who were going to vote for him anyway, despite some complaining on the internet the actual leftists do generally seem willing to vote, he needs to talk to the people who would have otherwise voted against him but might change their mind.
I'm tired of having that circular conversation and have enough going on in my private life I don't have the capacity to put up with it again, sorry.
To give you the summation and my only word on this, his first instinct at the start of the 2025 wasn't to fight the new Trump admin, it was to pivot right and find every right-wing influencer he could get or give a podcast slot to so he could agree with them that trans rights have gone too far and humor transphobic arguments. That, along with other policy disagreements soured me on him considerably.
And to save you the time and energy, no, I do not consider the bills he signed last year or his TDOR post a counterargument to this.
Honest to god, one of the things that's brought me around on him is people being more open about him being sleazy. It helps to not have that Buttigiegian "Our perfect boy can do no wrong" parasociality.
I completely agree with you. He's sleazy and disingenuous, but however is willing to go full law and order, gets my vote.
I’ll support him but I’ll never truly support him because immediately after the 2024 election he tried getting buddy-buddy with right-wing fascists because that’s how he was reading the tea leaves back then.
He thought becoming at least somewhat amenable to Nazi fascists like Charlie Kirk and his audience was the key to a successful presidential run in 2028, so that’s what he did. Now, he’s correctly identified that the key to winning the incoming Dem primary is by being the biggest hater of MAGA, so that’s what he’s doing.
But I don’t think he actually feels that way. He didn’t feel that way immediately after the election like I did. After like three straight months of Trump on the campaign trail calling black immigrants savages and promising to crater the economy.
Newsom’s current attitude of being the crusader against MAGA is not genuine. So I have no way of knowing whether that attitude will change the moment he calculates once again that being more conciliatory towards the right is better for his political career.
Immediately after the 2024 election (November 7, 2024) Newsom called a special session to pass legislative defenses and to build a war chest for the attorney general’s office to fight the Trump administration: https://calmatters.org/politics/capitol/2024/11/gavin-newsom-special-session-trump-resistance
That was in a bid to make a play for their audience and actually a good thing to do.
If you transcribed his podcast but didn’t say it was Newsom, no one would even think it was a Democrat, certainly not a Democrat with a spine.
He was as weak in messaging than anything we’ve seen even from Schumer, because he was sprinting to the table with the fashy right to show them that he was one of the “cool” Dems. He was not trying to court Kirk’s audience, or if he was, he was doing an abysmal job at it.
Yeah he tried something, it didn't work and he course corrected.
Dems hysterically hyperventilating over every mildly controversial statement/ interview hasn't worked out so great for them either, though many seem impervious to correcting that.
Have people forgotten the French Laundry brouhaha?
He is such a transparent political opportunist in some ways like the current VP.
Josh Barro had a pretty good rundown.
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/gavin-newsom-is-gross-and-embarrassing
A politician is a political opportunist? Say it ain’t so.
I've said it before that I'll vote for Patrick Bateman over the antichrist every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
It’s pointless to hope for this kind of redemption. The only regime capable of doing that is one autocratic and unaccountable enough to inevitably repeat the same crimes. The best we can hope for is living like Italians in 1946.
GRUESOME NEWSOM
Median Voter: Abolish ICE = Abolish immigration enforcement
If you feel you can explain what you actually mean to these people, you can’t and you’ve already lost.
Unfortunately it doesn’t help leftists are actually pushing to abolish immigration enforcement under the guise of “abolish ice”
I hate that you are right about this. It just creates content and easy fodder for the right wing media apparatus...
https://preview.redd.it/skh48zpebjcg1.jpeg?width=482&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=98226e13a28f78852b568b479fcfd66a8a980eeb
Prosecute them all
Exactly. If it’s abolished it can be reformed. Fascists need to understand that they will be held accountable for their atrocities
Do we think "Abolish ICE" as a slogan is going to perform better or worse with the median voter than "Defund the Police"?
"Abolish ICE" isn't a slogan, it's what I want to happen
ICE is younger than 9/11, this is not some permanent fixture of society that we have no context of living without
They changed the INS, which used to be an agency of the department of labor, to ICE after 9/11. Immigration enforcement has been around a long time.
"Abolish ICE" is not "let's not have immigration laws;" it's "let's not have this specific agency of secret police doing immigration enforcement." The masked goons with guns going around killing moms in their cars, hanging out around schools, and asking people for their papers please are the problem.
Immigration law should be boring, orderly, and bureaucratic.
it's not? wtf is the point then
Sure and I'd agree that the agency needs massive reform. Personally, I have serious issues with masked, unidentified law enforcement performing random raids in our cities. And, "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Now!" isn't a catch slogan for the Twitter activist class either, I get it.
But we should take the lesson from the Defund the Police movement seriously when it comes to radical sloganeering that is later rationalized away with obtuse academic language. If you're explaining, you're losing.
So Defund the Police 2.
The average person will not pay enough attention to get past the slogan’s initial impression.
This WILL be interpreted as abolish immigration enforcement by millions of voters. You will never get a chance to explain what you really mean to the low information voter.
“Abolish the Stasi”
“So you want to remove all intelligence services?”
Need I remind you Trump was reelected after trying to steal an election in broad daylight?
The slogan sucks and will repel median voters and we’ll lose. Again.
Your intent and facts don’t matter if no one understands what you’re saying.
Probably about the same
"Do we think Americans have more love for the people murdering random citizens, abducting community figures from their homes, who are most frequently compared to the Nazi SS and Gestapo, or their cop cousin who they think is alright?"
ICE has no goodwill right now.
I think you might need to try living your username.
Nah, it's for depressive doomscrolling episodes, not some random guy finding pushback annoying.
I’m a zero issue voter. I’ll literally vote for any democrat no matter what they think about anything
What about the primaries?
My single issue is hanging all the traitors, I swear to god if we get a trifecta in 28 and slap them on the wrist and we end up right back here in 32 I’m gonna become the joker. History clearly shows letting people off lightly after coup attempts never comes back to bite oneself /s
Johnson fucked up Reconstruction the first time.
We fucked up the aftermath of J6.
We need to get it right this time.
Dems need to be clear that although they want to abolish ICE, they will replace it with a new immigration enforcement agency. But ice definitely needs to go. It's likely they recruited a bunch of proud boys, militia members, neo nazis, etc.
https://preview.redd.it/rwhjrfxisccg1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ab0083d2e1fbcfd7456ce5d78ab5b7135f3ad5ad
Why does the US need a separate agency for everything? In Canada, Border Services issues a warrant for the arrest of people who are breaking immigration laws then local police execute the warrant.
Why should they do that
I agree with you, but open borders polls at like 20% or something. It's morally and economically right, but we're just too stupid and racist for it to happen any time soon 😔
Because having immigration enforcement is politically popular
Some type of immigration enforcement is necessary. The problem with Ice is it’s rotten to the core. Its powers are far too broad and its ranks are filled with hick thugs. It should be an abolished and a new immigration enforcement agency established with more limited powers and staffed by qualified professionals.
The public is so fickle on this issue, it's probably best politically to remain ambiguous. All it takes is some terrorist attack or some heinous crime by someone overstaying a visa and you'd find yourself backpedalling before an election.
ICE is shooting people in the face. The public has bigger concerns at the moment.
Reddit is not the public. This story is already halfway down the page on the NYTimes
People weren't going out into the street and protesting because of that collaborator rag's coverage, dude. The NYT is also not the public.
One of my most downvoted comments ever on reddit dot com was in this very sub flippantly (but I meant it) saying “I’m a single issue voter. I won’t support someone with an R by their name.” Shit was probably like 2017? I guess. Now look at this pinned post.
What does he mean by abolish ICE? Is he talking about ending customs and interior immigration law enforcement or is he proposes we go back to INS and Customs agents being separate?
Also a single issue voter now, but MY single issue is punishment of this Administration per the law. Promise to hold them genuinely accountable to the law, and you have my vote.
We just need a president who will punish Trump, his enablers, and their supporters and restore institutional power. Everything else is secondary.
I mean even if you change the name reform it and fire some people you do need to do immigration enforcement.
If you actually abolish ICE and not replace some of its functionality you will lose quickly lose the next election.
This is what happened with Biden because he became beholden to activists and got a border crisis so we got the current Administration.
If you don’t want to see the same dynamic you have to take a pragmatic approach of reforming the organization but leaving core functions in place.
You’re right. They will paint abolish ICE as abolish immigration enforcement.
If they're going to paint abolishing ICE as abolishing immigration enforcement, we might as well say "hell yeah", go all the way and actually push for justice instead of meeting in the middle with "actually some exclusion and legally distinct classes of person are fine if enforced Properly"
This feels like defund the police 2.
Also, if you run on actually abolishing immigration enforcement you definitely will lose.
IMO the clear and easy way forward is go for a top to bottom reform.
Democrats are terrible at semantics… so they probably will run on abolish ICE.
You cannot reform or fix the Gestapo. ICE needs shuttered and replaced at best.
The Biden admin made a pretty good attempt at reform but it got shot down for political reasons. They killed the solution they were asking for because the problem was more profitable for them in the short term. The R’s are likely to do that with any issue. It’s going to take a fuckmongous blue wave to legally achieve any kind of meaningful reform.
No you do not
The "border crisis" exists because we have created a secondary class of person that is not protected by the same rights and does not have access to the same institutions as we do, simply due to the circumstances of their birth. The problem is the border. Open the border, stop having it be closed.
The “border crises” was also a manufactured media event pushed by the right ignoring what was actually being done by the Biden administration
Immigration enforcement was still happening. We didn’t need an armed private military to do it. It was never “open”
US-Mexico border encounters/illegal crossings spiked during the Biden Administration and border communities bore the brunt of it.
I am not sure why that is controversial?
I do not understand why you insist on "illegal crossing" existing as a crime
Haven't Democrats historically supported ice and tried to reform it instead of abolishing it?
I mean I would love to eat my own words on this matter, I am just not sure Gavin is the guy for this.
Yes, but he has the easy pivot of "Then they shot American citizens in the face and I changed my mind". He'll catch a little deserved flak from the left for not getting around to this position fast enough, but no one outside the DT will actually give a shit.
Hey I would be thrilled to be wrong and have him abolish ice and I'll vote for whomever has the best chance of ousting the current regime... I just doubt Gavin will do anything about it.
Don't get me wrong, I trust him as far as I can throw him. But the most visible frontrunner openly promising top-to-bottom prosecution helps lock that as something other contenders have to make a stance on.
Fair play.
ICE pre and post Trump Part 2 are functionally very different orgs.
Not really? ICE has always been like this, just less openly
Key changes to ICE under the second Trump administration include:
Increased Funding and Staffing: The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" provided ICE with a substantial increase in funding for custody operations, quadrupling its annual detention budget. The agency is on track to hire 10,000 new officers by the end of 2025 as part of a major recruitment drive.
Record Detention Levels: The number of people in ICE detention has reached historic highs, with facilities often exceeding capacity, leading to reports of overcrowding and poor conditions.
Leadership Overhaul and Agency Collaboration: Nearly half of the top leadership positions at ICE field offices have been replaced with personnel from Border Patrol, an agency often criticized for a more aggressive culture. Other federal agencies, including the FBI and the Postal Inspection Service, have been directed to support ICE's immigration enforcement efforts.
Procedural and Policy Changes: The administration ended programs that allowed some migrants to legally schedule asylum appointments and is actively working to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of people. New directives allow for raids in previously considered "sensitive locations" like schools and hospitals.
Tactics and Force: There have been numerous reports of aggressive tactics during raids, including the use of unmarked vans, masked agents, and excessive force. At least four people have been killed by immigration officials during enforcement actions in the second term so far.
Yes, they got more power, but the power they had before was still for a terrible cause
I never liked them, but as with most things It's definitely gotten way worse. I don't remember the random indiscriminate violence, prison colonies, and concentration camps for starters.
I can definitely agree that it has gotten way worse as funding has increased and the administration changed to one more openly interested in enacting an ethnic cleansing
Gotten worse, but still on the same path it was before.
Most people in law enforcement are natural assholes. But the current bunch has finalised its transformation into brown shirts. They need to be purged and replaced with new assholes that know there are limits to their power.
Under Obama and Biden, ICE was much more pragmatic and humane.
Running on abolishing ICE would be paraded as open borders and playing into Trump and Fox news that the democrats want every boogeyman immigrant in (tren de Agua, MS13, erc)
Outside of reddit, abolishing ICE isnt going to fare well with voting public. Its a hill that the democrats will die on unless you’re in the deepest of the bluest of blue.
Even Mamdani walked back on defund the police, a nationwide messaging on weak borders will prove fatal for democrats.
Hot take: abolishing ICE would address neither the immoral conduct of American immigration enforcement nor the sometimes indiscriminate use of firearms by American police.
Abolish CBP too. Regular cops obviously have issues too but we do need law enforcement so it's a trickier problem to solve. But an easy first step is to get rid of the gangs of masked kidnappers.
"Abolish ICE" is a trap, don't fall into it please. Did we learn nothing from "defund the police"?
interestingly this sub was one of the last outposts of non-rightwing reddit where "defund the police" remained unpopular.
I suspect the thunderdomes swung this sub to the left and "abolish ice" is now popular.
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/s/djLgZiP6Sk
Heh, same
Reconstruction Act 2
Most dem candidates share like 90-95% of the same policies anyway and all would be better than Vance or Rubio, so whichever candidate runs on throwing all these people in jail has my vote whether it’s him, AOC, or someone else
You’re gonna be very disappointed when whomever wins the primary pivots to a new bullshit general election talking point about how ICE agents need more funding and training.
Gang gang gang. Also-
I think it would be really neat if there’s a bill passed in the next couple of years that says if you accept a bribe whilst in or about to take office you, your companies, and the person who bribed you all have to pay 3x the bribe amount to the federal treasury.
This is the bare fucking minimum. If a candidate isn't willing to dismantle the fascist secret police, how am I supposed to trust them on any other policy?