After immigrants are detained by ICE, there are probably records somewhere of who has an attorney, and who is calling family members or an attorney.
For the immigrants who aren’t calling any family or lawyers, the poorest of the poor, people with little to no connection to anyone, who may not even say which country they are from, if the administration were actually trying to kill as many disconnected immigrants as possible in secret, would society know?
For example, if the administration was composed of all types of conservative people, but 30 percent were secretly Nazis or wanted racial genocide, could there be a campaign to not just remove, but kill, immigrants, and the public doesn’t find out?
That’s right, because THAT’S the LAW. We don’t throw it out because the bad guys won’t follow it, because that’s STUPID.
Does your country throw out the law because there are criminals who refuse to follow it? Do you just say “What’s the point of having laws, if a few won’t follow them? I guess the solution is to have NO LAW AT ALL?” Of course not. You FORCE the law breakers to follow the law, OR ELSE.
That’s what we want, for MAGA to follow the Constitution like every other administration for the last 250 years. And if they won’t, we’ll FORCE them to.
Personally, I think the Constitution as we know it is starting to resemble the Articles of Confederation: not fit for purpose.
It WAS an useful document, but we don’t have enough people upholding it, and the overall design of the thing is filled with poison pills to democracy. The 13th Amendment’s slave labor exception, electoral college, the lack of ranked-choice voting, not considering one’s body and devices to be ‘effects’ for warrant purposes, and so forth.
That is one of the reasons why I favor preparations for a civil war, because a true successor to America would need a fresh document to light the path towards a better future. It would be a painful thing, but I don’t think we have the luxury of a peaceful reformation anymore.
Of course, I would like to be wrong. But it ain’t prudent to believe that the Donorcrats and Turdpublicans would have a revelation and fix themselves.
Again, get rid of the he Constitution, and then what? This is is a typical MAGA strategy. They hate something, so they point out a flaw, and use that to rationalize getting rid of the whole thing, and replacing it with nothing. Like Obamacare.
Yeah, there are flaws in the Constitution, and MAGA is going to use the 13th Amendment to revive legal slavery, and like they do with EVERYTHING, we can expect them to exploit the shit out of it. But the foundational promises of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill.of Rights - that all people are created equal, and ALL people have the INALIENABLE RIGHTS to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - are STILL worthy goals upon which to build a government, and a society. What foundational promises would you replace them with?
You can just just throw away the entire car because it needs some repairs as it ages, or you can recognize that the old girl just needs some basic maintenance, a few new parts, and maybe some upgrades, and she’ll go another century. That’s what our Constitution needs, just a little attention under the hood, and she’ll be good as new.
That seems a more cautious and responsible choice than let the obviously crooked MAGA used car guys pick out your next ride. They be happy to put you in a new governmental vehicle of THEIR choosing. What do you think that will be like?
Considering that some Founding Fathers wanted the Constitution to be a living document, the answer is obvious: Keep the best parts of the original, incorporate the good ideas from the charters of other nations, remove the awful, and try out wild new concepts that may or may not work.
When it comes to ‘weird’ ideas, I would like economic promises and rules to be added. You cannot pursue happiness nor prosperity, if you are impoverished. A renewed American society should adopt UBI, free education (all levels and types), universal healthcare, the rights of workers to vote on their leadership and the pay that leadership earns, absolute wealth and income caps, ect.
Wealth is a Goldilocks problem, where too much makes people like Trump or Epstein a common sight, while too little creates a caste of people who cannot live their best lives. I feel that creating floors and ceilings on wealth would help make the next American democracy much more healthy.
In any case, MAGA will ‘pick’ our ride anyways. As we have seen in Minnepolis, they make their own law. They murdered Pretti and Good, kidnapped children, ignore the 4th Amendment, ect. So we should consider civil war, and the ramifications that come with that, is creating new laws and institutions of our own. An overhauled Constitution is both functional and symbolic - a statement of intent for what we want our nation to become.
Keeping the basic structure and philosophy of the Constitution, reforming and refining the things that have proved to be a problem, and adding things that have worked, makes perfect sense. That’s a plan I can support, over just tossing it out, and THEN starting to figure out something new.
We need to clearly spell out the roles of each branch of government, and reconfigure our election system so that it doesn’t filter out the intelligent, competent and moral candidates, in favor of the worst possible candidates. Very importantly, we need to add teeth to the Constitution, to punish those who dare to make serious attempts to exploit our system.
When it comes to teeth, I think 100% taxation should be imposed on people and companies whose wealth exceeds a cap. In the case of companies, their limit on wealth and assets should be based on employees. Someone makes 50k a year? Half of their income’s worth increases the cap for the business. O’course, incomes should be capped, workers voting on leadership, and so forth, to prevent stupid exploits for increasing a business’s wealth cap.
To keep the businesses honest about the book keeping, they don’t handle the accounting and employee records. The state and federal government should have rotations of overseeing them. They can roll a 1d4 dice each year, the first two rolls deciding which quarters of the year that the state government is responsible for. The federal government takes the other two seasons.
This helps prevent corruption, because a company and government observers can’t get too familiar with each other. If a company tries to offer favors to a randomized person, they will eventually be found out by someone honest, who can relate the issue to both the state and federal government. Also, both state and federal governments can compare their fiscal books on a company, to ensure that they match up. Each season a state or government observes, they use a different observer. So a total of four different observers each year to compare records with. Bigger companies, of course, should get more people watching them.
IMO, corruption in general is the biggest reason why America is becoming an awful place. Making it harder to do is crucial, and what I outlined above is just one of many approaches that will be needed.
A civil war would mean the Balkanization of the United States. We would become a collection of russias and North Koreas with a few Dubais thrown in. I cannot overstate how bad this would be. Millions dead. Unrecoverable economy. Oligarchs running city States. Do you want Jeff bezos to be a governor? Because that’s how you get Jeff bezos as governor.
The reformes you are suggesting would take a century and the 50 states would never be united again. I don’t disagree that you are pointing out serious and actionable flaws but you are calling for nothing less than the complete destruction of America and likely a third of our people. Civil war is… Jesus… I fucking hope we can hold our shit together.
The issue is, do we get a good choice? I suspect that isn’t possible anymore, so we should try to create the least awful one.
Great post. This is the stark reality among all the fantasies of glorious revolution we are hearing.
The Sociopathic Oligarchs are already making plans for “Freedom Zones,” large areas where the government has surrendered the land to some Oligarch/corporation for them to develop and operate as their own, largely free from government interference of ANY kind. They can operate under any conditions, with any wages, and no oversight at all, largely staffed by foreign workers, perhaps supplemented by slave labor from American Concentration Camps. They will be creating autonomous city states run by brutal billionaire warlords. Think Hong Kong or Dubai, but with the emphasis on slavery and human degradation.
MAGA is already on board with this plan, and nothing would assist more than to Balkanize America, so that there is so much chaos and violence, these monsters could establish their Fiefdoms in relative peace, without a functional court system, government, or media interfering with their new hobby.