#Congress Zero

[silliestcolressfan]

my ocs😭😭😭😭😭😭my shaylas😭😭😭😭💔💔💔💔💔💔I'm being nicer to them as if recently

now time to see how many I can fit in the tags

[eggsistential-breakdown]

TWO FULL DECADES AROUND THE SUN

[niallsblckgirlfriend]

Another shooting in Alabama…….literally this will never stop.

[unforth]

Everything feels awful right now but it isn't really. We still don't officially have a winner, but regardless of how the presidential election ends up, I wanted to take a minute and find what lights I can in the 3 a.m. darkness. Here's what I know:

* Kentucky overwhelmingly rejected an attempt to undermine the public education system by offering private school vouchers:

* Delaware has elected a transgender woman to the House of Representatives, the first out trans person of any gender ever elected to congress:

* For the first time in history, two Black women will be serving in the senate at the same time, and they are only the fourth and fifth Black women ever elected to the senate:

* New York State has passed a constitutional amendment enshrining the rights of pregnant people (including the right to an abortion), LGBTQIA+ people, the disabled, immigrants regardless of legal status, and other at-risk groups:

* Democrat Josh Stein has beaten self-avowed Nazi Mark Robinson to become governor of North Carolina:

That's everything I know off the top of my head. It's not many bright spots, but it's not zero. I'm going to try to find more and I'll add them to the post. It's the only thing I can think of to do that isn't sobbing and throwing up or looking up Canadian immigration rules.

If you know more good news, I encourage you to add it in reblogs.

[krsonmar]

You know what's insane? When I was a kid I used to look at adulthood--which I guess I defined then as having the social, logistical, and executive functioning skills, along with employability and a practical knowledge of how the world works--as this intimidating thing I could only hope I'd be able to manage by the time I got there.

Now that I'm there, I'm looking around at ::gestures broadly:: and wooooow...you really don't need ANY qualifications to be let loose on the world and make decisions that affect others, do you? I was worrying way too hard about being able to cut it.

Controversial take, because it really would dramatically upset current power structures, but can we please bring back having standards about behavior in public, and really holding people to them? I did all this work to try to meet some kind of baseline I thought existed and yet the world is being run by the most harmful, incapable people failing upward and making the world worse for their own short-term benefit. It seems increasingly like being adequately equipped for a generally pro-social life lived in basic non-conflict with most other adults one encounters and contributing in some positive way to a shared functioning society is more of a liability for attaining success, or at least being granted power over others.

[wyrdweavings]

In case anyone out there needs a copy

The U.S. Constitution, pasted in from the copy at the U.S. National Archives (you never know when the site might be taken down): We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and…

[burning-thistle]

Now that the craze over the CEO is dying down, what are we suddenly going to find out the government did behind our backs? 😀

[beemovieerotica]

struggling with how to word this, but putting it out there anyway:

i can fully understand the posts on here from a lot of americans being tired of "vote blue no matter who" posts when the #1 thing that people are constantly (and sometimes only?) addressing is how the republican party is going treat trans/queer people if elected.

it's part of an unfortunate pattern of prioritizing the effects on a demographic that includes white + upper class people, when people of color and those in the global south are actively and currently being killed or relegated to circumstances in which their survival is very unlikely

it is genuinely exhausting to witness this, and i was also on the fence about even participating in voting because i a) felt like it didn't matter and b) every time i voiced being frustrated with the current state of the country, white queer people would immediately step in with "but what about trans people!" -> (i am mixed race trans man)

and i say this with unending patience toward people who do this, because i know that it's not something they actively think about. but everyone already knows how the republican party is going to treat queer people. you are probably talking to another queer person when you bring up project 2025. the issue is that, for those of us who aren't white, or for those of us who are but who are conscious of ongoing struggles for people of color worldwide, the safety of people around the world feels more urgent than our own. that is the calculation that's being made.

you're not going to win votes for the democratic party by dismissing or minimizing these realities and by continually centering (white) queer people.

very few people on here and twitter are actually talking about issues beyond queer rights that concern people of color, or how the two administrations differ on these issues instead of constantly circling back to single-issue politics. this isn't an exhaustive list. but these are the issues that have actually altered my perspective and motivated me to the point of committing to casting a vote

the biden administration has been engaged in a years-long fight to allow new applicants to DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program that allows undocumented individuals who arrived as children to remain in the country) after the Trump administration attempted to terminate it. the program is in limbo currently because of the actions of Trump-backed judges, with those who applied before the ruling being allowed to stay, but no new applications are being processed. Trump has repeatedly toyed with the idea of just deporting the 1.8 million people, but he continues to change his mind depending on whatever the fuck goes on in his head. he cannot be relied on to be sympathetic toward people of hispanic descent or to guarantee that DREAMers will be allowed stay in the country. biden + a democratic controlled congress will allow legal challenges to the DACA moratorium to gain ground.

the biden administration is open to returning and protecting portions of culturally important indigenous land in a way that the trump administration absolutely does not give a fuck. as of may 2024, they have established seven national monuments with plans to expand the San Gabriel Monument where the Gabrielino, Kizh / Tongva, the Chumash, Kitanemuk, Serrano, and Tataviam reside. the Berryessa Snow Mountain is also on the list, as a sacred region to the Patwin.

i'm recognizing that the US's plans for clean energy have often come into conflict with tribal sovereignty, and the biden administration could absolutely do better in navigating this. but the unfortunate dichotomy is that there would be zero commitment or investment in clean energy under a trump-led government, which poses an astounding existential threat and destabilizing force to the global south beyond any human-to-human conflict. climate change has caused and will continue to cause resource shortages, greater natural disasters, and near-lethal living conditions for those in the tropics - and the actions of the highest energy consumers (US) are to blame. biden has funneled billions of dollars into climate change mitigation and clean energy generation - trump does not believe that any of it matters.

i may circle back to this and add more as it comes up, but i'm hoping that those who are skeptical / discouraged / tired of the white queer-centric discourse on tumblr and twitter can at least process some of this. please feel free to add more articles + points but i'm asking for the sake of this post to please focus on issues that affect people of color.

[codewitch]

I dunno. One of the things I can’t shake about politics is how many online leftists talk about how democrats don’t include them in their party and it’s like. What leftists are in politics for them to include? The far right has been very successful in dragging the overtone window by seeding the political vacancies with themselves at the lower level, which gives the party a lot of people to pick from, as well as local power. And federal judgeships, which are now working in tandem to funnel any bullshit case to the Supreme Court to strip away even more rights and protections. Leftists focus all their energy on activism and think there’s no value into pursuing political careers. Like I dunno man it’s been hugely successful for the other guys and they just keep ignoring our protests maybe we should try it too. AOC and Bernie Sanders can’t do it all on their own.

[n0thingiscool]

Trump's Disgusting Zero Tolerance Policy

tldr:

US home grown stages of fascism and population abuses implemented mainly by Jeff Sessions, Steven Miller, Gene Hamilton, and Tom Homan.

- These cunts ignored their colleague's concern for ethics and process in order to justify kidnapping asylum seeking children from their parents, including taking infants from their breast feeding mothers, immediately.

- They ignored the pre-emptive warnings given by Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona Marshals and district attorneys at the borders telling them border patrol didn't have the facilities or staff capacity to handle the increased prosecutions.

- They didn't even bother to consider what they would do with the kids once they stole them. They barely notified DHS of the plan and didn't tell HHS at all. Therefore the was no way to track or document the stolen children.

- All of these assholes knew Trump was too stupid to comprehend the reality of the policy, knew all he was was a dipshit reactionary, and colluded to take advantage of this fact

- The rest of the rank and files had their heads so far up their asses it took thousands of displaced children, stories of parents suffering from grief, and actual leaked audio before they accepted what they were doing was wrong and/or what the news was reporting wasn't liberal bias

The full story:

"Trump-administration officials insisted for a whole year that family separations weren’t happening. Finally, in the spring of 2018, they announced the implementation of a separation policy with great fanfare—as if one had not already been under way for months. Then they declared that separating families was not the goal of the policy, but an unfortunate result of prosecuting parents who crossed the border illegally with their children. Yet a mountain of evidence shows that this is explicitly false: Separating children was not just a side effect, but the intent. Instead of working to reunify families after parents were prosecuted, officials worked to keep them apart for longer."

------------------------

"Elizabeth Neumann, Nielsen’s deputy chief of staff, told me she was shaken by the nonchalance with which McAleenan and Homan had proposed taking vast numbers of children away from their parents. “They were not grasping the humanity of the situation; they were just all about ‘I need Stephen [Miller] off my back. I need the president off my back,’ ” she said. (McAleenan denies this account.) Nielsen’s deputy chief of staff, told me she was shaken by the nonchalance with which McAleenan and Homan had proposed taking vast numbers of children away from their parents. “They were not grasping the humanity of the situation; they were just all about ‘I need Stephen [Miller] off my back. I need the president off my back,’ ” she said. (McAleenan denies this account.)"

----------------------------------------------

"In February 2018, Gelernt met a woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo who had been separated from her 6-year-old daughter. The girl had spent several months in an HHS shelter in Chicago; her mother was being held in an immigration detention center in the desert on the outskirts of San Diego. When she walked into a cinder-block room to meet Gelernt, she appeared gaunt and confused—“almost catatonic from what had happened to her,” Gelernt told me. "

------------------------

"The brutality of Zero Tolerance was immediately evident. The father of a 3-year-old “lost his s—,” one Border Patrol agent told The Washington Post. “They had to use physical force to take the child out of his hands.” The man was so upset that he was taken to a local jail; he “yelled and kicked at the windows on the ride,” the agent said. The next morning, the father was found dead in his cell; he’d strangled himself with his own clothing."

-------------------------

"González said that at the height of Zero Tolerance, about 300 children were separated each day at her facility and crammed into caged enclosures. She spent most of her time inside the enclosures, helping children call their relatives. Sometimes the younger children didn’t seem to fully understand what was going on."

--------------------------

"Recently disclosed internal emails from that time help explain what Bash, Patrick, and the other U.S. attorneys couldn’t figure out—why the plan for reunifying families was faulty to the point of negligence. Inside DHS, officials were working to prevent reunifications from happening. Within days of the start of Zero Tolerance, Matt Albence, one of Tom Homan’s deputies at ICE, expressed concern that if the parents’ prosecutions happened too swiftly, their children would still be waiting to be picked up by HHS in Border Patrol stations, making family reunification possible. He saw this as a bad thing."

-------------------------

"as the trump administration sought to defuse the anger over Zero Tolerance, White House officials proposed blaming separated families for what had happened to them. A damage-control working group developed fact sheets suggesting, without evidence, that most of the separated children were trafficking victims, according to two people who were present. At one meeting, one of these officials told me, “they were like, ‘Why don’t we just show these women throwing their children over the wall, and then people will think, How could they do this?  ’ ”"

(Two things I would to see after reading this all center around witnessing Steven Miller and his cunt wife, Kate Waldman getting their asses physically beat on public access. Absolute fascists.)

[qqueenofhades]

https://www.tumblr.com/qqueenofhades/743255237060689920/the-thing-that-confuses-me-about-the-dont-vote

The “don’t vote” left’s point is basically that, if Biden gets a second term, it’ll basically signal that “They’ll vote for us as long as we’re not Republicans, why don’t we do some REAL fucked up shit, if we can get away with it?” It takes the power out of the people’s hands and places it firmly in the party’s.

I can’t completely disagree with that, my caveat is that there’s no real alternative system or party in place, because top-down change is ineffective; a third party president has to contend with a two party congress.

Except no. This whole "Biden just wants to do as much fucked up shit as possible while not being a Republican, and if you give him a second term he'll do more fucked up shit deliberately to spite you" mindset is only possible as an interpretation if you a) deliberately and comprehensively ignore everything he has done to date, and b) you approach the situation with the maximum bad faith possible. Not to mention, the ultimate outcome of this Big Important Teaching Biden A Lesson is that Trump gets back into power and makes everything orders of magnitude worse, because he does in fact want to deliberately do evil shit to everyone and says so at every opportunity. There is not some magical happy alternative that springs into existence by not voting. If you choose this as a year to Teach Biden A Lesson, you are enabling Trump. Trump will be much, much worse. If you don't care about that, I still do not care what your Great Ideology is. You are not helping anyone and you are directly and irreversibly hurting everyone.

I made a post a few days ago wherein I mentioned that I want to assess Biden fairly, taking into account both strengths and weaknesses, but the rampant bad-faith, lying, misreading, misrepresentation, and open sabotage of him (especially by the online left; the GOP sometimes only wishes they were as good at turning Biden's voter pool against him) makes it really difficult to do that. My frustration with those people makes me just want to go "BIDEN IS GREAT THE END." I know he is a flawed old man (though by literally every account of a career spent in public service, he really does care about making the world a better place and any remotely good faith reading of his accomplishments thus far can see that). It is also very likely that he goes MORE left in a second term because he won't have to face the electorate again, he has always gone more left when pushed before, and he's not actually the scheming genocidal mastermind that leftist social media paints him as. Shocking, I know.

I know there are things in the world we don't like and don't want and want to stop, and therefore we blame our own president for not making it stop. But I have zero, no, none, absolutely none whatsoever sympathy for this pseudo-populist "WE NEED TO TEACH BIDEN A LESSON BY ELECTING TRUMP AGAIN, I AM VERY MORAL MUCH ACTIVIST" mindset. There's this funny thing about America wherein it is still (for now) a democracy. If Biden wins a second term, he can't run again. I would take literally anything these people said more seriously if they focused on developing their dream progressive successor for 2028 (and also figured out how to get that person elected and in a place to make real change) rather than cynically sabotaging Biden in the most consequential election year, again, of our lifetimes. If you don't like him now, find a way to make his successor a better option. Throwing a toddler tantrum and handing the country back to a senile, deranged, fascist, revenge-riddled, theocratic Trump HELPS. NOBODY. I still don't know how many times I'm going to have to say that, but yeah.

[fahk]

Annoyed post.

Big ups to the USDA, the FDA, and all the scumbags in congress and the senate who don't give a shit about health and food. On a trip to Southeast Asia and can't really eat anything due to my body developing a wheat rejection "allergy" most likely thanks to US grown franken-wheat. No one in Japan, Thailand, or Cambodia have issues eating gluten and that's because their governments haven't signed contracts to feed their populations trash like Round-Up grains. I would sue the US government if it was possible for exposing a large enough portion of its population to a fucked up food supply. Long term goals. In the short term I just wish I could have a single fucking meal in this part of the world.

[sweaterkittensahoy]

I looked into this because she notes she's from Southwest Missouri, and that's an area I know pretty well.

Something to keep in mind: Sometimes the only way you have a chance of winning in some places is to run as a Republican. In that area of Missouri (she's running in Branson's district; trust me, it's majority red), you may run as a Republican because you know you can reach a wider base of people who will agree with most of your plans. She was an independent before she ran Republican. She might not be terrible.

Based on the website linked in her bio up there, she serves as a policy lead for an independent research group called Institute of Digital Media & Child Development. The group looks into how digital use ("screen time") can affect child development. I can't tell from a quick glance if the group skews for or against screens, but it does note that it's multi-partisan in terms of staffing.

HOWEVER. Her website has literally zero information about her platform. There is a photo of her holding up a "Make Branson Safe Again" sign that was apparently done in protest of two sitting Missouri senators, but even googling their names and the slogan brought up no direct information about why she was protesting.

There's also no information on what she's running on besides "disaffected young people" which means nothing when there are no issues or stances listed alongside it.

You would think, if one were politically savvy and running for AO3, there'd be SOMETHING on her site about being unapologetically free speech -- a talking point that goes well with Southwest Missouri Republicans AND A03 voters.

But nothing.

That sniff don't sniff, you know?

Audrey R., who’s running for the OTW board, is apparently also currently running for office. As a Republican

so uhhhhhh keep that in mind when you’re voting

[theonion]

Saying his latest executive order was legal due to an “underutilized but totally feasible workaround,” President Trump claimed Tuesday that he could overrule the U.S. Constitution by means of the relatively obscure “no one will stop me” loophole. “My critics say a constitutional amendment or at least an act of Congress is necessary to end birthright citizenship, but what they don’t realize is that a seldom-evoked administrative guideline ensures I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, because zero people will stand in my way,” said Trump, adding that the largely unheard-of clause allows him to circumvent normal legal proceedings because it’s not like anyone in any branch of government remains effective enough to prevent him from doing so.

Full Story

[reallyunluckyrunaway]

WHY DON'T WE BAN CONGRESS AND THEIR BACKWARDS AND DANGEROUS ACTIONS INSTEAD?

This disgusting bill proposes we writers, and/plus queer people everywhere have to disclose our personal private data and histories. So they can censor, ban, and restrict us and our right to do whatever the fuck we want. This is not Nazi Germany, and we should not allow them to persecute and dictate gay people, women, or minorities. We deserve our privacy, we deserve the Freedom to express ourselves, HOWEVER THE FUCK WE WANT.PERSONAL OR RELIGIOUS BELIEFS SHOULD NEVER EVER DICTATE SOMEONE ELSES RIGHT TO CHOICE, PRIVACY OR THEIR SAFETY IN LIFE, OR ONLINE.

[traegorn]

Saw someone reblog my post (they've blocked me but I saw a reblog of said reblog) claiming that Biden somehow was failing on trans rights because of the state level rollbacks.

You know, the ones done by state governments.

You know, the ones the President has zero power over.

Or how the Republican controlled congress wasn't passing his agenda.

Like, hate the guy all you want -- but, like, do it for shit that's actually his fault, y'know? I swear, do folks not actually know how our government works? Did y'all fail sixth grade social studies that hard?