#but still no vote

[ausetkmt]

The chained hand of Archer Alexander, who was the last slave captured under the fugitive slave law, is depicted in a statue commemorating the Emancipation Proclamation. A bill to study reparations for slavery advanced through a House committee this year but hasn't gotten a floor vote.

Karen Bleier/AFP via Getty Images

Seven months ago, a House committee advanced a bill to study reparations for slavery, after more than three decades of efforts to build support for the idea.

But the bill has not been taken up for consideration by the full House of Representatives even though it has the backing of some of the country's most prominent Democrats.

"Since April there has been very little movement on the bill by the leadership in Congress," said Kamm Howard, a national co-chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America.

Advocates for reparations are frustrated despite the fact that the proposal faces steep odds of fully passing the closely divided Congress even if the House did take it up.

The bill is H.R. 40, and it gets its name from the unmet promise that former slaves would be given "40 acres and a mule" as the Civil War drew to a close. It would establish a 13-person commission to study the effects of slavery and racial discrimination in the United States, from before the country's finding to present day.

The commission would hold hearings, submit its findings to Congress and recommend "appropriate remedies." It would also consider a "national apology" for the harm caused by slavery.

The bill's original sponsor, the late Democratic Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, first proposed the bill in 1989, and did so year after year for nearly three decades, until he retired in 2017. After that, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas began sponsoring the bill.

"I don't think anyone could argue against the fact that the trajectory of slavery has gone through the centuries, the decades and is in the DNA of descendants of enslaved Africans," Jackson Lee, a Democrat, said in an interview with NPR. "America would do well to try to bring healing and repair, in this time and in this century."

The bill finally gained political traction among Democrats as the country grappled with race and systemic racism and protests sparked by the killings of Black Americans by police flowed through the streets of U.S. cities large and small over the last two years.

Republicans oppose reparations. Democrats say even studying them has value

The bill has nearly 200 co-sponsors in the House, including members of House Democratic leadership. But it is widely opposed by Republicans and was advanced by the House Judiciary Committee in April with only Democratic votes.

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the Judiciary Committee's top Republican, argued that because the committee's members would be appointed by the president, the House speaker and the Senate pro tempore, who are currently all Democrats, the commission would obviously come to a conclusion in support of reparations.

"Spend $20 million for a commission that's already decided to take money from people who were never involved in the evil of slavery and give it to people who were never subject to the evil of slavery," Jordan said during the hearing on the bill. "That's what Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are doing."

Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah, one of two Black Republicans currently serving in the House, said that the concept of reparations is "divisive."

"Reparation where you take people's money that they've earned — it's punishment, it's theft, it's judgement," he said in the hearing. "It's saying that because of your skin color, you owe me. That is not the American way. We're not racist people. This American country is based on meritocracy."

Jackson Lee says arguments like this miss the point. The bill does not prescribe what form reparations should take, a question that is a point of debate among supporters of reparations for slavery.

"It is not the study of getting a check. It is not giving you a check. It is not the bill on a check," Jackson Lee said. "It is to study slavery and develop reparations proposals, which would create, first of all, the platform for understanding."

Rep. Jamaal Bowman talked about reparations frequently when he campaigned for his New York congressional seat.

"We haven't taken a moment to stop and pause and reflect and look ourselves in the mirror as a country and really be honest with ourselves about how those harms continue to persist," Bowman said.

A group of advocates has been pushing Democrats to bring the bill up for a vote, arguing that it is deeply popular.

"We are working diligently to basically get them all in a room with us and tell us directly how we can move this bill forward," said Nicole Austin-Hillery of Human Rights Watch, one of the advocates calling for a meeting with House leaders. "They have the power to do it, and we're imploring them to do so."

Some argue that House leadership has yet to bring the bill up for a vote because they fear a backlash among voters. Democrats are coming off of a series of bruising off-year elections that featured fresh Republican attacks on race and culture. In next year's midterms, Democrats will be defending incredibly slim majorities.

"The Democratic leaders are saying that they are scared if they move this legislation today, that it will hurt their chances of keeping control of the Congress," said Howard.

Advocates are urging Biden to act without Congress

A senior Democratic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the status of pending legislation, said that conversations about the legislation are ongoing, and that Democratic leadership and the White House are working together on the path forward. The aide said that equity is a central priority of the party.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a co-sponsor of the bill, told reporters earlier this year that he hopes that President Biden considers establishing a commission similar to the one called for in H.R. 40 using executive authority, noting that the chances of the bill passing the Senate "are pretty dim." In the evenly divided Senate, legislation requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. A Senate companion bill, sponsored by Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, has just 22 co-sponsors, with no Republicans.

The idea of Biden establishing a commission on his own has also won the support of some activists, including the Rev. Mark Thompson.

"What sets H.R. 40 apart from all of those other pieces of legislation that 'Manchinema' are blocking, is this" he said — using a compound reference to moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. "H.R 40 is the only one ... that Biden can sign and enact by executive order."

The White House hasn't said whether Biden would consider creating a commission on his own.

"He supports a number of components of the bill, including the funding and the proposal for a study, which he feels would be the next important step forward and something that he feels would be absolutely correct in addressing ... these moments in history," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in June.

Jackson Lee said she's focused on the legislative process and still hopes to get a "successful result" in the House, but said that there's a "great deal of power in the White House and in the presidency."

"I think there is certainly a sufficient body of people that would give President Biden a standing ovation if that was the direction that we needed to take," she said.

[blush-and-books]

Yes Joe Biden dropped out and you still need to vote blue. Hope this helps

[covid-safer-hotties]

[starcurtain]

Comparing Aventurine's "Keeping Up With Star Rail" to Mydei's is so funny because

Ratio: 🥺👉👈 D-Does he like me?

Meanwhile...

Phainon: I would like to confirm, for the public record, that Mydei and I fuck.

[crypticscarecrow]

Would you believe me if I said I'm already making a playlist to the cast

[platypusplayhere]

besties, french results for the european elections are kinda disgusting (as expected) and the president just dissolved the national assembly (unpredictable and stupid) which will probably lead to more far right ppl in the parliament (expected and horrible) so my french besties lets go vote on june 30 pls (im begging)

[squidthusiast]

Post-Grand-Fest feels…

[doomdoomofdoom]

Kamala Harris does want "transgender surgery on illegal aliens that are in prison", btw.

So since Trumpists are getting mad enough about the jokes to actually cite their sources, I thought I'd put the source out into my left extremist commie faggot echo chamber, too.

The claim originates from an ACLU questionnaire she filled out for her 2020 presidential candidacy, specifically this section:

She wasn't given a new questionnaire for 2024, and has stated that while her policy on some things may have changed, her values had not. (This most likely means she moved more to the center to appease larger demographics and cut corners to reach compromises. The basic politician stuff.)

It boils down to this: If you're in prison, whether for "illegal" immigration or other crimes, you rely on the state to provide you with necessary amenities, like food and health care. Her argument isn't "hell yeah everyone in prison should get sex changes for free". It's "gender affirming surgery is a necessary medical procedure. If you are in the states care while this becomes necessary, the state should provide it." If you're outraged by your tax money being used on this, consider the massive amount of people being incarcerated in for-profit prisons, on your dime. Then ask yourself if maybe a prison reform might be in order.

Worth noting: In 2015, while Attorney General, Kamala Harris actually argued against providing gender-affirming surgery to an incarcerated trans woman, claiming that HRT and psychotherapy were sufficiently covering her medical needs. She has since obviously changed her stance and assumed responsibility. (I would like to take this moment to remind my fellow left extremist commie faggots that "willingness to learn and rethink your views" is infinitely more valuable than "perfect from the start and unwilling to listen to anyone")

Also found in the source: This image of Kamala Harris participating in the 2019 San Francisco Pride Parade, wearing what I believe to be a sequin rainbow embroidered denim jacket.

I encourage you to read the provided CNN article and the answers to the ACLU questionnaire, as they give great insight into her values.

TLDR: Based.

[nevermind-i-forgot-whats-that]

Sometimes, as much as I love internet communities and spaces, I really think a lot of people have spent so much time in sanitized, morally pure echo chambers that they lose sight of realism and life outside the internet.

I live in Alabama. My fiancée and I cannot hold hands down the street without fear of homophobic assholes. We have an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. We are one of the poorest states in the US with some of the lowest scores on metrics related to quality of life, including maternal mortality, healthcare, education, and violence. It’s not a coincidence that we are also one of the most red, one of the most Republican states in the Union. In 2017 the UN said the conditions in Alabama are similar to those in a third-world country.

Trump gave a voice to the most violently racist, sexist, xenophobic groups of people who, unfortunately for most of us in the Southern U.S., run our states and have only grown more powerful since his rise to power. The Deep South powers MAGA, and we all suffer for it.

We have no protections if they don’t come from the federal government.

I know people are suffering internationally and my heart is with them. However, this election is not just about foreign policy - we have millions of Americans right here at home living in danger, living in areas where they have been completely abandoned by their local leaders. We need this win.

No candidate is perfect, but for the first time in my voting lifetime I’m excited to vote. I’m excited for the Kamala Harris/Tim Walz ticket because they are addressing the issues close to home. They’re advocating for education as the ticket to a better life, but without the crippling student debt. They’re advocating for the right to love who you love without fear and with pride. Kamala has always been pro-LGBT+ and so has Tim. Again, if you’re queer in the South, we don’t have support unless it comes from the federal government, and we absolutely will not have support if the Republicans regain the White House.

Kamala speaks in length about re-entry programs to reduce recidivism and help people who have been arrested and imprisoned regain their lives. Tim Walz supported restoring voting rights to felons. In the South, you know who comprise the majority of felons? Members of minorities. It’s one of the major tools of systemic racism and mass disenfranchisement, and arguably the modern face of slavery (there are some fantastic documentaries and books that explain the connection between the post-Reconstruction South and the disproportionate rates of imprisonment for BIPOC). Having candidates who recognize this and want to restore the freedom and rights to people who have come into contact with the criminal justice system? And keep them from having to go to prison in the first place? That’s refreshing. That’s exciting.

I would *love* to live in a country where women’s rights are respected, where LGBT+ rights and protections are a given, where we treat former criminals and individuals experiencing mental health crises with respect and dignity. I would *love* to live in a country where education is free of religious interference and each and every citizen is entitled to a fair start and equal opportunities.

But I don’t live in that country. Millions and millions of Americans find their rights and freedoms up for debate and on the ballot.

Project 2025 poses the largest threat to the future of our democracy as we know it. We are being called to fight for the future of our country.

We have to put on our oxygen masks first before we can help others.

You don’t have moral purity when you wash your hands of the millions of us who are still fighting for own freedoms right here.

The reality is that a presidential candidate is a best fit, and not a perfect fit. But comparatively speaking? Kamala is pretty damn close.

[bestanimal]

So can we vote for Dire wolves now? (I know they are grey wolf based hybrids including jackle, red wolf, timber wolf, and artic fox dna arcoding to some sources idk how accurate that entire list is so please correct me) but still 😂

Nah, those aren’t Dire Wolves, sorry. 😅

What Colossal Biosciences did was examine some Dire Wolf (Aenocyon dirus) DNA and edited 14 genes of Gray Wolf (Canis lupus) DNA to match it. They even made sure to make the animals white, using a coat coloration gene expressed in Domestic Dogs, because they believe Dire Wolves would have been white (based on no published evidence; Dire Wolves were a temperate species and their coloration was more likely similar to jackals or Dholes).

DNA contains tens of thousands of genes. You can not make 20 changes in only 14 genes and have a whole other species, let alone a whole other genus.

Despite what the company is claiming, Gray Wolves are not the closest relatives of Dire Wolves, which we know from a (peer-reviewed) DNA study done in 2021. They are more close to jackals, African Wild Dogs, and Dholes than they are to wolves. Despite being around the same size, they do not share “99.5%” of the DNA of Gray Wolves; there are hundreds of thousands of genetic differences between the species.

What Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are are three Gray Wolves that have been genetically modified to look like pop culture “Dire Wolves” from a TV Show. They do not contain any Dire Wolf DNA and they can not and will not fill the same niche that Dire Wolves did.

Apparently, Colossal is doing legit conservation work alongside their clickbait-y work, and they use the sensationalized concepts to get funding from rich idiots and celebrities. If they can get some Elon-Musk-awesomebro-type to fund their “Dire Wolf de-extinction”, they can use that money to clone critically endangered Red Wolves (Canis rufus) on the side.

Personally, I do not trust them. What they’re doing is shady and irresponsible, and even if it’s bringing in money for conservation it’s still misleading and misinforming the public about how DNA works and about how irreversible extinction actually is. It’s taking money that could be used to save the animals we still have, and instead using it to make a hairy Asian Elephant and claim that it’s a Mammoth.

[leupagus]

Tuesday's House Budget Vote and what you may not have heard about

I'm reposting this from a reblog of a really great post about the work that Representatives Mullin and Pettersen did in voting against the GOP budget on February 25th, because I don't want to detract from that message.

Instead, I want to talk about the larger implications of H. Con. Res. 14 itself, and why the Democrats risked so much (in Mullin's and Pettersen's cases, actual harm) in order to show up for this vote.

The vote in question is starting the first of quite a few votes for the upcoming GOP budget; it's not a done deal by any means, this was just the vote to get it started, so to speak. But it was still a very, very, VERY important vote, because not only would failure be catastrophic, but so would a win that just barely squeaked by.

And this one squeaked like a fucking mouse in Murray's Cheese Shop.

Speaker Johnson has been waffling on putting this to a vote because there were several outspoken GOP members who talked a big game about opposing it. Usually this doesn't matter, since most bills get some bipartisanship, but at present the House is in GOP hands with only a three-member margin of error, with two seats vacant (note: those two vacancies are FL 1 and 6, which are holding their special elections on April 1 — lol — and which are EXTREMELY unlikely to flip but hey miracles happen! Donate or phonebank if you'd like!). And Democratic representatives have been voting in a bloc against...well pretty much everything the GOP's been pushing through since Trump took office. Not only that, but this budget is legit unpopular with a number of Republicans, so much so that Johnson pulled the vote at first on Tuesday because he knew it would fail if the GOP members who'd threatened to vote against it actually went through with it. What he needed was to either convince them all to fall in line, or resort to cheating.

So he did both!

He and Trump strongarmed all but one of the GOP holdouts into voting yes (Congressman Massie is in many ways a turd in a toilet, and his reasons for voting no were bad, but he did stick to his guns, I'll give him that). Reports of Trump actually screaming at one of the (female, naturally) GOP holdouts are...well, unsurprising, but that's how panicked they were about getting this bill started. Usually the Whip does this work, but Tom Emmer's been laughably bad at it and so they had to get Trump to actually do some work. Which is itself sort of astonishing. But even then, they weren't sure they could get it done.

Which leads us to part two of Johnson's plan: blatant cheating. During Pelosi's last session as Speaker, she allowed for proxy voting in light of COVID and, you know, the general state of things, but the second the GOP got back the gavel they nixed it right in the bud. This puts the Dems at a disadvantage right now because at least three of them are out for medical reasons — Mullin and Pettersen, as well as Congressman Raúl Grijalva who's fighting cancer at present. (He was the only Democrat who couldn't get to the floor for this vote, fwiw, and anyone who insists he should've can suck my left tit.)

So Johnson adjourned the House for the evening, sending everyone home, but told the GOP members to stay and then tried to rush through the vote before the Dems realized what was happening. His hope was that enough Dems would be caught flat-footed/not see the recall notice/be asleep watching Taskmaster (whoops that was me) by the time they got the message to get back to the floor. That way he could lose the holdouts but still pass the budget onto the next phase.

However! While Nancy Pelosi no longer rules the Democratic caucus with her iron fist and fabulous coats, my man Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries learned quite a lot from her (and is pretty fucking genius himself). Not only did he and the other House leadership expect this kind of chicanery from Johnson, they had planned on it.

Because here's the thing: Mullin and Pettersen didn't get on a plane at the last minute on Tuesday; they'd gotten to DC on Monday, without telling anyone they were in town. They actually hid from the GOP members all day Tuesday in order to lull Johnson into thinking he had more of a margin than he did; if the GOP holdouts really had voted against the budget, then it would've failed. Which would have been a biiiiiiig problem for Johnson and Trump.

As it is, it's still a biiiiiiig problem for Johnson and Trump, because now they know just how razor-thin their margin is. More importantly, they also now know that the Dems will fuck with them just as much (if not more) as they will fuck with Dems. Congress (and the USA in general) has operated for years on the assumption that Democrats operate in good faith, while taking it for granted that of course the GOP ratfuck as much as humanly possible.

This moment is a chilling one for the GOP; they can't assume anymore that Dems will play fair or fight clean. Which seems like a very small thing in the larger picture right now, I know, and I also know that people would love for their Democratic representatives and senators to be more vocal and angry in public ways. I get that!

But this move on Tuesday night? Is actually going to have far bigger consequences than any meme or viral video or clever soundbite from a politician. Democrats are no longer playing by the rules that the GOP's ignored for years (if not decades); they're playing by the GOP's own rules, and they just might win.

[radishearts]

The sun and the sea ☀️🌊

Anyone else wanna join me in thinking about the fact that they pulled opposite motifs ?!?? The horrors of the deep sea in contemporary/modernish time and the joy and brightness of a punk future with the power of the sun. This is so crazy to me. How do they do it !?

Anyways one reblog 1 Stamp for Gem (and pearl can avoid some uh. Well you know, fraud charges)

[returntosunder]

CONGRATS ERROR!!!

I’m so proud lmao

Error belongs to LoverofPiggies

[arsvnist]

he has my vote

[reunitedinterlude]

vote for phan<3 in the rpf tourney 2024

[unamusedyams]

asoryuu in my normal style