#insurrection act

[liberalsarecool]

Trump depends on disinformation. His base is so gullible for white leadership that they will believe whatever word salad bullshit that dribbles out of this traitor's mouth.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Robert Reich:

Friends, Trump may force a second civil war on America with his plan to use the military to round up at least 11 million undocumented people inside the United States — even if it means breaking up families — send them to detention camps, and then deport them. As well as his plan to target his political enemies for prosecution — including Democrats, journalists, and other critics. What happens when we, especially those of us in blue states and cities, resist these authoritarian moves — as we must, as we have a moral duty to? What happens when we try to protect hardworking members of our communities who have been our neighbors and friends for years, from Trump’s federal troops? What happens when we refuse to allow Trump’s lackeys to wreak revenge on his political enemies who live within our states and communities? Will our resistance give Trump an excuse to use force against us?

This is not far-fetched. We need to answer these questions for ourselves. We should prepare. Trump has said he’ll use the Insurrection Act — which grants a president the power to “take such measures as he considers necessary” to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” He’s also said he’ll use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to end sanctuary cities. Such cities now limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Trump told Fox News’s Harris Faulkner that “we can do things in terms of moving people out.” [...]

The Enemies Act was part of a group of laws enacted at the end of the 18th century — the Alien and Sedition Acts — which severely curtailed civil liberties in the young United States, including by tightening restrictions on foreign-born Americans and limiting speech critical of the government. Would Trump essentially declare war on states and communities that oppose him? When he was president last time, he acted as if he was president only of the people who voted for him — overwhelmingly from red states and cities — and not the president of all of America. He supported legislation that hurt voters in blue states, such as his tax law that stopped deductions of state and local taxes from federal income taxes.

Two Americas

Underlying Trump’s dangerous threats is the sobering reality that we are rapidly becoming two Americas. One America is largely urban, college-educated, and racially and ethnically diverse. It voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris. The other America is largely rural or exurban, without college degrees, and white. It voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Even before Trump’s win, red zip codes were getting redder and blue zip codes, bluer. Of the nation’s total 3,143 counties, the number of super-landslide counties — where a presidential candidate won at least 80 percent of the vote — jumped from 6 percent in 2004 to 22 percent in 2020 and appears to be even higher in 2024. Just a dozen years ago, there were Democratic senators from Iowa, North Dakota, Ohio, Arkansas, Alaska, North Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana (two!), and West Virginia. Today, there’s close to a zero chance of a Democrat being elected to the Senate from any of these states. Surveys show that Americans find it increasingly important to live around people who share their political values. Animosity toward those in the opposing party is higher than at any time in living memory. Forty-two percent of registered voters believe Americans in the other party are “downright evil.”

[...]

Red states are becoming even more reactionary.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade left the issue of abortion to the states, 1 out of 3 women of childbearing age now lives in a state that makes it nearly impossible to obtain an abortion. Even while red states are making it harder than ever to get abortions, they’re making it easier than ever to buy guns.

Red states are also banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in education. Florida’s Board of Education prohibited public colleges from using state and federal funds for DEI. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has required all state-funded colleges and universities close their DEI offices. In Florida and Texas, teams of “election police” were created to crack down on the rare crime of voter fraud, another fallout from Trump’s big lie. They’re banning the teaching of America’s history of racism. They’re requiring transgender students to use bathrooms and join sports teams that reflect their sex at birth. They’re making it harder to protest. They’re making it more difficult to qualify for unemployment benefits and other forms of public assistance. And harder than ever to form labor unions. They’re even passing “bounty” laws — enforced not by governments but by rewards to private citizens for filing lawsuits — on issues ranging from classroom speech to abortion to vaccination.

Blue states are becoming more progressive.

Meanwhile, several blue states, including Colorado and Vermont, are codifying a right to abortion. Some are helping cover abortion expenses for out-of-staters. When Idaho proposed a ban on abortion that empowers relatives to sue anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, nearby Oregon approved $15 million to help cover the abortion expenses of patients from other states. Maryland and Washington have expanded access and legal protections to out-of-state abortion patients. California has expanded access to abortion and protected abortion providers from out-of-state legal action. After the governor of Texas ordered state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children, California enacted a law making the state a refuge for transgender youths and their families. California already bars anyone on a state payroll (including yours truly, who teaches at Berkeley) from getting reimbursed for travel to states that discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.

Robert Reich’s piece on how Donald Trump’s return to office could lead America to a 2nd American Civil War is a must-read.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jesse Duquette :: @JRDuquette :: Of Inhuman Bandage

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 31, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 01, 2024

Yesterday, from a Harris campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia, Atlanta reporter Tariro Mzezewa noted that the crowd of 10,000 people “was ecstatic. There was chanting, cheering, singing, and dancing for hours in the lead-up to and throughout the event,” Mzezewa wrote today in Slate. 

Mzezewa reported that rapper Megan Thee Stallion told the audience “I know my ladies in the crowd love their body. And if you want to keep loving your body, you know who to vote for,” before performing her hit “Body.” Georgia Democratic politicians showed up in force: voting rights advocate and former state representative Stacey Abrams, senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, state Democratic Party chair Representative  Nikema Williams, and Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens. 

“What you’re seeing is very real,” Mzezewa wrote, and she quoted an attendee who said: “it’s nice to witness history, but getting to be a part of it from the ground up is a whole other level.” Certainly, the grassroots enthusiasm for Harris’s presidential candidacy is palpable. More and more self-identified groups are launching fundraising calls for Harris; yesterday the Latter-day Saints for Harris—Mormons—announced that they, too, are “putting [their] shoulders to the wheel!” Today the executive board of the United Auto Workers also endorsed Harris.

At last night’s event, Vice President Harris noted that Trump has pulled out of the September debate to which he had previously agreed. “Here’s the funny thing about that,” she said. “He won’t debate, but he and his running mate sure seem to have a lot to say about me,” After hitting the campaign’s refrain that marks MAGA Republican behavior as “weird,” she added to applause: “Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage because, as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”

Trump did not say it to her face, but today he unloaded spectacularly on three Black female interviewers at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Chicago.

When ABC News senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott began the interview by quoting a number of his racist statements about Black Americans and asking why, given that history, Black voters should trust him, he lost it. “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” he began. “You don’t even say ‘Hello, how are you?’ Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network.” 

He went on to try to dominate Scott, listing the policies he claimed to have put into place, and to attack the people who organized the event before saying, “I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln. That’s my answer….  And for you to start off a question and answer period…in such a hostile manner, I think it’s a disgrace.”   

As the session began, so it continued, with Trump questioning Harris’s Black identity—while also mispronouncing her name—and warning the attendees that they need “to stop people from invading our country that are…taking Black jobs.” NBC News correspondent Yamiche Alcindor told MSNBC that during the interview, “people were stunned, people were gasping, there were some people who were shouting back at him saying ‘That's a lie!’” Attendees laughed and jeered at Trump throughout the 37-minute session; his handlers made him leave early. 

Scott accurately summed up Trump’s long history of racism, but lately he has been advertising it. In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham aired last night, Trump said that Harris would be “like a play toy” for world leaders. “They look at her and they say we can’t believe we got so lucky. They’re gonna walk all over her.” “I don’t want to say as to why,” he said to the camera, “but a lot of people understand it.”

It is unlikely that his insults and naked racism will appeal to anyone but his base, making his performance, as Jessica Tarlov put it on the Fox News Channel, “a complete, absolute dumpster fire.” It is possible that Trump has lost the ability to read a room and reassure his audience that he’s a good bet. But it is also possible that Trump cannot bear to see the enthusiasm building behind Harris, not only because of its electoral meaning, but also because it reveals how small his own following is and how much people loathe him.  

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who produces wonderful video threads of important events, “put together an 11-minute supercut of Trump angrily self-immolating at the NABJ before his handlers pulled him from the stage.” 

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo analyzed Trump’s meltdown in Chicago this way: “I think we’re getting the first view of imploding Donald Trump as he realizes that what was his for the taking ten days ago is slipping away and he’s likely to go to prison rather than the White House. He [is] being dominated and humiliated by Harris and he’s losing it.” His post after the interview, in which he boasted “[t]he questions were Rude and Nasty, often in the form of a statement, but we CRUSHED IT!” seemed an attempt to reassert his old pattern of simply declaring things to be true that…aren’t. 

Indeed, one of Trump’s answers to the journalists in Chicago revealed that he cares only about getting elected, rather than governing. It also suggested that his camp is trying to reassure him that his pick of Ohio senator J.D. Vance to be his running mate will not hurt their chances, even as more and more videos of Vance attacking women become public and as he is historically bad in front of television cameras.

Vance has only 18 months of experience in elected office, making him one of the least qualified candidates for vice president in U.S. history. When asked if Vance would be ready “on day one,” to assume the duties of the presidency if necessary, Trump answered a different question altogether, revealing what is uppermost in his mind. “I’ve always had great respect for him…but…historically, the vice president in terms of the election does not have any impact, I mean, virtually no impact. You have two or three days where there’s a lot of commotion…and then that dies down and it’s all about the presidential thing. Virtually never has it mattered…. Historically, the choice of a vice president makes no difference.”   

The Harris campaign responded to Trump’s performance by saying: "The hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power and inflict his harmful Project 2025 agenda on the American people…. Today's tirade is simply a taste of the chaos and division that has been a hallmark of Trump's MAGA rallies this entire campaign,” while “Vice President Harris offers a vision of opportunity and freedom for all Americans.” 

It urged Trump again to “stop playing games and actually show up to the debate on September 10."

Trump’s petulant fury at the Black journalists today suggests just how dangerous it would be to put him in control of the nation’s law enforcement and military capabilities a second time. We were given a glimpse of how eager he was to turn those capabilities against American citizens in his first term when the Department of Justice today released the report of the department’s inspector general concerning the Trump administration’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C., in summer 2020.

The authors of the report emphasized that they were unable to compel the testimony of officials including then–attorney general William Barr, his chief of staff William Levi, FBI deputy director David Bowdich, and FBI Washington Field Office assistant director in charge Timothy Slater. 

But what they were able to put together even without their information was that, although the protests were largely peaceful, Trump was desperate to get 2,000 federal officers into the area around the White House on June 1, 2020, to increase federal control of the city. To the frustration of the people in charge of the agencies, he could not articulate a mission, only that he wanted 2,000 people around him. With only about 90 officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Bureau of Prisons, and the U.S. Marshals Service on hand early on the morning of June 1, Barr told a conference call with Justice Department leadership that  Trump wanted “max strength” on the streets, and to “dominate the streets.” 

Trump then echoed that language in a call with the nation’s governors, saying, “If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re [going to] walk away with you. And we’re doing it in Washington, in D.C., we’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before. But you’re going to have total domination.”

Then, the report says, the administration began to prepare to invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that authorizes the president to deploy the U.S. military and federalized National Guard troops within the United States to suppress civil disorder, insurrection, or rebellion. At 4:48 that evening, lawyers from the Office of Legal Counsel, who advise the president, received an email that the president was going to address the nation at 6:00 and that a proclamation invoking the Insurrection Act should be “ready for signing” before then.

Shortly after, additional officers from the Bureau of Prisons—without names on their uniforms because they do not usually wear them, if you remember the concern over those nameless uniforms—arrived at the White House. Barr was in charge of clearing the streets, and ultimately, by about 9:00 he felt things were calm enough that he advised Trump against invoking the Insurrection Act. 

But it was evidently a close thing.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[spiderlegsmusic]

With Harris as president, if you don’t like the US supporting Israel’s war with Hamas, you can protest. The cops in Chicago may be impatient, but they aren’t shooting.

With Trump as president , if you protest you will be shot. Trump wanted to shoot the BLM Protesters but was told by someone with a rational mind and moral ethic that he couldn’t. In his next term, there won’t be anyone to tell him not to shoot protesters. He’ll enact the Insurrectionist act and mobilize the military on any protests on day 1 and declare martial law, ordering troops to shoot protesters

[intelligentchristianlady]

The original articles are behind a paywall. This is a good summary.

tl;dr: "The stakes in the 2024 race couldn’t be much more obvious."

Update: (x). It's even worse than that.

[gwydionmisha]

12/6/23: Colorado Supreme Court appeal. I know it looks like a rerun, but it's not.

[nodynasty4us]

From the January 24, 2024 article:

A top Democratic senator is renewing his effort to rein in Donald Trump’s — or any other future president’s — authority to deploy the military inside the U.S., following recent threats from the former commander in chief to use troops to tamp down violence in cities if reelected.

...

Blumenthal said he is drafting a new version of his legislation that would amend the law to more clearly define what an insurrection is and the circumstances under which the president can use force.... It would also grant local officials standing in the courts to have the emergency lifted at some point after the act is invoked.

[archaalen]

https://apnews.com/article/trump-military-insurrection-act-2024-election-03858b6291e4721991b5a18c2dfb3c36

Trump hints at expanded role for the military within the US. A legacy law gives him few guardrails

[filosofablogger]

A Glimpse Into What Might Have Been

The indictment that was handed down earlier this week, and on which Trump was arraigned yesterday, paints a painfully clear picture of what might well have happened if things had gone just a little bit differently.  Jamelle Bouie gives us a chilling view in his OpEd for the New York Times today … The Most Frightening Part of the Trump Indictment By Jamelle Bouie 04 August 2023 Buried in the…

[politicalantibody]

The Insurrection Act is a time bomb waiting for a malicious President to set it off. What exactly was the intent of the 1956 update?

[liberalsarecool]

1. 'Have' not 'had'.

2. Illegally being targeted? What kind of letter did you get, Donnie?

Context:

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Imagine this: It’s exactly one year from today, Memorial Day weekend, 2025. It’s 94 degrees in the shade, but the fact that the world keeps shattering monthly temperature records isn’t even making the news — and that’s not what has Philadelphians so hot and bothered. It’s been about two months since Donald Trump, the 47th president of the United States, announced Operation Purify America in an Oval Office address, and about a week since a stunned Philadelphia watched an endless convoy of militarized vehicles and federalized troops from the Texas and South Dakota National Guards roll up I-95. After a week of setting up a base camp at the Air National Guard base in Horsham, the actual operation began at midnight the day before, as a parade of Humvees and armored personal carriers cornered off a wide area in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park section and supported federal immigration agents who went door-to-door in the predawn chaos, bursting into homes and asking Latino residents for their papers. Journalists who’d been kept blocks away by the troops now search for anyone who could confirm the rumors of screaming, scuffling, and dozens of arrests. As the hot sun rises, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, Gov. Josh Shapiro, and several hundred angry protesters gather outside the Horsham gate to denounce the raids. A phalanx of helmeted troops pushes the throng back, firing tear gas to clear the road for the first busload of detained migrants. They are bound for the hastily erected Camp Liberty, an already overcrowded and decrepit holding center on the Texas-Mexico border that Amnesty International calls “a concentration camp.” This might sound like a page from the script of Alex Garland’s next near-future dystopian movie, but it’s actually a realistic preview of the America Trump himself, his cartoonishly sinister immigration guru Stephen Miller, and the right-wing functionaries crafting the 900-page blueprint for a Trump 47 presidency called Project 2025 are fervently wishing for. As polls show Trump in a dead heat nationally with President Joe Biden, and poised to win at least some of the battleground states where Biden was victorious in 2020, the presumptive GOP nominee is making no secret of his scheme for what he calls “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History.” The audacious goal of tracking down and deporting all 11 million or so undocumented immigrants living and working within the United States is, experts agree, all but impossible. But even the forced removal of hundreds of thousands, or one million, would require a massive internal military operation on a scale not seen since the Civil War and Reconstruction. [...] What’s changed in 2024? Everything. Despite the Hannibal Lecter-ized outward chaos of Trump’s rallies, behind the scenes, Team Trump is focused and determined not only to name the most rabid Trump loyalists to key political posts but also todramatically strip civil service protections andremove recalcitrant midlevel government employees. And this time around, Republicans in Congress are going to be on board with whatever Trump wants. [...] It was somewhat amazing to watch the furious debate online and on cable news this week over the weird incident in which small text about a “unified Reich” found its way into a Trump promo video the ex-and-wannabe president posted on Truth Social. The perplexing part, for me, is that this was discussed as some kind of Sherlock-Holmes-magnifying-glass a-ha moment, revealing Trump’s secret plan for Nazi-style rule. Folks, he is screaming his plan out loud at his rallies! The Trump deportation scheme is really Trump’s blueprint for dictatorship.

Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer on how Donald Trump's proposed deportation plan is a pretext for a fascist MAGA dictatorship (05.23.2024).

Will Bunch nails it in this Philly Inquirer column on how Donald Trump's fascistic plan for mass deportations is a speed-run for a MAGA dictatorship.

[donald-trump-official]

In case y’all didn’t realize, I don’t actually want to post on this blog any more. I don’t want to think about Donald trump more than I have to.

Buuuuuut he’s getting indicted for the third time within the next week, so like… I feel obligated.

So here’s a recent truth social post from donald trump which includes a Freudian slip alluding to him getting charged under the insurrection act

And here’s the corrected version he put out after deleting the first post

Make with that what you will

[sawbuckplus]

Protesting the results of an election in D.C.

Didn’t the democrats say that was insurrection?

[raurquiz]

#happybirthday #maxgrodenchik #actor #rom #ferengi #startrek #deepspacenine #Insurrection #lowerdecks #therocketeer #rumpelstinkin #risingsun #bartonfink #crossingjordan #sisteract #sixfeetunder #herecomethemonsters #sliders #kingofcalifornia #csi #StrawberryMoments #Unbelievable