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aquaticmercy · 15 days ago

Text

Sleeper

Summary : When Bucky falls in love with the antihero he’s sleeping with, he offers her a place in the Thunderbolts*.

Pairing : Thunderbolts!Bucky Barnes x antihero!reader (she/her)

Warnings/tags : Violence, death, sex (a prominent theme but not graphic), cursing. Borderline obsessive behaviour. Congressman Barnes as per the Thunderbolts teaser. Batman/Catwoman-like dynamic. (Let me know if I miss anything.)

Word count : 6.5k

Note : This fic was genuinely written because of the van scene in the Thunderbolts trailer. That’s it. That’s how down bad I am for Thunderbolts Bucky. Reader is an antihero called ‘Sleeper.’ The Thunderbolts are referred to as ‘the team.’ The reader and Bucky first met a little bit before FATWS. I also have a cap! Sam fic coming out soon because my god. I am drooling over these two. Enjoy!

Bucky first heard of your existence in whispers.

He had heard your codename in hushed tones when he got off the ice in Wakanda, after Shuri helped rid his brain of the trigger words that haunted him.

Several of the Dora Milaje had crossed paths with you in Ivory Coast, and they had told everyone in the palace about how terrifyingly efficient—and violent— you had been. They said you finished the job before they even got there.

Your codename was nothing but silent rumours by those on the fringes of the intelligence community. They called you ‘Sleeper’— it wasn't a name you chose for yourself, but you have chosen to embrace the fear that people associated with it.

You were an antihero, a vigilante who left rivers of blood in your wake.

Four years ago, you started tracking down the same corrupt officials and Hydra remnants that Bucky was trying to arrest.

The difference: Bucky set out to turn them in, you had your heart set on killing them, fast and efficient, as you always have been.

The first time you crossed paths with the former Winter Soldier, it was in a crumbling KGB safehouse in Eastern Europe. Bucky had taken down most of the guards, ready to haul the high-ranking operative to a jail cell in DC where he can await his trial. He was tired, the strain of therapy and sleepless nights holding him down, but this mission kept him focused.

But when he reached the operative’s office, the target was already slumped over his desk, cold and lifeless.

"Guess I beat you to it, soldier," you said, voice laced with a confidence that made his stomach twist. You let him process the sight of you—fitted black suit, gloved hands, and a smirk that told him you were not only dangerous, but damn well aware of it. A mask obscured your eyes, but even with half of your face covered, he could see how smug you looked.

“I didn’t ask for your help,” he said, voice low.

“Good thing I wasn’t asking for you permission.” You tilted your head, the ghost of a laugh in your voice. You were watching him, sizing him up with those sharp eyes that felt like they could through see every part of him he tried to keep hidden.

“Sergeant James Barnes, right?” You said his name with a familiarity that sent a jolt through him. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Never thought I’d actually run into you, though. Lucky night for me.”

He narrowed his eyes, not trusting this mysterious stranger, though he couldn’t deny he was intrigued. “And you are…?”

“I have no name to claim for myself,” you shrugged, leaning back against the wall, “but people call me Sleeper.” You let the name linger, knowing he’d recognize it.

His memory reeled back to Ayo and the Dora Milaje, who had warned him of you: ruthless, volatile. A ghost who disappeared without a trace, always a step ahead. He’d just never expected Sleeper to be… so easy on the eyes.

“I didn’t ask for your help.” He repeated with no conviction. He narrowed his eyes at the body. “Especially not like this.”

You shrugged, pushing off the wall and strolling over. “Relax, soldier,” your gaze met his, “I only go after the ones who deserve it. Just because I do it my way doesn’t mean I’m the villain here.”

“Still doesn’t make it right,” he muttered, but there was a flicker of curiosity underneath his stormy blue eyes.

“Then stop me,” you challenged softly, leaning close enough to feel his breath. “If you can.”

His breath hitched ever so slightly.

You grinned, a spark of intrigue lighting up in your gaze. “I’ll be waiting, James.”

And before he could respond, you were gone.

He knew he should’ve stopped you— but some part of him was glad he hadn’t.

As you disappeared, he felt something he hadn’t in a long, long time: excitement.

—

From that day on, Bucky couldn’t get you out of his head.

At first, it was frustrating. You were hard to track, ruthless—and yet there was a sickening righteous principle to your actions that he couldn’t deny.

As the weeks went by, something else rooted in his brain when he thought of you. Fascination.

His mind often wandered about you during his quiet, sleepless nights, wondering who you were beneath the mask, beneath the mystery and the whispers.

Sam noticed, of course. He'd raise an eyebrow whenever Bucky lingered too long over case files where you'd been mentioned. He’d nudge if he seemed overly eager to volunteer for missions that involved your typical targets.

“Maybe you’ll get lucky and she’ll show,” Sam teased once, nudging Bucky. “She’s dangerous, though. Is that your type?”

Bucky scoffed, but he knew Sam was right. And maybe that danger was part of what kept him intrigued.

—

The next time you crossed paths, it was in a dark alleyway, both of you dripping with sweat and breathing heavily after taking down an underground fighting ring.

“You know,” he’d said, “killing them doesn’t make it justice.”

“You think turning them in is enough?” Your voice had cut through the air like a knife, but there was no malice behind it. You wanted him to understand your line of thinking, wanted him to know. “People like them are everywhere. They’ll get out. They’ll come back.”

“So you think you get to decide whether they live or die?” he challenged, jaw tight.

“No,” you said, readjusting your mask. “But I do it anyway.” There was a flicker of sadness in your gaze that he noticed, even if you tried to hide it.

What had happened to you? He thought to himself. What have you been through?

In that moment, he noticed the pain behind your eyes, the kind of pain he knew intimately. You weren’t just someone who killed for vengeance; you must have had your reasons. You must have carried scars that ran deep, maybe deeper than his.

—

From that point on, Bucky made it a habit to look for you on every mission. It was like an unspoken game, this cat-and-mouse chase. Every time he saw you, the tension between you grew.

Sometimes, he’d get there first, managing to intercept before you could execute the target. Other times, you’d arrive at the same time. He’d try to talk you out of it, to make you see things his way, but you’d laugh him off, the kind of laugh that hinted at more than your fair share of heartache.

And sometimes, you’d tease him, push boundaries he wasn’t sure he should cross.

“You like this, don’t you, James?” You’d whisper it low, close enough for him to catch your scent, a faint hint of gunpowder and vanilla perfume. “The chase. Getting to play the hero while I get my hands dirty.”

He wanted to deny it, but he couldn’t.

—

Bucky grew obsessed, even if he wouldn’t admit it. Every encounter left him more and more drawn to you. He’d search for files on you for days on end without sleep, but all he found were reports with no concrete evidence. He found himself looking for excuses to track your movements, hoping he’d be there to stop you but not quite sure he wanted to succeed.

One night, after another close call, you leaned into him as he pushed you up against the wall. He could feel the heat radiating off you, the electricity charged in the space between you. You looked up at him, the smallest hint of vulnerability peeking through your mask.

“Why do you keep doing this, James?” you asked, voice softer this time. “You can’t save me.”

“Maybe not,” he replied, frowning as his eyes looked down to the edge of your lips, “but I can try.”

That night, he wondered just how long he could keep up this dance before one of you finally gave in.

—

One night, while you were on a caper in Prague, everything changed for the two of you.

The mission had been bloody, chaotic, and a little too close to mayhem for Bucky’s liking. You had taken down an entire network of arms dealers, setting fire to one of their last remaining munitions blocks and leaving it to burn.

Bucky had arrived too late, frantically trying to contain the chaos you’d left in your wake, alerting local authorities, making sure the flames didn’t spread to a nearby market.

When he caught up to you, adrenaline ran hot through his veins.

He'd followed you through winding streets and up dark staircases, up to the hotel you were holed up in. He followed you into your room, locking you both in.

His voice was tight, anger simmering beneath. “You’re careless.” His blue eyes were striking underneath the european moonlight, “you could’ve taken out half the neighbourhood, and for what?”

“I got the job done, James.” You shrugged, trying to look unbothered. “It’s not pretty, but it works.”

He stepped closer, and you held his gaze, “You know, I’d turn you in if you weren’t so…” he paused, his voice faltering, as if the words were lodged in his throat, “Weren’t so…”

Your pulse quickened. “If I weren’t so what?” You snapped, daring him to finish, to admit what had been hanging between you two since the day you met.

But he didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled you into a fierce, bruising kiss.

You didn’t hesitate—you kissed him back with just as much fire, your hands tangling in his hair.

Bucky’s hands found your waist, fingers digging in with enough pressure to leave marks. He pushed you back until your shoulders hit the wall, lips moving down your jaw, then hot against your neck. His breaths were ragged, matching your own, and he was holding you as if letting go would mean losing control entirely.

You couldn’t help the gasp that escaped your lips as his mouth found a sensitive spot on the dip in your collarbone, his hands roaming possessively over your back, down your sides.

You pulled him back to your mouth, desperately needing that connection.

When you finally broke apart for air, his forehead rested against yours. You untied your mask and threw it across the room.

Fuck. he thought as his eyes widened, taking in your full facial features for the first time. You were even more beautiful than I imagined you to be.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, he thought to himself, I’m done for.

He was ready to throw you in jail cell. Instead, he ended up in your bed.

That night, in the dim light of your cheap hotel room, clothes were shed in hurried, frustrated movements, and all that pent-up tension finally found its release.

That first time had been desperate, raw. Both of you were driven by the need to let go, to feel something other than the weight of the cold blooded kills and the darkness you both carried.

Ever since then, every time you crossed paths, it was the same: adrenaline-fueled clashes and heated conversations about morality turned into hotel room rendezvous, hands grasping, lips colliding, both of you seeking the kind of solace you could only ever find in each other.

—

You’d never admitted it out loud, but Bucky had an effect on you. When he was around, you found yourself hesitating just that split second longer before slicing your target’s arteries and leaving them to bleed.

You didn’t feel the need to wipe out every enemy anymore, and his disapproval of your methods had started haunting you in ways you’d never expected. Maybe that was why you’d started allowing him to find you more often, taking on jobs you knew he’d be there for.

It was a dangerous game, but you kept playing it. He was obsessed with finding you, and you weren’t about to stop him.

He’d learned to read you better, your patterns, the places you tended to show up. By the time you landed in some city on the opposite end of the globe, he’d be there like clockwork, showing up right before you finished a job, confronting you before you could disappear into the night.

But the nights you spent together were… different.

You never asked about each other’s pasts; you kept it in the here and now, keeping him at a safe distance even as you let him pull you under the covers time and again.

Every time he asked your real name, you’d smile and brush him off, deflecting his curiosity with a kiss or a teasing answer. He didn’t press, but you could see the questions in the way his brow furrowed, could feel the affection in the way he lingered in the mornings after, with a soft smile in his eyes that made your heart beat faster.

Each time, he told himself it was just catharsis, just a release of frustration for both of you, nothing more. But that excuse had worn thin over the years, and Bucky knew it as well as you did.

He knew it wasn’t one sided either. He wasn’t blind to the way you’d look at him as he drifted to sleep next to you. Once, he caught a flicker of something vulnerable in your eyes before you put the walls back up.

And God, was he drawn to you, to the side of you that fought so fiercely, that showed just enough vulnerability to keep him coming back. He was so fucking desperate to understand you better, to see more of the person underneath the mask.

—

One night, after a mission in Manila, you’d both ended up in a small, worn-down cheap hotel room overlooking the city lights. You were leaning against the headrest of the bed, a hint of sweat clinging to your skin, breathing still unsteady as you came down from the high you gave each other.

He watched you, his gaze lingering on the barely-perceptible rise and fall of your chest.

“Don’t look at me like that,” you muttered, voice thick with exhaustion. There was a tremor in your tone, a flicker of something vulnerable that he wasn’t sure you meant for him to hear.

“Like what?” he asked, nuzzling closer to you. His now long hair was tied back in a low bun, your hair tie holding it together because he didn't have one of his own.

“Like you want something from me that I’m too broken to give,” you said, refusing to meet his eyes. But he reached for you, tipping your chin up until you had no choice but to look at him, and there it was—that flicker of affection he knew ran just as deep in you as it did in him.

“Maybe I want it anyway,” he murmured, his voice low and filled with a quiet intensity. “You ever think of that?”

“This is just a release, James.” Your gaze softened for just a second, long enough for him to catch it before you shook your head, pulling yourself from his grasp. “It’s just something we both need.”

Even as you said it, you weren't convinced. He reached for you again, pulling you close, and kissed you because that was the only thing you’d let him do.

You melted into him once more, you found yourself wondering just how much longer you could keep him at arm’s length.

—

The shift in Bucky’s life had been as dramatic as it was unexpected. You’d never pegged him for politics—neither had he, to be fair—but here he was, representing his district, looking sharp in a suit that cost more than the last few hotels you’d met in combined.

He’s upgraded. Freshly elected, polished up, all suited and respectable as a congressman, fighting for reform from a marble office by day and for justice in dark alleys by night.

But tonight, with that half-smile he only gets with you, he’s still the same— still carrying that simmering tension in his lips, his hair tousled from a long night of pursuing you through the shadows.

After a mission that had you both knee-deep in an abandoned bunker hunting a rogue assassin, you found yourself together once again. Only this time, the hotel he’d booked was far from cheap.

He brought you to a five-star suite. The bed was massive, the sheets soft, and the view from the window sprawled out over the city skyline, a stark contrast to the dingy rooms you’d gotten used to.

Now, lying beside him in the rumpled silk sheets, you watched him catch his breath. You moved off of his lap to lay next to him, euphoric from the guilty pleasure you both indulged in.

“You know, the second someone finds out Congressman Barnes has a relationship with a violent vigilante, you’re out of office.”

He looked over at you, eyebrows raised. “Relationship?”

Fuck. He caught you slipping up. He caught you thinking about a relationship with him.

“Casual sex is still a relationship, James.” You shrugged, trying to save face. You turned to him, with a lazy, unconvinced smile, “Strings attached or not, it counts.”

He shifted, the corner of his mouth twitching as he watched your wall break, even if only one brick at a time. “Casual,” His fingers traced idle patterns along your bare shoulder. “Is that what we’re calling it?”

“Unless you’re pretending you don’t want it anymore.” You paused, leaning closer, “Or maybe you just like that I could ruin everything. That I could say one word to the press, post one picture online and your reputation is finished. You’d be back to square one.”

He chuckled, his fingers grazing down your arm. It was terrifying, how comfortable he’d become with you. “I trust that you wouldn’t,” he said softly, voice laced with that steady confidence, like he knows you better than you know yourself.

His declaration hung in the air, and you felt guilt striking in your chest.

This wasn’t supposed to be part of this arrangement. Trust was for partners, for couples, for people who wanted things that lasted.

You shook it off, leaning back, a little smirk tugging at your lips as you lifted a brow. “You’re right. I do have a soft spot for you, Congressman Barnes,” you added, the title rolling off your tongue with a touch of sarcasm, “Consider it my gift to democracy.”

He laughed, letting his head fall back against the pillow. His hand drifted down to catch yours, holding it in a way that felt too natural, too comfortable for what you were supposed to be.

You both knew, despite the banter and the invisible boundaries, this thing between you was already past casual. It was the reason he keeps showing up where you showed up, the reason you’re letting him into your life in ways you never let anyone before. You were both just too stubborn to say it.

He pulled you closer, pressing his lips to yours in a way that feels almost… affectionate. For a moment, you let yourself sink into it, forgetting the consequences, the danger, the fact that this man might just unravel you completely and you would have no say in it whatsoever.

When you pulled back, his fingers trailed over your bare waist. “Maybe it’s more than just a soft spot,” he suggested, his voice barely above a whisper.

You raised an eyebrow, heart beating out of your chest. “Let’s not get sentimental, James,” you brushed, letting your fingers graze his jaw as you murmured, “You’ve got an image to protect, after all.”

He lets out a sigh that’s part laughter, part frustration. He knew you were deflecting. “Right,” he said, brushing his lips against yours again.

“You and your image,” you chuckled, “Out there, shaking hands and making speeches about justice while you sneak off to hotel rooms with someone like me.”

He grinned, not a trace of shame in his expression as he turned his gaze back to you. “Someone’s gotta keep you in line. Even if it takes…” His voice lowered, dropping into that deep, teasing tone that made your stomach knot. “…a hands-on approach.”

You rolled your eyes. “You’re the last person who’d ever get me in line, James.” You leaned closer, though you didn't believe a single word you said.

There was a long silence for a while. He eventually reached out, brushing a lock of hair back from your face, his thumb tracing over your cheek.

“Maybe you’re right,” he murmured, his eyes never leaving yours. “Maybe that’s why I keep coming back.”

As the city lights cast a faint glow over the room, you lay there in silence, limbs tangled together in a way that felt a little less no strings attached every time.

—

The next time you meet, you were on a late-night operation on the dark outskirts of the city. You’ve tracked down a group of mercenaries. They’re as ruthless as they were careless, leaving a trail of devastation across the criminal underworld. But tonight, their recklessness will end with you.

You moved through in silence, precise, methodical. One by one, you took them down, not killing, but incapacitating them. Your fists were quick, your strikes precise. It’s what you’ve done for years, a grim pattern of efficiency that never required a second blow. Just as you reached the man who hired them with your knife drawn—a local crime lord—you felt his presence before you saw him.

“Think twice, Sleeper,” Bucky said from behind you.

You froze, heart pounding as you stood over the crime lord begging for mercy. It would be so easy to end this now, but with Bucky watching, you hesitated.

You lowered the knife.

Instead of killing him, you tied him up alongside the other mercenaries, ignoring the questions in their fearful eyes. Bucky made a call, alerting local authorities to pick up the mess you’ve left behind.

“What now?” you asked, walking away from the carnage. You were expecting the usual pattern: another hotel room, a brief reprieve from the violence, nothing more.

But he surprised you, lacing his hand in between your fingers, warm and secure.

He had never, ever, showed affection outside closed doors.

“Come with me.”

—

You didn’t expect Bucky to take you back to his place, but soon you were standing outside a sleek high-rise in the heart of the city. You followed him up to his penthouse apartment. It’s almost disorienting— the polished floors, the floor-to-ceiling windows.

You found yourself standing in the quiet entryway of his home. The walls were painted in light, earthy tones, and the furniture was clean, modern, yet warm.

You glanced around, taking in the small details that hinted at Bucky's life beyond the missions. There were bookshelves lined with novels and memoirs, some old and looked like first editions, others barely touched. A few black-and-white photographs decorated the walls—New York City at dusk, a forest path, a beach sunset. It was an oddly peaceful place for a man like him. Certainly too peaceful for someone as broken as you.

“This is risky, James,” you said, looking up at him as he closed the door behind him, “Showing me where you live.”

“No, it's not,” he replied, his conviction absolute. “I trust you.”

There it was again. That word. Trust. The thing you never quite knew what to do with, especially coming from him.

You studied the way his favourite leather jacket was tossed on a chair, a half-read book by the couch. It felt like stepping across an invisible line. You set your mask down on the table before he grabbed your waist and pulled you close.

“This feels like crossing a boundary, James,” you admitted. You knew he should pull back, give you a chance to retreat. But you didn't want him to.

So he didn’t.

Instead, he cupped your face as he tilted your chin up gently. “What boundary?” he asked.

He knew that there were nothing separating you two. Not anymore.

The space between you vanished as his lips met yours. You kissed him back, losing yourself in the process of tasting him. His hands slid to the small of your back, pulling you closer. Kissing him felt like falling— like surrender.

You made your way to his bedroom, bodies tangled together, a blur of heated whispers and gasping breaths. Clothes fell away, discarded like old skin. The way he looked at you, it was like he was memorising every inch of you.

In that moment, you realised: the boundary had never been there. Not for him. Maybe not for you either.

—

The room was quiet as you lay tangled up in Bucky’s sheets. The duvet smelled like him, unlike the neutral, sterile scent of the usual hotel sheets.

You’d never admit it, but it was intoxicating.

The satisfied pulsing in your body had put a hazy filter over everything.

Bucky smiled softly, kissing your forehead before reaching to his bedside drawer, pulling out a small glass box, placing it gently on your palm.

"Here," he murmured, almost shyly. He opened the box to reveal a hair tie inside.

Oh. You recognised it. The ends were a bit frayed, the colour faded.

It was the hair tie you’d given him in Manila, a lifetime ago, a little piece of you that he’d tucked away in a corner of his home

You blinked, caught off guard. "You still have that?"

He shrugged, but his eyes wouldn’t meet yours. Was he… embarrassed? "I thought it was... worth keeping."

"Careful, James,” you couldn't help but tease him, nuzzling closer into his arms. “Keep this up and you might just start falling in love with me."

You felt his breath hitch.

He looked up, finally. Nervously.

Instead of denying it, he leaned closer, his voice dropping to a low, warm whisper. "Would that be so bad?"

His fingers brushed against yours, sending a shiver through your spine. Your heart fluttered irregularly, your head spinning in a daze as you tried to keep your thoughts down.

No.

You couldn’t let him see that he was getting to you like this, so you did what you always did: you deflected, grinning forcefully and rolling your eyes.

"Yeah, right," you said, brushing off the moment. As much as it broke your heart to deny the truth, you were doing it for his sake and yours. "I'm not that easy to love, James."

He chuckled softly, the warmth of his breath brushing your skin as he pulled you closer, tucking a stray hair behind your ear. "Maybe that's why I do."

You shifted away from him, wrapping yourself in the sheets as if they could shield you from what he was offering — and from the ache in his gaze.

"We can’t…" you said, voice barely above a whisper. "We can’t do this."

Bucky's eyes darkened, but he would be alright. He expected this from you.

He sighed, running a hand through his hair as he tried to collect himself. You could see the struggle in his eyes, the battle between his desire for you and something else… there was something bigger.

"I need to tell you something," he said quietly. “I have… a team.”

That caught you off guard.

Bucky? On a team? He’d always seemed like a lone wolf, just like you.

“There’s a couple of former Widows, who you’d get along with. Two other super soldiers. And someone who can… phase. Quantum experiment gone wrong.” He paused, “We’re trying to make something real here. And it’s missing someone.” His fingers trailed down your forearm, eventually clasping your palm in his, “It’s missing you.”

He pushed a strand of hair behind your ears, trailing your jawline delicately with his metal hand, “I need you.”

The invitation went unanswered for a moment. You swallowed, caught off-guard by how badly he seemed to want this, how he wanted you to be part of it.

“I work alone, James,” you said, brushing off the offer with a small, bitter smile. “You know that.”

“But why not?” His voice was barely more than a whisper. “Why won’t you let someone else in for once?”

The frustration in his tone was raw, and for a moment, you thought you saw a flicker of pain flash across his face from this rejection.

“This is your chance to do something good the right way,” he pressed, and there was a quiet urgency in his voice. “No more hunting down bad guys with no direction. No more living like you’ve got nothing left to lose.”

His words sank in, and your walls felt shakier than ever. The idea of leaving the past behind, of actually building something… you hadn’t let yourself imagine it in years.

“Just think about it,” he said softly, placing his forehead on yours. “You don't have to decide now. Just… consider it.”

You gave a noncommittal shrug, but the truth was that his offer echoed in your mind, louder than you wanted to admit. He smiled at your dismissiveness, recognizing the crack in your armour. He didn’t push further.

You realised that for the first time in a long time, you weren’t entirely sure if you wanted to say no.

—

The next time you saw Bucky was in the middle of a mission neither of you had wanted.

Just a week had passed since you’d spent the night in his apartment. Since then, you had told yourself you shouldn’t return. You couldn’t. You were getting too close, feeling too much.

It was getting dangerous.

But then Bucky had reached out to you, voice tight and desperate, the kind of desperation that stripped away all his pride. It was a vulnerability even you hadn't seen from him before. His team was in over their heads, he’d said. He needed you.

You’d agreed to help, but you’d been careful to remind him that this was a one-time thing. One mission, and that was it.

But then everything went wrong.

It happened so fast, you barely understood how everything had gone wrong.

You were with Bucky, fighting side-by-side, the two of you moving as if connected by some invisible thread.

You had taken a blow, separating you from everyone else. You tried standing up but fuck! The impact had shattered your ankle, sending a searing pain through your leg. Your nerves were on fire in a way they had never been before.

You couldn't move.

You couldn't get up. Couldn’t run.

And then the ground shifted, an explosion roared from behind, and the next thing you knew, a van was thrown across the road, hurtling straight toward you.

For a single, frozen heartbeat, you realised this was it.

It was over.

You saw the faces of bystanders staring from the sidewalk, their eyes wide, too horrified to look away. You let go of the cold steel of your knife still gripped in your hand. The acrid taste of smoke on your tongue intensified. And the truck—a wall of twisted metal hurtling closer, closer, impossibly fast.

You’d spent so many years brushing so close to death that you always thought you’d be ready.

But now, all you felt was regret.

Regret that this was how you’d die: in the middle of a cold, empty street, surrounded by strangers who would never remember you, never know who you were or what you’d done.

Alone.

You thought of Bucky in those last seconds—his quiet smiles, the way he’d look at you like he could see through every wall you put up, the silent crutch he’d offered without expecting anything in return. Bucky, who’d trusted you, who’d somehow cared for you even after everything you’d done.

For the first time, you felt regret for every life you’d taken, every person you’d left to die in your wake.

Your life had been nothing but survival and bloodshed. You had told yourself it was necessary, that it was the only way. But here, now, with your own death inches away, it all felt hollow.

You’d given up hope, abandoned the idea of redemption long ago—because you were too broken.

And yet, with Bucky, something had changed. He had looked at you and somehow seen past it all. He’d made you feel as if maybe, just maybe, you were something more than the ghost you’d become. Maybe, instead of running, you could have found a way to fight for something real, something that mattered.

Maybe you could have been someone better.

You would never know now.

The world narrowed, and you braced yourself for the inevitable, hoping it would be quick and painless. Your fingers tightened, clinging to the memory of him in those last, precious seconds as you waited to feel the impact—

But it never came.

Instead, there was a rush of air, a deafening crash, and then—silence. You blinked, dazed, your heart still hammering, and when you looked up, Bucky was standing there, his metal arm outstretched, braced against the van that he’d deflected away.

He turned to face you, his expression raw, worry carved deep into his features as he scanned you, checking for injuries. For a moment, he just stared, his breathing uneven, as if he’d been the one facing certain death.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice panicked.

You tried to answer, but the words tangled, caught in your throat. You managed a nod, barely able to process what had just happened.

“Shit,” he kneeled next to you, “Is your ankle broken, can you walk?”

You stared at him, trembling as he tore a part of his shirt and wrapped it around your injury for support.

Bucky had saved you. He had thrown himself in front of a hurtling vehicle without a moment of hesitation, as if your life were worth that sacrifice.

He had saved you.

You were alive because of him.

Alive, when you’d already accepted that you were going to die alone.

No one had ever done that for you. No one had ever saved you—not like this, not without asking anything in return. Hell, you never thought that you deserved to be saved.

“You’re okay, Sleeper,” he said, his voice softer now, like he was reassuring himself as much as you. “I’m here.”

His words settled into the cracks that had broken open inside you, filling them in ways you hadn’t thought possible. You hadn’t realised how empty you’d felt until now, how long you’d carried the weight of loneliness, of believing that this life—this endless, solitary fight—was all you deserved.

Bucky made you feel like maybe, just maybe, you didn’t have to be alone. That maybe, even after all you’d done, there was a place for you outside the shadows.

“Don’t call me that,” your voice trembled, “I don’t want you to call me Sleeper anymore.”

Bucky stopped for a second, confused. “What do you want me to call you, then?”

You couldn’t hold it back anymore. Something inside you broke, raw and vulnerable, and the name you’d hidden for years slipped from your lips before you even realised it. Your real name—your last, fragile piece of self you’d kept locked away, hoping one day you’d be able to reclaim it.

It felt right with Bucky, like you could trust him with it, like you could let yourself be seen.

Bucky’s eyes widened, his face softening as he repeated it, almost reverent, like he wanted to remember how it felt to say it.

Hearing him say your name, like a prayer, like it was sacred, like it mattered— tore down whatever walls you had left. He’d given you something you didn’t know you could have: the feeling of belonging to yourself again. The feeling of belonging to the world again.

Without thinking, you wrapped your arms around his neck, fingers shaking. He moved, pulling you closer. His touch was grounding, steady—a lifeline that anchored you to the moment, to this fragile reality where you didn’t have to be alone anymore.

You pressed your lips to his, but this kiss was different— it wasn't casual or sexual as it has always been. This time, it was gentle, carrying something other than desire, something precious and fragile.

Something worth nurturing.

When you finally pulled away, he looked at you lovingly.

“I’ll join you,” you said, the words coming from some deep part of you that had been waiting for someone to give you this chance, this choice.

Now you realised that this choice was yours all along. All you had to do was take it.

And you did, because maybe, instead of running from yourself, you could find a way to make things right. Maybe you could fight for something greater than yourself.

For the first time, wrapped in Bucky’s embrace, you believed that maybe you could be someone worth saving.

—

A month later, you were all gathered around a small campfire, tucked away in a quiet corner of nowhere.

The night was cool, the fire warm, and laughter bubbled up from the group as you shared bits and pieces of each other's lives.

“Team bonding,” John had said.

John passed around a nearly empty bag of marshmallows, Alexei poked at the fire, and Yelena and Ava exchanged eye rolls at everyone else’s antics, though they leaned closer together under the same blanket.

Eventually, the conversation drifted, as it often did, to you and Bucky.

“So… how did the Winter Soldier and Sleeper even meet?” Yelena asked, raising an eyebrow as she threw another marshmallow into her mouth.

The moniker you had adopted still twisted in your stomach every time you heard it, but it had lost its edge. This time, you felt in control. Like you owned it.

"I have theories,” Alexei nodded, crossing his arms, “but I have to know."

You shared a look with Bucky, a small smile creeping on both your faces. “There was a Hydra agent we were both after.” you began, biting back a frown. “And… well, I was angrier back then.”

He placed his arm on yours, a comforting gesture.

“You wanted him alive,” you said. “I had… different ideas.”

“After that—” Bucky wrapped his arm around your shoulders. “—She was all I could think about. I kept showing up wherever she was, trying to figure her out.”

“So basically,” John said, trying to hold back a laugh, “Bucky is a bit of a stalker.”

“A stalker?” Bucky echoed incredulously, “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘dedicated.’”

“No, no,” Ava interjected, “you followed her everywhere did you not? ‘Stalker’ is the right word, Barnes.”

“Fine,” he admitted jokingly, “But what can I say? It was love at first sight.”

Yelena gagged theatrically and John clutched his stomach in a fit of laughter.

Alexei just chuckled and muttered something about “American romance.” Ava made a face, disgusted but secretly amused.

You couldn’t help but laugh along with them, leaning against Bucky’s shoulder, feeling the steady rise and fall of his breath. You could see him out of the corner of your eye, looking down at you with a quiet smile.

In some way, this still felt too good to be real.

For the first time, you realized you’d found exactly what you’d been missing all along. A home. Maybe even the closest thing you’ve ever had to a family.

A place where you belonged.

And you knew, looking at all of them—especially at Bucky—that this was just the beginning.

-end

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blue-politics-reblogs · 4 years ago

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"A New York Times examination of the 77 democracy-bending days between election and inauguration shows how, with conspiratorial belief rife in a country ravaged by pandemic, a lie that [t]rump had been grooming for years finally overwhelmed the Republican Party and, as brake after brake fell away, was propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media."

- "As [t]rump’s official election campaign wound down, a new, highly organized campaign stepped into the breach to turn his demagogic fury into a movement of its own, reminding key lawmakers at key times of the cost of denying the will of the president and his followers. Called Women for America First, it had ties to [t]rump and former White House aides then seeking presidential pardons, among them Stephen K. Bannon and Michael T. Flynn.

"As it crossed the country spreading the new gospel of a stolen election in [t]rump-red buses, the group helped build an acutely [t]rumpian coalition that included sitting and incoming members of Congress, rank-and-file voters and the 'de-platformed' extremists and conspiracy theorists promoted on its home page — including the white nationalist Jared Taylor, prominent QAnon proponents and the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.

"With each passing day the lie grew, finally managing to do what the political process and the courts would not: upend the peaceful transfer of power that for 224 years had been the bedrock of American democracy.

- "For every lawyer on [t]rump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason. That included not only Mr. Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found.

- McConnell attempted one of his sly long games, "under a false impression that [trump] was only blustering, the officials said. Mr. McConnell had had multiple conversations with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the senator’s top political adviser, Josh Holmes, had spoken with Mr. Kushner, [trump’s] son-in-law and senior adviser. Both West Wing officials had conveyed the same message: They would pursue all potential avenues but recognized that they might come up short. [t]rump would eventually bow to reality and accept defeat.

"The [then] majority leader rendered his verdict on Nov. 9, during remarks at the first postelection Senate session. Even as he celebrated Republican victories in the Senate and the House — which in party talking points somehow escaped the pervasive fraud that cast Mr. Biden’s victory in doubt — Mr. McConnell said, '[t]rump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.' He added, 'A few legal inquiries from the president do not exactly spell the end of the republic.'

- "Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, then the Judiciary Committee chairman, went on Sean Hannity’s program to share an affidavit from a postal worker in Erie, Pa., who said he had overheard supervisors discussing illegally backdating postmarks on ballots that had arrived too late to be counted. He had forwarded it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"'They can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned — I’ve had it with these people. Let’s fight back,' Mr. Graham said. 'We lose elections because they cheat us.'

"Earlier that day, however, the postal worker had recanted his statement in an interview with federal investigators — even though he continued to push his story online afterward. His affidavit, it turned out, had been written with the assistance of the conservative media group Project Veritas, known for its deceptive tactics and ambush videos.

- "[W]ith the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, backing him, Mr. Barr told [trump] that he could not manufacture evidence and that his department would have no role in challenging states’ results, said a former senior official with knowledge about the meeting, a version of which was first reported by Axios. The allegations about manipulated voting machines were ridiculously false, he added; the lawyers propagating them, led by Mr. Giuliani, were 'clowns.'

- "The [Paxton] lawsuit was audacious in its scope. It claimed that, without their legislatures’ approval, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had made unconstitutional last-minute election-law changes, helping create the conditions for widespread fraud. Citing a litany of convoluted and speculative allegations — including one involving Dominion voting machines — it asked the court to shift the selection of their Electoral College delegates to their legislatures, effectively nullifying 20 million votes.

"Condemnation, some of it from conservative legal experts, rained down.

..."One lawyer knowledgeable about the planning, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: 'There was no plausible chance the court will take this up. It was really disgraceful to put this in front of justices of the Supreme Court.'

"Even the Republican attorney general of Georgia, Chris Carr, said it was 'constitutionally, legally and factually wrong.'

"That prompted a call from [trump], who warned Mr. Carr not to interfere, an aide to the attorney general confirmed. The pressure campaign was on.

- "The next day, Dec. 9, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana sent an email to his colleagues with the subject line, 'Time-sensitive request from [t]rump.' The congressman was putting together an amicus brief in support of the Texas suit; [t]rump, he wrote, 'specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join.' [trump], he noted, was keeping score: 'He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.'

- "Some 126 Republican House members, including the caucus leader, Mr. McCarthy, signed on to the brief, which was followed by a separate brief from [trump] himself. 'This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!' [t]rump tweeted. Privately, he asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to argue the case.

- "On Dec. 11, the court declined to hear the case, ruling that Texas had no right to challenge other states’ votes.

"If the highest court in the land couldn’t do it, there had to be some other way.

- "And so they came the next day, by the thousands, to a long-planned rally in Washington, filling Freedom Plaza with red MAGA caps and [t]rump and QAnon flags, vowing to carry on. [trump’s] legal campaign to subvert the election might have been unraveling, but their most trusted sources of information were glossing over the cascading losses, portraying as irrefutable the evidence of rampant fraud.

"'The justice system has a purpose in our country, but the courts do not decide who the next president of the United States of America will be,' the freshly pardoned former national security adviser, Mr. Flynn, told the crowd. 'We the people decide.'

"There was encouragement from figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the conspiracy theorist just elected to Congress from Georgia, and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, beamed in on a giant video screen.

"'Hey there, all of you happy warrior freedom fighters,' Ms. Blackburn said. 'We’re glad you’re there standing up for the Constitution, for liberty, for justice.'

- "The rally had been planned by Women for America First, which was quietly becoming the closest thing [t]rump had to a political organizing force, gathering his aggrieved supporters behind the lie of a stolen election.

"The group’s founder, Amy Kremer, had been one of the original Tea Party organizers, building the movement through cross-country bus tours. She had been among the earliest [t]rump supporters, forming a group called Women Vote Trump along with Ann Stone, ex-wife of the longtime [t]rump adviser Roger Stone.

- "'What we do now is we take note of the people who betrayed [t]rump in Congress and we get them out of Congress...We’re going to make the Tea Party look tiny in comparison.'"

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totosite20-blog · 4 years ago

Text

Quality Over Quantity - Why USA Online Casinos Are Superior

This legislation, sneaked in by piggyback through the Safe Port Act, would be named the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, and it became a thorn in the side of the online gambler, the online casino, and all payment processors there in.

Sadly, the UIGEA was not even set to go into effect until December of 2009, thought the implications of the legislation had fall out that would be nothing short of catastrophic for many online gambling companies, especially those that relied heavily on the United States market.

PartyGaming comes to mind specifically, though other large gambling firms had taken a hit. Additionally, many executives in charge of several of the online casinos, including Anurag Dikshit, one of the early founders of PartyGaming, had been indicted and fined for their involvement in online gambling - despite the fact that these companies had been based outside of the United States. Payment processors had also been significantly impacted,

as many of these financial companies had taken a blow from federal persecution, which, in some cases, amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars in seizures. Sadly, the UIGEA had not even been invoked in many of these seizures. Rather, the Wire Act of 1961, a law that had been passed years before the Internet was even beginning to develop into what we see today.

Though there are online casinos still operating in the USA, the choice has become limited. In order to focus on a marginal market, online casinos accepting American players had to provide a service of higher quality. That having been said, those online casinos have had to outclass the older forms of casino software that had removed themselves from the American market.

Each carries its own unique features, though they universally out perform those who have left the United states behind, including Microgaming, Playtech, and others. While some of the individual casinos operating under these brands have decided not to content with the contention of the United States government, nearly all of them continue to supply USA players with high quality casino gaming.

Casinos powered by RTG are one of the superior three. Real Time gaming has brought high quality gaming to players throughout the United States. Their superiority comes through the digital eloquence of their games. Rather than delivering tired, bland tables games and slots, they have taken steps to ensure that each player will enjoy the smooth graphics and game play of their casino. Real Time Gaming casinos supply their players with enough diversity to remain entertaining, as well as huge bonuses for their players.

Casinos outside of the United States, particularly Microgaming casinos, will almost always fall short in terms of bonuses. Through integrated security, these casinos under the RTG brand also remain the most secure.

Their table games have also been a huge hit, bringing in players who seek simply to play cards, dice, or other table based casino games. Though players outside of the United States may enjoy the Interactive Slot, there is no international online casino that blocks American IP addresses that offers anything remotely similar to the power and variety of the I-Slot.

The size and popularity of these tournaments are almost exclusive to Odds On. Slot tournaments provide players with the ability to enjoy slot gaming without an overwhelming financial risk, while providing easier access to large winnings. Though other types of casino software will periodically provide players with the chance to enjoy slot tournaments, none will be as versatile or commonplace as those found through Odds On - proving once again online casinos accepting USA players are superior to those found open only to European players.

In order to aid in the push for regulated Internet casino gambling, any individual may contact their senators and representatives in order to express their opinion. There are also political action committees, such as the Poker Player's Alliance, that are trying to bring casino gaming into the homes of players throughout the United States. Despite these laws, the casinos still operating for American players are ranked far above those who have decided against continued operation Stateside.

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nightking101-blog · 4 years ago

Text

Quality Over Quantity - Why USA Online Casinos Are Superior

In 1996, the explosion of internet casino gaming sailed the universe. The United States have become a massive portion with the and lots of gamblers'd switched to internet casinos for every one their gambling. For so a lot of decades, these casinos stayed played . Regrettably back in 2006, legislation has been passed that made it slightly hard for internet casinos to keep to use. This law, sneaked from piggy-back throughout the Safe Port Act, will be called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, also it turned into a thorn in the face of the internet gambler, the internet casino, along with all payment chips there-in.

The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, and also perhaps the UIGEA, had, at summary, illegal banks and payment processors out of processing trades which will correlate to internet gaming. It hasn't merely complicated loading balances, but additionally withdrawing. While USA online casinos also have continued to use, they will have been required to utilize payment chips that could bypass those restrictions. Sadlythe UIGEA wasn't actually place to move into effect before December of 2009, thought the consequences of this law had autumn out that might be nothing short of devastating to most on the web gaming businesses, specially the ones who relied heavily upon the United States market.

Even the UIGEA had hamstrung a lot of the operations across the globe which utilized the American economy as a way to remain ahead in gains, and all of the while keeping losses into a non. The consequences ran profound, damaging many businesses operating such casinos. Not merely had a number of those more expensive, publicly traded on the web casinos accepted a significant hit on the purchase price a share, which consequently hurt the investors of the businesses, but also cost the organizations profits out of the United States Market. PartyGaming springs to mind specifically, though additional large gaming firms had obtained popular. In addition, many executives responsible of a number of the internet casinos, for example Anurag Dikshit, among those oldest creators of PartyGaming, have been fined and imprisoned for their participation in online gaming - inspite of how these businesses were established outside the United States. Payment chips had been significantly affected, as most of these fiscal businesses had obtained a setback from national persecution, which, in a few instances, amounted to billions of dollars . Sadly, the UIGEA had been invoked in several of those seizures. Instead of the Wire Act of 1961, a law which was passed before the Internet was beginning to build up into what we find now.

Inspite of the legislation that'd begun to inhibit internet casino gaming, many internet casinos continued to simply just accept USA players. While a number of the bigger brands of internet casino was stripped out of the United States market, others had stayed steadfast in their devotion to bringing casino gambling into the American industry. While there are internet casinos still operating from the USA, the choice is now limited. As a way to concentrate on a market, internet casinos accepting American players had to supply something of top quality. That was said, those online-casinos have needed to out class the old forms of casino applications that'd removed from the American industry.

There are now three big brands of casino applications which have to quit working within the United States. These brands don't have any intent on leaving the American economy, but out function the ones which have left USA players dry and high. Real Time Gaming, or RTG, Rival Gaming, or even just just Rival, and Odds On, also called Vegas Technology, would be the 3 kinds of casino applications still accepting Americans. Each includes its own distinct options, though they professionally outside function people who have abandoned the United countries behind, for example Microgaming, Playtech, along with also others. While a number of those casinos operating under the brands decided never to articles with the emptiness of this United States government, not exactly all them carry on to furnish USA players using premium excellent casino gambling.

Casinos powered by RTG are among those three. Real Time gambling has attracted good excellent gambling to players across the United States. Their excellence goes through the electronic eloquence in their matches. As opposed to delivering tired, dull tables slots and games, they've taken steps to make sure each player will relish the smooth images and action with these casino. Real Time Gaming casinos furnish their players having enough diversity to continue being entertaining, in addition to huge bonuses to their own players. Casinos out the United States, specially Microgaming casinos, may always fall short concerning bonuses. Through incorporated security, these casinos underneath the RTG brand additionally remain the very dependable.

The 2nd variant of casino gambling stems through Rival Gaming. Rival Gaming is now generated and then spread a exceptional collection of games. These matches, that the Interactive Slots, have attracted a completely different level of entertainment on games. In the place of the conventional rotation of the slots, Rival has increased the bar to the pinnacle of casino gambling. Their dining table games also have been a enormous hit, attracting in players that search in order to play dice, cards, or different dining table established casino matches. Though players beyond the United States can delight in the Interactive Slot, there isn't any global Onlinecasino which blocks American IP addresses which features anything remotely just like this ability and wide range of their I-Slot.

Finally we encounter Odds On. With Odds On Casinos, players have the right to utilize one of those initial kinds of internet casino program. Odds On has altered how games have been played, specially slots. The Odds On incentive slots also have attracted thousands and thousands of dollars with their own winners. In addition, these bonus slots have been supported with the large, multi player slot tournaments which have grown to be a staple for several gamers across the globe. The dimensions and prevalence of all those tournaments are nearly exclusive to Odds On. Slot tournaments provide players having the capacity to relish slot gambling with no overwhelming monetary risk, while providing easier use of enormous winnings. Though other kinds of casino computer pc software may sometimes supply players with the opportunity to delight in slot games, not one is going to be versatile or trivial as people seen through Odds On - demonstrating yet more on the web casinos accepting USA players ' are more advanced than those found open just to European players.

Though casinos accepting Americans have experienced a rocky road, specially at '09, expect is determined by the horizon. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, that held that a deadline of December of 2009, was postponed. This delay bought period, half a year to be accurate, which could enable legislators to rethink regulations's passing. Several legislators, specially Congressman Barney Frank, have already been pushing to get a big change in law. Inorder to help in the push for regulated Internet casino gaming, anybody might contact their senators and representatives so as to share their opinion. Additionally, there are political actions committees, like the Poker Player's Alliance, which can be attempting to entice casino gambling in to the homes of players across the United States. Despite all these laws, the casinos operating for American players have been ranked far above people who decided against continuing performance Stateside.

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gamesfanatic · 4 years ago

Text

Quality Over Quantity - Why USA Online Casinos Are Superior

Back 1996, the explosion of online casino gambling swept the world. The United States had been a large part of this, and many gamblers had turned to online casinos for all of their gaming. For many years, these casinos continued to be played unabated. Unfortunately, back in 2006, legislation was passed that made it slightly difficult for online casinos to continue to operate. This legislation, sneaked in by piggyback through the Safe Port Act, would be termed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, and it became a thorn in the side of the online gambler, the online casino, and all payment processors there in. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, or the UIGEA, had, in a nutshell, prohibited banks and payment processors from processing transactions that would correlate to online gambling. This has not only complicated loading accounts, but also pulling out. While USA online casinos have continued to operate, they have had to use payment processors that would circumvent these restrictions. Sadly, the UIGEA was not even set to go into effect until December of 2009, thought the implications of the legislation had fall out that would be nothing short of catastrophic for many online gambling companies, especially those that relied heavily on the United States market. The UIGEA had hamstrung most of the operations around the world that utilized the American market in order to stay ahead in profits, all the while keeping losses to a low. The implications ran deep, damaging many companies operating these casinos. Not only had some of the larger, publicly traded online casinos taken a major hit to the price per share, which in turn hurt the shareholders of those companies, but also cost the companies profits from the United States Market. PartyGaming comes to mind specifically, though other large gambling firms had taken a hit. Additionally , many executives in charge of several of the online casinos, including Anurag Dikshit, one of the early founders of PartyGaming, had been indicted and fined for their involvement in online gambling - despite the fact that these companies had been based outside of the United States. Payment processors had also been significantly impacted, as many of these financial companies had taken a whack from federal persecution, which, in some cases, amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars in seizures. Sadly, the UIGEA had not even been invoked in many of these seizures. Rather, the Wire Act of 1961, a law that had been passed years before the Internet was even beginning to develop into what we see today. Despite the laws that had begun to inhibit online casino gambling, many online casinos continuing to accept USA players. While several of the larger brands of online casino had been stripped from the United States market, many others had remained steadfast in their dedication to delivering casino gaming to the American market. Though there are online casinos still operating in the USA, the choice has become limited. In order to focus on a marginal market, online casinos accepting American players had to provide a service of higher quality. That having ended up said, those online casinos have had to outclass the older forms of casino software that had removed themselves from the American market. There are currently three major brands of casino software that have yet to cease operating within the United States. These brands have no intention on leaving the American market, and still out perform those that have already left USA players high and dry. Real Time Playing games, or RTG, Rival Gaming, or simply Rival, and Odds On, also known as Vegas Technology, are the three types of casino software still accepting Americans. Each carries its own unique features, though they universally out perform those who have left the United states behind, including Microgaming, Playtech, and others. While some of the individual casinos operating under these brands have decided not to content with the contention of the United States government, nearly all advisors continue to supply USA players with high quality casino gaming. Casinos powered by RTG are one of the superior three. Real Time gaming has brought high quality gaming to players throughout the United States. Their superiority comes through the digital eloquence of their games. Rather than delivering tired, bland tables games and slots, they have taken steps to ensure that each player will enjoy the smooth graphics and game play of their casino. Real-time Gaming casinos supply their players with enough diversity to remain entertaining, as well as huge bonuses for their players. Casinos outside of the United States, particularly Microgaming casinos, will almost always fall short in terms of bonuses. Through integrated security, these casinos under the RTG brand also remain the most secure. The second brand of casino gaming comes through Rival Gaming. Rival Gaming has created and subsequently distributed a unique series of games. A lot of these games, the Interactive Slots, have brought a whole new level of entertainment to slot games. Rather than the standard spinning of the reels, Rival has raised the bar to the pinnacle of casino gaming. Their table games have also been a huge hit, bringing in players who seek simply to play cards, dice, or other table based casino games. Though players outside of the United States may enjoy the Interactive Video slot, there is no international online casino that blocks American IP addresses that offers anything remotely similar to the power and variety of the I-Slot. Finally we come to Odds On. With Odds On Casinos, players are entitled to use one of the original types of online casino software. Odds On has revolutionized the way games are played, particularly slots. The Odds On bonus slots have brought hundreds of thousands of dollars on their winners. Additionally , these bonus slots are backed by the large, multiplayer slot tournaments that have become a staple for many gamers around the world. The size and popularity of these tournaments are almost exclusive to Odds On. Slot tournaments provide players with the ability to enjoy slot gaming without an overwhelming financial risk, while providing easier access to large winnings. Though other types of casino software will periodically furnish players with the chance to enjoy slot tournaments, non-e will be as versatile or commonplace as those found through Odds On - proving once again online casinos accepting USA players are superior to those found open only to European players. Though casinos accepting Americans have had a bumpy road, particularly in 2009, hope lies on the horizon. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which held some sort of deadline of December of 2009, has been delayed. This delay bought time, six months to be exact, that would enable legislators to reconsider the law's passing. Several legislators, particularly Congressman Barney Frank, have been pushing for a change in legislation. In order to aid in the push for regulated Internet casino gambling, any individual may contact their senators and representatives in order to express their opinion. There are also politics action committees, such as the Poker Player's Alliance, that are trying to bring casino gaming into the homes of players throughout the United States. Despite these laws, the casinos still operating for American players are ranked far above those who have decided against continued operation Stateside.

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yasbxxgie · 5 years ago

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‘Mother Of Environmental Justice’ Hazel Johnson Could Get Postage Stamp To Honor Work Cleaning Up South Side

A beloved Chicago activist is one step closer to receiving her due, several years after her death.

Hazel M. Johnson spent half of her life fighting for environmental justice on the South Side from her home in the Chicago Housing Authority’s Altgeld Gardens, a five-minute walk from the street that now bears her name.

Earlier this month, Rep. Bobby Rush introduced two bills that would posthumously honor Johnson with a Congressional Gold Medal and a commemorative postage stamp.

For Johnson’s daughter, Cheryl, it is a move that is long overdue.

“Congressman Rush and my mom go way back, since the [Harold] Washington administration, when he was an alderman. He was supportive of some of the environmental issues she was addressing back then,” said Johnson, who is continuing her mother’s work through People For Community Recovery, the organization the matriarch founded in 1979.

Becoming an environmental activist wasn’t something the New Orleans native had set out to do, but when her husband, John — a bricklayer — was felled by cancer in 1969, she knew she wanted to do something. Johnson was no stranger to the work; she spent years organizing youth programs and fighting for capital improvements for Altgeld Gardens, a housing project originally built for black World War II veterans.

When she learned that residents in South Side zip codes had higher incidents of cancer than those in other parts of the city, she wanted to know why.

“She started talking to different neighbors, and noticed a pattern, a cluster of so many people from the same neighborhood diagnosed with cancer,” Johnson said. “That’s when she learned about the environmental problems in our area.”

Through her own research she was able to identify 50 documented landfills in the vicinity of the housing project. She also discovered that the area was one of the more highly polluted neighborhoods due to emissions from the industrial corridor nearby, nicknaming it “The Toxic Doughnut.”

Soon after, she mobilized fellow residents to force CHA to address the hazards plaguing Altgeld, from the asbestos-lined walls to the contaminated drinking water.

Doing that didn’t win Johnson any favors.

“Chicago and the Midwest had been decades behind on environmental issues,” recalled Johnson. “When she was advocating for the cleanup of Lake Calumet she was labeled ‘crazy,’ and told she didn’t know what she was talking about. But she was determined, you know?”

Johnson and her organization even launched a successful campaign to help the residents of Maryland Manor (a tiny subdivision bordering the city) by forcing the city to test its drinking water, and pushing them to install water and sewer lines.

While her work made her a target for local policymakers and elected officials, she was nationally lauded by two presidents, receiving the President’s Environment and Conservation Challenge Award from President Bush in 1991, and recognition for her organization’s work in environmental justice from President Clinton in 1996.

Johnson also mentored a young Barack Obama when he was just starting out as a community organizer. He worked with her and the People For Community Recovery to remove layers of fiberglass and asbestos installed in attics of the housing project units.

“The last time she saw him in person, he was stopping by the house to tell her he was going away to law school,” her daughter recalled.

Johnson would continue her efforts until the day she died of congestive heart failure in early 2011. Today, her daughter carries on her legacy.

“Today, in 2019, Chicago still doesn’t have an effective environmental policy or ordinance in place to protect the public from industrial pollution,” said Johnson.

A 2018 report from the American Lung Association tells the tale; the city received an “F” last year for its declining air quality, and it currently ranks 22nd out of 26 of the most-polluted cities.

Still, she fights on with the hope that one day, change will come.

x|h/t

Photograph (bottom):

From her home in Altgeld Gardens, Johnson spent decades working to improve air and water quality for residents on the South Side through her organization, People for Community Recovery, founded in 1979. It remains headquartered at the housing project.

#hazel johnson #people for community recovery #mother of environmental justice #environmental justice #black women #chicago #jamie nesbitt golden #block club chicago

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totoproweb-blog · 5 years ago

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Quality Over Quantity - Why USA Online Casinos Are Superior

Back in 1996, the explosion of online casino gambling swept the world. The United States had been a large part of this, and many gamblers had turned to online casinos for all of their gaming. For many years, these casinos continued to be played unabated. Unfortunately, back in 2006, legislation was passed that made it slightly difficult for online casinos to continue to operate. This legislation, sneaked in by piggyback through the Safe Port Act, would be named the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, and it became a thorn in the side of the online gambler, the online casino, and all payment processors there in.

The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, or the UIGEA, had, in a nutshell, prohibited banks and payment processors from processing transactions that would correlate to online gambling. This has not only complicated loading accounts, but also withdrawing. While USA online casinos have continued to operate, they have had to use payment processors that would circumvent these restrictions. Sadly, the UIGEA was not even set to go into effect until December of 2009, thought the implications of the legislation had fall out that would be nothing short of catastrophic for many online gambling companies, especially those that relied heavily on the United States market.

The UIGEA had hamstrung many of the operations around the world that utilized the American market in order to stay ahead in profits, all the while keeping losses to a low. The implications ran deep, damaging many companies operating these casinos. Not only had some of the larger, publicly traded online casinos taken a major hit to the price per share, which in turn hurt the shareholders of those companies, but also cost the companies profits from the United States Market. PartyGaming comes to mind specifically, though other large gambling firms had taken a hit. Additionally, many executives in charge of several of the online casinos, including Anurag Dikshit, one of the early founders of PartyGaming, had been indicted and fined for their involvement in online gambling - despite the fact that these companies had been based outside of the United States. Payment processors had also been significantly impacted, as many of these financial companies had taken a blow from federal persecution, which, in some cases, amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars in seizures. Sadly, the UIGEA had not even been invoked in many of these seizures. Rather, the Wire Act of 1961, a law that had been passed years before the Internet was even beginning to develop into what we see today.

Despite the laws that had begun to inhibit online casino gambling, many online casinos continued to accept USA players. While several of the larger brands of online casino had been stripped from the United States market, many others had remained steadfast in their dedication to delivering casino gaming to the American market. Though there are online casinos still operating in the USA, the choice has become limited. In order to focus on a marginal market, online casinos accepting American players had to provide a service of higher quality. That having been said, those online casinos have had to outclass the older forms of casino software that had removed themselves from the American market.

There are currently three major brands of casino software that have yet to cease operating within the United States. These brands have no intention on leaving the American market, and still out perform those that have already left USA players high and dry. Real Time Gaming, or RTG, Rival Gaming, or simply Rival, and Odds On, also known as Vegas Technology, are the three types of casino software still accepting Americans. Each carries its own unique features, though they universally out perform those who have left the United states behind, including Microgaming, Playtech, and others. While some of the individual casinos operating under these brands have decided not to content with the contention of the United States government, nearly all of them continue to supply USA players with high quality casino gaming.

The second brand of casino gaming comes through Rival Gaming. Rival Gaming has created and subsequently distributed a unique series of games. These games, the Interactive Slots, have brought a whole new level of entertainment to slot games. Rather than the standard spinning of the reels, Rival has raised the bar to the pinnacle of casino gaming. Their table games have also been a huge hit, bringing in players who seek simply to play cards, dice, or other table based casino games. Though players outside of the United States may enjoy the Interactive Slot, there is no international online casino that blocks American IP addresses that offers anything remotely similar to the power and variety of the I-Slot.

Finally we come to Odds On. With Odds On Casinos, players are entitled to use one of the original types of online casino software. Odds On has revolutionized the way games are played, particularly slots. The Odds On bonus slots have brought hundreds of thousands of dollars to their winners. Additionally, these bonus slots are backed by the large, multiplayer slot tournaments that have become a staple for many gamers around the world. The size and popularity of these tournaments are almost exclusive to Odds On. Slot tournaments provide players with the ability to enjoy slot gaming without an overwhelming financial risk, while providing easier access to large winnings. Though other types of casino software will periodically provide players with the chance to enjoy slot tournaments, none will be as versatile or commonplace as those found through Odds On - proving once again online casinos accepting USA players are superior to those found open only to European players.

Though casinos accepting Americans have had a bumpy road, particularly in 2009, hope lies on the horizon. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which held a deadline of December of 2009, has been delayed. This delay bought time, six months to be exact, that would enable legislators to reconsider the law's passing. Several legislators, particularly Congressman Barney Frank, have been pushing for a change in legislation. In order to aid in the push for regulated Internet casino gambling, any individual may contact their senators and representatives in order to express their opinion. There are also political action committees, such as the Poker Player's Alliance, that are trying to bring casino gaming into the homes of players throughout the United States. Despite these laws, the casinos 안전놀이터 still operating for American players are ranked far above those who have decided against continued operation Stateside.

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antoine-roquentin · 6 years ago

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In recent months some have said of the migrants, “Instead of running away, they should try to change the situation in their country!” Only those unfamiliar with the Honduran situation could say such a thing. Anyone who opposes it, anyone who criticizes or tries to change it, risks death. Between 2010 and 2016, more than 120 environmental and human rights activists were killed in Honduras. Freedom of the press is also under siege, as Reporters Without Borders has documented. Honduras is one of the most dangerous Latin American countries for journalists, seventy of whom have been killed there since 2001, with more than 90 percent of those murders going unpunished. Anyone who writes has two choices: leave the country or stop writing. Exile yourself or censor yourself. Otherwise you may be sued for libel—libel suits are expensive to defend against, and even if journalists are eventually cleared, their credibility in the eyes of the public is often damaged. Or you may be jailed on false charges, or killed. And attacks on the freedom of the press come not only from criminal organizations, but also from politicians.

President Trump talks about the migrant caravan as if it were an attempted invasion. In reality, Honduras and Central America have paid an enormous price precisely because of US policies. The dire situation in Honduras right now is shaped by the drug market, and the world’s largest consumer of cocaine is the United States. As early as 1975, Honduras was being used as a staging area by the Cali Cartel, led by the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers (the powerful rivals of Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellín Cartel). After their arrest, they told prosecutors that cocaine left Colombia by plane and landed in San Pedro Sula—the city from which the caravan originated—and from there went on to Miami.

Through the 1980s, the Colombian cartels transported their cocaine to the US mainly by boat, across the Caribbean to Florida. But when the US Drug Enforcement Administration ramped up inspections in those waters and began seizing more and more shipments, the land route to the United States from Central America through Mexico (with the help of Mexican traffickers) became a better alternative. And when the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala ended (in 1992 and 1996, respectively), that route was used more and more, since criminal organizations prefer to steer clear of conflict zones.

But the end of those conflicts also created another opportunity for the cartels. During the civil wars, many parents in El Salvador, in order to keep their sons from becoming either guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) or regular army soldiers destined for slaughter, sent them to the United States. Abandoned to their fate in Los Angeles, marginalized by American society, some of these youths formed the maras, street gangs of young Central American immigrants who banded together to defend themselves from the African-American, Asian, and Mexican gangs already active there. Thus were born extremely violent, close-knit groups such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Mara 18 (also known as the 18th Street gang or Barrio 18), whose names came from the LA streets that were their headquarters.2

Once the Central American civil wars had ended, the US government, eager to rid itself of this problem, sent back to their native lands thousands of young men. Having left as boys, they returned as gangsters. In those ravaged countries where poverty was rampant, they saw opportunity in the drug trade, and at the same time the cartels, always looking for new muscle, found them. Meanwhile, Honduras, the one country in the region untouched by civil war, had been used not only as a smuggling hub by criminal organizations but also as a base for US efforts to supply the contras, the paramilitary group fighting the socialist government of Nicaragua. Everything, that is, passed through Honduras—both drugs and weapons—goods that often shared not only routes but also intermediaries. The story of the Honduran drug lord Juan Ramón Matta-Ballesteros is illustrative: he forged a link between the Medellín Cartel and the Guadalajara Cartel (revenue from their cocaine shipments to the United States reached $5 million a week in the 1980s), and he also worked for the US government, using his air transport company to deliver arms to the contras.

The involvement of the United States goes further. In 2008 the US government signed the Mérida Initiative with Mexico and the Central American countries, a multiyear agreement under which it pledged to cooperate in the fight against drug trafficking by providing those countries (especially Mexico) with economic support, police training, and military resources. This crackdown pushed the Mexican cartels—already under pressure from the war on drugs that Mexican president Felipe Calderón had begun in 2006—to lean increasingly on Central America and its drug gangs.

The Honduran situation worsened on June 28, 2009, when a military coup forced President Manuel Zelaya to flee to Costa Rica. Zelaya had been elected with the support of the rich conservatives of the Partido Liberal, but during his term, which began in 2006, he proved open to dialogue with minority groups and friendly to the poorest, least powerful classes. In an effort to improve his country’s economy and his people’s lives, he joined the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), an organization conceived by former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to promote economic cooperation among the countries of Latin America and to counter the influence of the US over them.

But Zelaya was veering too far to the left for the Honduran oligarchy that had put him in power. The chance to oust him arose when he called for an advisory referendum on the election of a constituent assembly to rewrite the Honduran constitution with the goal of increasing participatory democracy and citizen equality. The assembly could also have removed presidential term limits, which under article 239 of the Honduran constitution could not even be proposed; this was enough for coup leaders to justify removing him, despite the fact that the referendum was merely advisory and therefore nonbinding. (Article 239 was struck down by the Honduran Supreme Court in 2015.)

After the coup, in the political instability that followed, criminal organizations ramped up their activities, taking advantage of corrupt police forces and often colluding with politicians and members of the military. On December 8, 2009, the Honduran government’s drug czar, Julián Arístides González Irías, was assassinated on his way to work: after he had dropped his daughter off at school, a car blocked the road and a motorcycle approached, one of its two riders firing an Uzi through the window of his SUV. Years later it was discovered that the murder had been ordered by high-ranking Honduran police officials and planned in one of their offices, revelations that led to a law enforcement shake-up in which over five thousand officers were dismissed on corruption charges. But in October 2018 a new and embarrassing piece was added to this already disheartening puzzle: the man who had been in charge of the “purification” of the force, National Police Commissioner Lorgio Oquelí Mejía Tinoco, was himself accused of money laundering and corruption, among other things, and is now a fugitive.

This story and many others make clear that Honduras is a de facto narco state. In 2009 Porfirio Lobo Sosa won the first presidential election after the coup; in May 2016 his son Fabio pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges in the US, hoping for a reduced sentence. He got twenty-four years in prison. Judge Lorna Schofield said at his sentencing:

You were the son of the sitting president of Honduras, and you used your connections, your reputation in your political network to try to further corrupt connections between drug traffickers and Honduran government officials…. You facilitated strong government support for a large drug trafficking organization for multiple elements of the Honduran government, and you enriched yourself in the process.

And history may repeat itself: Juan Antonio (Tony) Hernández, a former Honduran congressman and the brother of the current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, was arrested in Miami on November 23, 2018, for his alleged ties to drug traffickers, particularly Los Cachiros, whose leader claimed in a US court to have paid him kickbacks when he was in Congress. According to the indictment, from 2004 to 2016 Hernández was involved in the trafficking through Honduras of tons of cocaine destined for the US: he accepted bribes from the traffickers, and he hired armed guards and bribed law enforcement officials to protect drug shipments and to keep quiet. Further, authorities discovered that certain cocaine labs Hernández had access to in Honduras and Colombia were producing bricks of cocaine stamped with the initials TH, which may stand for Tony Hernández. He is awaiting trial and, if convicted, faces a maximum term of life in prison.

In 2010 the United States for the first time identified Honduras as one of the major drug transit countries and since then has cooperated with Honduran authorities to combat drug trafficking. But the offensive has involved only efforts to suppress criminal organizations and has shown no real willingness to tackle, at a societal level, the problem of drug trafficking and gangs, for which the US bears a great deal of responsibility. President Trump limits himself to exploiting the effects of the tragedy: when he speaks about the caravan, he talks of “invaders,” of “stone cold criminals,” who must be coming to the US to occupy and plunder. None of this is true. But to understand, we must grasp how badly US policy has failed and how culpable and terribly complicit it is in the current situation.

Today the maras—the gangs—provide the best employment opportunities for youth in Central America. According to a 2012 report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the maras in El Salvador had about 20,000 members, those in Guatemala about 22,000, and those in Honduras about 12,000 (though a report that same year from USAID indicated a much higher number in Honduras). As Corrado Alvaro, an Italian writer from Calabria—a region plagued even in his day by the mafia group known as ’Ndrangheta—wrote in 1955, “When a society offers few opportunities, or none, to improve one’s station, creating fear becomes a way to rise.” Mareros, or gang members, tattoo their face and body to signal their gang membership and to openly declare their separation from civilian society, as if their gangs were military divisions operating in a sort of parallel life. Gangs control the territory and protect the trafficking of the big cartels. Businesses are subjected to shakedowns, streets become the scenes of clashes between rival gangs competing for dealing locations, and the jungle is a no-man’s land in which clandestine runways are carved for planes loaded with cocaine. Some urban areas are off-limits to ordinary citizens; a perpetual curfew reigns. The maras recruit boys—younger each year—as drug-trafficking foot soldiers; refusing to join can be fatal.

Because no one protects the populace from the abuses and threats of the gangs, people feel abandoned and in constant danger. This feeling is exacerbated by the extraordinary level of impunity in Honduras. In 2013, Attorney General Luis Alberto Rubí caused an uproar by declaring before the Honduran Congress that law enforcement had the manpower to investigate only about 20 percent of the nation’s murders, and that therefore the remaining 80 percent were certain to go unpunished. In Honduras (as in other Central American countries) being a sicario—a contract killer—is a real profession: in the morning you wake up and wait for a call asking you to commit a murder, for which you’ll be paid more than you could hope to make at any other job.

This is what people are fleeing from, this landscape that seems to offer no future but killing or being killed. Despite their varied histories, the migrants all have in common the desire—or rather the need—to escape the violence of the drug gangs and the lack of work and opportunity in their country.

It’s 2,700 miles from San Pedro Sula to Tijuana on the US–Mexico border, and with every mile the caravan grew, eventually swelling to about 10,000 people. The head of the caravan—which was several days ahead of the tail—reached the US border in mid-November. Large camps began forming in Tijuana and Mexicali, with thousands of refugees crowding into tents, waiting to be allowed to cross the border. It looked like there would be a very long wait, since—due to a new Trump administration policy—no one would be admitted to the United States prior to a hearing at an immigration court.

Faced with the prospect of remaining in that precarious limbo for weeks, perhaps months, some migrants tried to cross the border illegally, others sought asylum in Mexico, and still others gave up and turned around. According to data from the Mexican authorities reported by the Associated Press, 1,300 migrants returned to Central America; another 2,900 received humanitarian visas from Mexico and now live there legally, with the chance to look for work (which many have already found); and 2,600 were arrested by the US Border Patrol in the San Diego area alone for crossing illegally. As of mid-January, hundreds—it’s hard to know exact numbers—were still gathered at the border, hoping to enter the United States.

The caravan had many children in it, including disabled children seeking treatment in the United States. Juan Alberto Matheu, for example, traveled thousands of miles with his daughter Lesley, who has been confined to a wheelchair since having a stroke at the age of two. At every stage of the journey, he sought out washbasins to bathe her. After reaching Tijuana and spending three weeks in a refugee camp, he eventually managed—with the help of the Minority Humanitarian Foundation—to enter the US with Lesley. After four days in ICE custody, they were released, and he was finally able to take his daughter to a hospital.

Jakelin Caal Maquin, age seven, was healthy when she left Raxruhá, Guatemala, with her father, Nery Gilberto Caal Cuz. On the evening of December 6, both were arrested, along with 161 other migrants, by the US border patrol in New Mexico, after illegally crossing the border. A few hours later, while in the custody of American border agents, Jakelin began suffering from a high fever and seizures; she was taken by helicopter to a hospital, where she died the next day from septic shock, dehydration, and liver failure. She had traveled two thousand miles, crossing the Mexican desert, enduring weeks of exhaustion and hardship to reach the US, because she knew that beyond its border she could hope for something better than the future her own country offered. She died in the very place she could have begun a new life.

Jakelin was not the first migrant child to lose her life in the United States after arriving with a caravan. In May 2018 Mariee Juárez, only twenty months old, died after being held in a detention center in Dilley, Texas. Also from Guatemala, she too entered the United States illegally, crossing the Rio Grande with her mother, Yasmin. According to Yasmin, after they were arrested and put in the detention center on March 5, sharing a single room with five mothers and their own children (several of whom were already sick), Mariee developed a cough and a high fever and kept losing weight. On March 25 they were released, and Yasmin took her daughter to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia, adenovirus, and parainfluenza. She died six weeks later.

saviano is an italian journalist whose book gamorrah was turned into the film of the same name

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bylillian · 6 years ago

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House Republican leaders removed Representative Steve King of Iowa from the Judiciary and Agriculture Committees on Monday night as party officials scrambled to appear tough on racism and contain damage from comments Mr. King made to The New York Times questioning why white supremacy is considered offensive.

The punishment came on a day when Mr. King was denounced by an array of Republican leaders, though not President Trump. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, suggested Mr. King find “another line of work” and Senator Mitt Romney said he should quit. And the House Republicans, in an attempt to be proactive, stripped him of the committee seats in the face of multiple Democratic resolutions to censure Mr. King that are being introduced this week.

Those measures would force Republicans to take a stand on the House Democratic majority’s attempt to publicly reprimand one of their own.

Mr. King, who has been an ally of President Trump on the border wall and other issues, has a long history of making racist remarks and insults about immigrants, but has not drawn rebukes from Republican leaders until recently. In November, top Iowa Republicans like Senator Charles E. Grassley endorsed Mr. King for re-election even after one House Republican official came out and denounced him as a white supremacist.

But in an interview with The Times published last week, Mr. King said: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”

Speaking to reporters on Monday night after the House Republican leadership team acted, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, said he was not ruling out supporting a censure or reprimand resolution against Mr. King. He said the Republicans are not removing Mr. King from the G.O.P. House conference itself, so he can still attend its party meetings, and it was up to Iowans whether Mr. King should stay in office.

“This is not the first time we’ve heard these comments,” Mr. McCarthy said of Mr. King, an acknowledgment of the racist language the congressman has used before. “That is not the party of Lincoln and it’s definitely not American.”

Mr. McCarthy, who conferred privately with Mr. King for an hour before the vote, did not say why the most recent comments were a breaking point given Mr. King’s long public record of similar remarks. “Maybe I did not see those, but I disagree with these.”

The full Republican conference must still technically ratify the leader’s decision, but Mr. McCarthy presented the matter as closed.

Mr. King remained defiant after losing his committee seats, releasing a long statement insisting that his comments in the Times article had been misunderstood. He said he had been referring only to “western civilization” when he asked “how did that language become offensive,” not “white nationalist” or “white supremacist.”

“Leader McCarthy’s decision to remove me from committees is a political decision that ignores the truth,” he said.

He said he told Mr. McCarthy, “You have to do what you have to do and I will do what I have to do.” He pledged to continue to “point out the truth” and serve his district for “at least the next two years.”

The push to condemn Mr. King illustrated how alarmed senior Republicans are about the party’s image just two months after they lost 40 House seats, most of them in suburban or diverse districts — including seven in Mr. McCarthy’s home state of California, where the G.O.P. is on the brink of extinction.

The condemnations of Mr. King stood in stark contrast to the lawmakers’ willingness to tolerate President Trump’s frequent offensive and insensitive remarks about migrants, black people, Native Americans and others minorities.

Just last week, the president used the Oval Office to unleash a blistering assault on undocumented immigrants, portraying them as criminals in a fashion that harkened back to an earlier era of American politics but rarely heard from a president in modern times. And on Sunday night, Mr. Trump invoked the Wounded Knee massacre of hundreds of Native Americans as an attempt to joke about Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

“I’m glad that they are finally taking action after all of these years of Steve King slandering immigrants and Hispanics, but the president of the United States is also doing that and he just said something about Elizabeth Warren a few evenings ago that was also racially ugly and we haven’t heard a word of condemnation from anyone in the Republican Party about that,” said Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas.

Congressional Republicans have continued to embrace the president and his hard-line immigration politics, averting their gaze from his inflammatory rhetoric out of fear their core voters will punish them if they stray from Mr. Trump.

The president, when asked by reporters on Monday about Mr. King’s remarks, said, “I haven’t been following it.”

Republicans are now trying to get ahead of a fast-moving political problem while the country is in the midst of a lengthy government shutdown over a border wall by President Trump, who in many ways patterned his immigration policies and rhetoric on those of Mr. King.

Mr. McCarthy called a special meeting of the Republican Steering Committee to remove Mr. King from Judiciary — which has jurisdiction over immigration, voting rights and impeachment — and Agriculture, which is a prized committee for Iowans. Mr. King also lost his seat on the Small Business Committee. The steering committee vote was unanimous.

While Republican officials quickly turned on Mr. King, the party also came in for criticism from the Senate’s lone black Republican, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. He noted that the G.O.P. has long remained silent in the face of racist comments.

“Some in our party wonder why Republicans are constantly accused of racism — it is because of our silence when things like this are said,” Mr. Scott wrote in a Washington Post opinion column.

It is not clear what, if any, additional steps congressional Republican leaders will take with Mr. King. The National Republican Congressional Committee indicated Monday that they were not ready to step away from him.

“The N.R.C.C. does not get involved in primaries and isn’t going to comment on a hypothetical general election two years away,” said Chris Pack, a spokesman for the House campaign arm.

Democrats are moving to censure or reprimand the Iowa congressman, a stinging penalty. Among them were Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest ranking African-American in Congress, who introduced a measure Monday night in the form of a resolution of disapproval of Mr. King’s comments and white nationalism.

Democratic leaders in the House have yet to say what they will do with the competing censure resolutions, but are inclined to allow a vote of some sort related to Mr. King’s remarks, according to one senior Democratic aide.

In the interview with The Times, Mr. King also reflected on the record number of minorities and women in the new Democratic-controlled House. “You could look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men,” he said.

Mr. King’s hard-line immigration policies and demeaning comments about Hispanics foreshadowed Mr. Trump’s nativist rhetoric in his 2016 campaign, in his two years in the White House and during the government shutdown over a border wall. The president once boasted to Mr. King that he raised more money for him than anyone else, Mr. King recalled in the Times article, which traced how the Iowa congressman helped write the playbook for white identity politics that dominate the Republican Party under Mr. Trump.

He has already drawn one serious primary opponent, state senator Randy Feenstra, for the 2020 campaign and some high-profile Republicans have indicated they will not embrace his re-election.

“It does open the door for other individuals to take a look,” Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa said in a television interview last week of Mr. King’s closer-than-expected victory last year.

Ms. Reynolds said she was staying out of the primary “right now,” but multiple Iowa Republicans said the state’s senior elected officials were unlikely to endorse Mr. King again and would wait until there is more clarity in the primary field before rallying to one of his G.O.P. challengers. Other Western Iowa Republicans are expected to challenge Mr. King, who has fended off primaries before but did so with the support of his party and its top leaders.

In addition to Ms. Reynolds’s criticism, Iowa Republican chair Jeff Kaufmann said the state party would “remain neutral” in Mr. King’s primary.

Also, Iowa’s two Republican senators, Mr. Grassley and Joni Ernst, along with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who had appointed Mr. King a co-chairman of his 2016 presidential campaign, all rebuked Mr. King in recent days.

All had eagerly embraced him in the past because of his standing with the state’s most conservative voters — keys to winning statewide elections in Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation presidential nominating contest.

Mr. Grassley had endorsed Mr. King in November for re-election, even after the chairman of the House Republican election committee denounced Mr. King as a white supremacist.

“Iowa needs Steve King in Congress,” Mr. Grassley said in that endorsement. “I also need Steve King in Congress.”

Ms. Ernst, who faces re-election in 2020, appeared with Mr. King at a rallyin his district the Monday before Election Day last year, after he had endorsed a Toronto mayoral candidate with neo-Nazi ties.

#iowa #steve king #nazis suck

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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JACOBIN MAGAZINE

I first met Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in August 2017, at a picnic for the Queens branch of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). It was a hot, muggy day. I was with my children, and Alexandria came to meet with us without pushing any kind of agenda. She was stylish and charming, and everyone was extremely impressed. Her political vision spoke to the values and political goals of DSA.

But for a (then-) twenty-seven-year-old unknown to run for Congress in our district, NY-14, seemed like an impossibility. Alexandria would sometimes come to our branch meetings and speak about her campaign, but as NYC-DSA was focused on city council races in Brooklyn that fall we didn’t take the idea of supporting a long-shot candidate like herself seriously — taking on the “Queens Machine” seemed like a masochistic task at best. The Queens DSA branch had not yet run its own electoral operation, so taking on a multi-borough district of a half million people, with the highest levels of linguistic diversity, seemed overly ambitious. Some DSA members were reluctant to support an endorsement, despite liking Alexandria, for fear that her loss might hurt the organization’s reputation. But through our internal democratic processes, NYC-DSA endorsed Ocasio-Cortez on April 22, 2018, following a spirited debate at our Citywide Leadership Committee meeting.

Her opponent, Congressman Joe Crowley, was a high-ranking Democrat rumored to be next in line for speaker of the house. More importantly, Crowley seemed to wield superhuman power locally as the King of Queens. Standing 6’5” tall, bald, fifty-three years old, and probably the last of the old Irish ruling class of Queens, Crowley was called a “modern day Boss Tweed,” with a vast war chest and control of the Queens Democratic machine. As the chair, he makes judicial appointments and decides how to fill vacancies in special elections (in New York State, about one-third of all state legislature seats are handpicked in this way). Almost all Democratic seats in a highly Democratic county were decided with Crowley’s blessing (Queens county has about 2.4 million people, with a eight-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans, which means that the primary is the most contested race in almost all Queens elections). While some individuals might win against the machine, eventually they get incorporated — generally falling in lockstep with Crowley and the county committee. In addition to controlling Queens politics, Crowley brings his influence to bear on appointments like the powerful New York City Council chair: instituting a pro-real estate council speaker in 2017, and using the position to enrich his political allies.

The key reason why Crowley and the machine were seen to be unbeatable is the impressive Democratic club infrastructure and his relationships (often economic) to other power brokers. There are a series of Democratic clubs that make up the true believers and committed activists within the Democratic Party. Some of these activists may want to become politicians themselves, and they do their time — volunteering from high school age, serving as elected but unpaid “district leaders,” and demonstrating their loyalty to Crowley and the machine. Failure to do this can lead to swift punishment for any possible slights and perceived disloyalties.

Furthermore, Crowley relies on his relationships with other elected officials and leadership within local unions for endorsements and resources to help canvass and get out the vote. (As a member of a faculty and staff union, I was really displeased to see my statewide union affiliate send out an expensive mailer to my home the day before the election, stating “more than ever, we need Congressman Joseph Crowley,” with no mention of his policies.) Crowley has also used his access to power and resources to benefit his partners and family members. In other words, despite our current political climate, Crowley’s incumbency advantage seemed insurmountable.

A good illustration of the reach of the machine can be seen in my interaction with “Inez,” a forty-something Latinx community leader. On Saturday, June 23, I met up with Inez and a group of women in Elmhurst — the working-class, Latinx and Asian neighborhood in northern Queens where the candidate’s office is located — and we had the privilege of doing a get-out-the-vote canvass with Alexandria. After Ocasio-Cortez left to catch a flight to Texas (to protest the separation of migrant children), Inez and I walked around the blocks knocking on doors of apartment buildings, with mostly strong positive responses from voters. Over tacos afterwards, Inez told me that she could not be public with her support for Ocasio-Cortez because she sat on the community board, and knew that even a social media post in support of the campaign would jeopardize her relationships with other elected officials, and thus hurt her ability to advocate for the progressive causes she cared about.

Yet despite this context, DSA volunteers grew cautiously optimistic about the possibility of an Ocasio-Cortez victory. Following our April 22 endorsement, our field captain began almost daily canvasses in which an average of six people went out (and sometimes as many as fifteen members came to volunteer). Other members who couldn’t travel to Queens held local phone bank parties. Phone banking and canvassing led to the identification of supportive neighbors. DSA helped to contribute to the canvassing efforts, and especially to the get-out-the-vote efforts, but we always worked in coalition with other movements — including Black Lives Matter, Muslims for Progress, local Resistance and Indivisible-type groups throughout Queens and the Bronx, existing educational justice organizations, and the Bernie infrastructure. And Ocasio-Cortez’s bold, socialist vision brought dozens of people to a cramped, often-overheated office on the second floor above a tacqueria in Elmhurst.

On June 15, NYC-DSA asked its members to turn out for a debate watch party/phone bank event to watch Ocasio-Cortez bring her unapologetic vision for economic and social justice against Congressman Crowley’s more measured stances. The volunteers, mostly young and very diverse, were thrilled to support her strong performance against Crowley. And the work of the coalition-based ground team must have been effective, as Ocasio-Cortez was polling thirty-six points behind Crowley just three weeks before the primary, but won by fifteen points in the end.

The election of Donald Trump has demonstrated that American politics is riven with unpredictable openings — and that applies to the Left as well. While Ocasio-Cortez’s impressive field operation was a testament to the value of a motivated volunteer force, perhaps the strongest asset was Alexandria herself. Ocasio-Cortez rarely attacked Crowley on a personal level, but the one theme that even my white, male, conservative Democratic neighbor told me really affected him was the idea that Crowley did not live in the district, breathe our air, drink our water, or send his kids to our schools.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #alexandria ocasio cortez #DSA #Democratic Socialists of America #democratic socialism #new york city #progressive #progressive movement #grassroots

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fourteenacross · 7 years ago

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prompt response: fake dating

Well, someone sent me a fake dating ask and somewhere between the drafts folder and hitting “post,” the entire thing just poofed out of existence. THANKS, TUMBLR. Luckily, I had the response saved in a google doc. So, sorry to the original asker, your exact request is lost to the whims of tumblr, but the general jist of it was Ham/Laurens fake-dating.

The idea that I had for this was immediately bigger than just a ficlet, cause for fake dating to be done to my satisfaction, it needs time to properly DEVELOP. So this is more along the lines of a “I’ll tell you about a fic I’m not writing” sort of thing than an actual ficlet--my apologies.

Alex and John are part of the same friends group in New York, a mish-mash of folks who went to college together, their friends who moved to the city after graduation, and other people who have been assimilated into the group over time. John was an early member of the group, one of the core folks who went to the same college, and Alex came along later, and even though they have the same sense of humor and attitude and interests, they've never been the closest of friends. They tend to have standalone crazy adventures in between seeing each other at group gatherings and talking on Twitter, but they don't go out regularly as friends.

They do, however, go out regularly as fake boyfriends.

The nature of Alex's job sometimes has him going semi-undercover to report on...I don't even know, this is a fantasy world where this is a regular thing that happens, okay? So he usually wants to bring a date, so there's someone else around to help him out if he gets in over his head or cause a distraction so he can do some snooping. Plus, he's much more inconspicuous with a date--no one brings a rando undercover with them and a couple wandering around and chatting with people looks much less odd than a single dude nosing around.

Anyway. John is usually his go-to for these occasions because a) he's one of their only friends who encourages these plans, b) he grew up very wealthy, so he knows the ins and outs of navigating the social mores of events like the ones Alex is usually trying to get into, but c) his dad, who would be known in these circles, is white, and people mistake the surname "Laurens" for "Lawrence" when spoken out loud often enough that he doesn't send up any red flags with folks who might know his family. And while John's not single, he's in a long distance relationship, so it's unlikely that someone will see him with someone else around town and think that something's up.

So this starts as just another one of those events--Alex is working on some political story and scores tickets to a big charity gala that's going to draw a lot of the folks he's investigating. He calls up John, who agrees to come with him, and they go to the party, just like any other evening. They're eating canapés and making small talk and then, someone to the right of them says, "John?!"

And John turns around and it's his fucking father.

And it's not UNREASONABLE that his father, a moderately high ranking member of the House of Representatives, would be present, but his dad usually only goes to things in Washington or South Carolina, and when he is in New York, he almost always gives John a call so they can have lunch or something.

So John's staring dumbfounded and Alex looks like a deer in headlights as the person they're chatting with says, "Oh, Laurens! Are you related?"

And Henry says, low-key offended-like, "Of course we're related, he's my son."

And the person gets all awkward about it--because they never in a million years would have pegged this Latino kid as Henry Laurens' son, despite knowing the back of their mind that he had married a Puerto Rican woman who passed away several years prior--and manages to stammer, "Well, I was just having a lovely conversation with him and his young man, Alexander, was it?"

And Henry raises an eyebrow and says, "Your 'young man'?"

And John says, "Uh...."

And Henry says, "Well, I must say, it's something of a relief. I tried not to comment on it--" A lie, he totally commented on it all the time. "--because I know you cared for him, but I never liked that Francis boy and your siblings and I all knew that he'd never actually emigrate to be with you."

Which is an uncomfortable moment because, obviously, John is still with Francis, though he's been starting to suspect the same thing after five years of long distance and vague promises that Francis is looking into moving, really, and also...well, he's not actually dating Alex.

But he can't give up the game, so he forces a smile and says, "Yeah, Francis and I ended things and, uh, this thing with Alex is pretty new."

Alex is doing complicated math in his head and manages to read the situation well enough to put on his best self-deprecating smile and offer his hand to Henry. "It's a pleasure to meet you, sir, if a little earlier than expected."

They make semi-awkward small talk for a few minutes while John is internally screaming, until Henry sees someone waving him down and excuses himself. But before he leaves, he says, "I imagine we'll talk more at Martha's wedding."

And John says, "Uh."

But Alex says, "I imagine we will. I look forward to it, Congressman Laurens."

And then he's gone and John quickly excuses them from the other poor soul stuck in conversation with them to drag Alex to the bar.

"That could have gone worse," Alex says.

"Alex, I cannot lie to my father," John says gravely as the bartender pours him a whiskey. "And I don't mean because of my moral character or something, I mean because he always finds out. He has a sixth sense for it. I'm surprised he hasn't already called me out on it. Fuck."

"Well, it's not like, long-term lying," Alex says. "He'll be back in South Carolina soon and then it'll just be the weekend of your sister's wedding. Which is, what, like, two months away?"

"I'm going for a long weekend!" John says. "Thursday to Sunday!"

"It'll be fine," Alex insists. "We'll get through the weekend and then a couple weeks later you can tell him we've broken up and then we can move on with our lives. It's not like we're not good at acting coupley." He takes John's already half-finished glass from him and drinks from it, as if to illustrate his point. John snatches it back.

"This is going to explode in our faces," John warns him. "I should just go alone and say we broke up."

"You wanted to bring one of us anyway because you got a plus one and Francis wouldn't come and you didn't want to go alone," Alex reminds him. "You were just bitching about it in the group chat. Mattie and I both volunteered. I'll go, it'll be fine."

John is pretty sure it won't be fine, but he also knows that this isn't the time to have this argument. Alex is here for work reasons and this is all just a distraction, so he muscles up and downs the rest of his drink and sighs and says, "We can talk about it later. Let's get back to your thing."

They don't exactly get back to it later. Alex heads home after the party to write and they don't get a chance to see each other again until Mattie's birthday brunch the next weekend, when Alex gleefully tells the story to all their friends. Mattie, who knows John's family, finds the whole thing fucking hilarious and everyone else is pretty amused as well. John brings up that they need to figure out what to do about the whole mess, and their friends high-key pressure them into going to the wedding and pretending to be a couple. Some of them because they think it's hilarious, but Mattie and Ned and a couple others are of the mind that they would make a really good couple and Francis is fucking toxic and maybe this will give them a little push towards each other.

At this point, there are seven weeks left until the wedding, which seems like forever, but they figure the best way to play this game is to make it as close to the truth as possible, so they start hanging out together a little more than usual. John keeps going to Alex's work shit with him, but they also hang out on the weekends and go to shows together and do other dumb coupley things. Alex takes John to a lecture that he sleeps through and John takes Alex on a bike ride outside of the city that nearly kills him. They text a lot more too, making up elaborate stories for how they got together. They've already decided to essentially tell the truth once removed--that they were friends and John kept being Alex's plus-one to work things and they realized they liked each other--but making up crazy stories has become a dumb game they play with each other, each playing off an element of the previous story to make a new one. So Alex will send John a message that says, "I used to be a lion tamer on the weekends and one of the lions got out and cornered you and I had to sweet talk it away from you, forever earning your love" and John will crack up and send back, "You fell into the lion enclosure at the zoo over a stupid dare and I helped fish you out right before the lions made a meal of you."

John's dad calls him a couple times during these seven weeks and it's surprisingly easy to lie to him, possibly because most of it isn't lies. He really did go to a concert this week and Alex really is taking him out to dinner tomorrow night and he really is looking forward to it. A lot, actually.

Which is something that John has been thinking about pretty seriously throughout this. He knows most of their friends and all of his family think Francis is a jerk. They met during John's study abroad during the fall semester of his senior year of college and started dating while he was over there. And then Francis came over and did a semester just outside of the city about a year later, after John had already graduated, meeting the proto-version of the gang for the first time. They were largely unimpressed, and get more and more unimpressed as time goes on and Francis visits less and less and his excuses for not coming back get weaker and weaker. And, honestly? Part of him already knows and has already accepted that this isn't going to work out. Despite all of Francis' promises in the first year and a half they were together, he's never going to move to New York. He's never going to prioritize John. And that's something that John has to think about.

Alex, meanwhile, has always had kind of a thing for John. A friend-crush. He never thought about it hard or seriously--he wasn't pining--because John was already in a relationship when they met, so the idea to think about John as a potential partner literally never occurred to him. It's hard not to think about it now, though. They're doing all this dumb couple stuff together and the dispassionate, logical part of his mind is pointing out that they are extremely compatible as a couple. Schedule-wise, temperament-wise, personality-wise, they work on a lot of levels. John is also hot and funny and just...it feels good. It feels good to be around him.

Which is kind of a bummer. Because, odds are, it'll stop after the wedding. They'll still be friends, sure, but Alex will miss all this extra-curricular hanging out they've been doing. Even the stupid shit like hiking and bike rides--he has to admit that the middle part, the part between hiking to a spot and hiking back, was kind of nice. Alex doesn't get out of the city much, and hanging out on the top of a mountain, sprawled in the sun and talking to John about nothing much in particular, had been the first time in a long time that his brain felt really...quiet.

But they'll still be friends. And maybe they can still have the occasional, intentional one-on-one friend hangout, instead of just the shenanigans that they accidentally get up to when they're the only two people interested in one local event or another.

He resolves to take advantage of this last week and have as much fun as possible, a resolution that John is also making. One of two, actually. The other one is that John is gonna sit down next weekend, after the craziness of the wedding is behind them, and figure out what to do about Francis--what he wants to do about Francis, how to approach Francis about his desires, and what to do if (when) Francis' own desires are in direct conflict with them. He's not looking forward to it, thus the decision to enjoy himself and not think about it for a few days.

They get to South Carolina and John introduces Alex to everyone. He and Martha immediately get on like a house on fire, which is potentially going to be an issue in the future, but John tries to ignore it. They spend a couple days doing all sorts of pre-wedding stuff, Laurens-Ramsay family bonding activities that Martha and David have come up with. John and Alex score two definitive victories for the Laurens Family by dominating first at pub trivia and then at paintball. John is genuinely enjoying himself, catching up with his siblings and chatting with David's family. He and Alex have completely abandoned the concept of personal space, which he figures makes them look pretty coupley until Martha pulls him aside as he heads to change for the rehearsal dinner.

"I know I told you that David's family is old school Southern," she says, "but I didn't mean--they're not like...homophobic. David has a couple gay cousins. It's cool."

"I...didn't think they were?" John says, which is not strictly true--some of the Ramsays have certainly made some under-their-breath comments, but some of John's extended family does the same thing. He's used to it.

"I just mean, you and Alex don't have to be chaste around them or anything."

John blinks at her. "We...what?"

Martha is blushing a little. "You can kiss him! Is what I mean! You don't have to, like...hide it or anything."

Kissing Alex hadn't occurred to him.

"Oh," John says. "Uh. Good to know."

He's still thinking about the conversation as he wanders upstairs. It must be clear on his face, because the first thing Alex does when he walks into their room is ask what's wrong.

"Nothing," John says. "Just...Martha pulled me aside to say none of the relatives will make a big fuss, so it's okay for us to kiss."

"Is it?" Alex asks seriously. He's half in his dress shirt, a curious expression on his face. "I just mean, I don't want to get you into trouble with Francis."

John considers it for a moment as he pulls off his t-shirt and looks through his garment bag for a shirt.

"I think it's fine," he concludes. "I mean, nothing that happens in front of my family at a wedding reception is gonna be too intense and I kiss Mattie all the time and Francis doesn't care." Mattie is, of course, both a girl and a lesbian, but in theory that shouldn't matter.

"Good to know," Alex says, and moves into the bathroom to do his hair.

And the rehearsal dinner is fine and the morning of the ceremony is fine. It becomes second nature to lead Alex around with a hand on the small of his back or let himself be led with a hand on his elbow. They rib each other affectionately and socialize with family and even kiss a few times. They're chaste kisses, sweet and quick, the kind of comfortable kisses you give someone you've known forever. They're good kisses, too, quick as they are, and even though he's not supposed to think about it until next weekend, he can't help compare them to Francis, who never kisses him casually because he's never casually around.

John cries all through the ceremony and Alex only makes fun of him a little. And at the reception, they dance together and with everyone else. When Martha is dancing with John, she says, "You know, I really like Alex. I tried to be chill about Francis, but he always seemed like kind of a jerk, and I hated that he kept stringing you along with promises of moving to New York. Plus, I only saw you guys together that one time, but it seemed so stilted. You and Alex are already so comfortable, it just makes me happy to see it."

"Thanks," John says. "I like him a lot."

He's not surprised at all, at this point, to realize he's telling the truth.

Towards the end of the reception, the two of them end up out on a balcony, the pounding music of the dance floor making their ears ring the moment it's muffled behind the french doors. Alex collapses onto a bench and John sits next to him.

"Man, your family knows how to party," Alex says. "I've never been to a wedding like this before."

"Yeah, it's pretty typical of heterosexual weddings where money is involved," John says. "I'd almost forgotten that not everyone has hipster DIY queer weddings in botanical gardens and apple orchards."

"Well, it's a good thing we're not really dating because I don't know if I could survive planning a wedding like this," Alex says.

John tilts his head up, staring up at the sky. There are so many more stars here than in New York. "Is it, though?"

"Is what?" Alex asks.

"Is it good we're not dating?" He looks away from the sky and over at Alex. "Sorry, I just keep thinking about how much I like you and it sucks that I'm dating someone else."

Alex is quiet for a moment. "It does suck that you're dating someone else," he agrees. "I like you too."

"I don't want to be the type of guy who dumps someone because he's met someone else," John says. "But our relationship is already pretty garbage. But it's also possible I'm just looking for excuses to justify it to myself, you know?"

"In my experience," Alex says, "if you're actively looking for reasons to justify breaking up with someone, you probably want to break up with them either way. No one wants to be in a relationship with someone who's only with them because they can't come up with a good reason not to be."

"I'm not really like that, I swear," John says, flushing with guilt.

"No, I know," Alex says. He looks over at John and grins. "And I can't pretend I'm being objective when I offer you that advice, so."

And John thinks about meeting Francis and those first tentative days together, feeling each other out. He thinks about how the giddy rush of a new relationship faded almost instantly into the nagging anxiety that John would be leaving the country soon. He's never felt comfortable with Francis the way he already feels comfortable with Alex. He never had this easy intimacy. And it's no one's fault--maybe if he stayed in the UK or Francis made good on his promises to come to New York, things would have been different, but it's hard to build that comfort over text and skype, and these days they barely manage that.

He makes a decision a week earlier than he intended, and he kisses Alex.

It's not a chaste kiss. It's not lewd, but there's intent. There's passion and affection, it's a kiss that's a kiss, not a greeting or farewell or absent moment of acknowledgement. John kisses Alex the way he would have if this had been a normal date, if they had been out together and had this much fun and mutually expressed an intent to do it again. He kisses Alex like he wants it to be the start of something more.

And Alex kisses back.

They pull back, both of them grinning, though Alex is a bit dazed. John pulls out his phone and checks the time and swears under his breath.

"What's wrong?" Alex asks.

"It's the middle of the night in London, I can't call Francis and break up with him."

"Just to be clear," Alex says. "That means we're gonna date, right?"

"Yes, genius, that means we're gonna date," John says, grinning, and Alex just leans forward and kisses him again.

John should probably feel worse about the kissing, but so far it's just kissing and it's hard to feel connected to Francis and the tattered remains of their relationship when Alex is here with him, having spent weeks showing more interest in John's life than Francis has since they were twenty-three.

And John doesn't intend for them to just full-on make out at his sister's wedding, but the next thing he knows, his little brother Harry is saying, "John, are you--oh shit!"

John pulls away from Alex, guilty for half a dozen reasons, only some of which make sense.

"Um," he says.

"Sorry," Harry says. "I just--um. Martha wants a cousins picture with Nana before Aunt C takes her home?"

"Right," John says. "Um--"

"I'll be here when you're done," Alex tells him, and then lifts his hand off of John's upper thigh--and when had that happened--and John stumbles back into the party.

They take the cousins picture and then they take a dozen more family pictures, even though they did posed paragraphs before and after the ceremony. And when John goes to find Alex, he's not out on the balcony, but waiting at the table with a drink.

"I know we should talk more," he half-shouts over the music, "but I figure we came here to enjoy the party, so we might as well do that while we can."

Which seems like a good plan, so they toast and dance some more and flood the wedding hashtag with stupid pictures and dance the last dance and then stumble onto the hotel shuttle, arm and arm. They're tipsy when they get back to their room and half-undress before collapsing onto the bed, lying side-by-side and staring at each other.

"We should talk," John says.

"Yeah," Alex says. "Totally."

"We can't have sex until I break up with Francis," John says.

"I'm 100% with you," Alex says.

"I don't cheat," John says.

"I wouldn't never think that," Alex says.

"But is it really cheating if the only reason we haven't broken up yet is that he's asleep?"

"I mean, I'm staying neutral in this decision, but it's just a few hours."

They're both quiet for a moment.

"Maybe we can just make out for a while?" John suggests. "I'm pretty tired anyway. And I haven't had sex with another person in two years, so that feels like a lot to process tonight anyway."

"I am definitely on board with this plan," Alex says.

So they do that. And it gets maybe a little heavier than either of them intend, but their hands stay above the waist, John's arbitrary definition of what's acceptable and what isn't, and they eventually fall asleep.

John gets up super early the next morning, first because he's in a weird place and he has to pee, but once he's up and takes his phone and goes out into the hallway and calls Francis. And they have a very short, awkward conversation where Francis first thinks that John is breaking up with him because he saw on social media he's been hanging out a lot with some guy, but John clarifies that he met someone else. Francis tries to be indignant about this for approximately five seconds before John reminds him that he literally just basically admitted to doing the same thing, and Francis concedes.

When John goes back into the hotel room, Alex is half awake and watching him from the very inviting looking bed. John holds his phone up for Alex to see.

"I broke up with Francis," he says.

"Then take off your pants," Alex says, and John bursts out laughing and pounces on him.

And John thinks a lot about growing up and relationships and figuring out who you are. He can't help but keep comparing his relationship to Francis to this new thing with Alexander--it's the only other relationship of his adult life--but it's not the same thing, not at all. He's not sure if the physical distance caused the emotional distance or just kept them mired in a false sense of intimacy, but it was never like this. It was never this easy and fun, because when it started John was twenty-three and a nervous mess trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. Now that he's older and settled and confident, it's easier to put his guard down around Alex. It's easy to let himself have this, fun and simple and freeing.

Of course, he doesn't really think about all of that until later, because first they have sex. Twice. And when they go down for brunch later that morning, he's positive they look entirely fucked out and overly pleased with themselves, but they're hardly the only couple with that glow, so the comments are raised eyebrows are minimal.

They spend their last couple days in South Carolina alternately hanging out with John's family and stealing time away because they can't keep their hands off of each other. Which is also a problem the next day on the flight back to New York and then on the cab ride to John's apartment. It's less of a problem once they're inside John's apartment, for the most part--the gentleman forced to ride the elevator with them, for example, might not agree.

Later in the afternoon, when they've graduated to the cuddling and take-out portion of the day, talking endlessly about themselves and their lives and their hopes for the future, John gets a text from his dad. It says, It was pleasant to meet Alexander. He has potential. I hope we'll be seeing more of him.

("Wow," John says, "I think you might already be my dad's favorite of the various siblings' partners. You might even give me enough clout to knock me up from last place on the list of his favorite kids, even."

"I'm irresistible," Alex says, and John doesn't give him the pleasure of admitting that yes, he is.)

You definitely will, he types back to his dad, filled with a breathless sort of joy that it's no longer a lie.

***

Will this ever be a full story? Who knows. I contain multitudes.

#hamilton #lams #the redacted boys #john laurens #alexander hamilton #fic by me #sort of #did i have a dedicated tag to all this not fic?#i don't remember

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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How Many Republicans Would Have To Vote For Removal

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-republicans-would-have-to-vote-for-removal/

How Many Republicans Would Have To Vote For Removal

The House Just Voted To Impeach President Trump Here’s What Happens Next

How Many Republicans and Democrats Have Been President – Brief History #4

From CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf

The House has just voted to impeach President Trump for the second time making him the only US president to ever be impeached twice. The resolution passed 232 to 197.

The impeachment resolution the House voted on charges Trump with;a single article, “incitement of insurrection” for his role in last week’s deadly Capitol riot.

Ten Republicans, including the House’s No. 3 Republican, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, joined with Democrats to impeach Trump.

There is no such thing as a routine impeachment but this one is unprecedented in all sorts of ways.

The overall impeachment process laid out in the Constitution is relatively simple:

A president commits “high Crime or Misdemeanor”

The House votes to impeach

The Senate conducts a trial

This impeachment process will feel entirely new and different from the one we saw in late 2019 around the Ukraine investigation, most notably because the Senate trial is expected to occur after Trump leaves office.

Here’s why that’s important:

New President Joe Biden will be asking the Senate to vote on his Cabinet nominees and act on legislation to address the Covid pandemic as well as relief for Americans hurt by the troubled economy.

In 2020, Senate business ground to a complete halt during the trial. This time, incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is hoping to pursue a half-day schedule to conduct the trial part of the day and business the rest of the day.

Watch the moment:

Trump’s Iron Grip Loosens

With just a week left in his term, it now appears all but certain that Donald Trump will become the first president to be impeached twice.

Unlike his first go through the process, this vote will have the support of at least a handful of Republicans – including Liz Cheney, a member of the party’s House leadership team. There is also, unlike January 2020, a chance the Senate has enough votes to successfully convict the president. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s recent signals of approval are evidence of that.

Of course, the primary consequence of Senate conviction – removal from office – seems of limited relevance with so little time left in the Trump presidency. Democrats, however, view impeachment as a formal way of marking their outrage at the president’s behaviour, not just last week, but during his months of challenging and undermining November’s election results.

A successful conviction could also result in Trump’s being banned from ever holding federal public office again and stripped of the privileges enjoyed by ex-presidents.

That prospect alone, in the minds of Democrats , makes impeachment worth the effort.

Liz Cheney Vote Count Latest Elise Stefanik Could Replace Wyoming Republican After House Gop Voted To Remove Her

8:30 ET, May 13 2021

GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik is favored to take over the position formerly held by Liz Cheney before her ousting on Wednesday.

Stefanik, the 36-year-old lawmaker from New York, originally criticized former President Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign for his “inappropriate, offensive” comments on the notorious Access Hollywood tape.

Since then, her stance has flipped, and when she voted against Trump’s impeachment, he called her a “new Republican star.”

Stefanik was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress in 2014, and the first woman to serve as the recruitment chair for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Cheney, 54, lost her post as House Republican Conference chair due to ongoing comments against Trump.

Cheney has often been vocal against former President Donald Trump and politicians from her own party.

The Republican was also facing backlash from colleagues as she has criticized them for promoting the big lie of baseless election fraud back in 2020.

Trump and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise have backed Stefanik.

On Tuesday, Cheney gave a speech on the House floor firing back at Trump and blasted fellow Republicans for backing the former president even after the attack on the US Capitol earlier this year.

Read our Liz Cheney live blog for the latest on the vote…

You May Like: Why Are Republicans Wearing Blue Ties

House Republicans Join Democrats In Voting To Impeach Trump

Washington Ten Republican members of the House, including one of its highest-ranking leaders, joined Democrats in voting to impeach President Trump for inciting the deadly attack on the Capitol last week by a violent mob of his supporters.;

The final vote was 232 to 197, as the 10 Republicans joined all 222 Democrats in voting in favor of the impeachment resolution.;

The article of impeachment will next be delivered to the Senate, where Mr. Trump will be placed on trial. However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said after the House vote that there is simply no chance that a fair or serious trial could conclude before President-elect Biden is sworn in next week.

Mr. Trump is the first president to be impeached twice. When he was;impeached;in 2019 over his attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden, no House Republicans voted in favor of impeaching him. But this time, 10 members of his own party determined his actions warranted impeachment.

Here are the Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump:

Liz Cheney of Wyoming

Tom Rice of South Carolina

Fred Upton of Michigan

David Valadao of California

Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House, said in a statement on Tuesday that she would vote to impeach Mr. Trump after he whipped up his supporters Wednesday at a rally not far from the Capitol.

A Majority Vote In The House Is Needed To Impeach Trump But 20 Republican Senators Will Need To Join A Vote To Remove Him

GettyTrump at the Social Media Summit

Impeachment proceedings are more complicated than they might sound. If you recall, in former President Bill Clintons administration, there were enough votes to impeach him but there were not enough votes to convict and remove him. This could happen again with President Donald Trump. You can read all the laws on impeachment proceedings here.

A simple majority vote is needed in the House to impeach Trump. This might not be difficult since the Democrats have a majority in the House.

If all 435 House members vote, they would need 218 votes for a majority to be reached and for Trump to be impeached.;There are 235 Democrats in office in the House, one Independent, and 199 Republicans, Reuters explained.

So getting a majority of Democrats wouldnt be difficult, since a majority of House Democrats already supported impeachment earlier this year. But even with an impeachment vote, Trump would still not be removed from office.

With a majority vote in the House, articles of impeachment would be approved that lay out all the impeachable offenses. Treason and bribery qualify as crimes warranting impeachment, as do other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

But this is not all that is needed to remove a sitting President. They would then need 2/3 majority of the Senates 100 members to vote to for the President to be removed from office. That means a total of 67 Senators would need to vote to convict and remove the President.

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Ten Republicans Joined Democrats In Impeaching Trump A Historic Second Time A Move That Was Quickly Met With Condemnation Back In Their Home States Theyve Been Publicly Scolded Pushed To Resign And Warned That Local Organizations Will Mount A Strong Push To Oust Them From Office In The Primary

After my last election, I had decided not to run again. But the vote by Congressman Valadao to impeach President Trump with no witnesses, evidence, or without allowing any defense was too much for me to stay on the sidelines, Chris Mathys, a former Fresno, California, city council member, told;Newsweek.

Valadao, who represents Californias 21st district, wasnt in office during Trumps first impeachment, as he had been ousted from office in 2018 by Democrat TJ Coxx. In November, Valadao won back his seat from the Democrat who beat him in 2018 by less than a point. The Republican placed blame on Trump for the Capitol riot, saying that his rhetoric was un-American, abhorrent and absolutely an impeachable offense.

That vote in favor of impeaching Trump violated the trust of the millions of Americans that voted for Trump in the November election, according to Mathys, who unsuccessfully sought a seat in New Mexicos House during the 2020 primary. The decision was so egregious, that Mathys doesnt think voters will forget it.

Whit Ayer, a GOP strategist, told;Newsweek;it was a very gutsy decision to vote in favor of impeachment because they knew they would likely draw challenges. However, it remains to be seen how much the impeachment will play in the 2022 primary and one of the factors that is still up in the air is how much of a political powerhouse Trump will be in 18 months.

The 7 Republican Senators Who Voted To Convict Former President Donald Trump Explain Their Rationale

Donald Trumps second impeachment trial came to an end Saturday with 57 senators voting to convict, falling short of the two-thirds margin required to find him guilty of the charge of incitement of insurrection in connection with the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol that resulted in five deaths. Seven GOP senators broke with their party voting along with all 48 Democrats and both independents in the body.

After the 57-43 vote, the Republicans who defied Trump explained their decision.

Richard Burr, North Carolina

The facts are clear, Burr said in a statement after the vote. The President promoted unfounded conspiracy theories to cast doubt on the integrity of a free and fair election because he did not like the results. As Congress met to certify the election results, the President directed his supporters to go to the Capitol to disrupt the lawful proceedings required by the Constitution. When the crowd became violent, the President used his office to first inflame the situation instead of immediately calling for an end to the assault.

Burr originally voted that the trial was unconstitutional, but said in his statement that the Senate is an institution based on precedent, and given that the majority of the Senate voted to proceed with this trial, the question of constitutionality is now established precedent.

He has already announced he will not be running for reelection in 2022.

Bill Cassidy, Louisiana

Lisa Murkowski, Alaska

Mitt Romney, Utah

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Why Most Gop Senators Are Likely To Oppose Conviction

Despite strong bipartisan elite fury and dismay over Trumps conduct leading up to and during the January 6 crisis, the base hasnt abandoned him in any significant way. Yes, hes losing some support across the board, but not enough to embolden Republican rebels. A new Axios-Ipsos survey dramatically shows the current public opinion dynamics: A majority of Americans now favor removing Trump from office, but a majority of Republicans still think Trump was right to challenge his election loss, support him, dont blame him for the Capitol mob and want him to be the Republican nominee in 2024. Among the more than one-third of Republicans who appear to identify with Trump more than with their party, support for Trump 2024 which of course conviction in the Senate would make impossible is at an astronomical 92 percent.

Republican senators will be reluctant to fight that sentiment, particularly since there are so many ways they could vote against convicting Trump without condoning his conduct. As his presidency quickly recedes into the background, Senate sentiment for formally burying him may recede as well.

House Democrats To Vote To Remove Gop Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene Of Committee Assignments

Panel: Will 17 Republicans ACTUALLY Vote To Convict Trump?

House Democrats are set to push ahead with stripping Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments after Republicans opted not to punish the Georgia congresswoman for past comments shes made in support of harmful conspiracy theories.

Greene has claimed that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and high-profile school shootings like the Sandy Hook Elementary attack are hoaxes and has called for the execution of prominent Democrats.;

The Rules Committee Wednesday voted to bring the matter to the full House for a vote Thursday that will decide whether Greene can stay on her committees for the rest of her term.

More:Donald Trump’s backers failed to take down Liz Cheney. But the GOP’s ‘civil war’ is nowhere near over.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the Democrats Greene had said should be killed, denounced Republicans for not expelling Greene from the caucus. “McCarthy has chosen to make House Republicans ‘the party of conspiracy theories and QAnon’ and Rep. Greene is in the drivers seat,” Pelosi said in a statement Wednesday that identified McCarthys party identification as Q.;

We had hoped that the Republican leadership would have dealt with this. For whatever reason, they dont want to deal with it. And that’s unfortunate. So we are taking this step,” said Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass, who chairs the Rules Committee. “The question we all have to ask ourselves is what is the consequence of doing nothing.

Matthew Brown

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Security Concerns Among Trumps Supporters

Trump doesnt appear to want to go away quietly, which is also a cause for concern from a security standpoint.

This week, a leaked internal FBI bulletin warned that armed protests are planned for all 50 states and Washington DC in the days before President-elect Joe Bidens inauguration on January 20.

Some state capitol buildings have begun boarding up their doors and windows, while 15,000 National Guard troops have been mobilised for deployment to the nations capital ahead of expected violence and unrest.

This is an unfortunate sign of how many expect Trumps supporters to respond to both his impeachment and Bidens inauguration even with Trump finally urging against further violence and unrest.

Most presidents aim to leave office with the nation better off than when they entered, but Trumps legacy appears to be cementing a more divided country, where his brand of aggressive conflict politics may be the new norm.

This is a no-win situation for the country. And Republicans are still trying to figure out which side of history they want to be on.

Republicans Gear Up To Oust Liz Cheney As Punishment For Criticizing Trump

Goaded on by the ghostly figure of Trump, House Republicans are poised to eject Cheney from her number three leadership post

Infighting within the Republican party is set to come to a head this week, goaded on by the ghostly figure of former president Donald Trump in his Mar-a-Lago hideout in Florida.

House Republicans are gearing up to oust Liz Cheney on Wednesday from her position as the partys number three leader in the chamber.

Her removal would come as punishment for her public criticism of Trump with regard to his role in inciting the 6 January Capitol insurrection and his big lie that last years presidential election was stolen from him.

Cheney was one of 10 Republicans to vote in favor of impeaching Trump for incitement of insurrection.

Leading Republicans took to the political talkshow circuit on Sunday to express support or opposition to the congresswoman from Wyoming. Critically, Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader who has in the past stood up for Cheney, made their break-up official when he told Fox News that he was endorsing Cheneys rival Elise Stefanik for the number three post.

What were talking about is a position in leadership. As conference chair, you have one of the most critical jobs as a messenger going forward, McCarthy told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.

Jim Banks, an Indiana congressman who chairs the largest Republican caucus in the House, attempted to justify the action against Cheney on grounds of party discipline.

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Liz Cheney Booed On Her Way Out

Republican lawmakers booed Rep. Liz Cheney when she criticized Trump in her speech responding to her removal from leadership.

“We cannot let the former president drag us backward and make us complicit in his efforts to unravel our democracy,” she said. “Down that path lies our destruction, and potentially the destruction of our country.”

Are There Enough Senate Republican Votes To Convict Trump

The brisk and successful drive to a second impeachment of Donald Trump and his ebbing power in Washington have raised some hopes that this time around the U.S. Senate might actually convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors and bar him from future office . Predictions that this could happen appear to be based largely on the relatively low level of Senate Republican support for Trumps electoral-vote protests on January 6, and a surge of questionably sourced claims that Mitch McConnell might actually support conviction.

Its worth taking a closer look at how many Republican senators might reasonably be expected to throw Trump into the dustbin of history. Seventeen GOP senators would have to break ranks to convict him on the incitement to insurrection impeachment article, assuming Democrats stick together . After conviction, only a simple majority would be needed to prohibit Trump from holding future office. Who might these Republican defectors be, in theory?

Recommended Reading: Where Do Democrats And Republicans Sit In Congress

Here Are The Republicans Calling For Biden’s Removal Amid Afghanistan Fallout

The fall of Kabul on Sunday and the resultant emergency evacuation of U.S. citizens from Afghanistan have triggered a wave of outrage among lawmakers, with numerous Republicans going beyond mere criticism of the Biden administration’s drawdown of U.S. troops to say that the president ought to vacate office.

The invocation of the 25th Amendment, resignation, and impeachment have all been promoted in recent days as possible solutions by a growing number of Republican officials, who say Biden’s actions since Afghanistan fell to the Taliban call into question the president’s fitness to serve.

Here are the GOP members who have called on Biden to leave or be removed from the Oval Office so far.

25th Amendment

Multiple lawmakers have said the use of the 25th Amendment may be in order.

Sen. Rick Scott: “After the disastrous events in Afghanistan, we must confront a serious question: Is Joe Biden capable of discharging the duties of his office or has time come to exercise the provisions of the 25th Amendment?” Scott wrote in a tweet Monday.

Rep. Claudia Tenney: Tenney, who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was less equivocal, saying it is “clear” Biden is failing to perform his duties.

Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sought during the previous Congress to establish a commission within the body to participate in 25th Amendment proceedings during the waning days of President Donald Trump’s administration.

Resignation

Impeachment

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How Many Republicans Will Vote For Impeachment

Republicans Cant Impeach Joe Biden At Least Not Yet

Rep. Schiff: Only Question Is How Many In GOP Will Support Impeachment | Morning Joe | MSNBC

The ongoing chaos in Afghanistan has led many Republicans to, understandably, criticize President Joe Biden. But at the same time, some have decided to go a step further and call for his impeachment.

Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene filed three articles of impeachment last week against Mr Biden, while Sen Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, his former friend, has called for his impeachment as well.

But if the idea of impeaching Mr Biden sounds ludicrous and politically unfeasible, thats because it is. While Mr Graham, who went from being one of former president Donald Trumps biggest critics to his biggest apologist in the Senate, and Ms Greene, who has done nothing but promote absurd conspiracy theories and antagonize her fellow members, may want to take advantage of the crisis, there is little to no feasible way for it to begin, at least for now.

First and foremost, the major reason is that Republicans are in the minority in the House and the Senate. While some Democrats may not be happy with how Mr Biden managed Afghanistan, immigration or the eviction moratorium, all of which Ms Greene cited, they arent going to collaborate with Republicans to impeach him.

The remote chance of this passing the House aside, if it makes it to the Senate, Republicans would again have to contend with the fact they are in the minority and two-thirds of all Senators need to vote for a conviction. In the last impeachment earlier this year, only seven Republican Senators broke rank.

Pelosi On Impeachment Votes: ‘we Are Not Whipping This Legislation’

Rep. Anthony Brindisi, another Democrat from a red district in upstate New York, said hes not feeling pressure from Democratic leadership but is hearing from constituents.

The phone is ringing off the hook both people calling pro-impeachment and people calling against impeachment, he told NBC News. And so, we take all of that into consideration and I’m going to take some time this weekend and go back and look at all these transcripts and make sure all the evidence fits the articles of impeachment.

Two critical swing district Democrats have announced their support for impeachment articles. Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., told reporters Thursday that she is going to support both articles of impeachment regardless of the lasting political impacts.

I think it’s equally important today as it will be six months from now to say that I stood up against the President when he did something wrong, Luria said.

And Rep. Conor Lamb , D-Pa., told Pittsburgh affiliate WTAE that hell also vote for the articles.

For Democrats in districts Trump carried in 2016, the decision is fraught with political peril for next November’s elections, especially because the president’s supporters remain mostly united behind him.

A small group of moderate Democrats floated a last-minute proposal of censure instead of impeachment but abandoned the idea when it quickly became clear that such a move would not garner support among the broader Democratic caucus, according to an aide for one of those members.

Republicans Join Democrats In Vote To Push Trump Impeachment Trial Forward

WASHINGTON – Most Republicans in the U.S. Senate voted Tuesday against holding an impeachment trial for former President Donald Trump on whether he incited insurrection in the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, signaling that he likely has enough votes to secure an acquittal.

The vote was 55-45 in favor of proceeding with a trial, but only five Republicans joined all 50 Democrats. A two-thirds vote is required for conviction, which would require 17 Republicans to turn against Trump, assuming the Democrats vote as a bloc after hearing the case against him when the trial starts in earnest February 9.

A Trump supporter, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, forced the vote on whether to proceed with the trial, calling it an unconstitutional sham.

Paul contended that the Senate cannot hold a trial of a private citizen, which Trump now is after his term ended last Wednesday and Democrat Joe Biden was inaugurated as the countrys 46th president. The Senate, in fact, has held trials for private citizens in the past.

All 100 senators were sworn in as jurors for the upcoming trial.

The Republican lawmakers hold Trumps fate in their hands, even though the former presidents four-year term in the White House ended January 20 with Bidens inauguration.

Also Check: How Many Republicans Voted To Impeach

Numerous Gop Primary Challengers Could Split Anti

As they prepare to face primary challengers, the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump after his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 raised significantly more money during the first quarter of 2021 than they did two years earlier.

The group, leveraging the power of incumbency, also swamped their GOP primary opponents in almost every instance during the first round of fundraising since angering Mr. Trump with their votes, new Federal Election Commission filings show.

While all the incumbents outraised challengers who filed campaign finance reports, it is still early in the two-year election cycle and money is just one factor in typically low-turnout primaries.

Mr. Trumps political-action committees could also weigh in financially on some of the contests, and his endorsements could carry significant weight with the partys base. The PACs arent required to report their latest totals until July, but one of them, Save America PAC, started the year with $31 million in the bank and has continued to raise money since then.

In a speech earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he called out all 10 by name, Mr. Trump told his supporters to get rid of them all in next years elections.

House Impeachment Managers Request Trump To Testify Under Oath Next Week

Democrats requested that Trump testify in person, an offer his attorneys declined. Inside his orbit, there has been disagreement about whether to repeat his groundless claims that the election was stolen or whether to push the procedural argument that appeals to GOP senators.

His attorneys, David Schoen and Bruce Castor Jr., have indicated that they will do the latter, saying in their brief that the impeachment is “unconstitutional, and must be dismissed with prejudice.”

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Republicans Who Voted To Acquit Trump Used Questions Of Constitutionality As A Cover

Following the vote, McConnell gave a scathing speech condemning Trumps lies about election fraud as well as his actions on January 6, only moments after he supported acquittal.

That speech was emblematic of how many Republican senators approached the impeachment vote: Although GOP lawmakers were critical of the attack on January 6, they used a process argument about constitutionality in order to evade confronting Trump on his actual actions.

Effectively, because Trump is no longer in office, Republicans say the Senate doesnt have jurisdiction to convict him of the article of impeachment. As Voxs Ian Millhiser explained, theres some debate over that, but most legal scholars maintain that it is constitutional for the Senate to try a former president.

If President Trump were still in office, I would have carefully considered whether the House managers proved their specific charge, McConnell said. McConnell, however, played an integral role in delaying the start of the trial until after Trump was no longer president.

His statement on Saturday was simply a continuation of how Republicans had previously approached Trumps presidency: Theres been an overwhelming hesitation to hold him accountable while he was in office, and that still appears to be the case for many lawmakers.

Articles Referred To Senate

Article I, charging Clinton with perjury, alleged in part that:

On August 17, 1998, William Jefferson Clinton swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth before a federal grand jury of the United States. Contrary to that oath, William Jefferson Clinton willfully provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury concerning one or more of the following:

the nature and details of his relationship with a subordinate government employee; prior perjurious, false and misleading testimony he gave in a federal civil rights action brought against him; prior false and misleading statements he allowed his attorney to make to a federal judge in that civil rights action; and his corrupt efforts to influence the testimony of witnesses and to impede the discovery of evidence in that civil rights action.

Article II, charging Clinton with obstruction of justice alleged in part that:

Clinton was defended by Cheryl Mills. Clinton’s counsel staff included Charles Ruff, David E. Kendall, Dale Bumpers, Bruce Lindsey, Nicole Seligman, Lanny A. Breuer and Gregory B. Craig.

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Michigan Rep Fred Upton

Upton, an 18-term lawmaker who previously held the gavel of the Energy and Commerce Committee, is something of an endangered species on Capitol Hill: a relatively moderate Republican who isnt afraid to cross the aisle to vote with Democrats. Fellow lawmakers and outsiders who lobby Upton say hes a pragmatist. Hes part of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group working to build consensus on legislation.

The former committee chairmans 6th District, nestled in the states touristy southwestern corner that includes Lake Michigan shoreline as well as Kalamazoo, voted 51 percent for Trump in 2020, according to Daily Kos Elections. Upton won reelection with 56 percent of the vote last year. Since 2017, the longtime congressman voted in line with Trumps position on legislation 78 percent of the time, according to CQ Vote Watch.

Bringing Trauma Back To Life

10 Republicans Cross Party Lines To Vote For Trump’s Second Impeachment

The terrifying invasion of the Capitol was illuminated through never before heard audio of police screaming that a riot had broken out, fresh security video of the armed, violent insurrectionists pouring in and then-Vice President Mike Pence and others fleeing, and parallel maps showing just how close Trump’s minions came to capturing and injuring or killing Pence, Sen. Mitt Romney and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The managers finished by hammering home the ex-president’s response once the rioting began: protracted inaction, repetition of the election lies that led to the violence,;and telling the insurrectionists he loved them. ; ; ; ; ; ;

The managers poured a surprising degree of emotion into their arguments. Whether it was Rep. Madeleine Dean choking up as she recalled her terror, or Rep. Eric Swalwell reading what he thought might be his farewell text to his family, it hit home.;Most powerful of all was lead manager Rep. Jamie Raskin’s closing;Tuesday. He brought the trauma back to life for the jurors, who were also present on that horrible day, in recounting;his and his family’s experiences.;His genuine tears flowed for them ;and for all;the tragedies that unfolded Jan. 6.

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Why Is Trump On Trial

Trumps second impeachment stems from his involvement in whipping up a mob on 6 January that went on to assault the Capitol building while a joint session of Congress was convened to certify Joe Bidenâs Electoral College win. The invasion of the Capitol led to five deaths and the temporary suspension of the vote certification until the assailants could be removed. The House voted to impeach him for a second time a week after the events and just a little over a week from him leaving office.

GOP Sen. Mitt Romney says his impeachment vote will be âbased upon the facts and the evidence as is presented.âRomney also says he believes âthat what is being alleged and what we saw, which is incitement to insurrection, is an impeachable offense. If not? what is?â

Illinois Rep Adam Kinzinger

Kinzinger, first elected to Congress in 2010 when voters swept House Republicans into power, has relied on his military background in crafting his legislative priorities, especially on foreign policy. The veteran of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan serves on the House Foreign Affairs panel, as well as Energy and Commerce. Kinzinger initially defended Trumps foreign policy and national security posture, but by 2018 he had become a critic of the commander in chief.;

He voted in line with the president on legislation 90 percent of the time during the Trump years, according to CQ Vote Watch. Kinzinger voted with Trump 85 percent of the time in 2019. Trump carried Kinzingers 16th District, which stretches from Illinois Wisconsin border north of Rockford to its line with Indiana, in 2020. Trump got 57 percent of the vote in the district, according to Daily Kos Elections, while Kinzinger got 65 percent.

He immediately condemned Trump in a video statement on Jan. 6. The storming of the Capitol was a coup attempt, with the purpose of overturning the election of a duly elected president, he said. The current president incited this coup, encouraged it, and did little to protect the Capitol and the Constitution.

Also Check: How Many Democratic Presidents Have Republicans Tried To Impeach

How The Impeachment Vote Could Benefit Trump Gop

Final votes on the articles are expected in the full House next week after they were passed in a party-line vote by the House Judiciary Committee Friday morning.

Slotkin said shes been lobbied by Republicans on the House floor.

I had a Republican colleague who Ive worked with before on a bunch of issues come up and give me a very detailed, thoughtful explanation of why I should vote against articles of impeachment, Slotkin told NBC News last week.

And the across-the-aisle personal lobbying in the Capitol is being reinforced with an aggressive, multi-million dollar political effort in their home districts.

Download the NBC News app for breaking news and politics

For example, the American Action Network, an outside political group that works to elect Republicans to the House, has spent more than $1.5 million on campaign ads focused on impeachment since December 10 in those districts as well as the districts represented by Reps. Jared Golden of Maine, Susie Lee of Nevada and Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico. Those ads are slated to run through the votes in the full House of Representatives next week.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is a vote of conscience and maintains that Democrats aren’t pressuring their members on which way to vote.

“We are not whipping this legislation,” Pelosi told reporters on Thursday. “People have to come to their own conclusions.”

Donald Trump: Impeached In 2019 And 2021

On October 9, 2019 in Washington, D.C., President Trump answers questions on a pending impeachment inquiry.

On September 24, 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump regarding his alleged efforts to pressure the President of Ukraine to investigate possible wrongdoings by his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

The decision to authorize the impeachment inquiry came after a leaked whistleblower complaint detailed a July phone conversation between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump allegedly tied Ukrainian military aid to personal political favors. The White House later released a reconstructed of the phone call, which many Democrats argued demonstrated that Trump had violated the Constitution.

On December 18, 2019, President Trump became the third U.S. president in history to be impeached as the House of Representatives voted nearly along party lines to impeach him over abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. No Republicans voted in favor of either article of impeachment, while three Democrats voted against one or both.On February 5, 2020, the Senate largely along party lines to acquit Trump on both charges.

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What To Watch For

While Trumps impeachment in the House is a foregone conclusion, conviction in the Senate is a far murkier question. A handful of senators have advocated Trumps resignation or removal without explicitly voicing support for impeachment, but Democrats may struggle to muster the 17 GOP votes needed to get the necessary two-thirds majority. Additionally, McConnell has signaled a Senate impeachment trial likely wouldnt occur until after Trump has left office.

How Many Senators Will Vote To Convict Donald Trump

Now that Donald Trump has been impeached for an historic second time, attention turns to the Senate where, according to the Constitution, a trial will begin. The big question isunlike last year when only one Republican Senator voted to convict Trump on charges resulting from his phone call with the President of Ukrainewill there be 17 Republican senators willing to vote to convict Trump?

Lets start with what we know. Senator Ben Sasse is the only senator who has said clearly that he is open to convicting Trump. Senator Mitt Romney voted to convict last year when Trump was impeached over his phone call with the Ukrainian president. The charges in this impeachment are equally if not more serious, so it seems likely that he too may vote to convict. Senator Lisa Murkowski and Senator Patrick Toomey have also made statements signaling that theyve had enough of Trump. Murkowski just wants him out, saying He has caused enough damage, and Toomey thinks he committed impeachable offenses but is unsure whether impeachment makes sense this close to the end of the Trump presidency.

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Trump Impeachment Odds: How Many Senators Will Vote To Convict

The Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump begins today, February 9, 2021. Accused of incitement of insurrection, the 100 senators will hear arguments from Democratic House Managers and a Republican Congessional defense, with a brand new team of lawyers to defend Trump. How many senators will vote to convict?

The trial itself is interesting in a way, because nearly everyone involved would have been in the Capitol when insurrectionists stormed the building on January 6; the crime that led to this impeachment. So the senators being asked to pass judgement are victims of the crime. But the popular debate has not so much been around whether Trump is guilty, but rather whether America should heal and move on.

To convince Republicans, Democrats are expected to show plenty of video evidence, reminding the senate of what it felt like on that tumultuous day. Trumps defense is expected to argue that, with Trump already out of office, the impeachment is unconstitutional. However, its been rumored that Trump fired his first legal team for refusing to push the 2020 election hoax angle he preferred.

In Trumps first impeachment trial, Utah Senator Mitt Romney was the sole Republican to vote to convict, and hes likely to do the same again, making the 50 or fewer betting option such a long shot. But who will join him?

How Many Senators Will Vote To Convict Donald Trump On Incitement By Apr. 29?

50 Or Fewer+1600

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-republicans-will-vote-for-impeachment/

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