Half of the Republican caucus in the house, today, gave MTG a standing ovation. https://twitter.com/cam_joseph/status/1357116355988910080
More Republican (citizens) have a favorable opinion of MTG than an unfavorable one. https://twitter.com/ArgoJournal/status/1356995117396201474
MTG is the Republican party.
Have fun with that, and especially, have fun defending that.
Oh please. This sort of rhetoric, while distasteful, is such a common sort of exaggeration that there’s a Supreme Court case on it: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/707/watts-v-uni...
> Robert Watts, attended an anti-war rally at the Washington Monument.... Watts allegedly said: “I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.”
> The Court agreed with Watts’s counsel’s characterization of Watts’s speech as “a kind of very crude offensive method of stating a political opposition to the President” that did not qualify as a true threat.
The phrase “deserves a bullet to the head” or the like is a (juvenile and violent, but common) figure of speech. It’s invariably used figuratively not literally.
1) There is no evidence that MTG does not believe that Nancy Pelosi should be murdered. There is evidence that she does. She has never apologized for it.
2) If you, or anyone else, makes a death threat to a public figure on social media, you will be at minimum receiving a visit from law enforcement, and will be arrested if you don't immediately disavow what you said or are thought of as a threat. "Watts" ruled that "mere political hyperbole" is not illegal, have fun in court trying to convince the judge of that. Death threats are not just "distasteful rhetoric", come on.
3) The fact that you a) gloss over the rest of my post and b) don't even bother to condemn this stuff is really telling.
One more thing: have you ever received a death threat from a stranger?
I have, I was playing poker in a casino late at night. I was not frightened, but it was not a pleasant experience. The guy was 86ed, and a few hours later I was escorted to my car by security. I stayed away for a few days despite it being my only income at the time. That was 15 years ago I still think about it some times. I don't wish that experience on anyone. Being a politician must be terrifying. Really sad to see it minimized here.
I have a hardcore feminist friend who repeatedly gets banned from Facebook for hyperbolic rhetoric like “kill all men.” Is that evidence she wants to kill all men? No it’s hyperbole. (And it’s stupid that Facebook bans it but the rest of the world doesn’t run by Facebook rules).
> If you, or anyone else, makes a death threat to a public figure on social media, you will be at minimum receiving a visit from law enforcement, and will be arrested if you don't immediately disavow what you said or are thought of as a threat.
The comment MTG liked, “a bullet would be quicker,” would not be perceived as a “death threat” in any court of law. It’s archetypal political hyperbole.
> "Watts" ruled that "mere political hyperbole" is not illegal, have fun in court trying to convince the judge of that.
I’d take that case in a heartbeat. It’s a straightforward application of Watts.
> Death threats are not just "distasteful rhetoric", come on. 3) The fact that you a) gloss over the rest of my post and b) don't even bother to condemn this stuff is really telling.
I condemn MTG completely. But this one is a stupid justification.
> One more thing: have you ever received a death threat from a stranger?
The whole point is that a violent comment made on a Twitter board about a public figure isn’t a death threat. If I called you up and said “I’m going to put a bullet in your head,” that’s a death threat. If I say “someone should take Ted Cruz out back and shoot him” that’s obviously not a death threat. You know this because you’ve heard this phraseology a million times.
As far as your other handwaving dismissals, all I can say is actions and words from public figures, especially politicians, have consequences. You might not agree, which is fine, but this is how we get January 6th. I hope you condemn that too.
And I have never, not once, heard "we should should shoot Ted Cruz", or anything even close to that. For, you know, Republican politicians. Democrats, many, many times.
MTG seems like a strange hill to die on. I assume you pretty much share the contempt everyone else has for her.
Reframing controversial political disagreements as uncontroversial issues of personal safety is a cancel culture trope that has worked well elsewhere and now being imported into our political life. Hence the ongoing theater with metal detectors and armed military guards, as well as the baseless accusations that legislators pose some physical risk to their colleagues and must therefore be expelled.
(I don't think Boebert is in quite the same league, but give it time).
The traditional remedy for such extremism was to expose the links to voters, who would be duly horrified and vote her out. But MTG's voters knew exactly who they were electing, and I will wager that she wins again with ease in 2022. She is now a culture hero thanks to the Democratic legislators who voted against her.
Overriding the voters' decision based on our own notions of propriety, in the name of saving democracy, is a sure path to ruin. As long as her conduct is lawful, there is no defensible way to get her out of Congress except the hard way.
But not seating MTG (or maybe Boebert) on committees seems like less of a problem, and it doesn't seem any less legitimate to me when the majority of the House does it to MTG than when the Republicans themselves did it to Steve King; in both cases, it wasn't the will of the voters that elected these people that created the consequences.
Also: it took a long time to get Steve King out, and an superheroic amount of effort from JD Scholten, who had to know his chances were slim and kept fighting anyways; I don't know that you can expect Scholtens to keep appearing to fend these monsters off.
But just looping back to the subject of the thread: there's a "rule of goats" thing about wishcasting the assassination of a political opponent, and, in collaborating with people who are almost certainly not being ironic in discussing the possibility, MTG has gone way beyond being an ironic goatfucker.
I think people do hyperventilate about right-wing conspiracy nutjobs. But lending institutional support to actual insurrectionists isn't just Twitter drama.
Yet when people point out an elected national official of the GOPs words. An official that far from sanction, actually has the backing of the caucus in a named vote, you defer to defending it as figurative language.
You are applying a clear double standard. One that is dangerous. You demand your opposition abide by the Queensbury rules while your team wallops the referee with a chair and sets alight our country in the process. What could she say that you’d sanction as much as you do anything Robin Diangelo does?
When MTG “likes” a juvenile comment saying “a bullet would be quicker,” obviously I don’t treat that with the same weight, because that’s a figurative phrase that doesn’t convey an actual plan to kill anybody.
I think it’s a fair thing for parties to have to defend the concrete policy proposals of their wings. Not so much random inane muttering of individual members.
It absolutely would destroy the rule of law. The Senate Judiciary Committee, controlled by FDR’s own party, had this to say: https://constitutioncenter.orgblog/how-fdr-lost-his-brief-wa...
> By June 1937, the Judiciary Committee had sent a report with a negative recommendation to the full Senate. “The bill is an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this country. . . . It is essential to the continuance of our constitutional democracy that the judiciary be completely independent of both the executive and legislative branches of the government,” the report read.
> Its conclusion was even more direct: “It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.”
Even the mere threat of court packing effectively gutted separation of powers and federalism. Today, a federal government of “enumerated powers” is a dead letter, all thanks to FDR.
Even RBG found this line of thinking to be nonsense and dangerous: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/24/744633713/justice-ginsburg-i-...
The only agreed upon "rules" are what the legislature passes. "Norms" don't really mean much; those are just glorified pinky promises.
You're basically comparing "norms" to laws, but those two are not the same. The fact that there are 9 justices on the Supreme Court isn't a norm that we all just shake hands and agree on, it's what's currently set by legislation. Mitch McConnell never violated any law, nor did he change the rules via legislation. He (and the GOP) exercised the power to advise and consent (or not) to a nomination. If the people had wanted the kind of nomination he refused to consent to, they would have voted for a different Chief Executive, and a different Senate. But alas, that did not happen; those are the rules of the game.
What you (and the so called "academics") are advocating for is changing the rules of the game. Notwithstanding the merits of that, it is in no way comparable to just playing hardball by the existing rules, and to argue otherwise is pretty disingenuous.
So yeah, if things go well, maybe the Dems will have the balls to do what McConnell has done for 10 years which is blow up "norms" to get what they want. Especially if the far right wing SCOTUS members do things that are INCREDIBLY unpopular among normal non far right wing Americans, like kill Obamacare and healthcare for 15 million Americans, and kill abortion rights which is currently supported by a huge majority of Americans.
Essentially, your argument is it would be awful if the party that won the House, won the Senate, won the Presidency did what they wanted. That party supports policies that are incredibly popular among Americans. The other party represents terrible policies that Americans hate, like no COVID relief, banning abortion, racism (birtherism, "build the wall", "send her back"), lawlessness/anti democracy i.e. 1/6 insurrection, "hang mike pence", all of these things the average American does not want. But lets clutch our pearls when the party that WON, NOT YOURS, tries to do what is was given a mandate to do. SAD.
That’s because Kennedy was Reagan’s third try to fill that seat after Democrats blocked the first two. In late 1987, a year before the election, Patrick Leahy gave Kennedy an ultimatum that if Senate Democrats didn’t like the next appointment, they’d hold the seat open until after the 1988 election. That was against a vastly more popular President than Obama—Reagan had won his election in 1984 by 18 points.
McConnel shoving through a SCOTUS justice 8 days before an election is breaking a norm. Adding justices to the Supreme Court because you don't like how they're deciding cases isn't just breaking a norm. Nine justices might be a norm, but changing the number of justices for the express purpose of getting different outcomes (which is what progressives want to do) is just breaking separation of powers.
It’s incredible how rather than indulge in a microsecond of self reflection, people like you just latch onto the most extreme caricature of your opponents that your media vendors can muster, ignoring the substantive reality.
Also, looks like you might have missed this one.
I don’t want to keep spending time on this. My position is that QAnon is a fringe internet phenomenon that is a total unknown to most people. Of the people who do have some knowledge of it, few take it seriously. A few crazies do, sure. But its somber elevation to grave significance by the liberal media is totally ridiculous (and gave it more attention than it ever would have gotten otherwise).
You can minimize this stuff all you want and deflect blame to librul media, but YOUR PARTY (that you have constantly defended in these threads) is and holds these positions.
The Republican party is the party of murdering their political foes, even ones in their own party.
The Republican party is the party of Barack Obama is a Muslim (something MTG has said on video and refuses to retract).
Just own it.
Btw, dismissing things as “whataboutism” isn’t an effective argument, its just an admission of hypocrisy.