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[–] 215 points 1 day ago (42 children)

Jeremy Lewin oversaw the destruction of USAID. It’s not clear he had the legal authority to do so.

Ummm, no. It's already been determined in court...they did not have authority to shut down any of those projects. That's either for Congress to decide, or for Congress to appoint someone to decide. They did neither. Not only were they not consulted, at all...everything that DOGE cancelled was already approved by Congress and should not have been touched.

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  • [–] 108 points 1 day ago (28 children)

    I do really wish with all my heart that dems win, grow some balls and they let the courts throw the book at the culprits of this for the maximum sentence.

    Then again, I might wish for a million dollars and a laser unicorn, which is more plausible.

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  • [–] 40 points 1 day ago (18 children)

    I fully expect Trump to hand out pardons like it's candy at Halloween if the Democrats take either chamber. I say doxx the lot of them and let the mob do its job.

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  • [–] 2 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

    Why would he? He'll be a lame duck and won't need anything from those shitheels at that point.

    Unless, that is, they pay him.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 hours ago

    I think he still cares about his legacy too much. Not that he thinks he'll be remembered fondly but that he'll leave such a scar he can't be forgotten. A sweeping set of pardons would be just one more way to troll the entire nation and leave a shit stain in our history books.

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  • [–] 2 points 17 hours ago

    I follow Liz Oyer, who was Biden's pardon attorney, and she says that pardons in general, and Trump's pardons specifically, may not be as untouchable as people think. Despite the general belief, there are limits on Presidential Pardons, and those people may not be as safe as they think they are. It will take a strong government and DoJ to challenge those pardons in court, but there may be ways around them.

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  • [–] 37 points 1 day ago (10 children)

    There should be a rule where if a president gets impeached and convicted, all the pardons they issued should be voided.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago (6 children)

    14A3 disqualification. He already wasn't legally appointed so the second term pardons aren't legal anyway. But somebody needs to enforce the disqualification

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    Are you saying that because he conspired seditiously to overthrow the United States government on J6, 2021, that he was constitutionally ineligible to run for office and should therefore not have been on the ballots in 2024?

    Cause I can get behind that, but like, how do we even begin undoing the mess that it's caused?

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  • [–] 1 point 12 hours ago (1 child)

    Yeah basically keep pushing left until a majority is willing to impeach and disqualify

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  • [–] 1 point 10 hours ago

    Yeah that's the only way. And that's what I keep trying to remind people, but a lot of people don't want to hear it.

    Like, I'm not being naïve about the upbill battle that it is, I know we're the underdogs and success is not guaranteed. But it's literally the only way.

    So people who claim "that never works" are only being defeatist. More accurately, "it hasn't worked yet." Nothing does until it does, but that's no reason not to try.

    And it's intellectually lazy to assume nothing will ever change, because change has always been the only constant running throughout all of human history.

    rant:But some people get really smug about claims like "well the past was always XYZ, so the future will be too!" Yet the facts of history do not support that claim, and it's honestly a praesen-centric claim, because it applies hindsight bias to the past, survivorship bias to the present, and availability bias to the future. In other words, it's a claim that our current perspective, from our current vantage point, is the only valid one.

    It's to claim "we are at a unique moment in time that is somehow separate from the very past from which it emerged, and is obviously superior to it in every way; even though it only is what it is because it came to be via the processes that unfolded throughout the past and up until this very moment."

    And so everything "good" or "correct" looks like it's because we're in the enlightened present, and everything "bad" or "wrong" looks like it was because of the ignorant past. But the truth is, there's no separation, and it's exceptionalist to claim that there is. There's a continuity which can't be ignored.

    So in a way, it's really just another extension of ego-centrism, just like ethnocentrism, linguocentrism, natio-centrism, etc.; i.e. of being unable to imagine anything outside one's own experience or identity.

    It merely expands the "in-group" to "now" rather than drawing spatial or cultural boundaries. Perhaps a more enlightened perspective than those other examples, but still trapped within the delusion of separation.

    I digress. Key takeaway: do not feel we are doomed just because it seems grim, because that assumes we are omniscient. In truth, the possibilities for the future might defy the limits of our imaginations. So we mustn't give up; we must keep striving for change.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    Unfortunately, the only ones with that power are the elected officials and a lot of conservative dems are just republicans with another name ready to do as they are told.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    I don't give a single fuck about pardons. Let them rot. If we have to gather a mob and throw them into a literal pit to rot, all the better. If these shit stains think that a pardon will save them or that their money will, they be sorely mistaken. These cretins are directly responsible for millions of deaths. Nothing can save them at this point, in my eyes. Not even the guns of the military.

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  • [–] 1 point 17 hours ago

    I agree. Citizens are getting fed up. If the Dems don't go out to the bleeding edge of Constitutional law to ensure that these traitors are punished harshly enough to discourage such behavior in the future, and MAGA rises AGAIN, it will be time to take it out on the Dems, too. They don't get a fourth chance.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    I say they follow the playbook that donnie has been doing and just arrest them anyway. Maybe give them the treatment ICE has been giving people they arrest. Deport them.

    Then let the courts battle it out to have them returned and let out of custody.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    The real battle starts after the mid terms when everyone needs to keep pressuring congress for accountability.

    If the election changes congress to dem and people don’t stay mad and keep pushing nothing will actually change.

    Protests, letters to congress, organizing, these all need to get more aggressive not less after the mid terms.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Things have already drastically changed and are actively getting worse, almost at an exponential rate thanks to those changes. If Dems win and don’t do anything, things will continue to get worse thanks to republicans, but people will blame Dems. They need to understand they’ll own it and that will likely be the only thing that might maybe possibly but probably not distract them from taking in their new shiny legal bribes from various lobbyists trying to keep them from prosecuting the people responsible and keep them from putting guardrails up to prevent it from happening again.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    Totally agree, also Trump is really good when he has someone to blame so the democrats need to be encouraged to bury these people. Just passing some policies isn’t going to be good enough, they need to metaphorically back up a truckload of coffins throw the bums in and get nailing.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    For Federal crimes, DoJ has to lay charges, so good luck with that.

    There's not a legal way out of this anymore.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    And they stole and leaked data.

    People need to serve time for this. Including Elon. I doubt that ever happens, but they absolutely should.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    We can clearly see that everyone in the DOGE group was criminally ignorant of everything related to that situation as well as being maliciously true believers in their quest, not caring if they were right or Right. There is however the distinct likelihood that someone higher up who, knowing the cause was false and the method was illegal, prescribed it anyway as a test of and attack on Congressional power of the purse and budget laws.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    You mean the twenty to thirty year olds that were told to usurp the power of congress were scapegoats?

    Anyone going to need to sit with that for a minute?

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  • [–] 17 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    I don't understand why people just threw up their hands and went "oh well I guess we are out of a job now"

    If someone comes in that's you've never seen before tells you to shut down operations why would you listen to them? As evidenced by this article it could just be some random dude off the streets basically. Just take their word for it?

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  • [–] 21 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    They coopted some armed federal police goons to help, like those times the workers refused building access to DOGE interns and presidential advisors (as they should).

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  • [–] 10 points 1 day ago

    It was actually more about the funding, than anything else. While the money allocated for USAID programs is determined by Congress, the accounts that contain those funds are under the control of the State Department. The Trump administration basically told the State Department to put "stop payment" orders on all transactions relating to USAID programs that DOGE deemed uneccessary. After that, no one got paid...and if you can't pay your staff or the bills...your office has to close.

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