GOP introduces bill that would send anyone convicted of unlawful activity on a campus since Oct. 7th, 2023 to Gaza.
GOP introduces bill that would send anyone convicted of unlawful activity on a campus since Oct. 7th, 2023 to Gaza.
Rep. Andy Ogles desperately wants to punish protesting students.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15286301
"A group of Republican lawmakers introduced a bill on Wednesday which would send “any person convicted of unlawful activity” at a college or university, to do community service in Gaza for six months."
"Strangely, the bill appears to refer to any “unlawful activity on the campus of an institution of higher education beginning on and after October 7, 2023” but does not specifically mention the ongoing student protests, rendering it stupidly broad."
"Ogles spoke with Fox News about the bill, saying that, “If you support a terrorist organization, and you participate in unlawful activity on campuses, you should get a taste of your own medicine. I am going to bet that these pro-Hamas supporters wouldn’t last a day, but let’s give them the opportunity.”
I am going to bet that these pro-Hamas supporters wouldn’t last a day, but let’s give them the opportunity
Most people don't last long in death camps.
They're basically admitting it's a death camp.
More wood for the fire, please
No, they wouldn't last a day, neither would any other civilian there. That's the problem, good job proving their point.
Imagine claiming to support freedom while also supporting anything even remotely as ghoulish as this.
Remember, we’re paying them to draft this legislation.
Check the election calendar for your state and vote them out!
Remember folks, a protest vote against Biden just puts us one step closer to fuckery like this actually happening.
I propose a law that says any rep introducing or supporting performative, moronic legislation that wastes my tax dollars gets to have their balls kicked off. Who’s with me?
Now hold on just a minute there. They can have their balls or ovaries kicked off. Inclusivity, y'know.
If this passes, you do have to have your balls kicked off, though
I disagree. In the long term, IchNichtenLichten's proposal would save so much time and money - through the mere threat of a ball kicking - that it would fail to meet its own second criteria.
"Don't like the death camps? Well, we'll send you to death camps and see how you like them then!"
The concept already seemed like something from a Futurama episode, and this fake quote cements it
Why wouldn't they last a day in Gaza, Andy?
Why wouldn't they?
Right like that's kind of the entire point of these solidarity encampments; it's a statement that we should not be subjecting humans to those conditions
I mean, they probably know there's no chance in hell of that bill gaining traction let alone passing (for so many reasons ‡). It's all performance / pandering to their base in an election year.
The scary takeaway should be that's what the Republican base wants to hear.
‡ The fact that you can't just "deport" a citizen to a random country is the least of the things logically wrong with this bill.
Can we get a bill started that says if you support any war, you have to be enlisted to fight on the front lines of it?
I stand by the fact that there would be way fewer warhawks if they had to put their money where there mouths are.
Cowardsw
Yeah, that one I could get behind.
100% of the population must vote to go to war or not.
Everyone is notified beforehand that a vote of Yes is also immediate enlistment into the military for the duration of said conflict.
No more shouting "hell yeah turn the middle east into a parking lot" from the comfort of your armchair or lifted pickup.
It'd be nice if they stopped wasting money on things that they knew were unconstitutional though.
"Arooo, that may be so. But I know a place where the Constitution doesn't mean squat!"
I think we should always take these bills as serious attempts to accomplish what they say. Anything else gives them cover, like:
Next year they could pass this and the Supreme Court could approve it. Imagine still believing in guardrails...
Just wait until next year. I wonder if you're post will seem silly or prophetic.
As with any statement I make when I make fun of Republicans, I sincerely hope it turns out to be silly.
The left need to stop being scared of guns, stop voting for useless gun control measures that only restrict control in their own district and do nothing to reduce crime (meanwhile right wing districts allow you to buy an arsenal of nice ergonomic firearms that can allow even a morbidly obese diabetic to accurately shoot the dick off a fly, delivered to your front door like Amazon), start forming left wing LGBTQIA+ friendly militias and train to protect themselves.
We can do that, or hope the boot lickers and cops don't persecute us. Which is the same as sending hopes and prayers on Facebook.
Protest against genocide? Straight to genocide. Be against genocide? Believe it or not, straight to genocide.
So people who are anti-genocide should be genocided?
Gotta fight fire with fire
-Republicans, probably
So when do we get to start calling these guys nazis? Cause I'm pretty sure that calling to send dissenters to camps, where a concentrated ethnic group is actively having genocide committed against them, is some nazi shit.
You don't need permission.
I’ve been doing it since 2016
to do community service in Gaza for six months.
Sooooo... these geniuses are proposing to send people who are already (and justifiably) not very fond of Israel on an actual state-funded six month fact-finding mission to witness the horrors caused by Israel for themselves?
Better make sure they don't have smartphones on them... otherwise, they might just record enough Israeli war crimes to fill three TikToks.
No Mr. Bond, they expect them to die.
Not if they ban tiktok too ;)
I had to triple check this wasn't an onion article. This seems too stupid and horrible to be real.
too stupid and horrible to be real.
And yet...
The real magic with the Onion is how they are able to satirize Repubs before the Repubs do the thing. The articles are no longer fiction, they are just early.
What terrible, awful people these conservatives are.
This is so old. "If you love communism so much, move to Russia" said every right wing asshole to the boomers when they were kids a half century ago. Yawn.
The new twist is it's now, "if you hate it so much, we'll move you there!".
What a great use of their time. Vote these chucklefucks out already.
Does that mean "any" person? So all police officers that broke the freedom of speech ammendment have to do 6 months of community service as well? And those nut jobs that attacked peaceful protest camps and clubbed students over the head?
So all police officers that broke the freedom of speech ammendment have to do 6 months of community service as well?
Hopefully not... Israel has enough genocidal white supremacists.
Concussions can make you more conservative so of course head injury is a priority
This is a clown doing a performance. It's a bunch of hateful horseshit to feed the ever rabid base.
And yet, another clear as day example that this election is literally the fight against fascism.
Lemmy is full of bad faith arguments about both sides, genocide Joe, etc. Always trying to frame it away from the very obvious truth.
The obvious truth is, that the Dems can end this genocide, force Israel to hand over all its war criminals and establish a Palestinian state. and gain all the support for it. The fact that they rather want a genocide to continue shows you that they rather want Trump to win, than to not take AIPAC money.
And they successfully gaslighted the people into believing it is their fault, instead of the fault of the leaders that can end this genocide right fucking now.
Apparently, in the very clear minds of Republicans, if you got busted drinking at a college party at any point after Oct 7 2023, that's sUpPoRtInG hAmAs nOw and you deserve to be deported to Gaza.
...Guess RFK's not the only politician with brain worms
Wait, will that include Matt Gaetz?
College. Not kindergarten.
Wait, this isn’t the Onion?
It feels Kafkaesque. "Hello, I'm against genocide. Do I stand in line to be labeled a terrorist simp? Should I stand in the Nazi line? Just wondering what label I'll need to own."
Thanks for wasting even more of our tax dollars on these publicity stunts
I honestly thought this was the Onion. Strange timeline. Bring Harambe back.
Fucking hell, they are CARTOONISHLY evil.
Oh, fuck you, you posturing GOP crybabies. Also, do you clowns realize that by using a trip to Gaza as punishment, you’re acknowledging that the conditions are unfit for the citizens who live there, many of whom are innocent?
many of whom are innocent
This is the problem. They have decided that they are guilty of being Palestinian, a crime worthy of death.
Can we get an uno reverse on this?
Any federally elected politician who does not
schoolacknowledge the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and that that crisis is the direct result of actions taken by the Israeli government should also serve 6mo service in Gaza.E: a word
Not serve and not 6 months either.
Well dump their ass there, no questions asked, and we won't be back.
Such a serious and intelligent political party. Yes, let’s give them lots of money and let them run things.
That is really messed up of the GOP.
Illegal on its face.
So, I think that this is just political showboating (though I don't approve of legislators doing this, normalizes it), but to take it more seriously....
My kneejerk reaction is that it'd be unconstitutional, but I'm not sure, upon further thought.
So, there are a couple isssues that I see.
Can you send an American citizen abroad as a form of punishment?
There's the question of whether this violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
So, exile is definitely unconstitutional. You can't simply kick an American citizen out of the US and keep them out, and there's case law supporting that. You can't take their citizenship away as punishment; that's an Eighth Amendment violation.
But...you can draft people to the military, and compel people to go abroad. Sentencing someone to six months of service is sort of like that. I don't know whether there's case law as to whether that can constitutionally be used as a punishment, however. And I don't know whether it's constitutional to compel someone to enter a non-US legal jurisdiction as a punishment, because I can imagine a lot of ways in which one could avoid constitutional restrictions if one could, as part of a sentence, just move someone out of the legal jurisdictions where those restrictions apply.
My guess is that this might be permissible, but I can't think of actual examples where something like this was done.
Ex post facto laws
The second is whether it amounts to an ex post facto law. Generally-speaking, you cannot make something retroactively-illegal, nor make the sentence more-severe.
I'm pretty confident that this would violate the ex post facto restriction, as it specifically applies to past actions as well as future. It might be possible to provide for making doing community service in Palestine as an alternative sentence for someone convicted of a crime that occurred in the past, to let someone convicted opt in to a new form of punishment rather than the one that existed at the time that they committed the crime. But this is a mandatory punishment being added. Note that this is specific to the portion making it retroactive. Generally, if a law is severable -- that is, the remainder of it can reasonably stand on its own -- part of it being invalid doesn't make the whole invalid. My guess is that the retroactive portion of such a law would fail the ex-post-facto restriction, but due to severability, it could still be applied to people who commit a crime moving forward, so would remain partially enforceable.
Safety
Gaza probably isn't all that safe, and some of the issue with being sent to Gaza might be physical risk. That might run afoul of the Eighth Amendment as well.
So, we do have the death penalty -- someone can explicitly be condemned to death. But aside from that, going from memory, there are some constitutional requirements for the conditions in which prisoners may be kept. You can't just say "you're going to prison for an N year sentence" and make the prison environment have a 50% mortality rate.
googles
Yeah, there's Eighth Amendment criteria on prison conditions:
https://www.ce9.uscourts.gov/jury-instructions/node/165
The Eighth Amendment imposes certain duties on prison officials: (1) to provide humane conditions of confinement; (2) to ensure that inmates receive adequate food, clothing, shelter and medical care; and (3) to “take reasonable measures to guarantee the safety of the inmates.” Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 832 (1994) (citing Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U.S. 517, 526-27 (1984)).
I'm not sure exactly the legal rationale there. It may just be that you cannot have the executive treat a sentence of prison as something akin to a death sentence, can't basically "upgrade" the severity of a law. It might be okay to do if the legislature's intent is for the sentence to be dangerous. Could be an issue or not.
Restriction on speech
The First Amendment generally does not let the government criminalize speech. It's possible to a very limited degree, but compared to virtually all other countries, the US Constitution has a very low tolerance for this.
So, I thought "okay, that's a sentence for a non-content-neutral speech restriction", so it'd violate the First Amendment. But...I'm not totally sure about that. Because in this case -- and I haven't looked at the bill text -- they aren't actually criminalizing anything new. The only association with content is the time, that there are currently protests on a particular topic happening. Like, if you were convicted for something unrelated to Israel-Palestine, it'd still apply (and in fact, the article authors complain about this). So I don't think that it raises First Amendment issues.
That being said, my guess is that there's some level of sufficiently-close association where linking a crime or punishment to speech even if the link isn't explicit probably does violate the content-neutral restriction. Like, you can't go out and come up with criteria that just happens to only punish the people involved in certain speech. But my guess is that this wouldn't reach that level, given how broad it is.
Overall
My guess is that the ex post facto portion would be struck down as unconstitutional. But I'm not at all sure that the remainder wouldn't stand, were we to hypothetically assume that it actually were passed and signed into law.
Assuming the US military is even deployed to Gaza, they generally don't want people pressed into service. The all-volunteer thing works pretty well for them. If anyone did get sentenced to this, the military would probably give them some shit duty stateside, or in Europe, or even just picking up trash in Gaza if Congress really forced it.
This has to be satire.
Why don’t we introduce a bill that would send any politician convicted of being GOP to Russia for free labor?
Performative nonsense. Even plenty of Republicans would vote against this.
Had to look at the link quite a few times to make sure I didn't eat the onion. These kinds of things are just getting more and more common
Can I introduce a bill to ship this republikkklown to Gaza?
How liberally fiscally irresponsible of them.
Just so people don't panic this is blatantly illegal at least for US citizens.
curious, where is this cross posted from?
It was originally posted in World News, but was (rightfully!) removed for being internal US news and not world news. I screwed up - I think when I read anything about Gaza I start thinking about how it relates to the international war at large. Clearly though this story doesn't belong there, and hopefully it fits here.
no worries, it was blacked out so I thought maybe it was some community I was banned from somehow. You’re good, thanks for sharing.
Exile then?
This is what you're voting for, people! Never forgive. Never forget. We cannot let this happen.