Under any occasion, it was inappropriate to arrest a judge like this.
We’re honestly at the point where I’d be comfortable with armed militias defending state and local institutions from federal police. If only to force someone to think twice about something like this. (To be clear, I’m not happy we’re here. But we are.)
why do you think the people willing to be a part of the armed militias you mention are NOT on the same way of thinking as what ICE is attempting to do. that's just how the militia types tend to lean, so I don't think this would have the effect you're looking for
you'd be declared an illegal immigrant and removed to hotel salvador pretty quickly at this point. The orangefuhrer has already said he's coming after the "homegrown" next.
While I'm not familiar with all 50 governors, I'm wondering if there might not be some Republican governors that think things have gone too far as well. Being a Republican does not mean you are in favor of autocracy. It just looks like that right now because nobody is sticking their necks out, but I'm holding onto hope that if it does get to that point, further resistance might come out.
we'll see if/when the lawsuits lauched against the administration is ignored by the administration. But no one wants a civil war. No one would win here except maybe China/Russia.
You discount the people that want to watch the world burn. The tree of...fed with blood...blah blah blah. "Burn it down, start over" is often touted as the fastest/best approach for wholesale changes when the friction to making change is too great.
Economically, China would probably be the biggest beneficiary to a US civil war, especially one that ended with 2 Americas with neither the strength of the former union. Russia would just love to see the chaos and reap whatever gains they could get as well.
What a strange set of ideas presented in such a small sentence fragment.
* Very few people demonize gun ownership. They just want some laws preventing criminals from owning guns.
* Guns are very easy to obtain, the "arms race" is a trip to the local sporting goods store. Sure, the weapon may not be super tacti-cool with a bunch of skulls and shit, but I'm pretty sure that even without all the virtue signalling decals it does the primary job just fine.
Do you think those that have been opposed to current gun laws would be nearly as proficient at the use of their newly acquired weapon as opposed to those that have been collecting them for years?
This just made up militia will be woefully untrained to handle anything. At least those that have their meeting in the woods practice to whatever extent they do, but that would be so much more than this recent trip to the sporting goods store.
Whether you want to quibble over the words demonize, there are a lot of people that do not interpret the constitution to mean that just any ol' body can own a gun to the extent we allow today. The well regulated militia is part of that amendment, and gets left out quite conveniently. The local police departments are closer to the idea of a well regulated militia. The national guard are even closer of a match to me. The guys that run around in the woods believe they are fulfilling that role, but nobody really thinks they are well regulated other than whatever rules they choose to operate.
Personally, I do not think that what we have today with the NRA and what not is what the framers had in mind. So you complain about demonizing being wrong and clearly on one end of the spectrum. I think that the NRA refusing any limits on guns is clearly the other end of that spectrum
I've taught people who had never held a gun to shoot. It takes an hour or two to get them to the point where they can get a nice grouping at a reasonable distance.
I haven't owned a gun in 20 years (it's not my style). I go shooting every 3-4 years with some gun nut buddies who have big arsenals and go shooting often. I am a better shot than many of them.
Armies have won wars while being comprised mostly of conscripted people who hadn't held a gun prior to the conflict breaking out.
Point being - effective use of guns does not require deep proficiency nor long term regular training.
Being able to shoot a gun at a paper target in the safety of a gun range is one thing. It's a different thing to do that when it's a person in front on you. It's also a totally different thing when that person in front of you is persons plural in the form of a trained opposing force and the bullets are coming at you. It takes training to quell that fear and be able to react in a manner that does not end with you full of lead.
When I've discussed training in this thread in other comments, this is what I was considering. Not target practice. Not being able reload a weapon. Specifically about mentally holding it together to not freeze, or even loose your ability to aim at something not a paper target in a gun range.
> Being able to shoot a gun at a paper target in the safety of a gun range is one thing. It's a different thing to do that when it's a person in front on you
Sure. I’m saying that the physical condition of most “militia” members doesn’t make for a threatening force.
In any case, if America went low-burn civil war, you’d pay the drug gangs to do your dirty work. The reason that’s the 20th century playbook is it works.
> Do you think those that have been opposed to current gun laws would be nearly as proficient at the use of their newly acquired weapon
I don’t own a gun and I’m a better shot than half those militia types. The purpose of the guns isn’t to shoot them, it’s to deter. By the time it’s WACO, one side’s marksmanship isn’t really relevant.
You can have 20 assault style weapons in your gun safe, but if that's where they are they do not act as a deterrent. They are only a deterrent when they are ready to be used. The purpose of a gun is to be shot. Confusing this is just some very excessive bending of logic. The intent of the shooter is an entirely different matter. They were not manufactured and then sold/purchased just to be in a display case. That's just what someone decided to with their purchase.
In fact, If you have 20 assault rifles in your safe you are a target for 20 or so revolutionaries. Oligarchs aside, most people of the hoarding political persuasion mistrust others and couldn't social engineer their way out of a paper bag.
>* Very few people demonize gun ownership. They just want some laws preventing criminals from owning guns.
Don't gaslight us. Democrats have been pushing civilian disarmament HARD recently.
Restricted magazine sizes, requiring all transfers to go through a FFL, basic features bans, permits to purchase, restricting ammo purchases to FFLs raising prices, and now repeated attempts at semi-auto bans.
This isn't focused on criminals, it's trying to discourage firearm ownership in general. When states ban the federal government marksmanship program from shipping firearms to civilians AFTER they have already been background checked by a federal agency it's clear there is no attempt to stop criminals.
The courts are a bit split on this. Recently in illinois a judge found an illegal immigrant is not a prohibited person if they meet some standard of community ties/integration, although I've totally forgotten what criteria the judge used.
Remember that the McDonald case incorporated the second amendment to the states so the judges have to decide these sorts of questions for people who are out of status.
I mean criminals: people convicted of a crime for which one of the punishments is revocation of gun ownership rights.
The important word here is convicted. As we were all taught in elementary school - there is a process required by the constitution in which a person goes to a special meeting (called a trial) where a whole bunch of people examine evidence and ask a lot of questions about that evidence to determine if a person is a criminal. If the decisions is they are a criminal, then they have been convicted. HTH!
You do not need to be convicted, you do not even need to be charged.
Since this is a hot topic, look at Abrego Garcia. His wife filed a restraining order. The initial order was slightly different than the temporary order 3 days later, which added one thing -- surrendering any firearms (this is bog standard, they do this in Maryland even for citizens). No matter that she did not even bother to show up for the adversarial final order, so he had his gun rights taken totally ex-parte without even a criminal charge or a fully adjudicated civil order nor any chance to face his accuser wife. Even david lettermen had his gun rights temporarily revoked because a woman in another state claimed he was harassing through her TV via secret messages in his television program [].
But that's not all, you can totally have gun rights taken away without any civil or criminal process. If you use illegal drugs, you cannot own weapons either, that is established without any due process to decide if you use or not, simply putting down you use marijuana on a 4473 will block a sale as will simply owning a marijuana card whether you use marijuana or not.
This is exactly my point, and what I've been driving at in this thread.
This could not possibly be a concern based on abrogation of due process - because there have been many similar due process violations concerning firearms, and I've never seen a single article submitted here about those.
Frankly, I don't see how immigration is any more relevant to this site than civil rights.
first knee jerk type answer is that there are a lot of people in the tech industry that are here on some sort of visa and are not citizens which means that they very much are subject to any changes to immigration enforcement.
Yes except that the very same armed types, after years of being derided by Democrat and progressive types as ignorant rednecks, are the least likely (for now at least) to defend a judge being targeted for protecting immigrants by the Trump administration. I know of no armed militia types that are of the opposing political persuasion, being armed is just a bit too kitsch and crude for them it seems. Maybe they reconsider their views of armed resistance in these years.
> We've got National Guards under the command of state governors for a reason.
Yes, but that reason is not for rebellion against the federal government, which is why their equipment and training is governed by the federal government and the President can by fiat order them into federal service at which point he is the C-in-C, not the government.
Most states do also have their own non-federal reserve military force in additionto their National Guard, but those tend to be tiny and not organized for independent operations (e.g., the ~900 strength California State [not National] Guard.)
If the federal government is no longer beholden to the law because the king executive refuses to follow or enforce inconvenient laws, would it be appropriate to consider it a rebellion? It seems more like basic law enforcement to me.
I was under the impression that state governors could refuse to federalize their National Guards. A quick read on Wikipedia points to the Constitution saying it would take Congress for the federal government to take command unilaterally. That could be a sticking point by the time it gets to the point where there is enough support for state governors to be deploying their state National Guards to keep the peace versus the lawless federal executive.
> I was under the impression that state governors could refuse to federalize their National Guards.
They cannot, under the Constitution. Of course, at the point the National Guard is being mobilized to prevent actions of the federal government, we are deep into a constitutional crisis and a short distance from a (possibly very brief) active civil war.
> A quick read on Wikipedia points to the Constitution saying it would take Congress for the federal government to take command unilaterally.
Congress has already done so , setting rules which require only a Presidential determination to invoke [0], and Presidents have used the authority so granted specifically to deal with very much the same state rebellion scenario you suggest, notably Eisenhower in 1957 when the Arkansas National Guard was deployed to prevent the implementation of a federal court order integrating Central High School in Little Rock: Eisenhower did the one-two punch of federalizing the entire Arkansas National Guard, ordered them away, and also deployed the Army (101st Airborne) to enforce the order. [1]
[0] in the Insurrection Act; the specific relevant provision is at 10 USC § 252: “Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.” (emphasis added)
I mean, we're deep into a constitutional crisis right now - the president has asserted himself to be a king unbeholden to the law, and installed loyal supplicants who agree with that interpretation. So the check of the judiciary (required for individual liberty, among other things. and as imperfect as it was) is effectively dead.
I keep looking for angles where we can organize bottom-up within existing governance structures to resist this anti-American tyrant, that won't just result in an escalation where any resistance is attacked and the chaos then used as fuel for more support of authoritarianism (like the police riots of 2020). Something besides the single obvious lever of getting Congress on board with impeachment.
At any rate thank you for responding. By your other comments I knew you'd be able to point to something specific. The National Guards could certainly still play a role in defending the United States as this conflict escalates, but that baseline dynamic creates a much higher bar to clear.
This is basically what Ammon Bundy did, and most of the US hates him for it. The federal government tried many times to jail him but ultimately he was found innocent everytime. Finally they managed to get him by a friendly judge who had a husband high up in the BLM, awarding an ungodly high lawsuit when he helped an innocent mother get her baby back by summonsing his protest-militia to protest a hospital that conspired to have the baby taken by child services.
Seriously, listen to some videos of Ammon Bundy actually speak (he is pro immigration rights as well, despite the 'far-right' label). Not what you hear from the media or others or under the influence of a political agenda. Most of what he says is 99% in line with your thought process here.
It is legal in all 50 states to organize a militia, it is illegal in all 50 states to do certain things as a militia including (the exact rules vary by state) things like participating in civil disorder, planning to participate in civil disorder, training for sabotage or guerilla warfare, etc.
Of course, since the purpose being suggested here is literally the purported urgent need to engage in armed rebellion against federal authorities, the concern that organizing a militia for that purpose would be constrained by merely "organizing a militia" being illegal is a bit odd. Waging war against the federal government, or conspiring to do so, is--even if one argues that it is morally justified by the government violating its Constitutional constraints--both clearly illegal and likely to be subject to the absolute maximum sanction. The legality of organizing a militia in general hardly makes a difference, either to the legal or practical risk anyone undertaking such a venture would face.
Party composition changes over time, and the people who made up the KKK switched parties starting when JFK backed the civil rights movement. It's the right wing militias that are the spiritual successors to the KKK, not the Democratic party.
As much as I wish we had a Republican party that was an actual successor to Lincoln's, that's not how political parties work.
> > Party composition changes over time, and the people who made up the KKK switched parties starting when JFK backed the civil rights movement.
> George "segregation forever" Wallace got a number of votes at the 1976 Democratic National Convention
1.89% of the votes, yes. "Starting when" doesn't mean "immediately completed on" (the mainly civil rights-related phase of the unusually long overlapping realignment period that started with the New Deal, as well as the realignment period itself, completed around the mid-1990s; if you wanted to stake a specific endpoint marker for it, immediately after the 1994 midterm elections is probably the best point.)
> and controlled that Party well into the 1980s.
George Wallace obviously never "controlled" the Democratic Party, and certainly not into the 1980s. (Now the state party in Alabama, sure, but the state party and the national party are not the same thing.)
> As much as we don't want it to be, it's the same Democratic Party.
It's not, and you can tell it is not by seeing which of the major parties people waving confederate flags and openly preaching white supremacy demonstrate for and advocate for and turn out for on election day.
I said the process started with JFK. Trump moved the needle a lot in the last 8 years, too, so it clearly wasn't finished then either and probably still hasn't finished, because parties are messy dynamic things that change all the time.
I never saw myself voting Democrat until 2016, yet here we are three elections later and it's looking like I'd better settle in.
The charge seems colorable to me, and I think most people would agree the judge was obstructing justice if you strip out the polarizing nature of ICE detentions.
If you take the charges at face value, Law enforcement was there to perform an arrest and the judge acted outside their official capacity to obstruct.
We’re honestly at the point where I’d be comfortable with armed militias defending state and local institutions from federal police. If only to force someone to think twice about something like this. (To be clear, I’m not happy we’re here. But we are.)