Then let’s put them in jail where most of them belong anyway.
Word. To hell with simply handing these thugs a pink slip…I want them to face legal proceedings that will make the Nuremberg trials look like a day at Disneyland. Make examples of them. Public shamings. For the most egregious of them, executions on pay-per-view.
Moderating:
I’m giving the thread a brief time-out. Several of the last posts have included borderline personal attacks, and language that is suited to the BBQ Pit, not to P&E. Everyone is heated, so rather than handing out notes or a warning to people caught up in the moment, I’ll set the thread to reopen in 10 minutes.
A reminder to the thread, this is P&E, not one of the Pit threads. Leave out the personal attacks on posters and the excessive death wishes.
This topic was automatically opened after 9 minutes.
How large? I’ve seen multiple definitions of political independent, with varying sizes as a proportion of the electorate.
One definition is “people who are registered independent.” While this is an easy way to differentiate, it does have an issue that many of them are in fact less than independent in terms of their preferences. Gallup categorizes independents as “Lean Republican”, “Lean Democrat” and “non-leaning” independents. In one of their polls from last year, published early this year, 47% of all voters were Democratic or leaned that way, and 42% were Republican or Republican-leaning. This left only 10% of the electorate (not up to 100% because of rounding) that were considered true independents.
You probably can’t pick up a whole lot of the other side’s leaners. Some, perhaps, but some of them are declared independents because of their disgust with their party, often because they feel the party hasn’t gone far enough towards their preferences. In other words, identification as independent doesn’t necessarily correlate with political moderation ideologically.
So how do you activate the true independents? Some of them will be too caught up in their own “a pox on both houses” rhetoric to do much of anything. There’s no indication of any kind of consistent political or ideological thought involved among those independents - indeed, the president’s baldfaced lying probably ended up appealing to some in this category simply by virtue of their picking and choosing what to pay attention to and what to disregard, along with the Republican party and its associated political machinery slicing-and-dicing the electorate, microtargeting voters with precision that it seems like the Democratic party doesn’t do well (of course, with Zuck, Musk and the like going all MAGA, who could trust them to help?)
Will independents help you in the off-year elections? Perhaps, but it’s usually harder to motivate low-propensity voters when the President isn’t at the top of the ballot. Of course, when the margins are this small, you don’t want to alienate anyone you don’t have to, but you might lose as many on your extreme flank as you do from the middle.
It’s tough. The modern electorate is near-evenly split, and - in part because of that - highly inconsistent. I do think that in times such as these it’s more important to stand on principle than to sell out temporarily for power, but that’s a hard stance to take when the consequences of an electoral loss are so huge.
There was some snark in my post, to be sure. But it accurately represents how I feel about the DNC making “Abolish ICE” their official position. Basically, I can’t understand how they didn’t learn from the whole defund the police snafu. I mean really. DtP was a very bad slogan but it at least it taught Dems an important lesson—do not use slogans like DtP if you want to win.
Learn, we don’t.
There’s a big difference that even at the height of BLM’s popularity police held high public trust. No such case with ICE who were at best sort of considered adjacent to border enforcement, but now have become synonymous with masked men who murder innocent civilians. The fact that ICE/DHS/the administration at large decided to call the murders of Good and Pretti justified puts ICE in a unique and precarious spot. Because they can’t blame what happened on Minneapolis on “a few bad apples”
The counter is what took place, almost no Democrat running in the past approved of “defund the police”, but the Republican disinformation machine convinced a few that all Democrats supported it, so Trump and barely the Republicans won then, and now those few learned now that funding the police (and that includes ICE in particular) Led to the deaths and deportations of Americans, and worthy immigrants.
There is a lesson there alright.
Yes, people generally like police. Independents generally like police.
This is absolutely not the case with ICE. Everyone hates ICE. Everyone but MAGA. Even the ones who don’t necessarily want to abolish ICE – unless they’re MAGA, they probably think ICE sucks. ICE murders Americans and terrorizes brown people. That’s what they do now – that’s what everyone knows they do, aside from MAGA nuts.
“Defund the police” is not comparable to “abolish ICE” when it comes to public opinion about the organizations.
And more than that, no one has remotely suggested how a Democratic presidential candidate could have a chance in hell of getting through the national primary on anything short of “abolish ICE”. Whether we like it or not, aside from the negligible-chance of actual reform by the Trump administration, “abolish ICE” is the supermajority Democratic position, and the next presidential candidate will almost certainly be in favor of it.
Sure, but I don’t think anyone reasonable is advocating we give up the internal enforcement of customs and immigration laws, which is what ICE was schemed up to accomplish back in the wake of 9/11.
That’s why I was saying they need to be careful about the messaging- make sure that abolishing the institution isn’t confused with abolishing the institution’s mission.
They’re not doing their mission right now. They’re functionally MAGA terrorists.
Reasonable people would agree that there is a need for immigration and customs enforcement within the US. That’s what ICE’s ostensible mission is, and what is important to make sure people understand is NOT going to be abolished.
Think about it this way… if you’re some hypothetical moderate Democrat, and you hear that people want to abolish ICE, you’ll probably think that’s good, but then pause and think “Well, who’s going to enforce customs and immigration within the US? Someone needs to do that. Maybe abolishing it isn’t such a good idea.”
And if you’re already undecided, that might be the thing that causes you to stick with the status quo rather than risk the potential chaos of abolishing a Federal agency.
The current administration has told us that what ICE is doing its mission, including how “careful” they are doing it. In truth, the lack of carefulness has led to death and most of the lack of due process seen.
The willful unconstitutional efforts to pretend that what they do is OK points to be careful, but to not be so careful as to ignore that the institution is rotten from the top.
Fair enough. That sounds easy. Abolish ICE and start over with a new agency, or give the duties to a different agency.
What specific percentage would it take for you to say that it is high enough to change your mind?
The poll from @iiandyiiii is from July and the Independent’s numbers are reversed (48% abolish, 34%).
Both the February and July numbers are pretty good if you consider you are only going to get about 50% of the Independents.
All you have to say is “re-organize ICE” or some other anodyne phrase. Why make it hard on yourselves, Democrats? There are all kinds of inoffensive ways to phrase it that can all lead to the same outcome: re-building an agency from the ground up.
As the saying goes, don’t stop your enemy when it is doing a mistake, the issue here is that some are missing who are the ones making the mistake here.
What Democrats do not want foreign criminals deported?
(A thing that every Democrat President has managed to do more effectively than our current immigrant hating President has.)
Part of the problem is that we don’t really have a Federal police force that could be co-opted, like say the Carabinieri or Gendarmerie in Italy and France respectively.
The FBI has a pretty well defined mission, and personnel that don’t lend themselves to jackbooted thuggery. ICE on the other hand, was kind of like the precinct constables1 of the Federal law enforcement world. Not real cops, as it were. So with that sort of not very rigorous law enforcement mission combined with Trump and the Republicans wanting to terrorize immigrants and non-white people, ICE was tailor made to fulfill that mission.
1 Back in the late 80s/early 90s in Harris County/Houston, for some reason TPTB empowered the precinct constables to give out traffic tickets. They were almost uniformly out of shape goons who resembled Farva from “Super Troopers” more than anything else. They’d always have visible bulletproof vests and all the tacticool stuff in their cars, and trying to look hard, even though their entire job was to basically process serve and be bailiffs for Justice of the Peace courts, and give out traffic tickets. They were basically the leftovers after the competent people became actual cops and sheriff’s deputies, and it showed. I imagine ICE pulls from the same pool of rejects.
Good luck getting through the primary with such a pathetically weak message!
ICE is a terrorist agency. Fuck any Democrat who doesn’t recognize this (at least when it comes to getting my vote in a primary). And I’m not remotely alone among the party faithful.