As Trump has a temper tantrum that anybody could dare accuse him of being a racist when several of his most ardent ass lickers have been Black, The Onion scores another bullseye.
It’s almost impossible to satirize incoherence like what we see from this totalitarian baby, but The Onion keeps managing. America’s finest news source.
The Onion’s got nothing on these babies.
Here’s Clay Jones:
And why Donald J. Trump is the biggest psycho grifter ever to hold our experiment in democracy hostage. Heather begins:
On February 13 and 14, President Donald J. Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport. As trademark lawyer Josh Gerben of Gerben IP noted, the application also covers merchandise branded “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” and “DJT,” including “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.”
Because of the trademark filing, Gerben notes, any airport adopting the Trump name would have to get a license to use the name, potentially paying a licensing fee. Gerben emphasizes that while it is common for public officials to have landmarks named after them, “never in the history of the United States” has “a sitting president’s private company…sought trademark rights” before such a naming.
In October, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought withheld billions of dollars Congress appropriated for a tunnel between New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River, saying he wanted “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” Trump told Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would release the funds if Schumer would agree to name Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., and New York City’s Penn Station after him.
Russell Vought, the Koch Brother’s own Project 2025 Nazi state architect and unelected Czar of the US budget (apart from his party-line confirmation in the Senate), the constitutional scholar/genius who declared Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs unconstitutional and grounds for denying funding already approved by Congress, quietly diverted $15,000,000 in appropriated USAID funds (cut by nongovernment employee/new government agency head Elon Musk’s nongovernment DOGE) to pay for his security detail. Better, for him, that his super important life be protected from every possible threat, by a $15,000,000 private army, than to have two or three hundred thousand insignificant brown children die preventable deaths formerly prevented by USAID.
Happy belated Presidents Day to these Nazi motherfuckers. Don’t forget to give generously to the Donald Trump Mount Rushmore Memorial Legacy, a wonderful new charity that, since an IRS ruling in September, 2025, can accept tax-free donations. USA! USA!!!!
Liz Oyer, the former DOJ Pardon Attorney (until Trump 2.0 began and all pardons became purely transactional) lays out the real intent of the SAVE Act. Not only is it designed to make it harder for Democrats to vote, its real purpose is to create complete chaos ahead of the midterm elections. Liz does an excellent job laying out the method and desired effects of this heavy handed Nazi attempt to fully Nazify our United States in the midterm elections. This proposed law (which does not yet have support in the senate to become law) will be particularly important in the disobedient, so-called Blue States, the places Bill Barr dubbed “Anarchist Jurisdictions” under Trump’s first wild spin as president. They can’t afford another Minneapolis!
Generally a sweeping nationwide change in laws takes a year or more to efficiently roll out, but efficiency is clearly not the goal here. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (and Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.) don’t have that long, they’ve got to get this done chop chop, with the zeal of billionaire “disrupters” who break the thing into too many parts to ever put back together before asking permission, or getting sued and stopped by courts enforcing the law.
The business model of disrupters is also the business model of MAGA. Break things you hate, smash them to smithereens, like Trump Postmaster Louis DeJoy did by disassembling gigantic mail sorting machines in “Blue” cities, delaying mail delivery and so on, and let your accursed enemies try to stop you in court. Let them keep trying this defensive tactic after you’ve ramped up to targeting them, killing them (when needed) and shoving them into concentration camps a thousand miles from their homes.
Not losing in 2026 is a TOP priority for the VERY STABLE GENIUS and his united billionaire benefactors/beneficiaries, if there is going to be a country anymore! So much the better if they are able to bring on the chaos in time to disrupt the 2026 elections, eh, Susan Collins (an announced “yay” for the SAVE MAGA Act in the Senate)?
It’s a real thing.
“The Democrats refuse to vote for Voter I.D., or Citizenship. The reason is very simple—They want to continue to cheat in Elections. This was not what our Founders desired. I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”
It is universally recognized that President Donald J. Trump is the most popular and accomplished president ever, in any country in history. This is confirmed by every objective poll and every honest white historian. If the Democrats are not allowed to flagrantly cheat, as they have been over and over in all the recent elections they “won” by “wide margins,” they will be wiped out in the midterms and certainly in 2028. This is beyond dispute, as is the President’s overwhelming, historic electoral mandate.
President Donald J. Trump will convene a legal team of John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, Alina Habba, Alan Dershowitz, Jeffrey Clark, Stephen Miller, Jim Jordan, Lindsey Halligan, Lindsey Graham, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Jeanine Pirro, Mike Johnson, Ginni Thomas and other top constitutional scholars to craft the concept of an irrefutable legal plan that will be fully articulated in time to implement a nationally supervised, no-cheating, no do-over election that the president’s candidates will all win in landslides, once the Democrats’ cheating has been eliminated by an Executive Order and all elected Democrats are in private detention facilities in Red States under a national security lockdown.
Call me crazy, but TDS seems like a real thing.
There is only one purpose to this proposed legislation which will make it harder for tens of millions to vote in the upcoming midterm elections — to save MAGA. The Senate would have to change the filibuster rules to pass this Jim Crow 2.0 bill with 54 votes. If we want to preserve our experiment in democracy, we have to keep Democratic senators honest, and a few set to retire Republican senators, (and good luck with some of these mf’s).
For future reference (when Congress returns from yet another break during yet another Trump shutdown — this time only TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard and a few other agencies within DHS will lose funding, ICE and CBP are fully funded through the Big, Gorgeous, Junior High School Girl Bill)
Update:
The Capitol emptied out on Thursday, a full day before the midnight Friday deadline for funding the Department of Homeland Security. Lawmakers who were deadlocked over new restrictions on immigration officers jetted off to Munich for a security conference or headed home for a weeklong recess, seemingly unconcerned with the looming closure. It was a jarring change from the past, when lawmakers were reluctant to seem like they were giving up for even a moment before time ran out for a deal.
“We are not even going to pretend that we are trying to figure it out,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, one of those bound for Germany. “It doesn’t look great.”
The blasé attitude reflected a conviction on the part of both parties that they were in the stronger political position in this round of the shutdown wars. (source, NY Times)
Brian continues on the fake fraud behind the latest, and perhaps most brazen, Republican voter suppression effort:
Levitt’s study found exactly no instances of a noncitizen knowingly or purposefully voting illegally. And why would they? The penalty is deportation.
Trump’s own investigation into illegal voting by migrants turned up not one shred of evidence of widespread fraud.
Out of 49.5 million voter registrations checked, 0.02% of the names were investigated as possible registered noncitizens. There was no evidence that any of those people had actually voted. A serious blow to Trump’s unfounded hysteria over droves of illegal voters sandbagging elections in favor of Democrats.
for more details on Jim Crow 2.0, a federal voter suppression law that will target women, young people, college students, people of color, people with various accents, people with physical disabilities, (while allowing Trump’s administration to access a national database voter information more powerful than what his then campaign manager Paul Manafort gave Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik during the 2016 “Russia Hoax”) here’s Brian Tyler Cohen’s full report on this desperate fascist move
In a desperate move to disenfranchise millions of voters ahead of a midterm election MAGA is expected to lose badly, and to foster the election rigging myth of widespread voter fraud, the MAGA House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act by a typical 218-213 margin (reflective of their mandate) . Like all of Trump’s other bogus national emergencies, the SAVE Act is designed to solve a crisis that doesn’t exist. SAVE is a transparent pile of lies designed to advance the organized right-wing’s consolidation of one party rule.
We come to this ugly precipice because our country was unable to punish a president who lost an election, hatched a multipart scheme to overturn the election, and finally urged a violent, armed crowd to march to the Capitol (without a permit, which would have lined the route with police) to confront a joint session of Congress and “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore” We all know the story. Here are a few details about the bill which must now go through the Senate and will have a hard time getting 60 votes.
President Trump has called on Republicans to support the legislation, saying “we won’t have a country any longer” [sound familiar? — ed] if it’s not enacted. Mr. Trump has said it’s essential that all voters show identification and proof of citizenship. But he’s also gone a step further and demanded an end to mail-in ballots, with some exceptions. CBS news
Heather Cos Richardson:
The Republicans are also trying to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which would require a document proving citizenship in order to register to vote and in order to vote. Only Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington have “enhanced” driver’s licenses that would meet the requirement. In all other states, voters would need either a passport or a birth certificate.
Half of Americans don’t have a passport, others don’t have their birth certificates, and the names of married women who took their husband’s last name and transgender Americans would not match their birth certificates. All of these groups tend to vote for Democrats. The bill also calls for state officials to purge voter rolls. The Brennan Center for Justice found that if the measure passes, about 21 million Americans could lose their votes.
The goals of the far-right — no tax on the super-wealthy, taxpayer subsidies for lucrative corporations, cutting government funding for social programs, ending regulations designed to lessen pollution, ending public education , enabling government agents, armed for an insurrection, to conduct warrantless searches and make arbitrary arrests of non-criminals that are difficult and expensive to contest in court, etc. — are very unpopular. These “policies” are increasingly unpopular even among those who voted for President Project 2025.
So unpopular that Gallup will stop conducting presidential popularity polls (they’ve been doing it for 88 years, but are taking no chances with this vindictive madman at the wheel). A police state to “own the libs,” and kill or detain citizens with complete impunity, doesn’t seem to be all it was cracked up to be for screwed working people who were lied to extravagantly in exchange for their MAGA votes. Like much of the MAGA agenda, it’s based on easily demonstrable lies, endlessly repeated by right-wing “influencers” and transactional media conglomerates.
For more than a decade amid Republican bluster about widespread noncitizen voting, the Heritage Foundation has been investigating and documenting such cases. And according to its own dataset, from 1982 to 2025 there have been only 99 documented cases of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections.
But don’t take our word for it—explore their data directly at this link: Explore the Heritage Foundation Data source
What’s the world coming to when you have a billionaire crony buy a major news network, appoint a reliable political ally as news editor-in-chief, and they still report this kind of ugly, critical shit about you? From Heather Cox Richardson:
Daniel Klaidman, Michael Kaplan, and Matt Gutman of CBS News reported that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit after a federal raid on a popular horse racing venue in Wilder, Idaho, led to the detention of 105 undocumented immigrants as well as the temporary detention of 375 U.S. citizens or lawful residents. Only five arrests ended in criminal charges, all for unlicensed gambling.
Answering allegations that agents had used zip ties on children, both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field office in Boise and Homeland Security spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin flatly denied the allegations. “ICE didn’t zip tie, restrain, or arrest any children,” she said. “ICE does not zip tie or handcuff children. This is the kind of garbage rhetoric contributing to our officers facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.” But after photographic evidence of zip-tie bruises on a 14-year-old female U.S. citizen as well as personal testimony, the FBI changed their assertion to say no “young” children were zip-tied.
An 8,000% increase in “death threats” against Trump’s violent, armed for insurrection Ku Klux Klan brigades? That’s almost as high as the 9,000% reduction in my drug prices under the most transparent, generous and loving president in world history. All that cash they send me every month is making me not care so much about civil liberties anymore, as long as those fat checks keep rolling in. Still, some part of me still notices there’s not a peep in the corporate media, or anywhere else, really, about the steady number of actual military veterans who kill themselves every day in the US. It adds up to around 6,000 a year.
More than 6,000 veterans have died by suicide each year since 2001, with the figure peaking in 2018 at 6,738 deaths. The slight decrease in 2023 follows the downward trend since 2018. source
Thank you for your service, loser.
As for actual total losers, nobody is reporting how many hundreds of thousands of poor, “nonwhite” children Elon and Donald continue to gleefully kill by slashing USAID funding and putting Little Marco in charge of closing it down completely. The shameful, quiet mass slaughter was discussed in the press briefly after The Lancet’s recently produced report projecting more than twenty million additional deaths (on top of the between 500,000 and 1,000,000 already dead in 2025) that will occur in the next four years. Here’s Little Marco, for the defense of Ayn Rand’s strong-get-to-fuck-the-weak view of the world:
Asked about the study, a senior US State Department Official called The Lancet a “failed journal” and said: “Some recent ‘studies’ are rooted in outdated thinking, insisting that the old and inefficient global development system is the only solution to human suffering. This is simply not true.”
“Rather than helping recipient countries help themselves, the old system created a global culture of dependency, compounded by significant inefficiency and waste. This has prompted development donors everywhere – not just the United States – to reconsider their approach to foreign aid,” the senior official added. Last July, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the new approach as “prioritizing trade over aid, opportunity over dependency, and investment over assistance.” source
And finally, the latest in Epstein/Trump news, Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) with a nice summary of the facts of the coverup and the always outraged, tantrum pitching Pam Bondi burning him for blasphemy. She had previously screamed at lawyer and constitutional scholar Jamie Raskin (D-Md) ” ‘You don’t tell me anything, you washed up loser! You’re not even a lawyer!” You can google that yourself, Pam.
Fascists do not compromise, being uncompromising is their brand. Fascism, militaristic rule by state violence, backed by corporate power, is based on a relentless appeal to terror. Being terror-based, fascism never needs to articulate a rational set of beliefs based on observable reality — no argument is allowed in a fascist state. A terrified populace is ready for the protection of a “strongman,” a leader who will never yield or bend. That these strongmen are, in fact, the weakest and neediest (and generally the most insane) people in history, is obscured during their reigns by the irrationality they unleash among a public scared out of its collective wits. A fascist ruler never compromises, about anything, ever — hence “strongman”. An angry two-year old never compromises while raging either, but nobody confuses an enraged toddler with an all powerful being. Unless your critical faculties have been disabled by a crippling fear of death, in which case that infuriated toddler has every right to rule.
Fred Koch, wealthy father of the most influential fascist of the American rightwing, billionaire polluter/”philanthropist” Charles, was essentially a Nazi. The German nanny Fred hired for his four boys (as he built the fuel refineries that kept Hitler’s Luftwaffe in business throughout the war), a stern disciplinarian who required the young brothers to defecate on a strict schedule, ran back to Germany to be with her beloved Fuhrer, after his blitzkreig conquered France. Fred Koch inspired his boys to fight, to compete for dominance. The two history recalls as The Koch Brothers, Charles and David, ruthlessly fought their brothers in court for decades and essentially prevailed. You can read the sickening details of how this psychotic father replicated himself in his two “strongest” offspring in Jane Mayer’s masterful Dark Money. David, backed by Koch money, ran for vice president in 1980, on the Libertarian ticket. The Kochs got an appropriate 1% of the national vote for the millions they spent on the campaign. Charles, a brilliant and dogged engineer, got to work building, testing and constantly correcting a vast anti-democratic machine to influence public opinion, frame every public issue to suit his private passions, pass unpopular legislation, defeat regulations to protect air, water and biodiversity, gain control of the federal judiciary (he succeeded 100% with the 6-3 ideologically pure Federalist Society Supreme Court) and so on.
A step back into the America that MAGA wants to make great again, back to the days before “judicial activism” destroyed our great nation. 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court, after hearing the arguments, ruled that “separate but equal” in America’s racially segregated public schools was a crock of shit. They ordered “desegregation” of all American public schools be carried out “with all deliberate speed”. The speed was deliberate enough that racists went to work to make sure their children never had to sit in the same classroom as non-white children. The public school I attended was not integrated until 1964. That school, one of the top rated public schools in New York, was the elementary school Trump would likely have attended, he could have walked there from the house he grew up in less than ten minutes. His psychotic father had other plans for his sadistic young son.
American racists were outraged at the “judicial activism” of the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling. It made no difference to them that the decision was based on a rational evaluation of the evidence presented, in fact, that made it 100 times worse. In response to this judicial act of “communist” sabotage, brought by Negroes and their race traitor allies against a school board 146 miles from his hometown of Wichita, Fred Koch and several wealthy industrialist fellow travelers founded The John Birch Society, a far right-wing fringe group still in operation today. You can visit their website. Once the lunatic fringe of the right wing, which Republican politicians and pundits were always careful to distance themselves from, JBS, as they brand themselves now, is mainstream MAGA, the quivering heart of the present day Republican Party. Check out this photo, the first thing you see when you open their homepage:
A Who’s Who of popular (and obscure– who are those two on the right?) American fascists. These extremists have a vision, as you can see bullet-pointed above. A white Christian oligarchy where none of our most entitled and deserving “legacy” citizens ever have to hear whining from “communists” and other sick individuals (people like me) who hate their freedom. You could call that a coherent worldview, if it wasn’t so inhumanly insane. The hallmark of these fuckers is their refusal to compromise. Here is their glorious mission statement:
Americans committed to:
Something I learned from my personal life — there are people, dear loved ones sometimes, who, once in a conflict, reveal a rigidity and need to fight to the death that was unthinkable a moment earlier. Their unwillingness to compromise is actually an inability to compromise, based on a deep terror of loss of control. This type only feels safe when they are in charge and their will is not disputed. They refuse to negotiate because they can’t compromise, crippled by a fear as powerful as the terror of imminent, violent death. Feel sorry for these creatures if you are kind-hearted, but never underestimate the depths of their desperation when they are in a battle to the death (which they always are when compromise is needed).
Speaking of psychopaths, it struck me last night — Trump was deeply jealous of his buddy Jeffrey, a guy who started with nothing but an amazing ability to lie and manipulate and an insatiable appetite for young girls, and wound up as a super-wealthy friend and confidant of the most powerful people in the world. Epstein got away with raping 14 year-old girls for decades, and his powerful buddies — including lying gay anti-icon Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent [1] — all stayed close to him anyway, even after his criminal proclivities became public. Wealthy, powerful men like Woody Allen, Larry Summers, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Trump, all stayed friends with Epstein, seemingly whether blackmailed by him or not. No wonder the perverted fucker was suicided in federal detention under Trump and Bagpiper Bill Barr. How infuriating his successful, unaccountable scumbag life must have been to the eternally covetous Donald John Trump!
[1] In the event the administration becomes aware of this on finance.senate.gov and takes it down, as they are wont to do, here is the first part of the post:
Washington, D.C. – Following new revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s deep and long-running relationship with J.P Morgan, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., today introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act (PETRA) to compel Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to turn over Epstein-related Treasury records to Senate investigators. Finance Committee staff reviewed a large portion of those files in person at the Treasury Department in 2024. Senator Wyden has sought to obtain the complete set for further investigation, but Bessent has repeatedly refused to produce them to the committee and downplayed their significance. The files detail Epstein transactions totaling at least $1.5 billion dollars, and they include the names of women and girls he may have trafficked, as well as the identities of individuals whose involvement with Epstein may put them at risk of blackmail or other foreign corruption. They also reveal potential violations of federal anti-money laundering laws by J.P. Morgan and other banks–compliance failures that helped Epstein continue abusing and trafficking women and girls many years after law enforcement was first alerted to his activities.
“The basic question here is whether a bunch of rich pedophiles and Epstein accomplices are going to face any consequences for their crimes, and Scott Bessent is doing his best to make sure they won’t. My head just about exploded when I heard Bessent say it wasn’t his department’s job to investigate these Epstein bank records, because it’s simply impossible that somebody with his background in finance is unaware of FinCEN or any of the other investigative offices within the Treasury,” Senator Wyden said. “From the beginning, my view has been that following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.”
The only language Nazis speak is power. The only way to defeat Nazis is through constant, organized, unbroken resistance. It is futile to argue with people who hold violently incoherent views and demand obedience or death. The impasse over funding of DHS is a great example of the futility of negotiating in good faith with a party that spits on good faith. This is a characteristic of any fascist movement. One slogan of the early Nazi supporters was “wir scheissen auf die frieheit!”, which the NY Times delicately mistranslated as “we spit on freedom” when the German verb actually means “shit”. We are a nation of laws, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage in fighting Nazis. As Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Josef Goebbels famously said:
The Framers of the Constitution, who “conservative” “constitutional scholars” like MAGA Mike Johnson claim to revere, amended the Constitution with explicit protections against government intrusion into personal freedoms. These first ten amendments are called The Bill of Rights. The Fourth Amendment [1] protects every person living in the USA from unreasonable searches and seizures. If the government wants to search your home, they must have a warrant signed by a judge who agreed there is probable cause of some illegal activity before that search is legal.
Nazis hate restraints like this on their power. They insist that the power they have justifies whatever they do, and if the doing gives them more power, so much the better. You cannot negotiate with Nazis. One reason is that their worldview is incoherent and inhuman. They can’t be persuaded by evidence, logic, appeals to ethics, conscience, common sense, common decency, fairness, justice, etc. Their mission is to unquestioningly serve the weltanshauung of their insane Leader. All authority in a Nazi system is top down, all power emanates from an infallible, superhuman Leader (Unitary Execuctive in American fascist lingo). Opposing the will of this all-powerful being is punishable by death in a Nazi state.
So true believer MAGA Mike Johnson refuses to yield, insisting DHS has the indisputable legal right to disobey the Constitution and a hundred years of Supreme Court precedent in performing its duties. Johnson insists DHS may make its own rules about arrest, detention, gassing and killing civilians in “self-defense”, and create their own “administrative warrants,” ignoring the Fourth Amendment, to round up dangerous brown children and their immigrant parents. 75,000 of these “worst of the worst” are already detained in over 200 American concentration camps.
There will be no compromise on this in the DHS funding debate, courts may not order the Leader to do anything that violates the Leader’s view of what must be done to preserve The Homeland (also borrowed from the German, Heimat [2], used by Nazis to define love of the Fatherland). MAGA “populists” work in coordination with our most powerful billionaire psychopaths and their hundred tentacled legal/public relations/voter suppression octopus. One particularly smelly tentacle is the “law firm” America First Legal, headed by nonlawyer Stephen Miller, the most adept and virulent of Mr. Trump’s inner circle of psychopathic asslickers. Miller’s absolute power flows directly from the Leader. Check out Miller’s mission statement for suckers who might kick in a few bucks they don’t have:
We are in a hard fight for our democracy, with worse days to come. Our elected leaders, many sponsored by, and beholden to, legally created “persons”, corporations, who are always psychopaths, are probably not up to the task of fighting for our experiment in self-rule. It is up to each of us to push them to stand firm in a battle where they have only the leverage we provide by organizing, protesting, speaking out. Call your senators.
[1] The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets requirements for issuing warrants: warrants must be issued by a judge or magistrate, justified by probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized source
[2] The word describes a state of belonging “the opposite of feeling alien,” and its definition is not limited to a geographical place Continued in Wikipedia
It is imperative to call and email our senators (and members of Congress) as they negotiate conditions for funding ICE and CBP. You can reach them at (202) 224-3121.
Have a short script ready. This will be mine, starting with thanking my otherwise weak-willed senators for taking principled action in severing ICE/CBP funding from the rest of the government appropriations bill in order to rein in their unchecked abuses.
Thanks for taking a stand for democracy, your votes are crucial and I greatly appreciate you holding the line in negotiations over reforms of ICE and CBP.
ICE and CBP have been deployed to cities under a false national emergency in an attempt to violently provoke a violent response from citizens. They should not be armed for anti-riot duty as though facing an insurgency in Fallujah — they have faced zero violence, in spite of their constant violent provocations including cold blooded murder.
At minimum, they must not be allowed to conceal their identities and must be placed under the jurisdiction of local law enforcement. They must not be armed with assault rifles, tear gas, pepper spray and green gas — a chemical weapon illegal under international law. Do everything possible to restrict the ability of these armed goons to gas children, smash car windows, break into homes, schools and churches, and murder law abiding civilians with impunity.
Stand strong against this brazen, lawless assault on our democracy!
And for my follow-up email:
A federal judge had to order this the other day, after massive ICE gassing (the plume of chemical irritant was visible from a mile away) of a peaceful crowd in Portland:
“In a well-functioning constitutional democratic republic, free speech, courageous newsgathering, and nonviolent protest are all permitted, respected, and even celebrated. In an authoritarian regime, that is not the case. Our nation is now at a crossroads,” he wrote.
Federal agents are restricted under the order from using chemical or projectile munitions unless the target of such weapons “poses an imminent threat of physical harm to a law enforcement officer or other person.”
Agents are not allowed to deploy munitions at the head, neck, or torso of any person, “unless the officer is legally justified in using deadly force against that person.” And agents are restricted from deploying munitions if doing so would “endanger any other individual who does not pose an imminent threat of physical harm to a law enforcement officer or other person.”
For help understanding the stakes and preparing your message, read this from Indivisible.
gratuitousblahg 