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submitted 1 month ago by GrymEdm@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

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.”

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[-] negativeyoda@lemmy.world 164 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] thefartographer@lemm.ee 19 points 1 month ago

More wood for the fire, please

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[-] Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works 145 points 1 month ago

Imagine claiming to support freedom while also supporting anything even remotely as ghoulish as this.

[-] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 47 points 1 month ago

Remember, we’re paying them to draft this legislation.

Check the election calendar for your state and vote them out!

https://ballotpedia.org/Elections_by_state_and_year

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 21 points 1 month ago

That's the worst part. This has no chance of passing, this is just bad theater. Bad theater that you and I are funding.

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[-] Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 134 points 1 month ago

Remember folks, a protest vote against Biden just puts us one step closer to fuckery like this actually happening.

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[-] IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world 120 points 1 month ago

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?

[-] voracitude@lemmy.world 34 points 1 month ago

Now hold on just a minute there. They can have their balls or ovaries kicked off. Inclusivity, y'know.

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[-] unmagical@lemmy.ml 104 points 1 month ago

"Don't like the death camps? Well, we'll send you to death camps and see how you like them then!"

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[-] RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 81 points 1 month ago

Why wouldn't they last a day in Gaza, Andy?

Why wouldn't they?

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[-] ptz@dubvee.org 70 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] NoIWontPickAName@kbin.earth 38 points 1 month ago

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

[-] ptz@dubvee.org 11 points 1 month ago

Yeah, that one I could get behind.

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[-] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 63 points 1 month ago

Protest against genocide? Straight to genocide. Be against genocide? Believe it or not, straight to genocide.

[-] LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world 51 points 1 month ago

So people who are anti-genocide should be genocided?

[-] TomAwsm@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Gotta fight fire with fire

-Republicans, probably

[-] meowMix2525@lemm.ee 51 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] PoliticalAgitator@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

You don't need permission.

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[-] masquenox@lemmy.world 48 points 1 month ago

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.

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[-] FunderPants@lemmy.ca 42 points 1 month ago

What terrible, awful people these conservatives are.

[-] crazyminner@lemmy.ml 42 points 1 month ago

I had to triple check this wasn't an onion article. This seems too stupid and horrible to be real.

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[-] bamfic@lemmy.world 39 points 1 month ago

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.

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[-] Nooodel@lemmy.world 36 points 1 month ago

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?

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[-] knobbysideup@sh.itjust.works 36 points 1 month ago

What a great use of their time. Vote these chucklefucks out already.

[-] Bobmighty@lemmy.world 26 points 1 month ago

This is a clown doing a performance. It's a bunch of hateful horseshit to feed the ever rabid base.

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[-] crispyflagstones@sh.itjust.works 21 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

[-] bradorsomething@ttrpg.network 21 points 1 month ago

Wait, will that include Matt Gaetz?

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[-] ramble81@lemm.ee 20 points 1 month ago

Wait, this isn’t the Onion?

[-] mhague@lemmy.world 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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."

[-] itsgroundhogdayagain@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 month ago

Thanks for wasting even more of our tax dollars on these publicity stunts

[-] NewAgeOldPerson@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago

I honestly thought this was the Onion. Strange timeline. Bring Harambe back.

[-] Granite@kbin.social 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Fucking hell, they are CARTOONISHLY evil.

[-] magnetosphere@fedia.io 15 points 1 month ago

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?

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[-] GroundedGator@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Can we get an uno reverse on this?

Any federally elected politician who does not ~~school~~ acknowledge 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

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[-] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

Such a serious and intelligent political party. Yes, let’s give them lots of money and let them run things.

[-] xc2215x@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago

That is really messed up of the GOP.

[-] phoneymouse@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago
[-] tal@lemmy.today 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

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[-] don@lemm.ee 10 points 1 month ago

Why don’t we introduce a bill that would send any politician convicted of being GOP to Russia for free labor?

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this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
427 points (96.9% liked)

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