“‘The unborn’ are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.”

~David Barnhart

The only reason pro choice exists is because the republican party found the perfect groups to advocate for and against. It makes their constituents feel all warm and fuzzy to say they’re pro life, while they’re given an equally convenient group to hate. Trans people make up just slightly less than one percent of the US population and the odds of one of their constituents will actually meet a trans person are significantly lower than them meeting that nice middle class gay/black Christian protestant couple who sometimes invites them over for supper after church on Sundays.

I’m not sure we can attribute this inaction to much more than the established Democrats actually stand to personally benefit from these policies. They don’t really have a reason to push back because their donors are the same people in most cases (there are a few exceptions) and so many of them have the same level of gerrymandering and name recognition in their districts as the opposition.

This is not a statement that both parties are the same. They demonstratively are not as Democrats won’t typically be the ones to enact these policies but they also don’t really have a reason to stop them either since things like the tax breaks personally benefit them.

Red Hat 4, father say me down on one of his Frankenstein computers built out of his trash heap in our basement and told me to have fun. I found tux racing konquest and played the shit out of them

Same reason people are pissed at Biden for every handling of <insert problem here> that 100% falls within the domain of another governmental branch. Currently the executive branch is sorta Atlasing our entire government which requires them to severely overreach their powers opening them up to checks and balances by the other highly sabotaged branches that both seemingly wish to force our entire government to accomplish nothing. The most publicized example of this is three student loan forgiveness package that Biden’s administration tried to pass that got blocked, though there are lots of other examples.

The reality is that the executive branch as a whole has very little long term reach and we need to be pressuring Congress to do literally anything at all. The only time I’m going to look at Biden and say “this is his fault” is when I see Congress pass a bill doing something like sending an aid package to Gaza and/or Ukraine, only to have him refuse to sign. Which I suspect he’d actually just sign something like that through. We’ll never know for sure because two of our federal branches are too busy playing something vaguely resembling a game of football where the ball is a 50 lb boulder and everyone’s screaming that they keep subbing their toes on on it.

One of the biggest downsides of a VPN; you share an exit node with lots of other people, only takes one bad actor to get your exit node ip banned

I wish I had been born in Denmark or Norway - at least their social democratic safety nets would allow my community to thrive as the world burns around us

I feel this in my soul.

Yes. That’s a question that has been raised by the US department of state that we might see an answer to in our life times of we’re lucky.

I was mostly using unverified in lacking sources and people not going through and verifying their sources before just blindly believing them. Which seems to happen a lot.

People see Biden did something and don’t look into why Biden did the thing he did then start calling him every because he did the thing he did without understanding why he did it. It’s a vicious circular loop that I’ve seen with pretty much every president we’ve had since I can remember.

Biden seems to be pretty conscious about remaining within the bounds of law so there’s a good chance there’s generally some obscure treaty or other random grouping of legal documents that when all bundled together cause the reaction we see. I like to look up what those are because I find it interesting but I can guarantee the bulk of people in this thread do not.

We’re not bound to sell weapons but we’re bound to provide aid by a combination of Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement (1952) which I can’t find the text of from my phone… Need to wait till I’m near a computer to try again and Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (1991) which I linked elsewhere in the thread.

https://www.dsca.mil/programs/excess-defense-articles-eda Does explicitly allow the sale of arms to a list of nations from my understanding. This is a huge rabbit hole of laws and then exceptions to laws.

whether I personally agree any of this is right is a different story here

The ways to remedy a bilateral defense agreement depending on the actual agreement (I’m having trouble finding any of the us-isreal ones… So I’m just making assumptions here) usually boil down to supplying military aid or providing military defense.

Essentially the us must deploy supplies or a defense force. I’ll keep digging for the actual text of one of these treaties but it might take a bit because the US state departments site is actually just really badly organized.

Summary of our obligations from the state department https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-israel/

The two that apply here are that arms can be dispersed with only congressional notification and that we’re have multiple bilateral defense agreements with them.

Hamas issued an attack on Israel which triggered the bilateral defense agreements and one way to remedy would be to deploy supplies to the region with congressional notification.

Just imagine the damage to the region if we took bilateral defense to it’s logical conclusion and dispatched actual military aid.

This is not Biden “going around Congress”. This is Congress explicitly granting permission in advance to do it as long as they are notified.

(Worth noting I’ve never looked this deeply into this before so I’m learning about this clown fiesta as well. It goes pretty deep…)

That’s only a subsection of our obligations. Two paragraphs up are what I was actually talking about. We have multiple bilateral defense agreements with them which essentially boils down to an attack on me must me treated as an attack on you.

Ah you are correct. They are a non-nato ally as they are out of geographical scope.

https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-israel/#:~:text=Israel has been designated as,relationship with the United States.

This world be applicable though.

It’s the NATO agreement. https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/stock_publications/20120822_nato_treaty_en_light_2009.pdf

Article 5 is the one that got invoked by the Hamas attack

As stated in another thread, at this point Biden has done enough to cover against any legal retaliation however, and 100% command a withdrawal of US support as Israel has actually been using the supplies to commit war crimes

The best way to think of it is that the presidents power is roughly bellcurved relative to how much Congress is in alignment with them. If Congress is completely out of alignment with them they have very little power because congress can pass a vote on what he vetos or issue a stop on any executive action he takes. If Congress is slightly in alignment or out of alignment he becomes able to singlehandedly stop laws and executive actions aren’t likely to get overruled and will have up go under judicial review. If Congress is completely in alignment with him, he doesn’t need to use his veto powers or executive actions and if he does they likely won’t be contested anyway but we’re generally better off with Congress passing a law.

Cool, sounds good to me. Thanks again, I was finding myself eagerly anticipating your responses because I was definitely learning some new things about why people dislike his handling of the Gaza genocides. You’ve made some really good points. I think he’s made a good enough case at this point that NATO is no longer applicable in the case of genocide. At least with to protect him from retaliation if he did command a stop of US support to a NATO ally.

There’s no congressional approval needed as he is driven by treaty to provide arms, if anything he is compelled by Congress to send arms as long as Israel is at war as a US ally due to NATO.

He’s trying to make the argument that Israel committing genocide with those arms is reason to withdraw support, unfortunately the US government moves at a glacial pace on it’s best day to the point that the US military is actually somehow faster. Given the number of Democrats that do support Israel, its entirely realistic that he could get successfully impeached if he failed to comply.

Anyway… Thanks for the civil debate but work is starting so I need to go, I’ll read your next message bit I probably won’t have time to reply.

He actually is in the case that the initial arms shipment was sent, Israel was attacked by Hamas and he had to respond by sending aid. He has gone on record stating that the current war crimes Israel has been committing raise question of the legality of providing further support.

Obviously still remains to be seen if anything will actually come of that though. Words are cheap.

I see, so essentially they would state that it was in defense of the United States because it is was onshore and is there’s nothing Congress could do about it.

That’s actually really horrifying if someone like trump takes the presidency given his current threats…

Biden is legally obligated by treaty to provide Israel with arms. Not doing so would give those maniacs in the house actual reason to impeach