The White House has found a novel way to ensure Donald Trump’s nominees ascend to power.
Federal judges in the Western District of Washington swore in former King County Superior Court Judge Roger Rogoff as U.S. attorney Wednesday morning. Within 54 minutes, Trump fired him.
The district’s 17 federal judges have been trying to find a replacement for Seattle’s First Assistant U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd, after Trump failed to formally nominate him. Floyd was appointed in October, though his name was never officially advanced to the Senate for consideration.
Federal law grants a district’s judges the power to appoint a U.S. attorney if the president and the acting attorney general fail to do so within 120 days, subsequently stonewalling the procedural Senate hearings.
Nobody is expecting immediate results. People are calling out the lack of action, not the lack of results.
Do you think the most valuable kind of actions are the ones people publicly talk about?
They would probably be talked about online and in the news after they happened, if they were happening. But they aren’t really, are they? That’s kind of the point. We all know why us US Americans aren’t doing anything, but that’s not really important since we’re still not doing anything.
To move the needle amongst the least politically engaged, yes, those things are very valuable. I know your position is that anyone ignorant of politics are just as bad as the Republicans, so I get why you don’t think you need to make your actions visible to engage these people, but reality doesn’t really reflect that.
While valid, a critical mass is required for any effective action. That’s going to take time in a country as large and spread out as the US. I do believe it will happen, the ball has been rolling. People have already been shot and imprisoned for resisting. Some states are fighting back as well. It’s just a matter of time until a flashpoint happens and a critical mass is reached. If I had to guess, the midterms are going to be part of that.
What actions do you suggest?
You guys are way past the point that many countries would have considered the flashpoint. The thing about reacting too late is that you give the people trying to gain power enough time to prepare to deal with any resistance. I fear it might be to late at this point, but I hope I am wrong. Just page me when you guys finally do something, and I’ll root for you from afar.
I would suggest to at least plan for a mass strikeout in all industries to make your message heard, and to maybe start organising some capability to put up an armed resistance in the off chance that it is too late to make a change through the proper process.
The problem, again, is how spread out the US is. The cities are very far from each other compared to Europe. The federated system also adds roadblocks. Some states are doing better than others, thanks to the state governments. Some states are doing much, much worse.
Unfortunately, the US is unlike any country, and not in a good way. Flashpoints here are totally different, if that hasn’t been obvious yet. The lower class is in survival mode, an intentional strategy by the Trump administration to keep the poor people distracted. They’re walking a fine line, if they go too far and people really start to struggle, it’s over. If they don’t go far enough, then people will have time to organize.
I totally agree on the mass strike, so long as a strike fund or food support network is also in place, so people can actually be willing to attend. I think that’s actually the best way to approach this, and I’ve discussed it with some of my neighbors in the past.
An armed resistance, unless something changes with the military (doubtful), is futile. It’s kind of difficult to use small arms against a reaper drone at 50,000 ft. We have the most funded military in the world, and the fascists in charge wouldn’t hesitate to use it in this scenario. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t prepare for armed conflict, but I’m betting that it would be a relatively quick one.
I agree with most of what you said, however, it should be noted that the US famously lost the war in Vietnam to a bunch of farmers with holes and booby traps. And insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan kept us busy for over a decade, only for us to pretty much lose those wars as well.
So I’m not sure it’s entirely true that armed resistance would be completely futile. But it certainly would be bloody and drawn out.
War is waged a little differently now than when we were in Vietnam, though I understand your point.
I hope you guys can have some headway into organising a general strike before it’s too late. As for armed resistance, while you can’t win against the US military, and armed resistance can still last longer than an unarmed resistance. It’s best to plan and prepare now, so that you can take action if the need arises, rather than attempt one hastily when the time comes.
Even just planning on how to organise later is better than nothing. Discuss where to meet, how to communicate, how to avoid surveillance, etc with anyone locally with the same mindset. If you can’t find anyone near you that would go along with this, that’s a bad sign that the flashpoint you’re waiting for might not be happening anytime soon.
There’s quite a lot of this happening, you’re just not going to see it in news articles and comment sections.
That part is me engaging the other person on what to do behind the scenes. The part about things in the news would be things like general strikes and such. Obviously, those things you quoted wouldn’t be, and shouldn’t be, on the news to be effective against a tyrannical government.
Right, so like, can we maybe collectively stop chastising America for not having instantly overthrown the government when it turned tyrannical? Maybe some patient, constructive encouragement instead; the constant hostility from ostensive allies will only serve to grind down those here on the fediverse actually trying to do things.
Again, nobody was arguing that you should have already overthrown the government, but people are expecting there to be protests that would not be so easily covered up by this point. This should not be construed as criticism on the people who are already doing something, but as a criticism of America’s society as a whole that is so resistant to fighting tyranny despite the efforts of the ones already fighting.