Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/22/son-of-malheur.html
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Dear Oregon,
This sounds like bullshit. Why not tell the big fat baby-men that if they don’t vote, they’re fired?
You can argue against a bill, but you can’t commit dereliction of duty to avoid it. And you can’t ask ammosexuals to protect you from NOT DOING YOUR JOB.
Fuck every Republican.
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Wait, they don’t want to vote AGAINST a climate bill? You think they would jump at the chance to show that they have fully ingested the Kool-Aid. Unless they are beginning to suspect that history will not look favorably at climate change deniers… or something.
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Because if they did that, they would lose. This way, they are preventing a legally binding vote.
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White and conservative. White people who non-violently try to stop logging companies from clearcutting old growth forest do get convicted of eco-terrorism.
Glad to hear that these guys have come to understand the fundamental problem with our two party system. Looking forward to their support in the next push for ranked choice voting or proportional representation.
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The best part of this is the guy threatening to kill cops trying to arrest him legally. Shows just how much “blue lives” only matter to them when they’re not on the receiving end.
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Well, I assume the cops won’t do the right thing and put a bullet into Boquist’s brainpan – but I do at least hope his next political opponent will have the decency to call him a “Nazi-loving extremist” in all their ads.
(Not that it’ll do a bit of good in Nazi-loving eastern Oregon…)
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Typical man-baby conservatives. The law is all that matters, until things aren’t going their way.
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To be fair, they learned this trick from Texas Democrats.
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Another example showing how republicans would rather selfishly destroy american democracy than take a loss.
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Well, the last time this happened a real asshole lost his job.
I sure hope that’s the result this time as well.
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In addition to the Texas Eleven mentioned above, there’s a long history of this sort of thing going back hundreds of years if not thousands, on every side of every aisle. It’s something that happens when you have some sort of parliamentary voting.
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The Rs are doing this to avoid a quorum, which prevents a vote on the bill. This is the second time they’ve done it this session, which makes it doubly pathetic.
Similar things have happened in Wisconsin and Texas, and probably at other times and in other places in the history of the USA. In Texas, they tried to block a quorum because of women’s rights issue. In Wisconsin in 2011, the Ds tried to block a quorum on a bill to deny unions some collective bargaining rights for state employees.
In Oregon, the Rs tried to block bills that would slightly increase business taxes (which are sometimes embarrassingly low in Oregon), and now are trying to block a bill that would “raise costs” for businesses that don’t reduce their carbon footprint.
In this particular case, if the Rs continue to hide until the end of the session on June 30, they will also kill a large number of bills, many of which they actually support.
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They won’t do their jobs? Then FIRE THEM.
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Not the “Imma shoot the cops” part. As I said on a different post, legislators will always pull shenanigans. But threatening to start a shooting war with the cops because they don’t like democracy is the chilling part.
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This is similar to what Democratic Senators did in Wisconsin in 2011. They fled to neighboring Illinois to deny Republicans a quorum for their anti-union bill.
I don’t believe those Senators threatened to murder any cop who came for them and received a white nationalist volunteer escort, however. That’s new.
In the end, the Wisconsin Republicans won by removing the budgetary elements of their bill, thereby removing the quorum requirement to pass it.
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Now that they can’t deny climate change any more, they’re essentially coming out and admitting their true plan for dealing with its consequences: hiding out in undisclosed locations, guarded by white supremacist thugs.
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Yeeaaah… that’s kind of an important distinction, there.
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I’m trying to imagine what would happen if a Democrat overtly and repeatedly threatened to murder police officers doing their job. I can’t. The shit-show of protest that would come from Republicans would be unimaginable.
The NRA is throwing their support behind him, too:
the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, the NRA’s lobbying arm, put out a press release applauding Oregon Senate Republicans and urging its members to “thank them for fighting hard … and encourage them to stand strong.” Boquist was listed among Republican senators the NRA-ILA asked its supporters to contact and thank.
Which… I guess is consistent for the NRA: rabidly pro-cop when they shoot brown people, rabidly pro-cop-murder when they inconvenience white conservatives.
I dunno - I say we take him at his word and send a heavily armored SWAT team after him. Whatever happens, happens. (Maybe the Republicans will suddenly become less enthusiastic about militarizing the police…)
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