WATCH LIVE: Trump rioters break through barrier and are attempting to break into the Capitol

You’re welcome to suggest it to them. I’ve never had luck with doing that.

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What does it contain? I’d like to know whether I want to watch it.

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It’s scenes from the breaching mainly from the POV of people going into the building (journalists who were outside with the crowds). There is one where a riot officer is getting crushed it looks like. They have footage of the shooting of that one woman as well. Mostly, things like that. Not tons of blood or anything, but it’s really very POV, so it’s upsetting from that perspective.

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Thanks. I will watch it then. Mainly I try to avoid watching people die or get seriously hurt on camera.

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I don’t see any of those things specified in the constitution. The only one I think would actually happen is that he might lose the pension.

There is the one shooting, but they blur the woman as she falls, and it’s in the midst of a scuffle, so… :woman_shrugging:

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None of the benefits are in the Constitution, either, so I would assume that whatever regulation or law that provides for them also lays out conditions for withholding them for cause.

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My god, having watched it now, the bit where they try to tear away the police officer’s gas mask is eerily like a zombie movie, down to the not quite human grunts the crowd emits and the mass of grasping hands.

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Really powerful footage. My fist. went into my mouth at that. And the crush scene was pretty harsh also.

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Indeed (and @robertmckenna), it really is incredibly stuff to watch. It was much worse than the initial reports conveyed.

We’re a failure of a democracy right now.

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I know that @DukeTrout posted the short answer, but I included links for your civics edification.

The overwhelming majority of US laws are not enumerated in the US Constitution. Secret Service protection and Presidential pensions aren’t in the Constitution. They were bills that became laws.

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Not.many of the white dominated countries are in a position to look down on you. Those that still look up to you though… Burkean conservatives they call themselves on this side of the water sometimes. Having to read Burke in school radicalised me.

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Thanks for the quality links!

image

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It’s probably time that the “west” collectively look critically at the past couple of centuries of history and figure out how we can move forward. We keep going through these “cycles” (or lack of a better term, though as a historian, I’m wary of it) where we do brutal and destructive things to each other, to people in the global south, etc, and then saying we learned our lesson this time, and will stop being assholes, then we get people just doubling down on this shit. It’s frustrating how little we learn.

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So I looked up the laws with regard to Secret Service protection for example and none of them say anything about the service being removed if a president is impeached. They stipulate that former presidents are to be protected. Trump will continue to be a former president whether he is removed from office or not. There is a 1974 Justice Department Opinion that states that “former president” does not include presidents removed from office but this doesn’t actually have the force of law. The biggest issue isn’t the benefits but the ability to run again which is sort of excluded by Article I section 3 but it is ambiguous between whether it means that if you are convicted on an impeachment, you lose the ability to ever be elected again or whether you simply are disqualified from keeping the office you currently occupy. If someone knows of an impeached official challenging the forever interpretation, let me know.

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In another forum there was an argument that deadly force should have been used to prevent the mob from entering the Capitol: You do not play around with a violent mob breaking into the seat of government while it’s in session in order to take its leaders hostage and install a dictator. That’s not how revolutions start, that’s how they end.

And while I agree with that, there were unfortunately at least one or two good counter-arguments that I also agree with:

  1. Ordering an authoritarian police force riddled with fascist infiltrators to fire on a mob of fascist insurrectionists… probably would not end as a one-sided bloodbath. The fascists might retreat in the end… but not without a lot more deaths on the pro-democracy side.
  2. If the police had been prepared for holding off a mob with deadly force, they’d have been prepared to hold it off with non- or less-lethal force. They weren’t prepared for any of it, so the argument is moot.

As it is, I have to agree that we were basically lucky that since the mob was full of brainless, confused morons this time it didn’t trigger a civil war.

[truncated before I start rambling extensively about how I think a civil war would be unlikely as any coerced declaration installing Trump as President would be ignored anyway and we’d get increased White terrorism “resistance” instead… Which is also what we’re going to get if we don’t eradicate these groups]

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:rofl:

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No shit? The problem is that none of the laws that aren’t in the constitution say anything specific about what happens to an impeached and convicted president. The Former Presidents Act, literally just says “former president” and I can’t see any reasonable interpretation of that phrase that excludes presidents convicted on impeachment, Justice Department opinions to the contrary.

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That’s funny. Maybe your Google is off

See the last line. But you can also do a search of the exact law, and voilà, number 2

ETA: from Article 1, Section 3

“Trust or profit”

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People should be pointing out to Mike Pence that there’s a real opportunity here. And you get help save the country!

(f) As used in this section, the term “former President” means a person–

(1) who shall have held the office of President of the United States of America;

(2) whose service in such office shall have terminated other than by removal pursuant to section 4 of article II of the Constitution of the United States of America; and

(3) who does not then currently hold such office.

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