Gotta slowly reverse boil the frog - these are definitely great first steps and will hopefully warm the public up to demilitarizing, then defanging, then defunding/abolishing the police state.

I think a live streamed execution of George W. Bush would be a good way to build back the patriotism after we destroy the Patriot Act. A legal execution of course after he is found guilty for his countless war crimes. Then we can do Clinton, Obama, Biden, and Trump.

Also the Espionage Act.

And Taft-Hartley

A lot of us remember an America without it and the DHS. They are both 9/11 knee jerk reactions that have been nothing but bad for us, exactly like the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. We would have been so much better off to just take the (L) after 9/11 but W kept trying for a (W).

You might not have. But Americans reelected Bush after all these awful post 9/11 policies. There was no appetite for an antiwar and anti surveillance state post 9/11. Americans aren't all victims. They are just mostly sheep.

I think the pew research poll immediately after 9/11 shows you're in the minority, unfortunately.

There are a lot of adults alive today who’ve had it their entire lives

It's not the party, though. There are progressive members of the party, and when they introduce bills like this, the rest of the Democrats cough uncomfortably, and sidle away quietly, leaving the brave progressive to bear the full brunt of the right-wing outrage machine. (See, for example, the Green New Deal.)

I also advocate for incrementalism, but I do think that very progressive positions need to be staked out and anchored by certain members in Congress, to move the Overton window allowing more moderate Democrats to 'make compromises' and still land everyone in a better position.

For DHS/ICE, if Congress can't herd enough cats to abolish them, they can hamstring anything they are permitted to do without a judge-signed warrant. They can also first cut the slush fund appropriated in 2025. If neither of those things work, they can change the purpose of DHS/ICE to go after employers who abuse undocumented workers or leverage restrictive visas against them, and help immigrants get visas instead of locking up and torturing them.

It's easier to settle on the three improvement positions if the initial anchor is closer to the extreme.

It does make sense to have someone who coordinates all the different federal police and intelligence forces in the country. The US has TSA, ATF, FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, Secret Service, Federal Marshals, even the USPS has a police force.

Without some kind of coordination you have undercover agents of one service being wiretapped and followed by another service. Plus, you get the kinds of things that happened around 9/11 where each agency had a slice of the picture but they weren't sharing info so nobody had the whole picture.

I think in a sensible country ATF would be the alcohol branch, tobacco branch and firearms branches of the federal police force. DEA would be the drug enforcement arm of that federal police force. It seems really strange to me that the FBI is basically the federal police force, but for some reason when it comes to firearms-related crime, that's someone else's department.

Also, in a sensible country, someone would be policing the police. I don't actually think any country has properly figured that out though. In reality, it seems like an important role for the police is to enforce the status quo, and ensure that the people on top remain on top and the people on the bottom remain there. That allows police to place themselves slightly below the people on top, but importantly significantly above those on the bottom. Because of that, I don't think the rich and powerful in any country really want a fully controlled police force, otherwise they can't do the extra-judicial things that maintain the hierarchy.

We've sure tried to forget them, but even though they miss 95% of the bomb exercises they are put through, they insist that we dont move on from them.

Itd be faster and just as effective if we made a bonfire of our money at the airport and all just emptied our wallets into it as we passed by them.

Precisely.

Honestly, I'm more scared of TSA than anything they are supposedly preventing.

Abolish America.

Huh, almost like that was the point -- make it so sprawling people can't comprehend getting rid of it. Too bad a lot of us remember a world before the DHS, and it wasn't rampant street terrorism in the USA like they'd have you believe.

Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Russian: Комитет государственной безопасности), which translates to the Committee for State Security

Homeland Security was a Bush Administration creation too, in the wake of 9/11 that they used to do things they long wanted.

Just as they submitted the patriot act like 10 days after, a thousand page law referencing other laws, something that would take years to create. They had it already, that was their wish list.

Homeland Security denies the Bill of Rights applies to them, and should be abolished.

If they were worried about open boarders before, just wait til they see what it takes just to get our farms restaffed.

In theory, a cabinet-level department can be removed with a bill that says "this entity is no longer a thing". But capitalism isn't an entity... You can't really remove it so much as you set up entirely new policies that would replace it. And that is a much different ball of wax to figure out

tusk tusk, er I mean "tisk tisk..."

What makes you believe that we'd magically just end up with something better? Nearly 80 million people voted for Trump after he already had 4 years in office. Those people didn't just vanish.

Even the French Revolution, the shining example that everyone here loves to reference (guillotines), almost immediately turned into a pure dictatorship.

It certainly seems that way, as long as said apparatus ensures their team stays in power. The alternative, consistently and actively engaging in politics, was too much.

They used to sell a slow cooker whose catch phrase was "set it and forget it." This also described prevailing attitudes about political engagement beyond elections.

Defund the police was a popular slogan in 2020, the year that Trump lost. Also, 65% of Americans polled thought burning down the Minneapolis East Precinct was justified.

Also, DHS is much smaller & newer than the idea of police departments. America existed for a long time without DHS, so I don’t even think these are equivalent things at all.

ICE is under DHS. DHS is also doing a bunch of wildly unpopular political "investigations". There are also a lot of concerns about surveillance in general, which DHS is definitely doing (like buying adtech data on everyone) It is not at all controversial to call for scrapping the whole department. Maybe the messaging needs refinement.