House Homeland Security Committee Subpoenas 8chan Owner
thehill.com
thehill.com
But clearly some people do have to comply, otherwise the subpoenas would be invitations, right? I'm confused about who has to comply, and for who a subpoena is optional.
Subpoenas of administration officials complicate this because the primary vehicle Congress has for enforcing contempt citations is a referral to the DOJ, which is part of the administration; a civil referral is, I think? its own kind of civil suit, which is time-consuming and complicated, and it's likely that the House majority will keep their powder dry on referrals about administration officials until they have a really good case.
But random civilians aren't so fortunate, and can effectively be compelled to testify, and it's likely that Congress would not have much trouble getting their subpoena enforced.
Surely someone needs to feature this possibility in a movie somehow!
Most famous are Michael Heseltine, or Oliver Cromwell a couple of years before the UK's brief experiment with republican dictatorship.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/10/day-of-brex...
"Disciplinary usage"
"In accordance with the House Rules, on the rare occasion that a member becomes unruly, the Sergeant at Arms, upon order of the Speaker, lifts the mace from its pedestal and presents it before the offenders, thereby restoring order. There have been at least six instances where the Mace was used to quell disorder."
"During President Donald Trump's 2019 State of the Union speech, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wore a brooch styled after the Mace, presumably as a symbol of her authority as speaker."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mace_of_the_United_States_Hous...
Weird, seems like a flaw in the checks-n-balances, a lot like the "American Rule" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fe...) for paying attorney's fees.
What it is not is a flaw on checks and balances between the branches of government.
That does not follow. In Germany, for example, the winner is entitled to costs up to the statutory hourly rate. Which is the minimum rate lawyers may bill. If you choose a lawyer that bills twenty times as much, your opponent pays only a twentieth.
The cost of the "best lawyers" doesn't (always/just) mean paying one lawyer an exorbitant amount, it means paying a large team of in-house lawyers, or large legal firm, to spend thousands or tens of thousands of man hours on a case.
Whereas, just blowing off a House subpoena is actually not that big a thing; like, they can still go to court and argue that they shouldn't have had to honor it in the first place. It's a whole different level of plausible deniability.
I did end up in a small clickhole looking for regular schmoes (i.e. not high-level government officials or political operatives) who've been held in contempt of congress and taken it to court. There apparently hasn't been one in decades (so presumably people just comply), except very recently, one of your favourite litigants - backpage.com!
It doesn't seem to happen nowadays, but the authority is there. Interestingly, the normal judiciary protections do not seem to necessarily apply. Legislative procedures is becoming an increasingly interesting area of research for me.
I believe that is not true.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/05/14/capi...
The Sgt. at Arms sits on the board of the US Capitol Police (USCP) and has the authority to request mutual aid from the USCP chief of police.
The USCP does arrest individuals on a semi-frequent basis and places them in holding cells at its headquarters building on D Street Northeast. They can also be held at the DC Department of Corrections' Central Detention Facility on D Street Southeast under USCP authority, just as if they were arrested by any other law enforcement agency in DC.
tl;dr: The House has approximately 2,200 officers and at least a hundred beds at its disposal.
This seems... fairly self evident? What do they want his testimony for, except a dog and pony show?
Since the focus is "content", this reaks of trying to violate the 1st amendment.
Sometimes I wonder if our government should be involved in this at all given that (1) the country was founded by people that would have been characterized as extremists by the crown prior to 1776, and (2) the ability to challenge the government through violence if necessary is natural right of the people when that government no longer represents the will of the people.
As much as I disagree with those fomenting the violence in this instance (El Paso, Dayton and others), my fear in allowing government additional powers beyond what they already have is that some day it might be me, my family, my community and others that share my values that find themselves at odds with the government of the day, and if that day should come I don't want there to be an omnipresent, omnipotent government that curtails unalienable rights that afford us life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The US government is supposed to be subservient to the people and the states by design, not vice versa.
Maybe they'll accuse him of Aiding and Abetting?
1. Credible, specific, and actionable threats.
2. Illegal videos & images (CSE, I think revenge porn might fall into that category now).
3. Recruitment or tangible assistance to terrorist groups.
Even things like broad threats of violence are protected by the 1st Amendment (e.g. calling for killing of groups of people, provided the statements do not amount to specific or actionable threats). See this case as one example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
The truth of the matter is that these recent senseless acts of violence are better seen as a scaling down of the status quo. Historically, mass media would rile up the entire country against a different whole country, creating an all-out war. This new trend is of isolated groups egging on lone members to directly commit an act of "war" at an intrinsically small scale.
The Iraq War was an act of media-incited senseless violence, with around 60,000 direct deaths. None of its cheerleaders were criminally prosecuted for speaking the untruths used to fuel it. Why are we panicking and abandoning our longstanding value of Free Speech over a comparatively tiny number of casualties from what are better described as ordinary crimes? Every single human death is its own tragedy, but wisdom cannot prevail when ignoring a sense of scale.
1. Sounds like this will be done by phone call. Will there be recordings or transcripts made public; is it closed even to reporters?
2. Is this expected to be mostly technical/fact-finding or emotional/political posturing? Frankly I'm not even sure how the usual Democrat/Republican split looks in this case.
This is just going to be political theater. Everyone already knows that unmoderated anonymous boards are cesspools of hate, the obvious recommendation is to do moderation. The government can't infringe on free speech, so this is a waste of time. What are you hoping to get out of him?
Only way this turns out to be substantive is if it leads to a push from the Democrats toward a constitutional amendment in regards to hate speech, which I could see happening.
A more valid answer might involve increasing taxes, and actually funding a department within an existing agency so that existing laws could actually be executed. It might involve directing IT at those offices to provide a stable submission interface that would be useful for outside interests such as browser creators and website administers to direct reports of abuse to. That could then be used to actually review the content and forward it to local enforcement authorities and/or courts if necessary.
Offhand, I think that's probably the closest thing to a real solution I can come up with in 5-10 min.
The only "useful" (to congress) information that I can see gleaned as a result of this is that congress has a news headline to say they're doing something... which is technically information; even if the thing they're doing seems (to me) to be unlikely to actually provide any useful data towards a solution.
Sound bites that you can use to get votes. What else?
These conversations are pointless without the ack that free speech forums are attacked with the most effective methods available. Open forums are not the rule, they are the exception. They are existential threats to conventional power centers.
Do you really not wonder what the most effective way to attack an open forum is?
Also, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't submit stories like this. Garden-variety politics is dime-a-dozen and off topic here. "Committee issues subpoena" is not a significant story, let alone an intellectually interesting one—even less than "politician introduces bill".
As for linking the graph of how a thread ranked, I’ll stop doing that too. However, could you also please call it out in the guidelines too then? The second last point of In Comments seems like the most appropriate place:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
It's how they nailed Al Capone after all.