It could take a few days to get into foster care.
By and large the children would be better off if the federal government lost track of them. Even if you believe Joe Biden is Josiah Bartlet, which he’s not, and even if you believe the policing agencies wouldn’t still be out of control, which they would, there will probably be a Trump in office before the Biden 8 year path to citizenship helps anyone.
So many people joke about us being the baddies. You can tell they don’t mean it. You don’t try to keep children in the custody of the baddie federal government.
Or I guess everything is different now. Every D administration is Camelot and if anything ever goes wrong it’s a few bad apples or something.
Eta: AOC is doing practical politics. She holds back. The reason it’s “impossible” to just put these kids in homes is because hardly anyone wants them free in the USA. I’m sure she does, but she knows “just make them citizens” ain’t happening.
Eta: I’m not doing practical politics. I’m posting on a forum. Hope that helps anyone who thinks I’m not making constructive suggestions to Joe Biden here. Sorry Joe. PM me if you want me to try to put together some official statements or something.
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New law: Congress critters’ pay when they return to the private sector is capped at 4x minimum wage for the next however many years they were in office.
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Yeah this is a good point, seems like just having that would be a MASSIVE benefit.
Obv we need to get them into better facilities and into homes ASAP, but they will need to go through them at some point. So for whatever time period that is, you gotta let everyone in there. Social workers, lawyers, immigration rights groups etc. with inspections with public reports. That would need to be from someone we trust though, not some Biden appointment.
I just want government to keep better track of everyone. That’s part of my path towards universal voter registration. I get that many people bristle at that idea, but that’s where I am coming from.
Just pay people in Congress minimum wage. Watch them raise it to $40/hr.
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Sounds great. Immediate citizenship and keep track so you can register them to vote when they’re 18. But that’s not why ICE/INS/ETC keeps track of people or ever will.
Maybe they can be in the care of the league of women’s voters. Maybe that’s sexist…ACLU?
This would work if almost all of them weren’t independently wealthy, some to an obscene degree (cough Pelosi/Feinstein)
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Wealth tax for all people in Congress. That would do something to weed out people trying to enrich themselves.
That won’t pass and it’s not going to do anything at all about the way lawmakers usually enrich themselves which is by taking a job at a think tank or lobbying shop after leaving office. They’d get made whole for the wealth tax this way so it wouldn’t deter them in the slightest.
It does stop the Donald Trumps and Kelly Loeffler’s from running, and it probably forces Mitch and Nancy to be a bit more creative about how they store their wealth, but it’s a pretty big political lift for a pretty small gain IMO.
A better angle of attack is to make public funds to campaign (including primaries obviously) relatively easy to get, drastically raise the direct pay of legislators, and ban lobbying. It’d be a lot easier to get Congress to vote on sealing the way they get paid off if we offered to make them whole in the process. I’m totally fine with paying people in Congress as well as the median MLB player + a very nice pension in exchange for them not being able to take outside payments.
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Massive transparency laws that require them to disclose a lot about their finances, including years beyond their time in office. Automatic auditing by the IRS for their time in office plus ten years.
That won’t pass either.
No one is listening to us, we’re not Biden’s advisors. A better angle of attack is probably something like you have to wait 2 years to lobby for an agency you had regulated.
What should the public demand though? That’s different than what Biden should try to do. Biden has people telling him to do things all the way on the opposite side of whatever we think is awesome and people telling him to do exactly the things we think are awesome and people saying “Ok, Joe, I trust you. Be practical. Do what you think is best.” Exactly one of those three things is not constructive for advocacy.
I think Congress could be persuaded to pay themselves 4.5M a year with a 1M a year pension for life if they serve 1 term in the senate or 5 terms in the house. That’s the what’s in it for them part. I’m fine with raising those pay packages as high as they have to go for it to pass.
We’re like the East India Company in that we need to transition from an era of shitty pay but enormous perogatives to an era of excellent pay but you to go federal pound me in the ass prison for taking a penny from anyone.
What are the chances that’s going to happen?
Great way to prevent people like AOC from being able to serve while simultaneously having no effect whatsoever no the republicans.
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I’d be tempted to advocate for the idea that members of Congress can keep any money allocated to staff salaries that is unspent, out of the belief that greedy Republicans will shoot themselves in the foot and choose to be understaffed, leading them to do the sort of bad job that costs them elections.
Not very high because it would be resisted from the left. But infinitely more likely than your idea because your idea has 0% chance of happening as there’s nothing in it for the legislators.
When someone tells me that our lawmakers are corrupt the first thing that goes through my head is ‘well then have the government buy them then’.
If we’re going to have careerist politicians who do what’s good for themselves (and that’s always going to be a large % of the people who go through the trouble of getting elected) we have a massive incentives problem. They need to be paid to represent their districts as well as possible… as much as that costs to actually achieve I think is money very well spent.
Yeah it’s the wrong direction entirely.
OG Griftmaster Ron Paul always made a big show of returning unspent staff money to the Treasury. You don’t need a staff when you don’t care about doing the job.
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Does your idea of using the threat of prison rape work as well if we dismantle the prison-industrial complex?
I’m pretty confident that we’ll still have to have places we put people who can’t function in normal society without hurting others. That’s where we should send the white collar criminals too.
I’m sorry but if you have a position of power and privilege and still lack the self control to not break the law to get ahead you’re a very dangerous person who shouldn’t be walking around free.