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r/democrats post about Melat Kiros winning the Democratic primary gets broad support until mods remove it
(hexbear.net)
They removed the post citing rule 5
R5: No posts about Democratic Socialists or Third Parties
- No posts about Democratic socialists
- Do not promote Independent politicians
- Do not promote events held by Independents or third parties
- Do not promote any form of Democratic socialism, socialism, Leninism, Marxism or communism.
- Do not promote other political parties or its members.
- Do not promote other political ideologies.
- Users that participate in a brigade will be banned without any warning
From a Hexbear perspective, they are closely associated with the Democratic Party. However, party leadership has been going on TV all week declaring them the enemy. This is the point of DSA electoralism if you offer it some charitability: the Democrats, as a bourgeois capitalist party, will be forced to purge the Democratic Socialists.
The question is: what should the US Left do when that happens? Furthermore: what do we expect he US Left to do when that happens?
My understanding is that there is no mechanism to do this in american politics. American parties are not "parties" like they are in the rest of the world. Anyone can self label as Democrat or Republican and run and there is absolutely nothing either "party" can do to stop them other than run a different person and tell people that's who the leadership endorses.
In most of the world you register with a party and pay dues to the party as a part of membership. In the US you just register with the government as having a party affiliation, the party has no control of that.
What they gonna do? Fund zionist primary opponents? They're gonna lose.
Only way to stop it is to change US law to make parties more like real parties that control themselves and have proper membership lists etc. That or just arresting all "communists" as traitors to america or something.
So, they do actually have a few methods at their disposal. They can expel DSA members from the official party caucus, forcing them to effectively act as independents though they cannot be prevented from self-identifying as Democrats.
The only other disciplinary measures would be to censure them by simple majority (officially this is a form of public humiliation, they have to sit there and listen as they're berated, but literally nothing else happens) or vote to expel them from Congress by 2/3 majority vote.
Fun fact: George Santos is the only Republican to ever be expelled from Congress. Most expulsions were for supporting the Confederacy.
In 1980, Michael Myers was expelled from the House for ~~wearing a William Shatner mask and murdering 5 in Haddonfield, IL~~ taking bribes.
In 2002, James Trafficant was expelled from the house for taking bribes, racketeering, tax evasion, and making his staffers do chores on his farm (lmao)
Doesn’t being censured also remove them from any committees that they may be on? Which is not insignificant.
Nope! That's just a second, other thing they do.
They're not connected other than that they're both used as a cudgel. A legislator can be removed from committees without being censured, or can be censured without being removed from any committees.
I can't imagine any of these DSA candidates would be allowed on committees in the first place, so that's unlikely to be useful ammunition.
Idk I guess I figure they will come up something just like they do when they need to pass military funding or something else important to upholding capitalism.
I also dont know if I'm full onboard with DSA electoralism, maybe that's all wrong, its just one of many perspectives I keep in mind when thinking about this stuff