@cenkuygur By now, everyone likely has heard about Jon Oliver’s offer to Clarence Thomas to GTFO the SCOTUS, by offering him a million dollars a year to resign and do so. Let’s expand upon the idea and set up the “Bad SCOTUS Justices GTFO trust funds.” Set up a trust fund for each of Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Brent Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Then, on a regular basis, we are continually running a GoFundMe to raise money to distribute in equal parts to these trusts. Then at any point in time, these Justices can, as a requirement to receive their trust, resign from SCOTUS in order to get the funds in their trust. Rinse and repeat with the GoFundMe until they all have resigned and received their trusts. The secondary condition of these trusts is that if SCOTUS rules are reformed to make such financial gifts illegal to give to the SCOTUS Justices, the trusts will be disbursed to specific charities.
At the bare minimum, this will help get rid of one or more terrible Justices, and eventually force Congress or SCOTUS to engage in actual legitimate SCOTUS reform.
Should the funds, until claimed, be reinvested in the project to increase pressure for the initiative? And what would be a good way to raise funds from the wealthy for this?
Funds raised would always be disbursed equally to each of the trusts. I think a regular GoFundMe on a sequential basis (each campaign starts after the other ends) would be fine, and word could be spread by progressives, liberals, and democrats by word of mouth and any way possible (grassroots organization).
My opposition would be that progressive grass roots has better investments to make with our limited funds. But if this could raise funds from the wealthy, then I’d support this.
Or, if we could make it a right wing or centrist populist initiative, then they could use their funds for this. Like, make media which targets a QANON audience, and clarify how the actual deep state includes specific SCOTUS, and share plans for how they could share funds to entice the deep state members to retire from the court. As a bonus, maybe some QANON would even scare them off the court.
@jared123456 If your opposition to this idea is based upon your judgement that “grass roots has better investments to make with our limited funds”, then you are denying agency to others. It is up to each individual to determine what they will do with their limited funds, not you. If you do not support the idea, or you do not think it is a good idea, than that is your prerogative and you can act accordingly.
Let’s not forget to put a clause in there about when they resign. Like a Democratic senate needs to replace them.
@cidra209 Any clauses like that, that are beyond their control, would defeat the purpose of incentivizing them to retire, preventing them from taking up the offer.
Oh I get that. But why would we pay them to retire and then replace them with one of the same?
The idea is that as soon as one or more SCOTUS justices take up the offer, either congress or SCOTUS will reform the rules for SCOTUS justices to make bribing SCOTUS justices illegal, which currently, as long as the justice reports gifts or donations, it is completely legal.
Oh, I seem to be misread, and I should be clear: I never wrote, suggested, nor implied that I could determine what anyone can / will do, contrary to your quoted reply (above).
To reiterate my misconstrued opinion: we have better ways to invest our funds. Again, this does not imply I have authority (nor certainty) over any part of the matter. And ironically, contrary to your misunderstanding, such collaborative feedback actually empowers our collective agency; we could explore such disagreements, I may even change my mind, (… not to mention we could at the least agree to disagree).
While it is unfortunate that I was misconstrued, it has at least opened up this opportunity to explore what I suspect led to the misreading, which hopefully will help our group to understand how to better collaborate.
Perhaps when considering my concern, (that we have better investments to make with limited funds), this could (mistakenly) feel as if I had wrote that: one morally can’t make such an investment. Such a misinterpretation would in fact deny one’s agency. And I sincerely apologize if anyone was bothered by such a misinterpretation. And in the interest of being open, I’m myself not too bothered by such misinterpretation, as I expect online interactions can tend to condition uncooperative expectations, and also I’m a bit of a weirdo so I’m misunderstood fairly often.
Now to be more clearly constructive, I provide feedback and I welcome feedback so that we can explore ideas collaboratively. Exploring disagreement is great, as is agreement. Exploring misunderstanding is also great. All this is empowering our organization. Go team 
I am of the opinion, that like the wildly productive Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s, we should try to absolutely everything possible to further human rights.
We should rely upon public education, legislative lobbying, litigation, and direct action such as boycotts, sit-ins, marches or walks, and similar tactics that rely on mass mobilization, nonviolent resistance, standing in line, civil disobedience, and anything else we can think of.
As an interesting example in the 60s, we had Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated Southern United States in the 60s to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional.
As long as nobody is contributing money they cannot afford to part with, or would rather invest in other efforts, there is no downside to trying to do this.
I deeply agree with needing all hands on deck, that there is no silver bullet, and that we will need an organized array of operations and solutions to the systemic and complex issues we face. My latest comment in political strategy thread talks about some of this.
And despite my previous critical feedback on improving this tactic, on second thought perhaps we don’t need to actually redirect millions of dollars year over year away from progressive small dollar donations. Rather than such an objective of sufficient economic incentives, what if an objective here was to clarify the politicization of the SCOTUS, so they couldn’t continue their pretense of needing to supposedly be apolitical. Then without this fig leaf, it would be much simpler to explicitly politically correct the institution, like by an executive order to unpack the court, or like by instituting term limits, etc.
@jared123456 Yes, that’s right. Even if we do not raise a lot of money, we are still standing there, waving that money at the SCOTUS justices, shining a light on the corruption of the current SCOTUS justices and the lack of accountability.
I wonder if raising such funds could be used for extravagant gifts like vacations for the more left-leaning justices, or something like that. Seems like this could make such a point (that they can not be apolitical) clearer than predicating the funds on the retirement of the obviously corrupt justices.
To be honest, I do not see why not, because they have no rules. I would rather we try to get rid of the most corrupt justices, but I think giving money to the leftist justices should have the same net result, ie: shine a light on the corruption and incentivize the reform of SCOTUS.
So, this type of thing would take more coordination with political representatives in positions of power to capitalize on an opportunity from such an effort. And also some collaboration with similarly focused initiatives (I know of efforts to keep watch on SCOTUS corruption, to expose it). And could take more research in how to legally(?) / successfully make the point politically salient. And at some point in that prep work, we would start the fund raising.
So, how could we network to get these ideas to those we’d need, or how could we bring them here? I would hesitate to start the fundraising first in order to get that networking attention, since how the funds will be used may not be fully determined until after the networking informs the process and coordinates objectives.
That last networking question is where I am a bit lost in the strategy thread, since it seems to me we need some real networking to get a wider collaborative movement organized. And I keep thinking TYT could maybe lend an influential organizer for something like that part, but idk how to get that going.
Well, before any of that, some of the legal stuff will have to be sorted out, probably consulting with a lawyer, set up a nonprofit, set up trusts and trust accounts, set up a trustee, set up things like GoFundMe, and so on.
If I was an American, I would already be looking into these things.
So I guess for now, step one is discussing the idea, and recruiting others, until someone is ambitious enough to look into what is all required legally, and step two would be raising the money needed to set things up legally. Then it would be go time.
Yeah, though I would think, in order to set up the legal stuff to do what it is we want to do, I think we would actually first need to be informed via collaboration (as my previous comment) how it is we should do what it is we want to do.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, makes sense. First step is likely to set up a nonprofit, then It does not have to fall on the shoulders of one person. So we probably have to ask around the community, see if we can find a lawyer that can talk us through what’s needed legally.
Haven’t read each and every post here completely, but isn’t this proposal also unconstitutional? Your proposal, as I understand it is a mechanism to financially encourage justices that disagree with politically to resign from the SCOTUS or that you know, or think you know, are being bribed. Isn’t what is being proposal also a form of bribery? In addition, it also weakens or directly violates the integrity of the Constitution.