Contempt of Congress. For invoking the Fifth Amendment. The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
He has a legal right to respond the way that he did. Are they saying that you can no longer take the 5th?
They are claiming that Biden’s pardon means that he had no legal issues to incriminate himself over, making the 5th Amendment moot. So he could go ahead and admit to anything, and he couldn’t be prosecuted, but they could still twist and pervert anything he says into something nefarious, something that the Conservative Propaganda Machine excels at.
So he refused to give them any ammunition to use against him, and they characterized his self-defense as Contempt of Congress, which I’m sure he has in the most literal meaning of the word, but not in the legal sense they mean.
Rand Paul’s witch hunt continues to waste everyone’s time.
It’s not like he wants to improve people’s material conditions. He’s a theater kid
A lot of republicans in congress needed to join a community theater instead
It was a damned if he did, damned if he didn’t set up. The GOP are going to prosecute him no matter what. He knew that. Everyone watching knew that. GOP for sure knows that. They were looking for any trivial thing that they could possibly use as cover but whatever it was, they were going to use it to try to charge him and now they have done so. If he had answered every question they would have found some sentence that wasn’t 100% the exact same as a previous time and used that to charge him instead. It is really making Americans look as stupid as imaginably possible and after decades of North Korea drama, that is something.
So what is it when all the Trump administration lie and say that don’t recall to every question? Or just don’t answer at all? Or yell about the DOW for some reason while actively in violation of the Epstein File release legally required deadline and terms for reductions (and still are)?
This new made up standard only applies to people not Republican. Republicans will be allowed to continue to pull bullshit.
This is truly the land of fuck you. It’s a race to the bottom to see who can be the biggest asshole.
Ask the world and you will find out that it always has been like that, you are just realizing that now with trump.
Dutifully serve your country and try to mitigate an ongoing disaster because of your boss. Treated like shit by a third of the population.
good luck finding another scientist to take responsibility like this ever again.
that’s kind of the point
To be clear the vote was along party lines and was about him excersising his rights under the fifth amendment. So just to be clear the republicans are not just derelict in their duty to impeach the president do to his violations of the constitution but they are directly violating it themselves.
In other news: Water is wet.
And people will now debate whether water can actually be wet or not.
Well technically wet itself isn’t wet, it makes things wet… Oh wait. I’ll fuck off.
Instead of helping people buy food or dealing with the Epstein papers.
Fuck off government
Fuck off *pedophiles/GOP
If we have another pandemic it will kill millions. Luckily it will mostly kill those like these senate dipshits. Unfortunately it will kill a lot of innocent people with it.
The fuck it will. Everyone of these senate assholes would throw a baby off a cliff to be first in line to get the vaccine when it becomes available. They wont risk themselves one bit but will pay lip service to “freedom” to ignore all public safety warnings
RFK junior sounding like apple sauce flowing from a car’s exhaust pipe
“I beg to differ.”
Contempt of Congress for what? Exercising his right not to incriminate himself?
It wasn’t to not incriminate himself, it’s not playing into their bullshit games that they’ve already decided he’s lost.
Why? What are they trying to blame Fauci for?
They’re saying he helped fund China’s bioengineering lab which ended up developing covid 19, and since he has said “my lawyer has advised me not to respond to those questions” as they try to pigeonhole him into whatever they can twist as his fault, they try to hold him in contempt for not answering.
Jesus christ, they’re serious conspiracy nuts in charge looking for a scape-goat.
I got parents who believe in conspiracy bullshit, and you just can’t have a reasonable argument with that level of stupid. Literally anything you say that isn’t in line with their ideology will either be turned into something in line or rejected as a lie or just being brainwashed.
“No comment” is the most reasonable and none-time-wasting response you can give.
In the words of Dan Olson, “they are trying to build a flat Earth”.
Rand Paul thinks China genetically engineered covid and released it to sap Aryan bodily fluids. But the oriental brainpan is incapable of biochemistry, so he thinks Fauci is the white that did it for them.
Rand Paul is a cynical, lying cunt who is unlikely to actually believe any of the bullshit he spouts. He just thinks his idiot constituents will fall for his conspiracy horseshit.
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Under no circumstance should you start diagnosing large swaths of the population with a mental disorder without proof. You definitely shouldn’t use a mental health disorder as a catchall insult (seriously, that’s how new slurs are born). And you most assuredly shouldn’t be labeling people with ODD when there is more evidence that have issues with defying authority, seriously can not overstate how much they ride their conservative leader’s collective dicks, rather than the opposite.
TL;DR don’t use mental health disorders in order to church up your insults. It makes you sound like a massive ass and kind of demonstrates that you’re not a safe person. Any one who grew up diagnosed with ODD will not trust you and with good fucking cause.
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Yeah, you’re just an unsafe person. People aren’t their diagnosis, my guy. You need to expand your circle to include people who scare you, cause you’re xenophobic as fuck.
Have the day you deserve
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Lol you people are always like this go pound dirt
To be fair, the stay-home orders and all that REALLY screwed over lots of small businesses. But the bigger issue there is the expectation that the US economy is predicated on tiny margins (saw a post around that time that said we work paycheck-to-paycheck for a paycheck-to-paycheck business, with a paycheck-to-paycheck landlord, that all answer to a paycheck-to-paycheck government and pretend that this is all sustainable). If basic needs were provided apart from employment, then I highly doubt that people would’ve been as angry about stay-at-home orders. That and the fact that “it’ll be 14 days, folks!” began to stretch into months.
There’s also the fact that, in the US, there is no guarantee that a government order will ever be rescinded. Case in point: the theater we all have to participate in when we try to fly.
That and the fact that “it’ll be 14 days, folks!” began to stretch into months.
That’d be at least partly because of all the fucktards going against sensible advice for “muh freedumbs!” That really stretched things out a lot.
since when are businesses important? if they can’t handle stay at home orders and fail, that’s just the market they pretend to love. seriously. fuck capitalists. pandemic safety for humans trumps people thinking businesses are important.
solution: get good. or maybe running a business is not for you.
You’re arguing that, to buffer against a black swan event, businesses should be making significant extra profit.
I think you’re creating a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.
no. i am arguing that a black swan event taking out a business is fine if it means that the humans are given the proper attention. but instead we got “save the businesses” rules and whatnot.
businesses are not more important than humans even if they hire humans they’ll then need to fire because they failed. this is because businesses are designed to exploit already.
There’s a way that businesses can mitigate risks of low-probability, high-impact events. That’s called insurance, and it’s not so expensive that it requires “significant extra profit” to pay for it.
Having most of your customer base die in a pandemic would’ve also screwed the businesses. The only math was “short term gain” vs “human life.”
The only reason corps and now the government are paycheck to paycheck is because about 1000 people decided they wanted it that way
saw a post around that time that said we work paycheck-to-paycheck for a paycheck-to-paycheck business, with a paycheck-to-paycheck landlord, that all answer to a paycheck-to-paycheck government and pretend that this is all sustainable).
In an economy based even the slightest minor disruption will result is a significant collapse.
It’s almost as though there are downsides to operating finely-tuned just-in-time supply chains without contingencies being taken into account.
Resiliency isn’t free, so beancounters are always resisting any change to improve it.
Doesn’t matter. They’re looking for a witch to distract from Trump’s assorted crimes.
Can we do the Doj next then for failing to release all the Epstein files as legally obligated by Congress and failing to answer why?
Poor guy was screwed either way. It was a no-win situation for him.
If he answered the questions they would have demonized him for his answers and prosecuted him on some bullshit charges.
If he pleaded the fifth (which he did) they would have demonized him for that. And prosecuted him for contempt.
And the whole argument that he has a pre-emptive pardon from Biden is bullshit. This administration - with the judicial system firmly in their pocket - will find a way to dismiss that if they need to.
Pardons can only be retrospective: they can only cover past events. So Biden (or any president) cannot pardon someone for a contempt charge that relates to a court appearance that happened after that president left office. So no chicanery required.
But the notion that you can be held in contempt of Congress for pleading the Fifth is insanely unjust. Which is not to say that the corrupt Supreme Court wouldn’t uphold it.
This is quite literally the entire reason the 5th amendment exists, in the first place. If someone is trying to trap you into incriminating yourself, you have every right to simply not play along.
I mean, the prosecutor (?) admitted it on Fox News that they’re trying to trap him into perjuring himself… the whole thing should’ve been shut down at that very point.
“Congressman, I was force to recommend quarantine lockdowns by the Anti-Trump deep state.”
“Right after the deep state forced the Chinese government to leak a virus from a lab and claim it came from a market.”
The amount of bullshit Republicans are coming up with to distract from real issues such as releasing the rest of the Epstein files is amazing.
This is the entire problem with pre-emptive pardons and why it’s fucked up whether it’s Joe Biden or trump handing them out:
The pardon from Biden covered acts from 2014 through the January 2025 day it was issued. It does not shield Fauci from state-level prosecutions or from investigations into any testimony that he did give that lawmakers thought was false.
It’s been fucked since Nixon got the first one over 50 years, and clearly if we don’t do anything about, it’s going to keep being a problem.
All this shit does is tell every single American:
The justice system is corrupt at the highest levels, but rather than attempt to fix the system, the powerful will just take care of each other and leave everyone else to fend for themselves.
Even if people don’t realize that, that’s what they hear. And it has a large effect on a populace and is usually the clearest sign a society has already failed.
When everyone believes the system is corrupt, they stop caring about what’s right and only caring about if they can get away with something.
It’s the root cause of why shit is so fucked up and everyone is so selfish.
General pardons are far older than Nixon. The infamous (because its dicta are so often misinterpreted as precedent) Garland case in 1866 addressed their legality, in the context if a ruling on general pardons.
The root cause of the lack of trust in the judicial system is corruption, not specifically pardons. Any executive or judicial power, corruptly used, undermines confidence in the system.
I see why he did them. I mean, the GOP said they would weaponize the DOJ. But also, yes, those pardons shouldn’t exist.
I see why he did them
Because he cares about those close to him personally…
Which sounds like a good thing, until you realize most of the country voted for him to fix the justice system for all of us, and one of the first things he did in office was insult people who thought he’d be able to accomplish anything.
If you were already worried about a corrupt justice system in 2021, that was a huge slap in the face.
And then Biden doing this pardons was an even bigger one.
The entire problem with pre-emptive pardons is that they aren’t broad enough?
The problem is double jeopardy doesn’t apply if you’ve never been to trial…
If Fauci had went to federal trial, gotten convicted, and then gotten a pardon; he wouldn’t have to worry about state charges.
He’s never been to federal trial, and he can’t go to federal trial for anything during that decade.
So if he pleads the fifth with a pardon, he should be able to be compelled to testify, and held in contempt if he won’t.
But if he doesn’t plead the fifth, Texas can prosecute him under Texas state law and the pardon means nothing.
It’s a weird “grey area” because it’s not a real area.
Nixon demanded it to resign, and since no one made a big deal because it was easier to let Nixon walk away, it’s become normalized to the point where if you say a president shouldn’t be able to give one to his clearly guilty son for drugs and guns charges…
People accuse you of supporting the other party which is clearly worse.
Which makes no logical sense, and just shows how bad political discourse has gotten.
If Fauci had went to federal trial, gotten convicted, and then gotten a pardon; he wouldn’t have to worry about state charges.
That’s wrong, as @archer correctly explained.
He’s never been to federal trial, and he can’t go to federal trial for anything during that decade.
That’s correct, as long as “anything” falls within the scope of the pardon during that time period.
So if he pleads the fifth with a pardon, he should be able to be compelled to testify, and held in contempt if he won’t.
Only if pleading the Fifth gives him no protection from other potential federal charges not covered by the pardon. If the committee had really wanted to compel testimony, they could have offered Fauci immunity for anything disclosed during his testimony. They didn’t. So a trap was probably being set. It’s unlikely Fauci’s legal counsel are all idiots, so they wouldn’t have advised him to take the Fifth for no reason.
But if he doesn’t plead the fifth, Texas can prosecute him under Texas state law and the pardon means nothing.
Texas can prosecute him under Texas state law whether he pleads the Fifth before Congress or not.
It’s a weird “grey area” because it’s not a real area.
That looks like it’s intended to mean something, but is so vague that it’s impossible to know what.
Incorrect. Dual sovereigns concept means if the Feds charge you with a violation of federal law and don’t convict then if that was a violation of state law the state AG can charge you also. State and Feds don’t get multiple gos each though - that’s double jeopardy protection
If you don’t understand, ask a question
If you had, I’d have explained further in the hopes you understand.
As it is, I don’t honestly care what you understand. So ask someone else for assistance
Hell, Nixon shouldn’t’ve been encouraged to resign. He should’ve been impeached, tried, and removed setting a precedent that nobody is above the law and that politicians can be held to standards
