The $64.4 billion bill, which includes roughly $10 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), passed the House by a vote of 220-207. All but one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.), voted for the measure.
The seven Democrats who sided with Republicans were Reps. Henry Cuellar (Texas), Jared Golden (Maine), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), Laura Gillen (N.Y.), Don Davis (N.C.), Tom Suozzi (N.Y.) and Vicente Gonzalez (Texas).
I don’t even blame them. I mean I do blame them, but I feel like it’s pretty obvious making them into a target won’t fix anything.
People usually rationalize their own corruption because if they believe if they didn’t do it somebody else would. That’s not an excuse or justification for what they do, but it’s also not incorrect or irrational.
If you remove one cog, it will just get replaced with another. In this case, it will also be used to help the machine generate it’s victimhood narrative and propaganda, which then is used to justify the bullshit they’ve preemptively laid out in NSPM-7.
That’s why they even hire these people in the first place. They’re basically paid scapegoats so that the machine can always carry on while society is focused on punishing a cog.
I really wouldn’t be surprised to learn that both Charlie Kirk and that CEO of United healthcare were murders for hire carried out by the same networks of wealthy shadowy conservatives. Neither of those murders actually changed anything, except increasing the likelihood of more reactionary violence.
Two cogs are gone, but they have already been replaced. Two men (probably patsys who believed what they were doing would make a difference) are in jail for attacking pieces of the machine, but the machine is more powerful than ever because it now can justify its own propaganda and preemptive crackdown against the people it antagonizes. Make sense?