If Trump Is Elected Again, He Will Kill 44 People In The First 180 Days
If Trump Is Elected Again, He Will Kill 44 People In The First 180 Days
Project 2025 includes a plan to execute all federal death row prisoners.
We’ve heard a lot about Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s creepy-as-fuck plan for the Trump second term we are all very much hoping never, ever happens. Now, you probably don’t need another reason to be horrified by this prospect, or by Project 2025 itself, but we’re going to give you one anyway: They want to execute all 44 prisoners on death row in the first 180 days. That’s about one execution every four days.
To give you an idea of the scale we are talking about here, there have only been 16 total federal executions since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Three under George W. Bush (who we all know loved an execution), and 13 under Trump. Last year, all of the death penalty states combined executed 23 people. Forty-four people in 180 days is a lot. Especially when you consider the fact it is very hard to get the drugs for lethal injections, which has resulted in more than a few botched executions over the years. It’s likely we could end up with a situation where they are at least trying to execute someone every other day.
This plan is detailed in a segment dedicated to the group’s plans for the Department of Justice. It’s authored by Gene Hamilton, vice president of America First Legal, the Stephen Miller joint that we’re very surprised isn’t already on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of established hate groups.
Enforce the death penalty where appropriate and applicable. Capital punishment is a sensitive matter, as it should be, but the current crime wave makes deterrence vital at the federal, state, and local levels. However, providing this punishment without ever enforcing it provides justice neither for the victims' families nor for the defendant. The next conservative administration should therefore do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row. It should also pursue the death penalty for applicable crimes — particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children — until Congress says otherwise through legislation.
Obtain finality.
Perhaps the most dystopian part of this is where they pretend that they’re also doing something for the prisoners themselves — like, oh, obtain finality for them. This has long been one of their favorite tactics. They do terrible things to people, things those people very much do not want (like being executed or forced to give birth against their will), while pretending as though they are actually doing them a favor.
Now, just to be clear — harsh punishments like the death penalty are not actually very much of a deterrent at all (so says the Department of Justice, mind you). All the death penalty is, really, is a special prize for the people who are into that kind of thing. It makes them happy. It’s gauche to pretend it is anything more than that.
If anything, it is likely that the death penalty actually makes society more violent. As Amnesty International notes, “in 2003 in Canada, 27 years after the country abolished the death penalty the murder rate had fallen by 44 per cent since 1975, when capital punishment was still enforced.” Countries that have the death penalty tend to be more brutal all over — whether because of violent crime or because of brutally oppressive, controlling, violent regimes. I mean, the five nations that execute the most people are China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt … and the United States.
Of course, if there is anything that we know the American Right resents and despises, it is actually looking around and seeing what works and what doesn’t, as opposed to just trusting their guts and what they imagine is “common sense.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) have, since 2019, repeatedly introduced bills to abolish the death penalty. These bills have slowly started to gain support, and now have 80 co-sponsors across Congress.
Via Huffington Post:
Asked if she thought Biden had done all that he could to get congressional Democrats on board with the bill, Pressley said: “I don’t think it is any one person’s responsibility to advance an issue. That is the work of movement-building, and that’s what we’ve been doing. The whole reason that you continue to reintroduce legislation is to continue to bring other people along.”
“At any one time, there could be 12,000 active pieces of legislation,” Pressley continued. “Oftentimes, and I’ll include myself in this, there are bills whose sentiments I’m very much aligned with, but I just didn’t know existed.”
I believe that this is a bigger and more important fight than a lot of people realize.
The purpose of Project 2025 is a complete governmental and cultural takeover, and this is part of that. There is a reason that, after years of barely bringing it up, Republicans have started to double down on the death penalty, why they are suddenly introducing legislation to use it for even more crimes than ever before. This is not about these individual prisoners, this is very much about guiding a culture where they want it to go, because they believe that a nation that is brutish enough to tolerate the death penalty, especially at the scale they would like to use it, is a nation that will, well, vote for them.
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Trump and Co. should be very careful about state sponsored violence. He pisses enough people off and it might be the awning of a gas station for him and his death row buddies
"until Congress says otherwise through legislation" ... uh, I don't recall the Constitution being written that way?