• buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    1 year ago

    Lots of parts of the American empire don’t get to send senators, like Puerto Rico and DC. Iraq is brown enough that even if we had annexed it officially we’d have done so in a nonvoting kind of way

    • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      They do actually send Senators, but they don’t vote. I think that it would be harder in the present day (maybe less so now with the number of reactionary judges, but American judicial precedent had been trending since the 60s to be more democratic and free for people until the 90s) to pull off another American Samoa.

      I say this because there are Trump-appointee judges reviving long-defunct legal precedents to support their ideological crusade to reshape America from some semblance of a liberal democracy into a fascist dictatorship – citing decisions upholding the Japanese Exclusion Act to uphold laws like Florida’s that ban Chinese people from buying property.

        • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          Right, I think I said Senators because I thought it was the same as DC. Not that a non-voting representative or senator matters either way – but the fact that you pointed it out should demonstrate that I wasn’t unreasonable for pointing out the initial difference in the US not actually annexing Iraq (although I fully believe that ~90 years earlier, the US probably would have pulled a Philippines, but I think that the UN, especially as more former colonies joined, caused superpowers to engage in more proxy wars over outright wars over who owns the dirt).