A group of Democratic lawmakers has reintroduced a joint resolution to negate a clause in the 13th Amendment of the Constitution that permits slavery or involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime.”
While this is a hopeful step in the right direction, I'm sadly, not holding my breath. It's going to be a long road. My state (Oregon) only LAST YEAR voted and passed to remove slavery/indentured servitude from the State Constitution, and it was only by about 51%. The state of Louisiana? Voted to keep it. They gotta make that money on the less fortunate, no matter the cost.
A bit of virtue signaling, yes, but the GOP is constantly putting forth legislation that won't pass. It works the same for both sides really. "Vote for us and expect more of this." I'd be happy just to start the conversation.
If it was going to start a conversation, wouldn't it have?
The red team tends to pass more godawful things that get some % struck down in the courts, but of which some % remains. It's still vice signalling, but it's vice signalling that causes real world effects.
I agree that's it may be signaling on the politician's part, we know they're all guilty of it, but people should absolutely be talking about that clause in the 13th amendment at every opportunity. Just the fact that it's being talked about in Congress puts discussion into the public sphere and that's a good thing in my opinion. We shouldn't stop the discussion just because we didn't solve the problem immediately.
It's not that I don't want the discussion to happen, it's that this isn't the first time it's been talked about in Congress, and there are other things they could be putting that time and energy towards.
If they were getting together and feeding money into a PAC to put ads on every tv and computer screen in the country about how absolutely fucked that particular provision in the 13th is, I suspect that that would start a lot more conversation. A ton of people in this country are totally checked out on what happens in Congress, but almost everyone stares at screens.
I hear what you're saying. It can be awfully discouraging when you see seemingly no headway on a serious issue like this. There's a lot of money flowing out of the prison industrial complex to stifle the conversation too because they're making money hand over fist working that virtually free labor. I posted it here though precisely because I think it needs to talked about. It's a disgraceful thing to still have legalized slavery in the US and it's going to feel like failure after failure until we finally win and get it changed. Don't lose heart.
Ideally, we could solve this at the level of the 13th, wham bam settled.
In practice, I think what we're going to end up doing, if we do anything, is chipping away at it; legalizing drugs, moving away from a privatized prison model (And credit where it's due, big fan of Biden making as much of that push was within his direct power), etc. I also think that it's not going to be a continuous trip to improvement; I suspect the states that are now losing a bunch of immigrant labor because they "just wanted to scare them" and succeeded at doing just that, are going to go even harder on the privatized prison / legalized slave labor angle. Someone has to harvest those crops, after all, and it won't be the average voter complaining about immigrants taking those jobs.
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