TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
No bio...
User ID: 373
MAGA would generally refer to the political movement of Donald Trump along with his supporters, especially those who strongly identify with his policy agenda, style, and brand of populist-nationalism. Most people readily understand what I mean when I use the term. Again, your line of argument very closely mimics the old debates we'd have against wokes/SJWs/social justice leftists/political correctness/identity politics. If you truly think another term is better, please state it rather than further charging out into the bailey of "because you use this descriptive term I don't like, that ought to give everyone carte blanche to ignore everything you're saying". This new term would need to fulfill the following conditions: 1) people intuitively understand what it means without having to define it every time I use it; 2) the rest of MAGA could get behind the term and would see not see it as just another step on the euphemism treadmill; 3) the term is short enough that it flows nicely. I could find + replace every time I use MAGA with "supporters of Donald Trump, especially those who strongly identify with his policy agenda, style, and brand of populist-nationalism", but that would be extremely tedious and wouldn't flow well at all.
Wokes could never find a reasonable term that satisfied all 3 conditions, and I doubt you could in this situation here either.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
13d ago
That is, Nielsen revolved around the question of whether a statute commanding that the government "shall take" custody of this class of criminal aliens only applied if those criminal aliens were detained immediately after release from jail. It had nothing to do with a requirement for the government to take custody of those criminal aliens and not doing so.
Sure, the central question in Nielsen was about the timing, but the background opinion surrounding that debate was that "shall" = "requirement". This is referenced several times.
The Board of Immigration Appeals has held that subsection (c)(2), which requires the detention of aliens “described in” subsection (c)(1)
Respondents in the two cases before us are aliens who were detained under §1226(c)(2)’s mandatory-detention requirement
Paragraph (1) provides that the Secretary “shall take” into custody any “alien” having certain characteristics and that the Secretary must do this “when the alien is released” from criminal custody. The critical parts of the provision consist of a verb (“shall take”),
It's the same thing for Guzman Chavez. Sure, "shall" isn't the primary question at stake, but that doesn't mean the courts are treating it as something other than an obligation:
But this argument overlooks the rest of §1231’s directive, which states that DHS “shall” remove the alien within 90 days “[e]xcept as otherwise provided in this section.” §1231(a)(1)(A). And, as noted above, “this section” provides for post-removal detention and supervised release in the event an alien cannot be removed within the 90-day removal period, §§1231(a)(3), (6). Interpreting §1231 to apply even if withholding-only proceedings remain pending longer than 90 days thus does not “mak[e] it structurally impossible” for DHS “to satisfy its statutory obligation,”
And lastly:
So, now you've proven zero out of three attempts to show "shall" as enforceable in any approach at an immigration detainment or deportation context, despite the very laws in question being driven by long periods of administrative neglect of the law. Do you care to try a fourth time? Do you think it's a coincidence that you keep conveniently making this class of mistake? Do you think anyone reading you could possibly miss it?
Cut it out with this nonsense. I think this is a productive debate and am enjoying it from that sense, but statements like "Do you think it's a coincidence that you keep conveniently making this class of mistake?" are just obnoxious.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
13d ago
I use the term MAGA specifically since I was advised to use it as opposed to "the alt right" that I used on my old article. The Trump-aligned right is now doing the same voldemorting tactics that the woke left used to use, so I can post FDB's old article and flip the partisan valences and it'd be correct. It's pretty telling that you don't actually tell me what alternative I should use.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
13d ago
I'll certainly not defend any of those, since the Iraq War and CRT were definite screwups, and stuff like the COVID response I don't know enough about one way or the other (it just wasn't an issue I ever looked into all that deeply). But stuff like the Iraq War and CRT can be defanged by building better institutions through iterative improvement, rather than replacing it with Trumpism which is just so much worse. One of the big fallacies a lot of populists make is that they believe since the previous systems weren't perfect in every way, then they should be burnt to the ground. Trump is rapidly proving why that's an awful idea.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14d ago
Why do you think his post is AI generated? It doesn't have the hallmarks I'd normally look for, and I put his text through 3 ChatGPT detectors and they all came back with 0% match.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14d ago
The filibuster already was partially defeated, first on lower court nominations, then for SCOTUS appointments. I guess you could claim those were different and didn't really matter compared to the filibuster on everything else, but that would just be a handwavy just-so story.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14d ago
I don't see why it should be impossible to subset an issue and talk about particular impacts. MAGA is very uncomfortable talking about missteps Trump made, so it's clear why they'd want to move every conversation away from that towards their usual fare of talking about how "the system is broken!" and recite their usual laundry list of greivances against the dems that they've practiced dozens of times.
"OK, you keep telling me the system is broken. Now you're in charge. How are you going to make it better? What are you going to replace it with?"
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14d ago
Have we considered that while Joe Biden and his grand vizier Ron Klein didn't want open borders, the increasing radicalism of the democratic party(and I specifically mean the party, not the base) made it near-impossible to implement non-open-borders policies due to staffers and undersecretaries?
This is possible, and if you've read Matt Yglesias' works on "The Groups" and how they influenced Biden, it may have been the cause. I'm not sure exactly how much % of the blame they should get, but it's almost certainly higher than 0.
In any case, I suspect the de facto equilibrium is 'when there's a democrat in the white house the borders are open, even to serial killers claiming asylum from bigfoot
Again, strong disagree here. MAGA is overindexing on Biden's 4 years due to recency bias and since it lets them ignore Trump's inaction on an issue that's critical to them. Even Obama's second term had illegal crossing numbers that were about on par with Trump, although Obama probably kept it that way because he knew immigration could be a bombshell if mishandled rather than from him having his hand forced by explicit legislation.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14d ago
If you wish to exercise power, you must retain power.
This is true in a basic sense that "Democrats could just repeal anything we pass", but it's not true in this context where we're talking about making things more difficult to do by unilateral executive authority. The Dems have shown they respect the courts in at least some cases, e.g. Biden trying to ban new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, the courts striking it down, and then Biden effectively going "aw shucks guess we can't do that then".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14d ago
The Lankford immigration bill didn't change venue as far as I understood it, so you'd sue in the district where you're harmed, the appeal to your regional circuit. There was nothing special about DC in the bill.
You're right that the bill didn't change anything explicitly about standing, but I never argued that the bill should be the last word on the issue, simply that it was far better than the status quo for fixing a lot of other things. Now that MAGA won the 50-50 it's functionally irrelevant since Republicans could make whatever type of bill they want, within reason.
In terms of US v Texas, standing demands injury, causation and redressability. The case held Texas had injury & causation but no judicially cognizable interest absent special statutory authorization. In other words, it wasn't a case of just ignoring "shall" requirements, it's that the laws were poorly written (or weren't written with these types of plaintiffs in mind in the first place). By contrast, in Nielsen v. Preap (2019) and Johnson v. Guzman-Chavez (2021), the Supreme Court enforced the INA’s “shall detain” for criminal-alien detention. Those were “shall” duties plus clear statutory schemes that provided judicial review. Long-term neglect by prior administrations underscores why Congress must match “shall” with funding and remedies. When that has been done, “shall” has repeatedly proven enforceable.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14d ago
It almost certainly could be done, though. It would just require Trump to spend a little political capital to move it along. Waffley centrist Senators liked to hide behind the filibuster as e.g. Manchin did during Biden's term, but there's 53 R senators which gives a buffer of 3 defections and they'd still be able to remove it. There have been plenty of news stories recently about how R's in Congress basically can't disagree with Trump on anything, so there's plenty of reason to think the filibuster could be overcome here.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14d ago
Sure, I'm by no means claiming democracy explains 100% of the reason. Single explanations rarely have high r-squared values when dealing with entire countries with millions of people, even if one of them is led by a dictator.
But it's likewise foolish to dismiss democracy as a major explanation.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14d ago
What the fuck is going on?
Humans broadly don't want to hear political opinions that differ greatly from theirs. It's just not in our nature.
Themotte is genuinely the best I've seen by a long shot, even though it has tons of flaws.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
Of course Democrats could and perhaps will try to torture the law's interpretation to crack open a ton of immigration again, but there are limits to how far that can get. Trump and MAGA did that in the other direction in his first term and are doing it again now, and you can see how it pans out: many of the EO's get mangled by the courts, and he achieves results no better than Obama's second term, and which can be revoked by the stroke of a pen when the next guy comes in. So yeah, Democrats could do that but their hand will be far more limited than it was under Biden if conservative legislation is passed. Also, the SCOTUS is probably going to be conservative for at least the next generation since it's that way now, and Dems have no plans for how to retake control of the Senate any time soon.
I'm asking MAGA the question "Now that you have power, what's your plan to deal with immigration long-term, especially once Democrats retake the Presidency sometime in the future", and the response I'm hearing is functionally:
"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas! Legislation is 100% fake and pointless and never makes a difference ever, so there's no reason to bother. Our only hope is to ensure Republican Presidents forever. Thank God for daddy Trump! Trust the Plan!"
With MAGA being the Trump-cult that it is, my priors are that there's a huge distributed search to find a deflection for any accusation that Trump is somehow not the best of all possible worlds for conservatives on every issue. Since Trump isn't prioritizing enduring immigration reform, they work backwards to find excuses, and land on the goofy result that "passing laws is meaningless" with a decent dose of populist pablum "the system is rigged!" and, of course, a recitation of how much they loathe their outgroup, how evil and conniving they are, etc.
MAGA has a golden opportunity to entrench their immigration win, and they're just not doing that since it would require them to hold Trump accountable for failing to optimize for enduring wins rather than temporary fixes that look good on cable news.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
Hochul and Adams didn't criticize it directly by name, but they did complain about immigration's burden on NYC, and many of the chnv arrivals were going there.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
First, 2A rights and duties of the Executive branch are using "shall" in very different contexts, at least from the Judiciary's perspective.
Also, 2A rights are still largely intact? Some states can screw with you a bit or place some minor restrictions on firearms, but none have been able to ban them outright.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
Where you see "democracy" and "freedom", dictators see "coup" and "regime change". Check out Putin's rants on "Color Revolutions" for instance.
You cannot properly understand dictators without understanding how much they obsess over coup proofing.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I was only vaguely aware of the Gang of Six stuff, but I looked it up and... yeah, it's bad. Typical Trump sabotaging actual reforms and failing to make deals.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
If you're looking for any specific thing, my old article goes into the asylum fraud loophole that the bill explicitly would have fixed. And yes, "may" vs "shall" is a very important distinction when writing legislation. Most things are written in "may" terms as a rule to give the Executive flexibility to respond in reasonable ways if situations change. Of course that leeway can be abused which happened with immigration, and that's when "shall" is necessary if you think the Executive isn't going to do its job. If you want an example of this in action, look up 8 U.S.C. §1226(c) and court cases Nielsen v Preap as well as Johnson v Guzman Chavez
If you want another example of what legislation could fix, look up US v Texas (2023). Republicans tried to sue the federal government to get them to enforce immigration restrictions, but were thrown out for lack of standing. That's something that could be addressed by legislation.
I'm not really going to touch the rest of your post on the legitimacy of the system more broadly, since we're so far apart that I doubt it would be productive.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
Russia already had multiple NATO states on its border, and the war added Finland which Russia pretty much shrugged at. Ukraine has somewhat more advantageous terrain if NATO wanted a ground invasion to Moscow, but there's long been zero appetite for that AND Russia has the ultimate deterrent in the form of a huge nuclear arsenal. The major reasons Russia actually invaded are:
- Putin hates democracy because it shows his people what life could look like if they didn't exist in a kleptocratic dictatorship. It's the same reason why he screwed over Armenia when they democratized a bit, and why he went after Georgia. There's a reason Russian leadership seethes so much over Poland too, given that it's a shining example of how much better the West is than the Warsaw Pact (i.e. the former Russian sphere of influence). Ukraine was threatening to become that, but even closer to home. Dictators are always thinking of ways to coup-proof their regimes, and getting rid of pesky alternative political systems on the borders is one option.
- Putin has amateurish views of "The Russian People" and thinks Ukrainians are misguided mini-Russians who need to be shown who's the big brother here.
- He thought he could get away with it easily, and once he made an effort it would look foolish if he had to run home with his tail between his legs, so he constantly doubled down.
Taiwan is a similar problem for China. The direct threat on the border part is an element of the equation, but it's far from the whole story. Taiwan is a democracy full of Han Chinese that shows what life could be like without the CCP. Hong Kong was crushed for similar reasons. It also occupies a special place in the political myth that is the Century of Humiliation, a victimization narrative similar to what the Treaty of Versailles did for Weimar Germany, i.e. it's a fairly mundane piece of history dressed up to be this hugely unjust violation that must be corrected if China is ever to stand tall.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
Yep, lack of standing of Republican plaintiffs is another thing that legislation could explicitly address.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
And even the most-ironclad, loophole free law you can write is useless if the administration isn’t going to enforce it.
Strong disagree here. You're overindexing on what happened in the last few years and assuming different legislation would be functionally identical because that's just how the system works. In reality, a lot of what Biden did was available due to how current laws are written, e.g. not having hard "shall" clauses that gives wide bearing to executive fiat.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
Sure. I remember the meme and found it funny.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
The last major legislation was in 1986, and it was a mess of compromise and had some incoherencies that would later become evident. Add those issues on top of being 40 years old, and yeah, I'd say it's hardly a surprise things aren't exactly in the best shape today.
The reform bill in 2024 would have gone a long way to fixing it. With that dead, Republicans could have (or could still do, I guess) their own party-line bill now that could fix a lot of the issues.
Is there something specific you're looking for? I'm not sure how much of what you wrote were genuine questions, or whether they were just gesturing at political nihilism and implying that since we didn't get it perfect 40 years ago then there'd be no point in doing anything ever.
It sounds like we agree that "shall" implies a requirement from the POV of the courts then, and it's really a question of whether or not it's enforceable. Note that the specific types of legal challenges we're talking about are mostly a Biden-era thing. Bush and Clinton were before my time so there may have been something there that I'm unaware of, but during Obama's tenure there wasn't really any serious challenges in the vein of "hey can you enforce like any immigration restrictions at all?" The major Republican legal challenge that I remember was against DAPA, which functionally would have led to Obama not enforcing immigration laws on a certain category of people, but Obama lost and DAPA died. During that time we were still in the era where Presidents followed the orders of courts without additional enforcement needed from plaintiffs alleging harms, so when the courts ruled against DAPA that was functionally the end of the conversation.
With that in mind, the courts ruling against Republican plaintiffs during Biden's tenure look less like "courts will always just find ways to screw Republicans on immigration", and more like the laws just weren’t prepared to handle these types of situations since they weren’t the anticipated issue when the laws were written. This is just an argument for writing better/updated laws. The AZ v Biden case you cite has the court saying “shall” doesn’t always necessitate action if certain discretion is required or implicitly left to the Executive, but again, this is just a matter of writing well-worded laws that don’t have that issue. When Congress couples “shall” with a detailed statutory scheme that leaves no gap for agency choice, the courts have consistently treated those duties as legally enforceable, and even gone so far as to vacate rules and enjoin the Executive when it violated them.
Your insistence on me producing cases that prove all the points I’m saying in one package is putting the cart before the horse. I can prove the individual points, like:
• The courts are willing to rule in favor of Republicans on immigration generally (e.g. DAPA)
• Well-written “shall” rules are interpreted as requirements by the courts (Nielsen v Preap)
• The legislature can explicitly give litigants the standing to enforce “shall” rules
And all these points taken together would logically imply that well-written immigration legislation would materially help Republicans enforce the law even if there was a Democratic President. But if you want me to give you a court case that does all of those together at the same time, then I really can’t since those laws haven’t been written yet, and I do not possess a time machine.
If you think I've behaved in an unreasonable manner, then yes I'd like to hear it so I can improve. Note that I draw a pretty strict line between talking about public figures + political movements generally, and talking about people participating in the conversation right now. Criticisms of the former are granted significantly more leeway both to understand priors and as an acknowledgement of the innately heated nature of political discussions, but there's a much higher level of decorum expected (from me) and required (to generally have productive debates) for the latter. E.g. calling Trump a buffoon is fine, but if I called you a buffoon that would not be fine. Calling MAGA broadly a Trump cult of personality movement is fine, but if I called you a Trump cultist, that would not be fine. I think I've done a pretty good job abiding by that distinction in these conversations. Again, if you think I haven't feel free to point it out. I think you're not observing the proper decorum with statements like "Do you think it's a coincidence that you keep conveniently making this class of mistake?" and I don't think I'm forcing you to "bend over backwards in the interests of politeness" here. I've said nothing like that to you, and I ask you extend the same courtesy to me.
The conversation you linked where I posted that was a particular case where they functionally said "I think you're meaning to say , but you actually sound like , and with that in mind can you make points to clarify", where I replied with "well, I think you guys sound like , and with that in mind can you make points to clarify". I wouldn't have started down that line of my own volition, but I found what they said had some usefulness so I gave them my own perspective.
More options
Context Copy link