TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d ago
Yep, lack of standing of Republican plaintiffs is another thing that legislation could explicitly address.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d 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
3d ago
Sure. I remember the meme and found it funny.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d 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.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
The Senate was always meant to be a powerful counterpart to the House. It was supposed to be the "cooling saucer" that could take up long-term projects like court appointments and treaties, while more immediate concerns like the budget were left to the more representative House. It was also part of the big compromise between big states and small states as to how representation should be handled, and helped allay Southern fears that the North would come for slavery (at least for a time).
There really was quite blatant corruption before the 17th amendment, not just "corruption" in the modern sense where the government doesn't do everything an uninformed populist citizen wants, and so the populist hallucinates that "the system is broken!!!" I do fully agree that the modern Senate is too much of a vetocracy though.
Americans don't care that much about state elections of governors any more. And while that still leaves the Presidential AND House AND Senate elections, they all happen together every 2-4 years so it's not that crazy or hard to keep track of.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
That type of program was probably more typical of the type Biden wanted to have overall, i.e. a much higher number than Trump but still "controlled" in a sense of having some numeric cap, with preauthorization and other checks. I still oppose that type of thing, but think it's different from what was happening at the (land) border where anyone could say "credible fear" and be let into the country.
Also I'm pretty sure there were several Dems who did criticize it, like Adams, Hochul, Cuellar, and some others.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
This wasn't true to any serious extent, other than how laws are always interpreted by the judicial system
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
I agree that Biden had the power to have Obama-level illegal immigration, i.e. about on par with Trump's numbers. I also agree that his refusal to enforce the laws on the books is what caused the spike in immigration. Then he did start enforcing them once it became clear that immigration was a huge liability, hence why immigration numbers started plummeting before Trump took office. I strongly disagree with the notion that the bill was somehow a "trap". It was created by a Republican immigration hawk, the text was out there for all to read, and Trump couldn't come up with many actual issues with the bill so he just cooked up lies to try to sink it. Legislation can have unintended side effects, but it's not like its a haunted house with secret compartments filled with woke lawyers and a million illegal Hondurans. Policies are also not etched in stone and can be amended if they turn out bad.
But you can put all that aside since that's in the past now. MAGA won the 50-50 and now has (or had) the opportunity to create almost whatever immigration bill they wanted. And what did they do with that chance? The answer seems to be "sweet nothing".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
It grew in strength over time. Even in early 2021 there were some rumblings with Kamala Harris making her "do not come" speech (satirized by the right as "do not cum"). Then agreeing in principle on a conservative immigration package that I talked about. Biden doing stuff like trying to reimplement "remain in Mexico", and eventually cutting deals with the country to try to staunch the flow of immigrants without having aggressive enforcement at the border. There were always progressive groups chanting for open borders throughout the process, but the more centrist left realized they had an issue fairly early and gradually picked up steam.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
It's not really about getting to 0 illegal immigration as that's not plausible, it's about having better control over the levers of who gets in, and preventing crazy Biden-era spikes. There's definitely a lot of cynicism when it comes to R politicians on immigration, with how the base wants strict controls but plutocrats want cheap labor, so politicians dance like they're making a change and then do nothing to keep the donations rolling in. MAGA was supposed to be the end of that, but unfortunately it seems like they're too broadly incompetent to actually do much of anything other than temporary fixes.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
I covered this in my earlier post. Yes, the flood that happened under Biden was his fault, although it didn't seem deliberate. It seemed like he wanted to roll back Trump's immigration vibes in nebulous ways, but they way they (Biden or his handlers) effectuated that had unintended consequences that were functionally open-borders via loophole. I know a lot of conservatives on this site take the approach of "never attribute to incompetence that which can plausibly be explained by malice if it involves the outgroup", but the Dem response to immigration afterwards sure made it seem like they knew they fucked up and had dropped a grenade at their feet that they never intended.
Coalitions in the US are large and amorphous, so both your points 1 AND 2 can be correct for different Dems, and they occasionally rotate turns at the wheel depending on who wins elections or who has dementia.
Better immigration laws are needed because the US system is fundamentally broken in ways that only Congress can fix. Executive orders can help (or hurt), but they're just bandaids on a bullethole. You can try mangling interpretations of laws created decades ago and hope the courts don't notice, but they have the annoying habit of saying "hey bro, you can't just ignore Congress" and striking things down. In the status quo, the best conservatives can hope for is Obama-era levels of immigration. At worst, they can expect open borders with next to no recourse. Changing the laws on the books could significantly help that.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
I covered that in my post that I linked. The notion that the bill was "open borders up to 5000 migrants per day" was just egregiously false.
The Wall was always partially/mostly symbolic since it's not like it would stop people committed to getting through it, and it wouldn't do anything to touch people overstaying visas which was a big part of the problem. Sure it would help, and it wouldn't cost that much so it was always worthwhile, it just wasn't something worth fighting tooth and nail for relative to other parts of enforcement.
I wholeheartedly agree though that it's a heck of a lot easier to stop people from getting in beforehand than trying to deport them afterwards, for logistical and political backlash concerns. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
About a year ago I made a post (with motte discussion here) about an immigration reform bill that would have handed Republicans a major victory on the issue with the most conservative comprehensive reform in a generation. Dems would have agreed to the bill since Biden's whoopsie defacto-open-borders made the issue a huge liability for them. Trump tanked it for purely cynical reasons, and the discussion hinged on whether the legislation was somehow a "trap" since Dems were agreeing to it, and whether Republicans should risk getting nothing if they lost in 2024. I contended that Republicans should take the deal and then maybe do additional legislation that was even more stringent if they won, that way they'd have something even if they lost, which was about at a 50% chance on betting markets at the time. But MAGA and Trump won out, going all-in on the double-or-nothing strategy.
In a sense that bet paid off, since Trump won and got a trifecta! There's just one little problem: he's not actually trying to pass any comprehensive enduring immigration legislation. There was the Laken Riley act, but it's quite small in scope. Overall, it's back to his first term tactics of mangling the interpretation of laws through executive orders, and hoping the courts don't stop him. It's likely to be about as successful as it was in his first term. Why do it this way? Why not just ask Congress to give you the powers to do what you want so you don't have to gamble on the courts? Matt Yglesias has a potential explanation in his mailbag post
I think this is pretty easily explained as the intersection of the filibuster, Trump’s authoritarian temperament, and Republican Party domination of the Supreme Court.
We saw progressive versions of this kind of thinking in things like The American Prospect Day One Agenda from 2019 or the late-Obama effort at dramatic climate (Clean Power Plan) and immigration (DAPA) policy via executive branch rule making. But Democrats get much less leash from the judiciary than Republican do, because the Supreme Court is very conservative. We never got to see what the universe in which Biden halts all new oil and gas leasing on federal land looks like, because he just lost in court.
At the same time, Biden genuinely did not have the Trump-like aspiration to be a plebiscitary dictator. When he lost in court, he mostly folded and moved on. If anything, his administration was happy to be able to tell the Sierra Club that he tried and then reap the economic benefits of record oil and gas production. Biden really enjoyed legislative dealmaking, was very good at getting bipartisan bills like CHIPS and IIJA done, spent decades in the US Senate, and was frequently the Obama administration’s “closer” on the Hill. There’s a reason Frank Foer’s admiring biography of Biden is titled “The Last Politician.”
To Biden, shooting the shit with other elected officials and striking bargains was the peak.
Trump, despite the art of the deal bluster, has never shown any interest in legislative dealmaking. At no point during either of his terms has he attempted to engage with Democrats on passing some kind of immigration bill. He spiked the bipartisan border security bill from the Biden era, and has never gone back and said something like, “If we tweak these three provisions, I’m okay with it.” It’s just not of interest to him — he wants power. And the broader conservative movement has become weirdly deferential to that, both because it’s a bit of a personality cult and also because the filibuster has acculturated everyone to thinking of this as being the way the government ought to work.
A bunch of people have asked me whether the 2024 election outcome doesn’t make me glad that Democrats didn’t scrap the filibuster. But honestly, I feel the exact opposite. I would be much more comfortable with a world in which the answer to the question “Why don’t you just get Congress to change the law?” wasn’t just “Well, Democrats will filibuster if I try.”
So MAGA as a political movement has a better chance to change immigration than Republicans have probably ever had, and they're pissing it away with Trump cultism. They'll try to hide behind excuses like the filibuster, which could be ended with 50 votes in the Senate, and Republicans have 53 right now. Alternatively they'll try to hide behind political nihilism and say that passing laws doesn't matter since Dems could just ignore anything they pass -- this is wrong because the laws could help Trump (or other Republicans in the future) do things while there's a friendly president in power, and they could do a variety of things to try to force the Dem's hand when out of power like writing hard "shall" mandates in laws, giving Republican governors or even private citizens the standing to sue for non-enforcement, attach automatic penalties like sequestration-style clawbacks if removal numbers fall below some statutory floor, add 287(g) agreements with states giving local officers INA arrest authority, create independent enforcement boards, etc. None of these are silver bullets obviously since Dems would always be free to repeal any such laws (there are no permanent solutions in a Democracy, just ask Southern Slavers how the Gag Rule went), but that would cost them political capital or otherwise force them to try gambling with the courts if they tried to circumvent things by executive fiat.
But doing any of this would require telling Trump he needs to actually do specific things, and potentially punish him in some way if he fails to enact an ideological agenda he (vaguely) promised. That's very unlikely to happen.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
Same. Not a high confidence bet on my part, but seems far more readily plausible than a cyberattack.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4d ago
I'm perfectly fine with just being mean at this point.
OK, you've decided to be mean. ICE agents are screaming at crying toddlers and dragging them kicking and screaming away from their parents, who are put in concentration camps until they can be deported to a country that may jail or execute them.
Problem: Normies hate seeing things like this. They balk and the other party wins the next election. All of Trump's policies are written in chalk that can just be erased when a new POTUS is in town. Now there's talk about going back to the defacto open borders of Biden's times.
What's step 2 in your master plan then?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
6d ago
What? Are you saying Russia's occupation of Ukraine has been substantially less brutal than the US occupation of Iraq?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
6d ago
Because most people won't care that much no matter what happens, as long as the Russians don't do something completely crazy like bombing nuclear power plants or nuking cities.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
6d ago
Russia cares about worldwide public opinion to some small degree, it's just at a much lower level than you seem to think. If you asked the median Ukrainian if they thought Russia was fighting with "several hands tied behind its back", they'd almost certainly laugh at you. With the electrical bombings trying to freeze civilians to double tap strikes, there's a reason why citizens of the former brother-state of Ukraine are now calling Russians "orcs".
Russia is supply-constrained in many of its munition types nowadays. It doesn't have infinite rockets to just level every building. It's used its stockpiles and has to wait to produce more, then launch them in salvos. Even artillery shells are getting somewhat scarce (relative to the typical Russian way of war) which is why they bothered to get a bunch from North Korea.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
7d ago
Russia has been more than happy to bomb historic buildings and civilian targets like shopping malls, apartment complexes, and hospitals. It hasn't moved the needle. They've also been happy enough to bomb bridges and electrical infrastructure almost continuously. There was supposed to be a minor truce at one point I think where they wouldn't bomb some electrical infra, but it fell apart almost immediately. They have limited themselves in attacking civilian ships and nuclear power plants though, as the risk of a nuclear meltdown is just bad for everyone. And yeah, they can't bomb logistics in NATO countries like Poland due to diplomatic repercussions, but otherwise Russia is fighting pretty much as hard as it can. I don't know why you think Russia is fighting with "several hands tied behind its back", as its not true for the most part. Russia even blew up that dam a while back (although they tried to muddy the waters and make it look like Ukraine could have done it).
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
7d ago
I don't really think this peace offer is real. Both Zelenskyy and Putin have been doing a goofy game trying to pin the other one as "the one who doesn't want peace" in the eyes of Trump. Most of Trump's public ire has been directed at Zelenskyy so far since much of the US right has nothing but searing, red-hot hatred for him. But Trump wanted to get a "deal" of some sort within the first 100 days and Putin's wargoals are still quite maximalist, so it was inevitable that Russian attempts at can-kicking peace negotiations would get old at some point. This is probably just a play by Putin to keep pinning the blame on Zelenskyy by leaving out the crucial component of security guarantees.
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.
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