TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
No bio...
User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
"Donald Trump and his supporters" has a moderate clunkiness issue, with it taking 31 characters (or 24 if "Donald" is omitted) as opposed to 4 for "MAGA". More importantly it's fairly ambiguous on what "supporters" means here. To a lot of people that could plausibly mean anyone who voted for him, or to people who are supporting him on specific issues. But that would be overbroad, as a reluctant moderate who voted for Trump as the lesser of two evils against Kamala is not who I'm typically referring to when I talk about MAGA. Likewise, Mitch McConnell is a Republican like Trump, and explicitly supports him on issues like SCOTUS nominations, but he's not part of MAGA.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
Actions speak louder than words. The fact they forcibly butted him aside due to the age concerns should be enough proof.
But if you want articles, here's one explicitly issuing a mea culpa.
Beyond that, here's some more: From the Times, from the WSJ
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
Last week there was a conversation on here about a potential peace deal in Ukraine. I claimed that the peace deal seemed fake since if you knew the background on peace efforts, you'd know that both Putin and Zelenskyy were playing a goofy game trying to pin the other one as the one who "doesn't want peace" in the eyes of Trump to try to direct Trump's ire in the other direction.
We now have pretty good confirmation that no peace deal will be forthcoming in the near term. JD Vance has said that the war won't end anytime soon. This backs up further reporting following the mineral deal that Trump's team was looking for ways to compel Russia to come to the table, and didn't really find any options that they liked.
The bull case for a Trump-brokered peace deal was the idea that the US could use its power to demand that both sides come to the table, and if either side tried to walk away then the US could force them back. This worked halfway, as the US has a lot of leverage over Ukraine for things like intelligence gathering, air defense, and to some extent other military deliveries. Much of MAGA hates Zelenskyy personally, and Trump was more than willing to exercise that leverage when Zelenskyy snubbed him at the WH meeting. The problem was that the other half of the puzzle was missing. Some claimed that the US could threaten Russia by promising to "drown Ukraine in weapons" if Russia didn't come to terms. However, Trump has been unable or unwilling to do this, so we had the situation where Trump could compel one side quite effectively, but when the other side did something Trump didn't like all he could do was tweet "Vladimir, STOP".
Peace is good as a general rule, and it would have been good if Trump could have gotten a peace deal along the lines of "ceasefire at current lines of control, Ukrainian defense guaranteed by Europe" so it was worth a shot. But alas, it seems like the war will continue.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
This made me laugh.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
I think there's some truth to movements themselves being concessions when they replace something, although I still think it's useful to look within the movements to see if there's corrections within the movements as well. When Dems lost 2024 they had a notable period of reflection where new ideas were more accepted. When MAGA lost in 2020 they denied the results and said the election was a scam without any compelling evidence. And again, I can't see MAGA doing anything close to what the left did in regards to Biden's age.
I don't see why anyone here is relevant since this place is small and mostly dominated by conservatives. Demanding they stop rejecting conservative critiques more broadly is just silly since there's so many conservative (really, MAGA) critiques that are just utterly wrong, like thinking 2020 was rigged or that vaccines cause autism. I'd like to see MAGA really change it's position on any major thing in a way that implies their critics are right.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
you're repeatedly drawn back to this complete bullshit well, and you can't even deflect well.
and the last one is the only bit that fucking matters?
Nope, I'm done with this. And since you've both stated and demonstrated that you don't want engage without going to personal attacks then I'm just probably not going to reply to you much any more.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Yeah, that's approximately correct.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
The left broadly owned up to screwing up over Biden's age. Could you imagine MAGA doing anything remotely similar, i.e. saying "yes our enemies were broadly right about this particular issue, and we have no choice but to change our strategy"?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Hard agree with Scott here: MAGA's refusal to try to rein in Trump when he does something silly is not a fluke, it's an essential part of the cult of personality that MAGA has become. The fact that the usual suspects are working backwards trying to justify it from nearly any angle (many of which are mutually conflicting, but they broadly don't bother trying to rationalize their defenses) should update the priors of anyone who thought MAGA was an ideological movement rather than a cult built around aggrandizing the whims of a single capricious man.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
The US could have told the Europeans to more firmly eat shit when they suggested intervening, and it likely would have proceeded in the same way that many other African insurrections have, i.e. it would be over quickly... or maybe it wouldn't, but in either case it wouldn't be our problem. Unless of course it became another power-vacuum that allowed a proto-ISIS to rise. In any case the US was probably more deferential to European calls to intervene given how they helped the US to some extent in its wars in Afghanistan + Iraq, and there were a lot of people wondering if NATO had any purpose any more, so they probably hoped to kill multiple birds with one stone and ensure NATO didn't look like "all for me, none for thee".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Libya was already in what could only be classified as a fullblown civil war well before the French pushed NATO to intervene. The country had already functionally split in half, with pitched battles between the rebels and state forces.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
My prior is that Congressional Democrats, State Department Bureaucrats, White House staffers, DNC operatives, and Democrat-controlled media all move more-or-less in lockstep.
The best counterexample I can give is how Biden handled Israel-Palestine. Much of the leftist base along with some true-believer DNC operatives and parts of the media are very much pro-Palestine, and wanted Biden to basically say "fuck Israel". He didn't do this, and it was an ongoing point of tension within the Dem coalition for most of Biden's presidency.
Another counterexample would be to read up on Matthew Yglesias' take on "The Groups", and how during the Biden admin it seemed like on many policies (with the exception of things like the aforementioned Israel issue) the base got to functionally overwrite what the President wanted. Furthermore, it seemed like Harris would have liked to pivot harder to the center if she could have, but the base was fractious enough that there were concerns about wide defections, so Harris ended up being a mealy-mouthed "something for everybody" candidate.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
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.
Do you want me to give a list of your behaviors in this thread and the last thread that are "just obnoxious"?
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.
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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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.
To some extent, maybe? The US hasn't sent Ukraine everything in its reserves since the US repeatedly said that it wasn't willing to compromise its own readiness in the case that a conflict emerged elsewhere in the world. The US could use those reserves, although obviously that would come with (potentially catastrophic) drawbacks. The US could also maybe go to a wartime economy and really start cranking out weapons for Ukraine, but there's just no political willingness to go down that road.
In any case this was never a point I myself made, it was something I just heard when interacting with some MAGA folks who were opposed to Biden's slow-burn approach, and instead wanted a "escalate to de-escalate" policy from Trump.
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