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A lot of the current immigration debate is wondering what increasingly exotic interpretations of statutes can be made to sneak immigration reform through the backdoor without the Judicial system interfering. But this only needs to happen because the statutes the Legislative passed decades ago say specific things. Why not just pass a new bill? I wrote a post (copied to substack here) that detailed the Republican sabotage of the compromise immigration reform bill back in 2024, and a lot of the discussion was predicated on Trump winning a trifecta in November. I thought that was excessively risky... but they won! Why not do what they said now!?! Stop with the judicial cloak-and-dagger, and pass some freaking immigration reform!
Even if the bill wasn't terrible, which it was (link to previous discussion where this was fleshed out pretty well), passing that bill would have caused the GOP to soundly lose the presidency and the house because their voters wouldn't have showed up to vote for them after that deep betrayal.
Not to mention the Biden Admin would have spun up a vast hostile bureaucracy legalizing millions of recent "asylees" before Trump would have taken office.
reform which makes things worse is bad
taking all of the illegal and bad biden admin decisions which were losing in court and formalizing them into law is bad
having every legal dispute about the bill being forced into the DC Court, the same court which is currently issuing a flurry of insane nationwide injunctions, is not smart politics
Oh? Does DOGE want to fire the incredibly hostile new army of "Asylum Officers" who are rubber stamping asylee claims at breakneck pace and giving people work permits as legal residents? Well, you get to go before Judge Chutkin in the DC Court.
Why didn't they do this, in reality? What in the bill was necessary to do this?
They did this. What did you think the mass asylum and cbp one app were?
If they did the thing that Bleep said would have been a consequence of the bill passing, without the bill passing, how is it a consequence of the bill?
Oh Jesus Christ, this is ridiculous. They did everything through executive order that the legislation would have made permanent.
I've been reading this argument for days without chiming in because it just looks like trolling and gaslighting.
Looking back at the old arguments makes me even angrier because all the claims about how Biden needed this bill to "do something about the border" were obviously gross partisan lies, and nobody ever apologized for them. Just moved on to spewing new lies as if nobody would remember.
I wasn't familiar enough with the details of the debate, but the problems with both presidents' executive orders seems like evidence for the superiority of statutes as a means of setting/implementing policy.
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