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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18140 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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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.

I guess I still don't actually understand what your working model is here. Setting aside whether the new legislation would have been good or not for the moment, it seems clear and obvious that there are plenty of statutory reasons for removal or denial of entry that weren't being used. With that fact well established (at least to me), I immediately become very skeptical of anyone that tells me we need new legislation to accomplish something that they're not even trying to do with what's already on the books. So skeptical, in fact, that I tend to think there's an ulterior motive - perhaps there's some poison pill in the law I missed, perhaps they want the optics of saying they did something, perhaps they're shooting for a compromise lock-in that I don't want. From a game theoretic perspective, I would love an off-ramp from this equilibrium, but it's very hard for me to believe that the Defectbot that just did 243 consecutive tats has responded by agreeing to cooperate after only one tit.

I guess our disagreement is about whether the current laws provide statutory reasons for removal or denial of entry?

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".

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