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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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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.

Not quite. The case around DAPA focused on whether the memo followed the APA. SCOTUS left a preliminary injunction (due to a tie vote!) about the DAPA memo itself, but the case was never processed on its merits, and eventually mooted rather than actually requiring the administration follow the law, and that only because Trump won the election literally within months.

There were several other major cases, such as whether states could refuse to offer drivers licenses to illegal immigrants covered under DAPA/DACA/DREAM. Oh, and that little thing called DACA? Maybe you might have heard of it? Big thing that Trump couldn't end it.

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.

... the Obama administration issues thousands of work permits under DAPA after the Fifth Circuit injunction, and then said oops. A further hundred thousand reprieves were granted after the Obama administration swore before the court and in written submissions that they would not act on the memo while the court was ruling on the preliminary injunction to start with. During appeals the Obama administration held that it could offer whatever individualized discretion it wanted, so long as no one made those decisions because of the DAPA rule. Nor was this problem specific to DAPA. The Obama admin repeatedly refused to follow both statutory requirements and court orders mandating notice to a state for settling refugees, up to and including directing state charities to not tell state authorities.

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.

Show me an example, in this or a related context. Your entire argument rests on this, you're repeatedly drawn back to this complete bullshit well, and you can't even deflect well.

((I mean, the first one's somewhere between misleading an false; SCOTUS didn't rule in favor of the immigration restrictionist position in DAPA, it was a tie that always leads to the lower court action holding, and a simple google search on the citation would have shown that! If you mean to say that some courts might, well...))

Did you notice that you gave a three-point bulleted list, and two of them have case citations, and one of them doesn't, and the last one is the only bit that fucking matters? Do you notice that I provided an exact quote from a majority SCOTUS opinion holding that the thing you're asking for would be either an unreviewable political question or unconstitutional?

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.

Hm...

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".

There is a contradiction, here. What, exactly, do you think the difference between "people participating in the conversation right now" are, and what "you guys sound like" is?

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.

Oh, well, if it's okay to be rude as long as someone else's behavior indicates some usefulness... that'd be a fun rule to run! Invite me.

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.

And you've demonstrated that you just don't want to engage. But hey, I'm sure calling people cultists up and down will really change minds.

Just in an more interesting way than I hope you intend.

EDIT: and you've done a respond-and-block. Grats.