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They have all three branches of government and a favorable supreme court. Trump owns the party and can make all the senators and congressmen fall in line. It would be so easy to pass legislation to massively increase state capacity for audits, deportations, expedited court hearings, etc. Well, it would be easy, if the administration had any competency to work with.
But the purpose of this presidency is impotent lashing out at perceived enemies. It's all theatre and grievance politics. There's no intention of executing proper statecraft, of actually doing things. The best you can hope for is wonton destruction. That's what you get when you elect a conman.
So in one sense, no, it isn't necessary -- if they were comptent. But given they aren't, it's the only option they have.
The majority in the House is less than 10, and there are a lot of clowns in the GOP caucus who can and gleefully will screw everything up on their pet issue du jour.
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The Tea-Party/MAGA Right isn't trying to expand state capacity because a significant portion of the Tea-Party/MAGA right is opposed to expanding state capacity on general principle.
Why would the "don't tread on me" crowd vote to buy the "We will tread" crowd new boots?
As i tried to explain to Anti-populist down thread, the Republicans don't want to change existing laws they want to enforce them.
The "don't tread on me" crowd is already dead and irrelevant, as if they weren't already 10 years ago.
Laws are tools for power. You don't just get one of them and say "ah, we're done, now let's just enforce it and call it a day." Did liberals stop once they got the Civil Rights Act of of 1957 passed? Civil Rights Act of 1960? Civil Rights Act of 1964? Did they call it a day then? No. Of course not. They packed courts with sympathetic judges and universities with sympathetic admins. They even got Republicans to sign off on amendments.
If you want to win, you keep passing more and more laws that get you more power until you get as much of what you want as you can get. You tear up as many enemy laws as possible. You do all of that and you do everything else you can too. Propaganda, persuasion, institutional capture. Enforcing laws you like, ignoring ones you don't. This is politics.
What you don't do is piss and shit yourself and then have a cry when that doesn't do anything.
If you want your state to do things, you need state capacity. That is reality. You might not want that, but the average MAGA voter has a laundry list of things they want their Daddy to do to their enemies.
They've been weirdly successful for a crowd that's supposed to have been "dead and irrelevant" for close to a decade.
Yes, the popular narrative amongst blue and grey tribers is that the Tea Party was killed and eaten by "establishment" republicans and that the populists are stupid for even trying, but the last 12 years of electoral results, cabinet nominations, etc... tell a different story. If anything the opposite is the case, the establishment as represented by people like Bush, Cheney, Romney, French, Brooks, Et Al. have been utterly routed. They have been exiled to the wilderness while Tea-Party luminaries are getting to dictate national policy
You seem to be conflating the Tea Party and MAGA. They're not the same thing. Plenty of people were involved in both movements. That's just politics.
MAGA doesn't care about deficits. They're about to sign a $2.6T omnibus bill. Take a guess how much of that is going towards capacity for deportations.
The latter grew out of the former. Fact remains that the old "establishment republicans" who shared the left's views on technocratic corporatism have been soundly defeated and the populists are getting to set the agenda.
The populists are leery of expanding state capacity because they are well aware that the deep-state/priestly-caste hate them and will immediately turn that state capacity against the populists the moment a Democrat is back in the oval office. This is why the first order of buisiness was to attack the deep-state/priestly-caste's suppply lines. USAID, the MSM, Academia, etc... theory being that if you break the Democrats' ability to support the rabble-rousers and the rabble will disperse themselves.
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