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Ezra Klein in the pages of the NYT on why the Democrats need to Shutdown the government.
TLDR: Trump is an authoritarian.
Back in March, Democrats justified keeping the government open by saying that the courts were restraining Trump, that a shutdown would only accelerate his executive power, and that markets were already punishing his recklessness re tarrifs. But now with Trump firing dissenters, using federal agencies against political enemies, and enriching himself and his allies through foreign investments and unchecked power, Klein says that none of those arguments hold anymore. The Supreme Court is now backing Trump on key issues, DOGE’s chaotic dismantling of the bureaucracy has slowed because Trump loyalists are running it, and the markets have largely adapted to the new normal.
Maybe the markets have normalized, but we shouldn't according to Klein. Democrats are politically and morally failing by continuing to fund a government that has become an instrument of authoritarianism. He outlines how Democrats could frame a compelling message around corruption and abuse of power, citing Senator Jon Ossoff’s July speech as an example of effective messaging that ties everyday struggles (like high medical costs and housing insecurity) to elite corruption. Specific examples the firing of agency heads like those at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Defense Intelligence Agency for political reasons, targeted investigations into critics such as Senator Adam Schiff and Attorney General Tish James, the FBI’s raid on Bolton’s home, masked ICE agents now conducting raids without identification or warrants, and National Guard troops being deployed to cities LA and DC.
Remember when Joe Biden deliberately let in and imported 10 million people for no other reason than he wanted to? Yeah and the republican house just sat there and funded it all over and over.
The house did try to negotiate a "deal" and got somewhere but unfortunately Biden wouldn't budge on the "inport millions of people" part so the deal dieded.
If the democrats shut down the government without even a list of concrete demands that they want, they're going to look like absolute clowns and take all the blame. The only way to win a shutdown or win threatening a shutdown is to makde demands so reasonable and commonsense that the other party will look bad not giving in.
I'm annoyed by the "imported" framing. Biden didn't wake up one day and go out of his way to coax ten million people into coming to the US. These ten million people wanted to come, and Biden's government elected to not use violence to stop them. This is how any pro-immigration Left-winger thinks of the issue, and you are asking the wrong question at a very deep level if you wonder why they "want" to bring in millions of people. It's simply liberalism taken to its furthest extreme. These people want to come, therefore what right have we to infringe on their freedom by stopping them? How could any amount of missing paperwork justify bringing lethal force to bear against a human being? That's the impulse, and it is a fundamentally moral, compassionate one.
Let this not be mistaken for a pro-open-borders argument on my part. I obviously think America can't afford to let in literally everyone who wants in, for the same reason a private person can't afford to let all the homeless people in town crash on their couch. It's just not reasonable. But it is obvious why someone would "want" to do it - would feel a moral impetus to do it - and the "imported for no clear reason" framing obscures this, which is at once uncharitable to the decision-makers, and obscures the underlying issue of naivete which needs to be confronted head-on if anyone's minds are going to be changed.
He rather did, and then continued doing it for years.
The Biden administration conducted a number of policy changes upon taking over from the trump administration, changes intended to increase the retention rate of migrants and well communicated to migration-related interolutors. These were changes to a status quo, done deliberately and systemically, with predictable and openly desired results by involved elements of the Biden administration. Biden made multiple domestic legal efforts to broaden the inflow potential, spending non-trivial political capital, to shift the status quo into a more publicly receptive position.
Unless one wants to redefine the term violence, enforcement of migration laws is not violence.
Compassion without consideration of the consequence and harms imposed onto others is not compassion.
Rather than compassion, the Democratic stance on migration is much more accurately characterized as a luxury belief, a performative display undertaken only so long as it does not become onus. This was most notably when the Texas migrant bussing began, and then Democrats began panicking at the fiscal burdens of accepting and housing a fraction of the migrants that they'd been in Texas and elsewhere for years.
Self-righteousness and punting the costs onto the outgroup may be a fundamental impulse, but it is not particularly moral.
Sure it is. I mean the term purely descriptively; it's how the business of government happens. The authorities acquire a monopoly on legitimate violence, and use that terrible but awe-some power to enforce laws and regulations for the public good. Enforcing migration laws entails preventing people from crossing the border if they're not allowed to do so, and expelling them if you catch them post hoc. This involves a threat, either explicit or implicit, of physical violence if they don't comply. That's just how it works.
I regard runaway pro-immigration sentiment as a case of people getting irrationally squeamish about one particular area of enforcement, even though they are not consistent anarchists.
You used the word pejoratively; it would not make sense as a moral argument justification if it were used in the purely descriptive sense that you now claim.
This line of argument has no limiting factor, and can apply as much to any interaction.
This internet interaction has an implicit possiblity of violence if certain boundaries are not obliged, since you could always turn to internet sleuths or hackers and seek to harm me if I annoyed you enough, or vice versa. Anyone weaker than you could infer an implicit threat of physical violence if they disagreed with you. Even people not weaker than you, but less interested in a topic, could take the firmness of your position as an implicit threat.
Fortunately, actual violence does not work that way, and neither do sound moral arguments resort to categorical pejorative redefinitions.
Yes it would. Or, to put it another way, I meant it in the objective sense of "if you don't comply, the government will send men with guns after you". I don't know what to tell you. There is of course a kind of implicit pejorative there, in that hurting people is wrong in a vacuum. But like anyone sensible, I recognize that violence can be justified in many cases, to prevent a greater evil. The state having the theoretical authority to use violence, and wielding it as a threat to prevent more chaos and suffering, is one such case. This is all pretty basic stuff.
The moral argument brought forward by pro-immigration extremists (when they are not outright anarchists who reject the premise that state violence is ever justified) is that the harm caused to immigrants by repression efforts is greater than any harm runaway immigration could cause. This is a dumb position and checked out from reality. But it has nothing to do with "pejorative redefinitions". It's just an extremely biased analysis with regards to the harms and benefits on both sides. A coherent anti-immigration argument still has to acknowledge that at some level you're saying "were an illegal to ignore all warnings and come anyway, there comes a point where we would physically shove, hit, or shoot that guy until he was no longer on our side of the border". Such an argument simply involves saying that the benefits of such a policy outweigh the minor moral cost of that violence.
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