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So... is there a reason you asked how we could interact in ways other than criticism?
No, it is not. A coherent claim has to have some clear logical support. There needs to be an X thus Y component; otherwise it's just an ipse dixit.
And this sort of game is what drives me bonkers about HR815 getting used as a cudgel. You're not "specifically referring to that bill", and you aren't even saying it's an example or part of your example now, but you're also not going explain any level of specific support that could be falsified, to confront any of the reasons people might disagree, and you're not going to recognize that the people defending it here had to constantly
liecompletely miss details about every single section.No, my position is not "we will never trust any legislation on immigration again". My position is that any compromise on immigration needs to have immediate, serious, and costly compromises paid by the group that has spent half of the last forty years exploiting and ignoring the law for their own purposes, instead of people insisting that it's a compromise because it's an immigration bill and Ezra Klien lied about it.
If you think 'fedposting' is bad, you probably will do a better job arguing against it by arguing against it, instead of just going nuts shoving words in other people's mouths.
Trivially, as I demonstrated in the link that coincidentally wasn't worth responding to, it's actually pretty unclear how incompatible it is with winning in the court of popular opinion or passing laws in congress.
More critically, if a policy someone in the media gives a bad name, mean words, and sketchy misuses of DoD funds are all that it takes to make someone not-moderate on that position, you're going to have to give up ever Dem politician on the national level in the last thirty years, especially on gun control. Trump's actual actions were, despite his best efforts, not that far from those of the Obama era... as evidenced by one of his biggest 'scandals' on immigration enforcement revolving around pictures from the Obama era. Didn't matter. Suddenly everyone thought kids in cages were worth crying themselves to sleep over, until Biden got elected and they forgot it was even a thing.
... there's a minor quibble, here, about the 'normie hobby' of spending several minutes doing an Austin Powers impression in the middle of a bunch of federal officers trying to do their job. But it's a distraction.
In 1992, ATF agents trying to enforce a pretty arbitrary federal gun laws -- while operating off a bench warrant issued for a 'failure to appear' to a court date that was itself issued in error -- shot four people, killing two, including an unarmed woman holding a baby. Lon Horuichi, the sniper who killed the unarmed woman, had his state prosecution dropped after federal politicians intervened heavily in the state to unseat the only prosecutor willing to consider that a Bad Thing.
There was another thing, you might have heard about it in the context of charcoal briquettes for some reason? Oh, yeah, 82 people died, a significant portion of which were women or children. Many of them in pretty awful ways! Heavily motivated by the ATF wanting a big, high-profile win on a gun-related case.
And, of course, this had zero impact on Bill Clinton's then-active campaign for a federal assault weapon ban, which passed in 1994 and only ended when an unrelated Republican wave coincided with a sunset provision. Wasn't even controversial at a federal level until a couple complete nutjobs spent five-plus years digging into it and revealed that the official story in both cases had more holes than Ben_Garison's Lankford story, and even then you didn't get national television heads suggesting that maybe you can't shoot people or burn them on a pyre for being annoying and 'resisting arrest'.
(Not that one in a hundred normies could tell you what, say, LaVoy Finicum was protesting, either, but he didn't have a vagina, so he doesn't count.)
No one cared. Progressives don't give a damn about women getting shot. They care about what's politically useful, and what's on the television. And, hell, I'm not saying conservatives are different! (although I personally try to care; in addition to my IRL work, I've pointedly tried to stick to 'don't speak ill of the dead' for this specific example.)
After a sizable Republican trifecta, bluntly, if then. There is absolutely zero tolerance for any serious enforcement on immigration, there wasn't before Trump flopped his fat ass onto an escalator, and there won't be in my lifetime. There's not a single Democrat on the federal stage that can even credibly pretend to oppose sanctuary city policies hiding convicted murderers from ICE. Wasn't in December 2024, either.
Klein, Newsom, and Hochul 'admitted' a lot of things in the same sense that they admitted some trans policies were wrong or a Fieren villain admits anything: "words are a means for deceiving humans". And you can tell that, because Trump has not overstepped anywhere near as dramatically on trans stuff, and all three are bending over backwards for those at the same time they make mouth sounds about moderation, and that Newsom was promoting benefits for illegal immigrants in this supposed golden hour before Trump's second inauguration.
The opportunity for rapprochement and compromise was before someone else had power over you. There may well be strategic or tactical benefits for moderation on the behalf of the victors, but you have to actually make them and support them, not just that it costs political capital to do things, or that you have things you'd rather the political capital be spent on (I agree with you there!), but actually demonstrate that it's not the BATNA.
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