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Trump has made me very fatalistic about this. The two options seem to be the following:
Are you able to define "competent" in this context?
Competent at pushing forward political changes as I said. E.g. Obama had to have a certain level of competence to ram through Obamacare, even if it only ultimately survived in a somewhat mangled form. Trump has had comparatively little long-term change relative to the amount of political capital he entered with, especially in his second term.
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My general feel is that Trump has an unusually-bad case of this. Most alt-right parties in the non-US West are led by defectors from the centre-right parties, not literal reality TV stars.
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This captures why most people aren't actually against immigration. When they reach the precipice of telling other people: "No, you can't live here with us", they buckle. And it's not really a surprise given the media most people consume. For decades, news and entertainment have inundated the public with emotionally charged narratives venerating empathy for the outgroup. When boundary enforcement is systematically framed as moral cruelty, conservative voters absorb and even revel in that emotional conditioning. They favor closed borders in the abstract, but the moment execution demands personal backbone, their media-ingrained impulse to 'be soft' takes over.
To put things in context, conditons haven't been this bad for the left base since Bush Jr. Their footsoldiers are getting killed or jailed for their anti-ICE stunts that provide no tangible political or material benefit to them. They are to some extent demoralized to a point where their political coalition is fracturing in very polarizing ways.
All the right wing has to do is put their foot on the pedal and drive it home. Do a Charlie Kirk legislation, then do another, and another. Demonize 'protestors' who don't strictly abide by every law in the book. Arrest them on the spot. Call them terrorists. Raid their chat groups for dirt, sick the FBI on their parents or neighbors and ask about their childrens or neighbors potential terrorist activities. Every high card has been in the right wings hand for what, a year now? But no, neither the republican politicians or the republican electorate has the guts to maintain their society.
Law and Order is a slogan, not an actual thing most right wingers believe in. They feel angry when reading stories about repeat violent offenders miraculously getting off scot free for the umpteenth time, only to go out to maim or murder again. But there's no organizing around that problem. No consistent emotional animation. Not having law and order when convenient is just another thing the left gets to do that's filed under 'I guess that's just how things are now'. It's actually easier for right wingers in general and conservatives in particular to tolerate the raping and pillaging of their village than kicking out the rapists and pillagers since one has no positive emotional resonance in media whilst the other does. Not all outsiders are pillagers and rapists, don't you know?
Disagree. The Right's problem on immigration really isn't that it lacks viciousness that the Left supposedly has. It's that it's bad at harnessing popular anger against immigration mismanagement under Biden into durable political change. Part of that problem is Trump Cultism. Another part is valuing the optics of dunking on the Left over long-lasting results. The Right had plenty of political capital to do this, it just spent it ineffectively.
The right in the United States is actually achieving results on immigration- it’s just that online right believes immigration crackdowns will make American 90% white. That’s not going to happen.
Is that the case? Show me the numbers. Show me the durable changes that will likely stick through the next Democratic President.
Why is that a requirement? Democrats have the right to implement their own policy they win. It's their decision, and not the Republicans job to cast magical spells that are supposed to stop them?
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This critique would be significantly more effective if you could describe the more effective expenditures of political capital the Right has failed to exploit. To date, your argument appears to begin and end with "Pass more laws", in a context where the laws in place have been systematically ignored and subverted for multiple decades without cease. This has been pointed out to you, at length, many times and by many people, and you remain incapable of explaining how passing additional laws will succeed against the opposition's well-established tactic of ignoring or refusing to enforce laws it doesn't like.
These discussions generally tend to come down to a basic question of the nature of the problem the culture war presents to us. A popular answer, once upon a time, was that our procedures needed updating and then the problems would essentially go away. It does not seem to me that this is an argument that can be credibly made, given the last decade's-worth of evidence.
The problem, as I understand it, is that large portions of the population have incompatible values, and consider those holding opposing values to be an existential threat that must be neutralized. Further, even if such a belief is mistaken, once that belief is embraced and acted upon, it is no longer a mistake for the other side to perceive those who have mistakenly embraced conflict to be an actual existential threat. Given that democrats are willing to run on criminalizing significant portions of Reds' way of life, have demonstrated an ability to win elections while arguing that nits make lice, and that their grassroots broadly supports ideological murder as a solution to the present situation, it seems to me that we're a bit past the point where formalism and norm-respecting carries the day.
For Reds, there is no livable future where we go back to letting Blues run society with a blank check and zero accountability. Coordinating a legitimacy crisis for the current regime is the single most valuable use of political capital available to us, and if you cannot see that, it seems to me that you are going to continue to find reality a very surprising place for the foreseeable future.
If I had a magic wand to control Republicans on immigration, I would do the following:
Enforcing immigration policy at all is maximally inflammatory to many Blues. There are numerous videos from MN of ICE officers explaining that they are trying to apprehend a literal convicted child rapist while some liberal white woman screams that she doesn't care. The one actually bad shoot from that scenario seemed like more of an accident than "trigger happy" and it took something like 100k acts of deliberate provocation to conjure up by what was functonally deliberate Blue policy of trying to generate martyrs and bad press.
And when that was stopped (which was mostly just a matter of going elsewhere for a while before going back), the Blues switched to trying to instigate riots and shit at ICE facilities themselves. You are assuming a level of reasonableness, media-savvy, good faith and mistake theory from the pro-immigration people that is just not in evidence.
Desantis will be portrayed as a corrupt buffoon Nazi by every media outlet to the left of Fox News in that scenario.
Maybe to a tiny handful but it's not useful to collapse strategy down to the what the most hysterical Blues would think. The majority of normies want immigration laws "enforced" in some nebulous way, they just don't like seeing it done.
It was an accident because the ICE agent was trigger happy. To some extent it can be chalked up to bad luck but Trump did a number of things to make the bad luck more likely:
Every vaguely politically aware Blue was being bombarded with agitprop about the MN ICE surge. I had random strangers histrionically rant at me about it from nothing. It was protrayed as the Trump Gestapo kicking in doors to kidnaps, exile or just disappear anyone who was brown.
I'd really like to see how well you keep your cool when dozens of people are given free reign to be as stress-inducing as possible while continually flirting with and threatening violence against you. Or how well you can distinguish "I've got his gun!" from "He has a gun!" after I spend an hour blowing an alarm whistle in your face.
Absolute nonsense. Pure, empty, bad faith talking point. Available data suggests that ICE is probably our best federal agency in terms of not making overzealous fuckups. You're about a hundred times more likely to have a "jumpy" IRS agent accidentally audit you.
MN was not a unique target, they went to tons of states. The difference is that most of those other states had some level of cooperation, even if it was quiet so as not to enrage the Blues. What made MN special was Tim Walz and Keith Ellison doing their best George Wallace impersonation, which is exactly why Trump made some comments to drive the point home.
States don't actually get to openly flaut black-letter federal law. This is well established precedent.
Citation needed. ICE had an enormous surge of agents to hire to hit Trump's goals in an arbitrarily short amount of time. It'd be almost impossible for any agency to hit targets like that without slackening standards to some degree. And that's exactly what happened, though I wouldn't claim the Pretti shooting was responsible for this, it just generally added gas to a combustible situation.
I never said they didn't go to other states, it's that Minnesota was particularly targeted as defacto retaliation for displeasing Trump. MN wasn't "flaunting federal law", they just weren't actively cooperating, so the George Wallace comparison doesn't work here. Part of Trump's ire against MN was for not cooperating, but it was also a target before that too, and this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. So part of this is potentially understandable (send agents where there's less cooperation), while much of it was tangled in Trump's preexisting grudge with claims that he actually "won the election!" in MN, his personal hatred for Tim Walz, and the Somali welfare fraud stuff.
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I think the theatrics help, actually. For the left, it’s about demoralizing them. Showing them that they’re not going to get anything from throwing tantrums and that we aren’t impressed with No Kings rallies with little bouncy houses. It’s about getting the immigrants to understand that liberals cannot stop this and the conservatives don’t care about optics. And it shows the conservatives that immigration enforcement is actually happening, and will continue with no regard for whatever hostage puppy the left or the media put in front of them. The message is: we are serious and it will happen regardless of what anyone thinks about it.
That's all well and good... until the next election rolls around and you've alienated all the normies.
It is not clear to me that your model of "alienating the normies" is accurate. Certainly what alienates normies does not follow any sort of rational model, or that there is a way to take effective action sufficient to the situation that we can know in advance will "alienate normies" less. It is now established to a high degree of probability that Blues ran an illegal project to engineer novel plagues in secret, leaked their work-product, caused a global pandemic, killed thirty-two million people, wrecked the global economy and significantly and pointlessly reduced the quality of life of, to a first approximation, every human being on the planet. All of this is now strongly indicated by publicly available evidence, and somehow none of it has "alienated the normies" to any significant degree. If you are going to claim that normie-alienation is an important part of your model, I'd be interested in how your model accounts for that sequence of events.
It appears to me that Normies are alienated by, essentially, hostile propaganda, and the biggest gains we've made in reducing normie alienation are by direct conflict with the Blue knowledge-production apparatus, not by allowing it an uncontested veto. This is not to say that my side cannot make mistakes or be genuinely unpopular, but rather to note that most of the mechanisms offering granular control over what is popular are controlled by enemies, and to the extent that this is less true over time, it has become less true through an open-ended acceptance of conflict and escalation in the face of highly effective propaganda.
One way to never lose an election again would be to vote for Blues exclusively. Unfortunately, the point of elections is to secure power to coordinate the pursuit of good things; if the choice is between pursuing good things at the risk of "alienating the normies" or accepting bad things indefinitely with the approval of normies, the former is clearly preferable. Any level of immigration restriction beyond de facto open borders would not be a viable policy without "alienating the normies". Having police is not a viable policy without "alienating the normies".
We will definitely make mistakes, and we will definitely lose elections. When this happens, the proper course of action is to escalate. Procedural outcomes exist to be manipulated, and it is my side that should be manipulating them to secure positive outcomes. The hope is that we will be able to secure those outcomes before the escalation becomes uncontrollably self-sustaining, but the alternative is also acceptable.
For your first paragraph, lab-leak is a potential explanation but I've never seen it proved to a high degree of certainty over a random mutation. Also, calling the CCP part of the "Blues" is more than a stretch. There are a few tankies like Hasan Piker that idolize Mao as part of their shock-jock routine, but little beyond that. The modern CCP is basically just Fascism with Chinese Characteristics anyways (lots of nationalism, free enterprise + state capitalism, jingoism).
Obviously the both groups will try to demonize the other side, and the quality of their propaganda has a big impact. But both sides are still easily able to score a bunch of own-goals on that front, giving their opponents easy ammo or acting like ghouls. That's quite common with the Right when it comes to immigration at this point.
These are not the two choices. Political changes will generate a baseline backlash proportional to how substantial the changes are. But on top of that you can also have partisans being extra inflammatory to flex their ingroup credentials. It's personally beneficial to them since they gain advancement within the organization, but collectively detrimental as it hurts the movement's image. Trump is basically the king of this.
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Some of the issues with the right never doing anything I think comes down to the US believing in Adam Smiths invisible hand and not state power.
The US administration has lowered foreign born population by a few million people for the first time in I believe a century we have had a decline.
For a system that believes in the private sector this is still impressive. It’s much easier for an activists to go to let’s say George Soros and raise a few billion dollars to start a ngo that operates in Central America to abuse immigration loopholes to get people in than it is for the federal government to deport millions. You can’t go to the Koch Brothers and raise a few billion to deport people privately for various reasons. Even ardent anti-immigrationists would see giving the Feds the power to check papers and deport on site as an evil infringement on their own rights though potentially a necessary evil.
I seriously doubt how much the private sector could enforce immigration restrictions. Many of the loopholes that get abused when D's are in power are explicitly written into the legal code as statutes. The solution is to overwrite them!
I remember a conversation we had on this, where your argument was 'you just need to write better laws'.
But that's not how politics works. That very well may be the case how legislation works, but any set of laws can be worked around, given motivation and cooperating actors in a supposedly impartial system. There is no system of rules of which is invincible to the people who operate within it. If you have a system of perfect rules which is immune to shenenigans, please share it with the class. If the solution is so apparent, why don't people just make laws with no loopholes at all?
I never claimed well-written laws will be a silver bullet that will work 100% of the time. But yes, they do help quite a lot. The last 10 years has seen a parade of executive orders from both sides trying something egregiously illegal, and then the courts shredding it. Then they try again, but it's with a watered-down version that sort-of survives.
This ideology of legal nihilism, that laws are all fake and have 0% influence on anything is not backed by recent history.
You're making a legalist argument for a society that has arguably abandoned it. Even the Romans, who were scrupulously so, could not stop Caesar with their laws, with all the religious sacrality they put into obeying it.
I would not call it an ideology, but a fact. The laws do not constrain the great, but the small. I'm sorry, Cato. You've lost this argument thousands of years ago. The Americans of today are hardly more moral or law-abiding than the Romans, much less the Americans of yesteryear. Some would argue a lot less.
How does John Marshal refute Andrew Jackson?
Society hasn't abandoned laws. Court cases end up being important or outright decisive in US immigration conflicts all the time.
Would you tell the Cherokee that? Would your legalist argument somehow undo the Trail of Tears? I'm sure the interned Japanese were happy when Korematsu was overturned, but I think the interned Japanese would rather it not happen in the first place. But I belabor the point. You don't want to be convinced. I bring up all of these examples because it is an example of the law being bent around the interests of the state at the time. By motivated actors, within the system, who ignored the plain American constitution to do as they pleased.
And you refuse to recognize it. It's infuriating. The liberal administration before Trump ignored the plain reading of the law, but somehow you still insist that a carefully written piece of legislation will magic them into compliance. No, that's not going to happen. You would be naive to believe that men would be constrained by laws, especially if they believe they are moral in the breaking of it. Liberals go on how conservatives no longer believe in the rule of law, but don't admit to their own shamelessness in this regard. There are areas of which federal law does not apply. They are called sanctuary cities.
You think conservatives will ever believe that the liberals will act in good faith, after trying everything in their power to cheat them?
That trust is not coming back.
Trump and Biden are not Andrew Jackson. They're largely not ignoring court orders. They both try to reinterpret the statutes in ways that help their sides, but when the courts tell them to stop it they listen for the most part.
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In defense of @TheAntipopulist, laws can be a weight on one side of the scale.
It’s kind of like when you sign a waiver to not sue when you bungee jump. You’re not really waiving away your right to sue. But when you do sue, the waiver might slightly influence the jury/judge.
This attitude is only useful when it is clear eyed. Punting on executive action because you need a new law is naive. But laws are still better than nothing.
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It’s really tough to write legislation that can’t be interpreted in a way that creates loopholes. I feel like you need something else to keep things like asylum from being abused. Especially since you kind of want asylum law to be broad enough to be useful in an emergency.
Even worse, once you get a person in the presidency that doesn't want to enforce those laws, they don't have to. It becomes "prosecutorial discretion" whether or not to enforce the most tightly written law you can think of - and the president, as the head of the Executive branch, determines that discretion.
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I would just not allow asylum except from select European countries.
It's meant to help friends, not enemies.
Only allowing asylum from countries we're friends with doesn't really make much sense. How could we be a European country's friends if, at the same time, we were recognizing that they were persecuting their own citizens, and taking the persecuted citizens' side? I agree that asylum should generally not be applied to people who are themselves our enemies individually, but the obvious use-case is defectors from enemy nations - it's Muslim apostates, it's politically-dissident Chinese. Granting asylum to the denizens of an ally only makes sense in the case of a Ukraine-style war and I don't think that's the central case for an asylum-seeker, those are black-swan events.
You have successfully divined the point. I don't want to help the vast majority of current asylum claimants. A tyrannical dictator or a massive catastrophe are rare, valid events that I want to help. Living standards in Pashtun being shit (because of all the Pashtuns) or interminable ethnoreligious sand wars (a product of the backwards people and religions there) are not.
I do not want to help Africans or Arabs or Bomalians or Gomalians. Not in any way that involves bringing them here, at least.
By "the central case for an asylum-seeker" I didn't mean "the median person seeking asylum today" - who, to be clear, I agree should not be claiming asylum - I meant "the central case for the platonic ideal of asylum". That is, I think asylum should typically apply to individuals, not broad demographics. A catastrophe or war that leaves tens of thousands of people needing help, I think that's very abnormal, and specific decrees can be made when the situation arises. The archetypal asylum-seeker should be some anti-establishment journalist facing purging or assassination in Russia or China; some prominent Muslim-born thinker who gets a fatwa declared against him; etc. People, in other words, whose personal commitment to western-style values puts them at risk in hostile illiberal nations.
I would be willing to offer a reasonable asylum hearing to Europeans being threatened by their governments for proscribed speech.
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Wasn't that the aftermath of WW2, where German jews were displaced across Europe, into culturally similar countries? As in, this was why asylum treaties exist.
Shithole sand wars should not provide a golden ticket for illiterate goat herders to come and leech off of Western states' largesse. Shithole sand wars happen constantly, all the time. It's the default state of the area.
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Even then I think it needs to be tighter. Im firmly in favor of “first safe harbor” as a legal principle here. If you’re in danger, you are free to go to the nearest safe country to seek asylum. If you’re a Palestinian fleeing Gaza, you can go to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, or Egypt. You are not getting in to Europe or North America on an asylum claim because at that point you’ve crossed over half the globe in search of a rich country to live in. It’s crazy to me.
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Maybe you don't get everything right on the first pass, but well-crafted legislation will have far fewer loopholes than slapdash laws, and then you can patch things if/when problems arise. Trump just isn't really bothering.
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The Trump administration has been extremely effective at removing immigrants, much more than I would have predicted. The foreign born population has fallen by something like 3 million since he's taken office, illegal immigration is near zero, asylum claims are being denied at record rates, H1Bs are declining rapidly.
What's more, removals are accelerating. The "ICE goon squads" are doing their job in a more quiet, effective way than they were when Greg Bovino (a peacocking retard) was in charge.
I mean, if you want less immigration, it's hard to imagine a better alternative.
Edit: Just today, the DOL suspended nearly all of India-based Cognizant's visa filings. And news like this is like a weekly occurrence.
https://insiderwire.com/news/dol-suspends-nearly-all-of-india-based-cognizants-visa-filings
This number is almost certainly wrong.
Trump has been decent on the flow of immigration, but much less on the stock of immigration. Even if we accept the 3M number, that puts Trump still somewhat behind Biden that let in about 10M over his 4 years. And I expect the pace to decrease overall since Trump is likely to lose at least the House, and much of the decline is from self-deportations which will probably taper off.
The bigger issue is that there's a number of well-known loopholes in the immigration statutes that Dems have used that Trump just... isn't bothering to fix. I don't really blame Trump for not winning on the birthright citizenship issue since that's more of the SCOTUS acting like philosopher kings, which is outside of Trump's control.
Trump came in with the biggest momentum for immigration crackdown of any president that I've seen in my life, and at best he might be able to undo Biden's damage while still leaving the overall system just as prone to loopholes when a D takes over.
Yeah, I'll acknowledge its much harder to deport than to import which is why Trump's success is so remarkable, and far beyond what any reasonable person would have predicted. I'll also acknowledge that measuring the foreign born population is hard, although people on the low-IQ right saying "107 million" are full of crap.
Which ones? The crazy thing is that the Trump administration is somewhat responsive to randos on Twitter pointing out good ideas. Despite what everyone says, we don't actually have an imperial presidency on domestic issues and there are strong limits to what he can do. Tinpot judges have a lot of power.
Really we have to give a lot of the credit to Stephen Miller who is the 150 IQ turbo-autist that the country needs. If you're anti-immigration, and Stephen Miller isn't doing it for you, I don't even know. I think we're actually pretty close to the limits of what's possible.
Of course it will all be undone and more the second we get a Democratic president. Every election is existential now for the foreseeable future.
They have all three branches of government. Now is the time to remove from power through lawfare or otherwise the various "Soros DAs" and judges.
Sure. But how, exactly?
I'd even debate that the "all three branches" claim is a bit much. Republicans have a razor-thin majority in the House, and do not have enough votes to break a filibuster in the Senate. The judiciary branch has a supermajority of leftist judges. Even in the Supreme Court, two of the "Republican" justices are squishy to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if voted for Haris in 2024. They couldn't even fix birthright.
The demands on the Trump administration from the right are bordering on ridiculous. It's actually amazing how much the Trump administration has done with the small mandate they had. Imagine a counterfactual Romney presidency!
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Immigration law is a trainwreck in general, so there are tons. One particularly noteworthy issue that Biden abused was the parole authority. This is something the 2024 bill would have ameliorated somewhat. Then Trump cynically torpedoed that bill with MAGA promising he'd deliver a much stronger bill if he became President. Then he did almost nothing statutorily.
Then another issue is Trump's border policies are constantly getting shredded by the courts, usually because he's trying to do something with an executive order when there's laws on the books from decades ago that say differently, so the courts rule against him. Instead of trying to fix the law he just looks for a different loophole for enforcement. It's a strategy with more wins than he had in his first term, mostly because he spent his first term losing hard over and over, and a few effective strategies bubbled to the top. But it's still wobbly in lots of places, and it's a very fixable issue.
Miller is great but is more like a local maximum -- Trump has given him broad leeway to do stuff with EOs and enforcement agencies but gives him little leverage beyond that.
It is a trainwreck because one side just ignores the law. Look at your example of Biden's parole abuse. The law says that the pres admin can temporarily parole individuals into the US on a case by case basis. Biden admin parole in millions of him over his term, this was done categorically, not at all case by case.
Why rely on another law to fix parole? The original law is already clear and is ignored. Trump was able to shut down the border with the laws on the books, what is another law that gives concession to the pro side going to do?
Biden didn't really ignore the law on immigration. One could make the argument (which I would agree with) that he ignored the spirit of what the law intended, but his parole abuse followed the letter since every applicant technically received an individual decision, and the DHS asserted individualized "significant public benefit" findings. The definitions of those things were so wishy washy that it could mean almost anything. Republican states tried to sue, then fell victim to another way in which immigration law was busted: technicalities around standing. They actually did fix that issue in 2025 though with the Laken Riley Act.
I would consider "pretending words mean what we want them to mean instead of what they actually mean so we can technically follow the law" the same as just ignoring the law.
Biden's interpretation wasn't so egregious that a "reasonable" person would say it's completely unfounded based on the text alone. Usually we'd have courts decide these sorts of things, and they almost did! But then the court case got thrown out for lack of standing because, again, US immigration law is a trainwreck and badly in need of reform.
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I'm having a hard time seeing how this is easy to do, or even possible. We actually do have a lot of good immigration laws on the books. The problem is that, until Trump, they were just not enforced. Remember how Biden said he needed a law to strength the southern border? And then Trump fixed it almost immediately? This is similar to gun control. We don't need more laws. We just need the will to enforce existing laws.
The most important thing is not to pass any new laws which come with amnesty. Because that was tried before. The result was millions of new citizens while enforcement was just forgotten immediately.
I'll go further though. Congress is hard to work with because there are enough crypto-democrats to prevent the passage of any genuinely useful laws. The SAVE act is the most salient example. A lot of Republicans who got primaried like Thomas Massie and John Cornyn revealed their true colors once they no longer had to answer to voters. Its just easier in this world to be a Democrat and collect applause from the genteel classes.
The courts are also nigh-impossible to fix. There are nearly 700 judges who can issue an injunction against an executive order. Probably at least 100 of these are on the Kentanji Brown Jackson partisan level where they don't care what the law says. Their goal is to block Trump. Thus the strategy to rotate to a new executive order playing whack-a-mole. As Cardinal Richelieu said, "no executive order is lawful enough that I cannot find a reason to block it".
The problem with many of the immigration laws is things like they say "may" instead of "shall" so they can be turned off whenever a D executive decides not to enforce them. Then another issue crops up when states sue saying "hey well you have to enforce at least enforce the laws that say shall" and then they get thrown out of court for lack of standing.
Funny you say that since the 2024 bill was actually supported by many Democrats! Then Trump had an overwhelming amount of political capital to spend at the start of his term to force something even harsher through Congress, but he never even bothered trying.
This particular issue was basically fixed in 2025.
I feel like this is that two screens thing we've talked about.
May, shall? Who cares? Certainly not the Biden administration. Certainly not blue city DA's.
Trump was met by insane resistance from Democrats and a good deal of resistance from his own party from day one. A lot of the latter took place in the form of slow-walking. But the craziest thing to me is the idea that any bill signed by Biden could have been a good bill. This was the guy who let 10 million illegals walk across the border. He could have stopped it at any time! So clearly he wouldn't sign a bill if he believed it would meaningfully restrict immigration. Sure he was a doddering fool, but his people knew exactly what they were doing. This bill just gives them political cover to say they're doing something. They weren't.
Maybe I'm not enough of a legal expert to discern the difference, but it seems to me that Boasberger and Sparkle Sooknanan keep doing their thing. Lower judges can just ignore the Supreme Court. Sure they'll get a tongue lashing but impeachment is off the table. Of course the Trump admin could simply ignore those same judges, but they seem mostly not willing too. I'll admit my certainly is less on this one.
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Trump plus no bill is better than Harris plus bill.
Even if we accept the bill was a net positive by itself (it still had loopholes) executive authority is still far more important. And giving the Biden administration a win that they were doing something could have flipped the election which polling showed as much closer at the time. He ended up winning big so perhaps you still could have done the bill.
It would be impossible to pass anything right now without eliminating the fillibuster. I think we should get rid of it but so far we haven’t gone down that path. It would costs some political capital; though in my opinion smart people on both sides are thinking that we have too many checks/balances and eliminating them to boost the power of congress would be a good thing.
If the GOP got rid of the filibuster now it would give the Dems another issue to run on even if their smart people think it’s a correct decision.
One of the reasons I like getting rid of the filibuster the most is it would be a check on the Supreme Courts power as the SC would be more comfortable telling Congress to fix legislation.
Agree-ish, at least on the topic of immigration. Though I'd pretty strongly claim that the two were not mutually exclusive! It might have been a bit awkward for Trump when the Dems started implementing small chunks of his immigration-restriction agenda, but the Dems had already started their own crackdown on immigration by this point. The bill itself was mostly closing loopholes and getting funding for border enforcement, which I doubt would have moved public opinion much.
Too convenient of an omni-excuse for purple state legislators to never have to vote on anything controversial. Obviously it should be abolished -- by either side.
If it was a serious obstacle to immigration reform at the start of Trump's term, Trump almost certainly could have obliterated it.
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For anyone that doesn't want to reenact the reruns.
Glad that my somewhat lazy reading of the situation matches with a much more thorough investigation.
Although really everything can be said in a few words: Laws don't matter if they aren't enforced.
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