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I have pretty much had it with people who ranted about "trump disrespecting the troops!" now waving the flag of Hezbollah who actually killed a lot of those troops.
The next time a Democrat starts regurgitating NPR at me I'm going to end up saying something friendship-ruiningly impolite because I just can't hold in the anger at this stupidity any more. It's almost worse than 2020 because the deranged hysteria isn't happening in unique circumstances.
How do you all deal with this every day?
Your anger reminds me of the Liberation Pledge that vegans did, where they aggressively pushed their principles to their non-vegan friends in the form of ultimatums, "either stop eating meat or we can't be friends". When their non-vegan friends didn't comply with their craziness, the vegans got extremely mad and essentially said "well I guess they weren't ever my friends anyways!!!"
Losing friends and making enemies for pointless battles is just dumb. Politics has always been overwhelmingly about vibes and direct personal interest. Leftists of the e.g. feminist+pro-Muslim variety irk me as much as anyone, but it's utter silliness to think you'd accomplish anything but your own harm by raging at those types of people. And if you think your outgroup is the only side with a large amount of contradictions, then you're hopelessly naive. The Bible has so many contradictions that it's worthless as a philosophical guiding light, yet it's served that purpose to basically the entire Western world for centuries. Individual rulers or religious leaders just cherry-picked whichever parts happened to suit them. For another example, it wasn't too long ago that a large chunk of the alt-right cheered when Trump sank the most conservative immigration bill in a generation for blatantly self-serving reasons. When pressed, most of the alt-right just mumbled out explanations that showed they had no idea what was actually in the bill, or the state of current immigration laws. In practice it didn't actually matter, since the fact that they like Trump's vibes easily overrode their ideological pre-commitments.
How would you feel if I did what you plan on doing to Christians or Trump supporters? How would you feel if I "say something friendship-ruiningly impolite because I just can't hold in the anger at this stupidity any more"? You'd probably think I'm being silly and dumb, right?
IMO this is incredibly uncharitable on why they sank the immigration bill. You make it sound like we crashed it for shits and giggles. The bill had core issues.
Too much discretion. If you don’t control the Presidency and key asylum courts it doesn’t do anything.
Biden had levers to slow immigration now. He wasn’t doing it. Why make a deal where he can claim victory and enforce it during election season and then if he wins the election it’s back to open borders.
Formalized a lot of bad things like the asylum system
We all know that in American politics you usually only get to do things once when legislating. If the first bill is shit you’re probably not getting a second bite at the apple.
Trump as POTUS is better for limiting immigration than Biden with the bill. This tells you how weak the bill was.
House passed a bill. It was always better to use the up coming elections to press the Dems for a good bill than a bill with Swiss cheese loopholes.
I opposed the bill because it was a bad bill. Its better to do a good bill with real teeth after winning the elections.
Here's the summary of the bill, and here's the full text. Can you point out what specifically you object to? I've been accused of being uncharitable on this topic before, but whenever I press for details I typically get little but handwavey "Biden bad" style arguments. Which, to be clear, he was bad early in his presidency on this topic, but then he did an about-face and has signaled that he would have used the law quite aggressively.
Most of the bill is funding increases or rules changes that have little discretion involved. The big point of discretion was the Border Emergency Authority, which could be used if there were an average of 4000-5000 immigrants per day, and must be used at 5000+.
What is this referring to? The US already has formalized laws on asylum, like its signature on the Convention Against Torture. Right now, a big loophole in immigration is that immigrants can stay in the country until their asylum application is heard by a court, but courts are clogged and they often just miss their appointment anyways. The law would have plugged that.
What does this even mean? The bill was never passed, so comparisons to "Biden with the bill" as if it was law are nonsensical.
What "Swiss cheese" loopholes are you referring to? Trump was effectively no better on immigration than Obama, and most of his changes were executive orders that cost little political capital, and were trivial to repeal or ignore. Trump himself often went back on his more aggressive immigration changes whenever he got negative coverage on Fox News.
The 5k per day is way too much. Combined with the Presidency getting to suspend the act for I believe 60 or 90 days. Then courts would have to get involved. So you can run high to get to the trigger then ignore it for 45 days. Tell the immigrants you back to not come for a month. Run some to get to the trigger. Ignore it for 45 days. Just not enough teeth that they would ever close the border.
It’s further formalizing that 5k a day asylum seekers are fine. We should honestly just ban asylum at the border which we can do. Make them file at an embassy and have true causes. We have virtually zero true asylum cases at the US border. They are safe in Mexico. They can email Senators/Lawyers etc for asylum cases outside the country.
This entirely depends on the courts. Conservatives are not good at controlling those type of asylum claims. If you get liberal judges on those courts who accept not being American makes them a little poor and boom asylum claim accepted then the act does nothing. And again asylum should not be initially approved inside the country.
Trump did NOT need to pass this bill to stop immigrant caravans. This is obvious we did NOT have these issues under Trump and no laws have been changed in the interim. Like you say above Trump closed immigration doing things that were “trivial to repeal or ignore”. Electing Trump is what we need to close the border. He’s done it before. Biden could do the same thing.
Which brings up the big problem with the bill. It’s toothless. If the POTUS is of the wrong party then the border is open. There were no teeth in the bill to force a Democrat to close the border.
If you disagree with the “teeth” then please quote in the bill the “teeth”. How would this bill limit President AOC to 10k “asylum” seekers per year?
The Border Emergency Authority is a "break in case of emergency" tool that's specific to the crisis happening now. It sunsets in 3 years, so it won't be relevant if AOC takes office in a decade unless it's renewed. If it's not used then it would be no different than the status quo, but the rest of the bill expanding funding for border security and plugging asylum loopholes would still be in place. It's in no way formalizing that 5k migrants a day is "fine", it's simply a trigger when opaque and extraordinary measures can be taken.
Trump was really no better than Obama when it comes to border crossings. A lot of it is driven by the relative strength of the economy, but also by non-US factors like the state of Latin American countries especially in the Northern Triangle. Your answer of "Trump didn't need this" is exactly the handwavey "Biden Bad" thing I was talking about in my earlier post. The assumption you seem to be coming to is that the tougher laws are all just a ruse, that Biden must be doing something sneaky, but this is effectively unfalsifiable.
This law doesn't open the border. If you think it does, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what the bill does.
Why can’t we just have a clean bill that closes the border?
You say the golden triangle. The south is richer than they have ever been. There is always going to be some excuse. America will always be richer than every where else so there will always be economic demand.
I find it interesting you did not try saying these are real asylum seekers.
I prefer Trump over the bill because I know the bill does nothing when the wrong party is in power. Biden could have stopped this but chose not to.
I presume you mean "close the border to illegal immigrants". I agree that would be the best, but it's like saying "why don't we make murder illegal". It already is illegal, it's just a question of enforcement. This bill would have beefed up enforcement.
I presume you did an autocorrect error and meant to type "Northern Triangle", not golden triangle.
The causes I listed aren't excuses, they're explanations that lie on a continuum. It's like judging the performance of a CEO based solely on the stock price, when you really need to understand the whole underlying environment to make a proper judgement. If the company grew by 10% but the rest of the sector grew by 50%, the CEO probably screwed up. Similarly, extraneous factors affect enforcement at the border.
You keep saying this but that doesn't make it true. At the very least this bill would have given more money for enforcement and closed an obvious loophole that illegals were abusing to enter the country. If Biden actually used the bill to its full effect (which he said he would) then it would have done even more.
I mean a clean bill where we close the border. And not the I claim asylum bullshit.
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It wouldn’t necessarily limit Dem presidents much, but it would allow a GOP President much more discretion against mass illegal immigration. Given the Dems will do what they want anyway, that would have been a win.
I think you just made the argument for why they killed it. If you think the bill does 0 to limit immigration during a Dem presidency then the best course of action was maximizing the probability that Trump wins the election. Giving Biden a legislative win hurts Trumps election chances.
I am confident enough that Trump can crush immigration just by being POTUS that it’s not that important to have a bill.
This gets to my origional point that I disagreed with that the right killed the bill for shits and giggles. They correctly identified that winning the POTUS limits illegal immigration and the bill would still allow a Democrat to have an open door policy. The GOP wasn’t offered anything in the deal.
You really have to jump through mental gymnastics to get to this conclusion.
"We must not enact tougher immigration laws so that the guy who says he wants to use the tougher laws loses, in order to get a guy who I say will enact even tougher laws but who failed to actually enact any lasting changes".
Or, you know, we could just enact tougher laws now, then continue fighting for them later?
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