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I am skeptical about the judiciary changes happening: if Democrats win the Senate and the Presidency, the court "reform" (I agree it would be bad, and I'm pretty content with the composition of the current court) is a much bigger lift than simply appointing new justices. In fact, I'd say that Trump winning actually increases the risk of judiciary reform over the next decade, if he replaces one or two of the Democratic justices and Democrats feel increasingly desperate and hopeless. If court packing is going to happen, electing Harris or electing Trump just shifts it a couple years forward or back.
As far as immigration goes, neither Trump nor Harris will do much to change the existing system. They'll take different rhetorical approaches and make some marginal changes, but both will more or less maintain the status quo. The constant stream of millions of illegal immigrants is just too critical for the lifestyles of both Democratic and Republican donor classes to allow for any real action to be made. You'll still see roughly the same number of immigrants in the US regardless at the end of their respective terms.
The only place I see a substantively different choice of futures is foreign policy, particularly China. Who's better to avoid a war with China? This is not obvious and requires some guessing: Harris is a sock puppet for the existing foreign policy establishment, while Trump's approach is (charitably) more personalistic. As much as I dislike the foreign policy establishment, they provide predictability. Major wars break out when one side doesn't correctly predict what the other side will do; if everyone can predict what will happen and the costs to each party, it greatly increases the likelihood of managed transitions that don't go kinetic. A war with China will hurt the economy far worse than cherry picking all the worst policies from each candidate, so that ends up being one point in Kamala's favor for me.
What do you make of Senator Whitehouse saying that they'd pass the reforms that, bundled in a single bill with a bunch of other popular things, to only circumvent the filibuster once? That they would be "virtually certain" to pass such a bill, and that it would have "spectacular tailwinds"? Is he lying, or wrong?
I don't expect Republicans would overplay their hand with replacing Democratic judges, because of what the situation is like right now—if they could get a sufficiently strong commitment to not blow up the whole thing in the future in exchange for replacing the justice with another Democrat, that seems well worth taking. (Though I could certainly see them replacing some of Thomas, Alito, or Roberts, with other conservatives.) I could be wrong; it's possible they have no self-control.
I think immigration can be done with more direct action, so congressional actors are of a little less importance.
I'm similarly uncertain on foreign policy. In practice, it looks like Trump's foreign policy worked out a lot better than Biden's (see: Afghanistan, Abraham Accords, Ukraine, Iran), which is a point in Trump's favor, but I don't know how the amount of risk taken compares. Are you opposed to people using strategic ambiguity?
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I don't see how this follows at all. If one side is able to predict with relative precision the costs of a conflict will be, they will be more likely to do it whenever the benefits exceed those costs. Predictability alone is not a prophylaxis, you need a robust and credible cost infliction strategy to actually generate deterrence.
You absolutely need a cost infliction strategy. But the competitor needs to be able to predict costs will actually be inflicted. Otherwise, they can convince themselves it would be lower cost than it actually will be.
For a Taiwan contingency, I believe the variance of costs (or, more precisely, China's perception of the variance of costs) is higher with Trump than with Harris. A war resulting in a quick, painless victory with minimal worldwide economic repercussions is likelier with him as he's more likely to call bluffs and cow China with escalatory responses, but so are disasters where we tumble into massive total war because China mispredicts US responses. (He's also more likely to sell Taiwan off, which isn't great but still a much better scenario than the total war outcome.)
I acknowledge this is guesswork, and the primary determinant of how horrific war will be is decisions on the Chinese side, not the US side.
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And yet Putin didn't invade Ukraine until the existing foreign policy establishment was fully back in control.
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