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If I actually believed Trump would or could accomplish any of the things he says he will (from calling up Vlad and "ending the war with one phone call" to deporting all the illegal aliens), I would consider voting for him. Since we saw how well he did as President already, I have no reason to think this is the case. (And no, I don't buy "That's because the Deep State was against him but this time he'll know how to fight them.") I think his followers who expect This Time It Will Be Different are being taken for a ride, like last time.
You don't have to believe he'll accomplish them to be able to tell that one person says "mass deportations now" and the other has let it happen.
I'm not holding my breath that we'll get the necessary 10 million foreigners per year deported, but I know which one will move the needle more. Also, just look at the graph. Obama had the uptick, Trump was a reversion to form, and then Biden opened the floodgates. He doesn't have to deliver on much to be better than the worst President of all time, who has enabled the likes of Cuban-born Jew Mayorkas to facilitate an invasion of my homeland, and who thinks an unrelenting stream of immigration is a good thing.
I've said recently there's only one difference in politics today, and that's the issue of migration. We at least have two people on opposite sides of that issue, and I'm voting for the one who is on my side, and hoping for the best.
We haven't even mentioned RFK, or any potential role for him in the administration. The same man who, in an open convention, could very well have been on the top of the ticket today. The man who I would have been voting for, maintaining my third-party voting streak, if he had not endorsed Trump.
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Amusingly, this is pretty much the one thing that I think could happen (which is not a claim that it will). We frequently reference a left/right divide on "violence as a continuum/switch", and the piecemeal "escalation" we've seen from the Biden administration is very much on the continuum side and pretty clearly doesn't really scare totalitarian despots. Viewing it as a switch, and then credibly threatening to throw the switch if necessary seems like it would be more convincing: "Come to the negotiating table and accept my minimal terms, or I pull out the Gulf War playbook and destroy all your remaining Soviet stockpile. Tanks are already staging in Poland."
Is there a danger of nuclear war there? Maybe. But if you let that spectre drive all your decisionmaking, you'll find yourself cosplaying Neville Chamberlain in pursuit of "peace" all the way to a world war. I don't like war. It's terrible. Always has been. Always will be. But eternally shying away from it has its costs too.
The problem is that the United States and NATO armies are in shambles already, and wouldn’t be able to credibly threaten that kind of conventional war. Hell, I doubt the US has the ability to do a 2003-style thunder run against a country like Iraq anymore. Ashton Carter absolutely gutted the military under his watch. He got high on Francis Fukuyama and assumed that the United States was the one remaining superpower and would only be doing goat herder wars for the next fifty years. So he got rid of all the programs that would allow the United States to fight conflicts against peers and went all in on COIN stuff. A NATO expeditionary force in Europe would have enough shells to last for about three days. And modern air defenses are outpacing offensive air capabilities, so the Air Force probably wouldn’t be able to get level of air superiority that NATO combat methods require. Which would mean Ukraine war style meat wave offensives with insufficient artillery support. How are the American people going to react to taking 19,000 casualties in two weeks? Because that’s what the the Army War College is estimating. How is the army going to replace one fifth of it’s combat troops in that time frame? What happens when China and North Korea take the opportunity to go for it the second America is tied down elsewhere?
NATO is even worse. Poland ran the numbers, and their war games estimate that the nation would last about 48 hours in the event of a war with Russia, which is why their bellicose rhetoric suddenly got real quite about a year ago. Britain would have serious problems getting even a single combat deployable division ready, and that would probably take months.
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Which candidate is mostly like to effect the end result of deporting aliens? The one who talks about how terrible mass migration is, or the child-of-immigrants who celebrates indigenous peoples’ day by talking about how America was founded on genocide?
If you genuinely care about effecting an end to illegal migration, then there’s an obligation to vote for whoever moves the needle on effecting that change. Trump didn’t succeed in building a border wall but he did smash the borders of acceptable speech on illegal migration.
As long as birthright citizenship exists illegal immigration will continue without clear end. Since there is no viable plan to end birthright citizenship none of this really matters at all.
The viable plan to ending birthright citizenship is to reexamine the legal definition of natural born citizen in light of earlier British jurisprudence which, in some cases, mentiins that the father must also be a natural born citizen. This is the kind of originalist legal argumentation that we find among Heritage Foundation guys and their SC picks.
We can do that, and then we can just restrict how many people can come in. Do a pregnancy test on women who come in. Lots of simple stuff. This issue is a failure of political will, not political thought.
There's no need to have motivated semantic arguments about what is a "natural birth" and what isn't (what about those born via Cesarean section??) because it's totally irrelevant to the constitutional language. The fourteenth amendment is extremely clear and unambiguous:
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How many members of the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court do you believe would vote categorically against birthright citizenship?
If they can be persuaded that what the founders intended precluded the children of non citizen fathers, then maybe all of them, why not?
The whole point of the 14th amendment was to grant citizenship to the freedmen, who had no legitimate descent from any US citizen. (Slaves not being citizens, as an obvious statement of fact). If a citizen parent was a requirement to benefit from the 14th, then it wouldn't have done what it was supposed to do.
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Is that like, whoever raises the birthrate the most gets to become a citizen? That’s certainly one plan for dealing with the problem.
Yeah I’m just mildly dyslexic, sadly. I edit a lot of ‘writes’.
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I don't have an obligation to be a single-issue voter, nor do I have an obligation to vote for anyone.
Why would you consider voting for him if he 100% ended illegal immigration, but not if he merely increased the chance of ending it? This applies to your other issue (ending war in Ukraine).
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