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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   29786 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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A lot of the current immigration debate is wondering what increasingly exotic interpretations of statutes can be made to sneak immigration reform through the backdoor without the Judicial system interfering. But this only needs to happen because the statutes the Legislative passed decades ago say specific things. Why not just pass a new bill? I wrote a post (copied to substack here) that detailed the Republican sabotage of the compromise immigration reform bill back in 2024, and a lot of the discussion was predicated on Trump winning a trifecta in November. I thought that was excessively risky... but they won! Why not do what they said now!?! Stop with the judicial cloak-and-dagger, and pass some freaking immigration reform!

Remember when Trump totally ended the deluge of illegal immigrants in a week using only executive power? And remember when that executive power was upheld in court? That's the clearest proof you can get that Biden was lying through his teeth when he claimed that it was impossible to stop the illegals using executive power. In fact it's also good evidence that Biden intentionally manufactured the crisis.

Also, remember when the Democrats, who created this crisis, tried to pass this backstabbing bill multiple times with literally zero Republican support? That's the clearest proof you can get that the Democrats were lying through their teeth when they claimed the bill was a "compromise" when in fact it made zero concessions. If Democrats were gonna completely give up on Republican support and still try to pass the bill, they would bring it into total alignment with their priorities. And guess what, no changes were needed; it was already in perfect alignment.

Yeah I remember that bill. The bill that would have done nothing to mitigate the illegal immigration issue while being so loaded with poison pills it was more deadly than a pound of fentanyl. Good the Democrats weren't able to pass it.

Remember when Trump totally ended the deluge of illegal immigrants in a week using only executive power?

People cite this frequently, but I think the biggest change isn't one of law or even executive policy, but only one of stated preference. The Biden administration was perceived as being friendly to illegal immigrants asylum seekers, and when a flood showed up in response, then administrative choices (the CBP app, for example) demonstrated the perception to be broadly correct. So far, at least, it seems enough to merely change that perception, although I assume some actions to back it up would eventually be necessary.

In my post 9 months ago I agreed with the notion that Biden was fundamentally at fault for the surge of immigration, and that he could have reduced it significantly with powers he already had. This was borne out when illegal immigration numbers plummeted towards the (very) end of Biden's presidency. That said, immigration is still fundamentally broken in a lot of ways that only the Legislature can fix. From my post:

The issue with this idea is that even if Biden were to reimplement all of Trump’s executive orders, they still amounted to little more than a bandaid on a bullet hole. Critics of the bill are technically correct in pointing out that there was less blood before Biden ripped off the bandaid, but it’s ludicrous to then assume that the bandaid was all that was ever needed. US immigration law and border enforcement is fundamentally broken in a number of ways, and this bill would have gone a long way in addressing the worst problems. Recall that Trump himself tried to go after asylum laws directly, but his efforts mostly fizzled in the courts.

The fact no Republicans voted for the bill after Trump told them not to is just an indication that R congressmen are utterly beholden to Trump. Remember that Lankford, a Republican immigration hawk, was the chief architect of the bill in the first place.

Even if the bill wasn't terrible, which it was (link to previous discussion where this was fleshed out pretty well), passing that bill would have caused the GOP to soundly lose the presidency and the house because their voters wouldn't have showed up to vote for them after that deep betrayal.

Not to mention the Biden Admin would have spun up a vast hostile bureaucracy legalizing millions of recent "asylees" before Trump would have taken office.

Stop with the judicial cloak-and-dagger, and pass some freaking immigration reform!

reform which makes things worse is bad

taking all of the illegal and bad biden admin decisions which were losing in court and formalizing them into law is bad

having every legal dispute about the bill being forced into the DC Court, the same court which is currently issuing a flurry of insane nationwide injunctions, is not smart politics

Oh? Does DOGE want to fire the incredibly hostile new army of "Asylum Officers" who are rubber stamping asylee claims at breakneck pace and giving people work permits as legal residents? Well, you get to go before Judge Chutkin in the DC Court.

Not to mention the Biden Admin would have spun up a vast hostile bureaucracy legalizing millions of recent "asylees" before Trump would have taken office.

Why didn't they do this, in reality? What in the bill was necessary to do this?

One, "would have" notes something which would have happened had the bill passed which it thankfully did not.

Two, they did do it on a smaller scale; the bill was to formalize into law the system, structure, and rules the Biden administration had already implemented. That's how we got the mass parolees into the interior, the planeloads of foreigners into a town near you, the cellphone app where an illegal can click a red button on the screen and then be "legally released" into the interior with a plane or bus ticket.

The Biden admin had spent years losing in court for Senator Lankford to allegedly come forth with a bill which solves the Biden admin's problem for it by putting their illegal behavior into law. The bill would have armed a hostile administration with statutory cover to essentially legalize the tens of millions of illegals which had been shipped into or otherwise allowed into the country while also not even forcing them to stop the flow.

One, "would have" notes something which would have happened had the bill passed which it thankfully did not.

I was basing this on:

Not to mention the Biden Admin would have spun up a vast hostile bureaucracy legalizing millions of recent "asylees" before Trump would have taken office.

Can you clarify the counterfactual you think was avoided, by not passing the bill?

in one situation, it's legislatively authorized and protected and specifically funded

in the other situation, it's done by executive fiat which had already been declared to be illegal multiple times by multiple courts and which would lose at the SCOTUS

Thanks. I wasn't familiar enough the details of the debate.

They did this. What did you think the mass asylum and cbp one app were?

If they did the thing that Bleep said would have been a consequence of the bill passing, without the bill passing, how is it a consequence of the bill?

Oh Jesus Christ, this is ridiculous. They did everything through executive order that the legislation would have made permanent.

I've been reading this argument for days without chiming in because it just looks like trolling and gaslighting.
Looking back at the old arguments makes me even angrier because all the claims about how Biden needed this bill to "do something about the border" were obviously gross partisan lies, and nobody ever apologized for them. Just moved on to spewing new lies as if nobody would remember.

I wasn't familiar enough with the details of the debate, but the problems with both presidents' executive orders seems like evidence for the superiority of statutes as a means of setting/implementing policy.

I don't think we'll ever see eye-to-eye on the previous bill, but at this point it doesn't matter. That bill is dead, but Republicans have a trifecta, so there's no reason not to get a real bill done now. There will likely be no better time to pass a bill in possibly decades than the present moment, and it would significantly ease a lot of the issues the courts had with EO's and practical enforcement.

no reason not to get a real bill done now.

The enemy will filibuster literally any good bill, and not a single person on their side will ever defect. Funny how that works.

it would significantly ease a lot of the issues the courts had with EO's and practical enforcement

why?

The other commenter's opinion is that all "universal injunctions" issued by district judges are insane. See Justice Gorsuch's views on the topic.

It has become increasingly apparent that this Court must, at some point, confront these important objections to this increasingly widespread practice. As the brief and furious history of the regulation before us illustrates, the routine issuance of universal injunctions is patently unworkable, sowing chaos for litigants, the government, courts, and all those affected by these conflicting decisions. Rather than spending their time methodically developing arguments and evidence in cases limited to the parties at hand, both sides have been forced to rush from one preliminary injunction hearing to another, leaping from one emergency stay application to the next, each with potentially nationwide stakes, and all based on expedited briefing and little opportunity for the adversarial testing of evidence.

In the entire history of the United States, something around 90 national injunctions have ever been ordered, with Donald Trump accounting for almost 70% of all of them (and rising by the day).

No, this isn't a both-sides situation. If they were effectively banned tomorrow, it would be a large win for Republicans.

For example, the USAID decision carves out big exceptions that allow the administration to continue dismantling USAID:

which they'll use and then the court will broaden or rule against the administration which other judges have already done in other cases

Trump already had the majority of all national injunctions ever issued in the history of the United States by the end of his first term. There is no numbers argument here; the only argument is a substantive one about the particular executive orders which I also think is wrong, but this would take a long-form high-effort post to articulate well.

In any case, this isn't a both-sides situation, it is primarily against Trump and Republicans generally that these are used.

You can’t get “deport 13 million people” (or even 5 million) past the senate filibuster or quite possibly even 50 Republican senators without some kind of pathway to citizenship for at least some illegal migrants, which would be unconscionable absent extreme concessions (see below).

Personally if I was Trump I’d propose a grand gambit, in which the GOP approves a pathway to citizenship for, say, the 5 million longest-resident illegal migrants in exchange for fully restoring the pre-1965 national origins restrictions (thus limiting all future legal immigration) into law. Sadly, the left is still too smart to go for that.

The left would go for that in a heartbeat, if only to demonstrate the illiteracy of the GOP. The pre-1965 immigration restrictions did not impose any quotas on immigration from within the Western Hemisphere. While it put Asian immigration to a dead standstill, the focus was limiting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Funny, the Democrats explicitly wanted to pass a very conservative immigration bill last year before Trump sabotaged it for cynical reasons.

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Yes, and at the time I argued here that that was a huge mistake. Still, the bill (while good - and again, it should have passed) didn’t really address this particular issue.

Oh, that's right, you were seemingly the one person on the entire forum that agreed with me back then. Thanks for that, by the way. It was nice to not feel like I was going completely insane.

My sympathy for you is truly heartfelt. But so is the insane cackling I can't seem to stop doing.

Millions of people can already be deported because they either have final removal orders or will be caught in the US without a visa and placed in removal proceedings. No further legislation is required to deport these people, just way more resources (realistically, the magnitude of the deportations envisioned is almost impossible without fundamentally changing the social fabric of the country).

Yeah, exactly. The bill would presumably be about both legitimizing and funding / building the infrastructure for that kind of action.

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