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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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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.