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... Okay? Ben's not arguing Biden is blameless here, just that Trump is blameworthy. Yes, Biden and the Dems aren't doing this out of sincere care for immigration, they're trading a better chance at getting elected for a concession to the public's policy priorities. Trump should, by the values of his own voters, take the deal and reduce his chance of winning because this would hugely reduce illegal immigration.
Dems make a problem much worse.
Dems then demand “Republicans capitulate on X, Y, and Z and we will slightly partially ameliorate the problem.
If Republicans rightfully say “fuck you,” Democrats then respond “I guess Republicans care more about elections instead of fixing the problem they claim to care about.”
Any party that wouldn’t say “fuck you” is a party that will get rolled. The republicans sole position should’ve been “you broke the border, here is the bill to fix it. If you won’t pass the bill, then you will lose.” The republicans allowed this charade the moment they entertained a “bipartisan bill.”
And OP’s post are proof of that.
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Dems don't need new laws to stop illegal immigration. They aren't enforcing the laws that already exist. Why would passing more laws make Dems enforce them?
The politicians who created the problem, who could stop the problem at any time, are saying they need new powers to stop the problem. The politicians who want to solve the problem say that it's a bad bill. Trump wants to run on the border? But Biden could solve it today.
Biden can deport 15 million people today? The law mitigates some percentage of the legal challenges by pro-migrant groups that would be inevitable (and will be) in any executive-led effort.
sure, Biden can reimplement the Trump policies which required detention in the US or release into foreign countries to await their removal proceedings because these policies have already been upheld in court
and then re-arrest all people he illegally released on parole and have them detained or removed to Mexico to await their removal proceedings
he can do that right now; he of course won't do that because he the Biden admin wants the immigration, they just don't want to suffer the electoral consequences of what he's doing
which legal challenges are mitigated by this bill?
the bill definitely opens other pathways for challenge, e.g., the entirety of 235(b) and process by which applications are reviewed as well as mandatory release into the US under a president who wanted to reduce migrant numbers
the bill may as well be a jobs program for immigration lawyers and provides billions more to those "pro-migrant" groups
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The surge at the border is consequent of Biden's decisions. He can't change those? He could reimplement Remain in Mexico, he could suspend Catch and Release, he could stop granting asylum. He could reimpose the Trump policies he suspended.
In fact, he doesn't need Trump to pass the border bill. If this is a great bill that Democrats are happy to have, they can pass it in the Senate and leave it to the House. They're not even trying this, they don't want to do anything, they just want to run on how Republicans won't do anything. This is maybe the best going scam in American politics: tearily tell the voters that we can't do anything, our hands are tied, unless you vote for me again...
Anything Biden does will be challenged, that's the nature of being president. Why does that mean he can't deport naybody? He could if he wanted to.
Because the left faction of the Democrats hate it and oppose it, which is why they need GOP votes in Congress? I mean this isn’t in any way new. The real question is that if this bill really does nothing and wouldn’t stop any immigration, why did Liz Warren, Bob Menendez, Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey and others vote against it?
Hmm.
This is political sloganeering: Markey wants it both ways, saying yes and no, hoping voters like one answer or the other. If Markey really believed that this is a bad bill, and that Trump killed it, shouldn't he be thanking Trump? Wouldn't he be gloating? No, he just lapses into cliche: American values, better life, cynical Trump, etc.
Markey probably didn't even write his own statement. Someone in his office wrote it, and he signed off after making some changes. Now his statement exists as a fact in the public record I'm supposed to take as evidence of something. But taking it seriously is like trying to understand a LLM: it's just a rationalization for whatever was already decided upon.
(I'm not arguing that Markey wanted the bill to pass and is just giving kayfabe. I am arguing that his position is obviously, blatantly, contradictory. If I had to resolve that contradiction, I imagine that he thinks it was a bad immigration bill, and that his blaming Trump is purely cynical.)
This is my frustration with many discussions about politics here and this conversation in general: I think way too much credence is given to the imaginary fake facts the political world creates. "The bill was a good bill because the Border Patrol endorsed it" is like saying OMB predicts Obamacare will reduce the deficit: these are just press releases. They are treated very cynically by the people who make them. Take again Markey's statement: he wants to blame Donald Trump for leaving the border in chaos, because Trump (supposedly) stopped a bill Markey wanted stopped. Huh?
Which is back to the whole problem with the frame of OP's post: the frame that Trump tanked a good immigration bill was invented by politicos for cynical reasons. We could have given you this great border bill (that we don't want), but Trump stopped us, because he's selfish, while his supporters cheered, because, uh...? It's actually much simpler to assume that conservatives thought it was a bad deal, which explains neatly why they opposed it, why Trump opposed it, and why cons cheered when it was tanked.
You could argue that cons were wrong for thinking it was a bad deal, but the frame here basically accepts, uncritically, a cynical idea pushed by Democrats that they themselves don't believe.
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