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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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what part of the bill forces a hostile administration to reduce immigration at all? the bill may as well be a sieve with all the ways a hostile administration could legally ignore and excuse explicit limits; every single section of the bill which allegedly reduces immigration is actually not mandatory and is able to be set aside under vague, undefined language, like "operational circumstances"

this bill does nothing at all to force a reduction in immigration; it still relies entirely on a friendly executive to reduce immigration, but a friendly executive could already reduce immigration right now and they have for decades under status quo laws by simply enforcing them

So to reiterate, according to your own comment the bill makes things easier for a friendly executive but doesn’t make anything easier for a hostile executive, and the GOP voted against it because…? That a hostile Dem executive could still keep the doors open is the status quo. Nothing about this bill would make anything worse from a rightist anti-immigration perspective, it would just make things the same to easier for a conservative executive.

If the Republicans were willing to support a bill that made it harder for them to control the border while allowing a hypothetical Democratic presidency to print an unlimited number of extra green cards per year the Dems would be stupid not to vote for it.

You still haven't mentioned a single specific thing which the bill does to force a reduction in immigration; are you just not interested in talking about specifics of the actual bill?

no, my comment does not claim the bill makes things easier for a friendly administration

the bill makes it easier for a hostile executive to legally release migrants into the US and formalizes/codifies the regulatory scheme and legal interpretations of the Biden administration who have repeatedly been losing in court because the current laws make what they're doing illegal for whatever that's worth

it gives tools to a friendly administration which will not meaningfully reduces immigration beyond what is available under current law and in addition actually hamstrings a friendly administration in what they can do with immigration in some ways

(edit: for example, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, a laughably biased and corrupt court, is given sole and original jurisdiction for all judicial challenges from the validity of the law, to the policies written under it, to any decision made under the law; it will be this court which reviews any friendly administration's policies or invocations of these new alleged powers and good luck with that

this is a thing which is regularly overlooked, but it is just so painfully stupid to agree to this sort of thing and it's really telling the GOP couldn't even manage to avoid this)

the bill is worse than the status quo

the fundamental problem is the GOP are clowns, the Democrats realized under the Obama administration that their threats are empty, and this is why they've pushed the accelerator to the floor as soon as they got back into explicit power and the GOP can't even manage to stop expanding programs which explicitly fund Democrats to do it

the GOP voted against it because…?

The moment Republicans vote for the bill it will be touted as a bipartisan solution/compromise to fix the border crisis. Giving approval to the bill puts their reputation on the line and having it then fail to sufficiently fix the problem would catch them in the fallout and relieve pressure on Biden.