When Democrats Go States’ Rights
Last year, California passed a law protecting unauthorized immigrants from employers working with federal law enforcement. This week the Attorney General has issued a warning:
“It’s important, given these rumors that are out there, to let people know – more specifically today, employers – that if they voluntarily start giving up information about their employees or access to their employees in ways that contradict our new California laws, they subject themselves to actions by my office,” state Attorney General Xavier Becerra said at a news conference. “We will prosecute those who violate the law.”
The publicity of the law suggested that any cooperation would be against the law. That didn’t seem right to me since we can be legally compelled by the federal government to cooperate. Turns out, it is more limited. There appear to be five provisions:
- Requires employers to ask immigration agents for a warrant before granting access to a worksite.
- Prevents employers from voluntarily sharing confidential employee information without a subpoena.
- Requires employers to notify their workers before a federal audit of employee records.
- Gives the attorney general and labor commissioner exclusive authority to enforce new provisions of state labor laws.
- Prohibits employers from re-verifying information on employment verification forms, unless compelled to by federal law.
I don’t understand how the first one can possibly pass constitutional muster, unless “nonpublic areas” means everywhere except private lockers and whatnot (and maybe even then). But if “nonpublic areas” means past the lobby, this seems like a nonstarter. I generally like giving states leeway, but this borders on state nullification. The last one also seems iffy to me, assuming they are referring to eVerify. If an employer is on the legal hook for hiring unauthorized workers, they shouldn’t be barred from double-checking and triple-checking their work. Further, eVerify is a federal program and I’m not sure what basis a state has to interfere with that.
I was prepared to agree with the second one due to the word “confidential” but the law itself reads as though any employee information cannot be shared. I would probably need to know the case history to have any sort of assessment on the legality of that. Do employees generally have an expectation of privacy in this regard? Should they?
The notification of federal audit seems reasonable, as does stating clearly that state labor laws are not meant to be an invitation for the feds.
California does seem intent on going as far as the courts are going to let them. In the meantime, employers who employ unauthorized immigrants may be caught between a rock and a hard place. Somebody has to be the test case, right? Except that there is a good chance that nobody actually will. The listed fines are, in the greater scheme of thing, pretty small (between $2-10,000). Much smaller than costs accrued by contesting the law in court. The most it appears to do is provide the employers with an out by saying that they would let the feds in but that would be against state law. But they already have an out.
Conservatives on Twitter and elsewhere are suggesting that this law requires employers to break the law. It doesn’t. The law states over and over again “except as otherwise required by federal law” or “in accordance with state and federal law.” They’re making it sound a lot more comprehensive than the law actually is.
Its proponents, however, appear to be doing the same thing. The statements I’ve quoted from the Attorney General seem also maximalist. There’s not a lot about balancing competing interests or anything of the sort in their language. This is an attempt to give the appearance of going to war with the feds. And they’re doing so on what is unquestionably a federal issue. Utah attempted to pass its own immigration laws:
The Utah legislation seemed like a major triumph in contrast, because it sought to give undocumented immigrants the chance to apply for two-year work permits. They only had to prove that they had already lived and worked in the state and passed a criminal background check; they then had to pay a fine of up to $2,500. The state Legislature passed the bill in March 2011, after receiving broad support from an unlikely political alliance that included conservative Republicans, a statewide business group, Utah’s handful of Democrats, and the powerful Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
They needed the feds to do it, however, and that didn’t happen. The enforcement provisions were struck down by the court, and the accommodation provisions were never signed off by on the feds. Depending on precisely what was in it, I would probably support federal laws that give the state more flexibility in a cooperative manner. Obviously, the Trump Administration isn’t going to be on board with that just as the Obama Administration wasn’t. Ultimately, though, a lot of it can’t be spun off and a lot else shouldn’t be.
Both on a philosophical level and a strictly political one, I am sympathetic to Democrats who want to stand up to Washington. On this particular issue, however, there just isn’t much states can do. Except that they can bark loudly, which appears to be mostly what this is.
You neglect to mention that California’s AG mentioned this after Sessions suggested he would or should arrest politicians and officials that support sanctuary cities. Also after Sessions said he was reserving on marijuana policy at the DOJ.
The conservatives fought a legal battle in the 1990s in order to prevent state and local officials from enforcing federal law. They won this at the Supreme Court.
Yet now they want to abandon these victories because it suits their needs.
We are at a fight without compromise. This is related to the budget. The GOP doesn’t need Democrats to pass a budget but they are too driven by internal divisions. Yet even the “moderates” in the GOP want the Democrats to ageee to a hard-right budget without concessions. Meanwhile DACA and pro-immigrant policies are important to the Democratic base.
So I am sympathetic to our AG’s stance. This is war.Report
You complain about the other team abandoning its principles and then justify that by showing your team has no principles?
This is why I stick to lifting. I have very right-wing friends that do this and seeing my liberal friends pull the same shit makes me want to throw things.Report
But it’s different when you’re in an iterated prisoners’ dilemma and the other team defects first!
And I know that they’ll say that we defected first but they *WOULD* say that. You can’t trust those people.Report
Are principles being abandoned here? California wasn’t terrified of its non-white population before, and they’re not now, and they’re doing what they can to protect it from Trump’s racist targeting of that same population. Isn’t that consistent, even if the tactics have been forcibly changed?Report
The abandoned principle that Dave is alluding to his that Democratic generally don’t agree with the ideas of federalism and state rights but prefer the federal government to act as a unifying and centralizing force in American politics.Report
Nobody generally agrees with the ideas of federalism and states’ rights. Any such invocation, by anyone of any political stripe, is purely opportunistic.
OK, “nobody” is a slight exaggeration. There is a small number of principled federalists — by my count 37 of them. For everyone else, I stand by the original statement.Report
Views on Federalism seem much more dictated by current state of winning or losing at the Federal level. I have seen exactly 0 principled Federalists object to the idea of Federally mandated CCW reciprocity, or forcing states to allow out of state health insurers. Zippo, nada, zilch.
I would be happy to see evidence to the contrary. It would give me some faith that they are unicorns and exist only as myth.Report
Politicians tend to be opportunistic about it. People do fall towards and away from federalism, though. Jesse tends to be against federalism even when his cause might be served by it and has been consistent during transfers of power. I tend to favor it even when my causes are not served by it and have been consistent through transfers of power.
The best way to think of it is as an argument for a proposed answer to a question rather than the answer to a question. There is no pure federalist argument for dealing with guns, but federalism does lead me in opposition to CCW. On other gun-related matters, though, I fall against the states because we do need a national framework and arguments are balanced against other arguments.
The main difference between someone who is federalist (or federalist-inclined) and anti-federalist (in the new sense not the AFP sense) is how much weight they give to arguments for decentralization.Report
Yeah, part of the problem is that there is a great deal of overlap between the whole “staunch 2nd Amendment supporter” and “staunch Federalist” thing.
If you were a staunch supporter of the 1st Amendment and a staunch Federalist, would you support Rhode Island banning books?
If not, why not?Report
I may be so far outside of the relevant group that I can’t even come close to passing an ITT, but if states aren’t bound to respect and defend your God-given rights, why even have them?Report
So you support Federally mandated CCW reciprocity, then?Report
Well yeah…?Report
Yeah, well, Joe M. doesn’t.
Or I assume he doesn’t.
Probably should let him come back and explain that concealed carry isn’t a God-given right if that’s what he thinks instead of just assuming it, though.Report
To be fair, I was trying to pass the ITT the first time.
I mean, I don’t believe that rights are God-given, being an atheist and all.Report
38Report
Maybe you’re one of the 37; I left my list at home.Report
I don’t know you so not likely.
1
I think federally mandated CCW reciprocity is almost as big of a joke as the individual rights view of the Second Amendment, which I put on par with birtherism, flat-eartherism, Christian Nation thesis and the belief that CrossFit produces better hypertrophy than traditional hypertrophy training.Report
But maybe I know you.:-)Report
@cjcolucci
Well, if you do, then I should probably feel like a jackass since I completely blew you off…not in a bad way but in my ADHD sort of way.Report
Jay jay,
Your problem is that you seem to be a lot more inflexible than most voters. How many people really make Federalism a die on the hill for principal? Most people have a variety of issues that they vote for and they put them on a scale. There are a few voters who go “I disagree with politician X 2 percent of the time and I just can’t vote for them.” Most people think “I support politician X’s goals 90 percent of the time, I will vote for her.”
You are also on the outskirts on the American public life in terms of what you consider very important in my observations.Report
How many people really make Federalism a die on the hill for principal?
Looks like neither side do.
Congrats, the Republicans on a national level now agree with you on Wickard.Report
Federalism, to the extent it works at all as a check on federal power, requires states to try to use it in an unprincipled way. The same applies to checks and balances between the branches of government. Hypocrisy is an essential feature of our system government.
It’s not a good feature, IMO, but the Constitution is pretty bad and mostly seems to get by on the Halo Effect around the Bill of Rights.Report
That’s a really interesting take — that the balance of powers requires all sides to constantly be pushing to upset that balance in their own favor.
I don’t like it, because there is the risk that one or another actor within that balance will one day simply win. And I’m not sure that the “faction against faction” reasoning Madison wrote about in Fed 17 applies with respect to inter-institutional conflicts.Report
The alternative is one or more actors unilaterally disarming, which is the sort of thing that seems to be more, rather than less, likely to cause problems where one actor ends up unassailably dominant.
This has already sort of happened; there are many reasons for the ever-growing power of the Executive Branch, but a particularly important one is the persistent unwillingness of Congress to assert its own prerogatives when push comes to shove.Report
I think you mean Fed 10, and you’re right that Madison was analyzing just small r republican government. The idea of 3 co-equal branches of government didn’t even enter anyone’s mind until Marbury v Madison discovered it.
However, even though it wasn’t explicitly considered by Madison, I do think it does fit the framework, as having the different factions play off each other both within each branch and between the various be branches has worked out mostly well. (Except for that one time it didn’t, but there was no way out of that regardless of the mechanism design of government power)Report
Actually @burt-likko I think @pillsy is dead right about the push-pull relationship, in fact, it is one facet of what I have been talking about here off and on. The parties are also push-pull, the states vs. the fed, and as @kolohe states the three branches being equal is another face of it. It may not have been codified but it is what makes our gov’t special.
And as far as one actor winning, it has happened once or twice (FDR and LBJ) and STILL managed to right itself. This is due to both time and, again, the feature of many actors having power within the gov’t.Report
In my experience systems under tension/competition tend to be more successful. As things drift further from the optimum the pressure increases to push them back. It applies all over the place. Ecosystems, free markets, adversarial judicial system, etc.
Where we are going awry is that the three branch of government tension is now less than the two party tension. Individual actors care more about the integrity of their party than the integrity of their government. There have always been some where this is the case, but the number of “defectors” is now swamping the system.Report
I always thought liberals loved the Constitution so long as it says what they think it means and nothing else. It’s a pretty simple formula: General Welfare Clause + Warren Court-era Bill of Rights forward (excluding the super secret list of not-approved cases per liberal logic (Heller, Citizens, add the rest here, etc.).
I kid…kind of…if it makes you feel better, I tend to have more irritation towards libertarian originalism hence my hostile views towards the 2A, but that’s another discussion for another day.
You and I don’t view federalism the same way. It’s not a check on power. It’s the recognition of a structural system that divided sovereignty when the Constitution went into effect. Dual sovereigns (state/national) and dual citizenship (state/United States). We don’t have to take a deep dive into a long-winded debate over what’s happened over the last 200 plus years to agree that our constitutional system leaves certain responsibilities with the federal government and others to the states.
What you’re describing if you’re talking about a potential check on federal power as exercised by the state, is called interposition. It has been in our constitutional system since Day 1. The concept is all over the Federalist papers. Notable examples include the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, the northern states refusal to cooperate with federal officials seeking to enforce Fugitive Slave laws, and perhaps to a lesser extent, the rise of state-level medical marijuana laws.
Yes, it’s messy, but that’s because there was never a formal mechanism for it. However, properly understood, it’s neither hypocritical nor unprincipled because interposition does not run afoul of the constitutional system. Madison wrote about this extensively in the Report of 1800 and then again in his Notes on Nullification when he shredded John Calhoun’s nullification to shreds, a doctrine that is, well, hypocritical.
The anti-commandeering doctrine highlighted in Printz was simply a restatement of a doctrine that has been around forever and well-within the constitutional structure – the federal and state governments are independent entities, each a sovereign to some degree. Neither can compel the other to carry out its laws. I don’t understand why this is even controversial. That the U.S. can compel state authorities to carry out federal immigration law or use the threats of prosecution to compel state authorities is a blatant overreach of federal power.
But we’re not talking about that…we’re talking about the stupidity of California, which is on full display here…and otherwise intelligent people are making themselves look like complete fools by twisting themselves into whatever knots they need to in order to justify this travesty.
Here’s the thing – you are a citizen of your state and a citizen of the United States. You are bound by the laws of your state and the laws of the United States. Given that pesky thing called the Supremacy Clause, since federal law supersedes state law on matters left to the federal government, the idea that a state can pull and end-around on that by demanding that citizens of the United States comply with the laws of the State of California in choosing how to follow the laws of the United States.
That feels a lot more like the states rights doctrine of John Calhoun and a (feeble) attempt at nullification than it does something that will ever survive constitutional scrutiny.
Hypocrisy is not a feature of our system of government. Hypocrites are a feature of our system of government, and hypocrites are the biggest players in the partisan games when people try to justify this bullshit.
Consistency may be the hobgoblin of a small mind, but I’d rather have my mind then where a lot of people have theirs. I’m already bat shit crazy. I don’t need any more of it TYVM.Report
I’m not saying the mechanism is unprincipled, I’m saying that, in general, any procedural check in our system, including this one, is going to be used as a tool by elected officials who are unprincipled, or at least have no principled commitment to it. This, IMO, makes them more effective than they would be otherwise, since they can work even if no elected officials actually give them more than lip service.
I probably should have been clearer and said that I don’t believe the system is hypocritical (at least not for this reason), but that it functions perfectly well in the presence of political actors who are hypocrites, and even relies on those actors’ hypocrisy to keep it functioning properly.
I also am totally open to the argument for the CA law is dumb and bad and wrong. I’m just not overwhelmingly concerned that political actors are making dumb and bad and wrong arguments, since that is another thing our system seems to tolerate fairly well.Report
@pillsy
A week later, I’m here to tell you I 100% agree. I bet you were waiting with baited breath too.
Life I tell you…Report
Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds!!
I’m on @pillsy’s side here. Or I would at least note that the Democrats have nothing to gain and everything to lose by allowing the Republicans to reverse on how they view State Rights. What do the Democrats gain by keeping firm to their critiques of Fedearalism? Debates on Federalism are really important to a small group of people. Most people are going to vote for or not vote for the Democrats (or Republicans) based on how they act to protect them/represent them.
Immigrant rights are much more important to Democrats than maintaining perfect consistency on Federalism.
What is your plan to high-mind the people and to get them to care more about Federalism and being consistent with it than immigration or anything else?Report
Question: Is the GOP reversing itself on how it views federalism, or is it mostly just Jeff Sessions?Report
While I think it’s worse policy, Sessions’ actions here strike me as much more constitutionally defensible than California’s.Report
I don’t think the GOP is backsliding on federalism here, as immigration was always and forever a function of the Federal gov’t and not one of the states.Report
Well, the GOP did try to push the state’s envelope in Arizona and Utah. They can argue “Now that the courts have spoken, we’ve changed our stance” but it’s hard to argue “This has always been our stance.”
Not that I would actually buy either argument, of course. Both sides are likely to push for their preferred policy outcomes at whichever level. I have my opinions, but I mostly just ask that they do so constitutionally.Report
OK, I had forgotten about that. But, was it due to the Feds at the time not “enforcing the constitutional law” or something like that? Like I said, I can’t recall.Report
On marijuana, mainly Sessions the Hessian. On immigration, the entire GOP is to blame.
As I pointed out above. The GOP theoretically can pass a budget without any Democrats but the reality is different. There are too many internal factions fighting in the GOP. However, even the factions that realize they need to work with the Democrats don’t want to give the Democrats anything they want. Or they want to be brutal. See Jason K discussing how hardcore restrictive the GOP “compromise” on DACA is.Report
Go back and re-read Gonzales v. Raich.
Which side is the side of the Angels, again?Report
The side that was right on the policy merits (i.e., Raich), because why would angels care about which sort of administrative division is making that policy?Report
Policy merits? This falls under the precedent of Wickard. 6-3.Report
Why would the angels care about the dumb details of the dumb procedures imposed upon us by our dumb Constitution?Report
Well, to what extent do you give a crap about precedent?
If your attitude is that precedent doesn’t matter with regards to the judiciary and the law doesn’t matter with regards to whether it should be enforced, I’d say be careful. The next step is a doozy.
(Which should not be confused with me saying “don’t take it”. I think you should take it. Just take it knowingly.)Report
I’d prefer the courts to be bound by it unless it really sucks. But I don’t think it’s useful for activists to be overly concerned about it, and elected officials enacting policies that are likely to be struck down on the basis of precedent is mostly harmless.Report
“I’d prefer the courts to be bound by it unless it really sucks.” said everyone ever.Report
Well, yeah. It’s a good feature of the system!Report
The pro-immigration forces in the GOP are small to non-existent and largely being silent. Trump said he supported a compromise and then reneged after talking with Kelly and Miller. The Trump response to this is to go full-throttle totalitarian and xenophobia:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-shutdown-immigration/trump-campaign-ad-on-murder-raises-heat-in-shutdown-fight-idUSKBN1F914U
The GOP has largely become a party of white supremacy on this issue if not totally.Report
The small to non-existent and largely silent faction of the GOP is, as we speak, preventing McConnell from getting 50 votes. Further, Schumer has suggested he would be able to produce the votes (ie find Republicans) if DACA were put up for a vote. And given that McConnell and Ryan are avoiding putting it up for a vote, they seem to agree.
So this is a really weird week to talk about how the pro-immigration faction doesn’t exist anymore.Report
@saul-degraw @will-truman
I like how you consider that there are only two sides of the immigration question-pro or anti.Report
There is only two sides of the DACA question, in that no one’s really presented any alternatives besides ‘give people here since childhood legal status’ and ‘do not give people here since childhood legal status, making them subject to deportation’.Report
One suggestion I’ve heard from conservatives is that those folks get three year work permits re-upped on condition they are net-positive tax payers over that time frame with clean criminal records, etc. So it’s not a binary choice between granting citizenship or denying it.Report
Who could possibly be opposed to net-positive tax payers with clean criminal records?
All our immigrants should be like that!Report
“Citizenship means never having to pay taxes again.”Report
What about students? It’s a rare month when one of the newspapers in the Southwest doesn’t run a story about an outstanding high school or college student struggling with admissions policies or in-state tuition policies.Report
So it’s not a binary choice between granting citizenship or denying it.
I didn’t say anything about granting citizenship. I said the alternatives are ‘they have some legal status so cannot be deported’ and ‘they do not have any legal status so can, in theory, be deported, if ICE decides to do so’.
What _sort_ of legal status is not important to my statement. My point is that there are only two possible positions to take. You either want that group of people to be possibly subject to deportation, or you do not. It is a binary choice.
Now, the _bipartisan_ bill worked out lets them have citizenship eventually.
So if your point is that ‘It is possible to be in favor of legal status, but opposed to this bill as citizenship is slightly too far’, that is correct, I guess. There might indeed be a hypothetical ‘middle ground’ that thinks it’s reasonable for a democracy to deny voting rights to, and also constantly keep in suspense as to their legal status, a certain subset of permanent residents. (1)
Most of us think that’s a bit absurd, including apparently Republicans in Congress.
But anyway, I’m not certain that the people who oppose it would be okay with a hypothetical bill that does not have any route to citizenship. I rather suspect they think DACA people should all be deported.
So there’s not actually any middle choice on the table, and I’m not certain anyone has ever proposed just extending the program ‘as is’, because the only reason the program ever worked that dumb way is that the Obama Administration couldn’t make them citizens.
1) As I have said before, we should not have any significant amount of people wandering around this country who not only do not have voting rights, but exist basically at the whim of the government (Either because they are illegal, or because the government can yank their legal status with almost no effort.) so cannot even safely avail themselves of government programs and law enforcement without fear. This is extremely damaging to the idea of democracy.
And as it is literally impossible to deport them all (And by them all, I mean _all_ people here illegally.) without an undertaking the size of WWII, I recommend the obvious solution of ‘make them all citizens’, in much the same way I suggest we build cities on the ground instead of suspended a quarter mile up in the air.
But it is apparently not up to me.Report
I’m pretty sure that the argument is that you don’t have to deport them all.
You only have to deport *ENOUGH* of them.
It seems that there is a consensus that we should leave the net-positive tax payers with clean criminal records alone, so maybe just focus on the ones who aren’t? Good compromise!
Let’s get on it.Report
I’m pretty sure that the argument is that you don’t have to deport them all.
You only have to deport *ENOUGH* of them.
That is the argument.
That argument is really stupid.
It seems that there is a consensus that we should leave the net-positive tax payers with clean criminal records alone, so maybe just focus on the ones who aren’t? Good compromise!
What the hell is ‘net-positive tax payer’ supposed to mean? It’s almost impossible to not be a net-positive tax payer unless you receive a very large subsidy in your taxes, or some sort of welfare program, and basically _none_ of those can go to non-citizens.
Or are you just counting income tax? And not, for example, sales tax? (And not counting that would, weirdly, make most children into not net-positive.)
Or is this just some coded way of pretending that people in this country illegally are on welfare, despite, again, basically every welfare program only applying to citizens? (They usually don’t even apply to legal permanent residents.)
How you propose we figure this out? Have people keep track of every penny they pay in taxes? Do they have to be net-positive for every level of government, or just Federal?
Let’s get on it.
I don’t understand what you are trying to say. We are currently deporting a lot of people right now.Report
That is the argument.
That argument is really stupid.
I’m not sure that it is. There does not (yet) exist a law that is 100% enforceable. But I believe that numbers show that enforcing *ENOUGH* of the law does have a positive impact on the margins (the murder rate in Baltimore provides an example of this, I think).
What the hell is ‘net-positive tax payer’ supposed to mean?
It was one of the arguments given for why it was bad to deport one of those doctor guys in one of the other threads. I’ll go over there and ask what the person who originally used the term meant. I’ll get back to you.Report
@stillwater @jaybird
There was just a story today about a doctor whose parents brought the family over, maybe legally when he was 4. He did some stupid misdemeanors at 18 and plead guilty. He has a green card.
ICE arrested him and wants to deport him. That’s fucked up. They are going hardcore. And he fled communism. Aren’t Republicans supposed to be for communist refugees?Report
What ICE did is horrendous *and* consistent with the law, right?
Hence Schumer and the moderates trying to get a federal level fix for this type of thing.Report
ICE’s behavior is consistent with the law. If an LPR commits a deportable offense, ICE can technically decide to enforce it at anytime. You can exist and leave the country with your green card for years and have no issue until you hit an officer that decides to make on issue of it on re-entry or an ICE official looks you up and makes a deal about it, or they do it when you go for naturalization.Report
Everyone who works with him likes him a great deal, the media talks with them. His wife, parents, children also like him, the media talks with them.
The ex-girlfriend who was the subject of the spousal assault trial isn’t interviewed, she’d have very different things to say (and might have put him on ICE’s radar as a problem to be solved). Similarly the police and ICE probably aren’t (or can’t be) interviewed.Report
And we now have the first statement from the police about the doctor: 22 charges from 18 separate counters with the police. Police there are not predatory, this is extremely unusual.
I assume he has a lawyer and in each case they settled the specific incident. I also doubt this is end of the revelations about what he did in his private time.
http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2018/01/ice_arrest_michigan_doctor.htmlReport
“Enforce Federal Law” vs. “Change Federal Law” vs. “Do Not Enforce Federal Law”.
At the moment, it looks like that middle one isn’t on the table.Report
Erm, no, it’s the _last_ one that isn’t on the table. Trump removed it.
Thus leaving two choices.Report
As someone with a generalized contempt for the law, I’m 100% down with this attitude spreading throughout society as a whole.
But it seems to me that people who have an attitude that says something vaguely like “I hope that my team will be in charge of the government at some point” would want to stamp this attitude out even if it meant abolishing laws that they really, really agreed with.Report
Since it’s not on the table, people who dislike the law are obviously going to do what they can to make enforcing it impossible, or at least annoying.Report
Were the Republican ‘no’ votes on cloture on Friday because of their immigration stances?
The no’s were Flake, Graham, Lee, and Paul, none of which are known for being particularly pro immigration, (but they’re also not the hardliners against it), but all are known for being ‘quirky’ in their own way in recent itterations of the Congress.Report
Fair point about Lee and Paul.
Graham is one of the most pro-immigration voices in the senate, of either party. Flake is also pro-immigration and reportedly sought assurances that there would be a DACA vote in exchange for his vote for the tax law.Report
Any Republican Senator from the Southwest (Flake, Gardner, Hatch, Heller, Lee, and McCain, I believe) who is interested in continuing in that role, or having a Republican successor, is going to be at least thinking about DACA.Report
I got the feeling Graham and Flake were protesting the process more than advocating for a desired policy outcome.Report
See my above comment. Flake and Graham are pretty consistent.Report
So this is a really weird week to talk about how the pro-immigration faction doesn’t exist anymore.
Yes. In fact, the majority of the Republicans want to renew DACA.
Instead we should be talking about:
1) How the Republican leadership is allowing its own people to basically fillibuster movement forward. It’s not technically a fillibuster but I don’t know what else to call a few hardline Republicans somehow blocking a bill that everyone else wants, because without them you can’t get ‘over 50 votes with just Republicans’ and somehow bills cannot move forward if they would require the support of Democrats, even if Democrats have agreed to vote for it. As I said, the country is somehow being held hostage for a bill that contains DACA, a law that the majority of _Republicans_ have said they want to pass, and even if a few of them are lying, it very clearly could pass.
And on top of that, Democrats even made concessions like funding that idiotic wall. (Concessions, again, for DACA, something Republicans are insisting they are in favor of.)
2) Remember that entire question of ‘Whether or not this country worked without a president?’ we had a few weeks ago? Well, that got answered quickly.
Because apparently ‘agreeing with the last person to talk to him’ makes it _really hard_ to negotiate with him, and ‘negotiate with the president’ is how we avert shutdowns. We would not have a shutdown if Trump was not president. I don’t mean if a Democrat was president, I mean if almost literally anyone else but Trump was president, that person would have stuck to the deal that everyone was negotiating, whatever deal they would have wanted.
But Trump’s word can be trusted only as long as you are literally in the room with him, and thus he decided to not only reject the deal last week, but leave everyone confused as to what deal he would accept.
3) Homer Simpson: Democrats, you tried your best to work in a bipartisan manner on a single bill that was something very important that time was running out on that even the Republicans said they wanted, and you failed miserably due to the fact Republicans are deeply broken as a party, their leader is a liar, and all their assurances are bullcrap.
The lesson is, never try.Report
@saul-degraw
I think this is sort of true but only with a huge caveat. The issue festered in large part because the establishment GOP for decades was reluctant to come down on the use of cheap illegal immigrant labor by its business constituency. Now we’ve got harshness for the sake of harshness on the GOP side versus, as best I can tell, an endorsement of open borders by the Democrats (anything less seems to be interpreted as racist). This is a bad place to be and it’s the most obvious issue where GOP refusal to compromise with the Obama administration has left the country much worse off.Report
@saul-degraw If you’re going to use Emerson to snark at other commenters I would suggest quoting him correctly and in context.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
Plus he wasn’t talking about how to get things done and convince people, rather quite the opposite: he was talking about how to be a great, singular, unquenchable mind like Jesus or Socrates. Or perhaps like his friend Thoreau, who was willing to go to jail for a principle, so obviously was consistent enough to refuse to abandon his principles in the name of achieving his goals. Or perhaps this entire paragraph was a way of teasing Thoreau or one of his other friends, Emerson rarely plays it as straight as he sounds like he’s playing it.
In any event, if you want to talk *plans* and making stuff *happen*, Emerson is probably not your best authority to quote. He really didn’t care about the sorts of things you are speaking to here.
(I mean, I am FOR more immigration and more mercy at the expense of consistency, don’t get me wrong. This is a scholarly objection, not a positional one.)Report
Your sentence that includes ‘…unless “nonpublic areas” means…’ is the first place that the word nonpublic appears. Does it apply to the first item in the list, ie, that employers must not allow immigration agents into non-public areas without a warrant?Report
Yes. The phrasing of that section is “Except as otherwise required by federal law, an employer, or a person acting on behalf of the employer, shall not provide voluntary consent to an immigration enforcement agent to enter any nonpublic areas of a place of labor. This section does not apply if the immigration enforcement agent provides a judicial warrant.”Report
A lot of focus here has been on federalism, but unless someone can point to a flaw in my reasoning and state that states should be allowed by the courts to do what they’re doing here, the issue here goes to actual constitutionality.
Democrats who are defending this law aren’t saying “We’re willing to put our general views on federalism aside” so much as “We’re willing to put the Constitution side.” Or, at best, “We’re going to trust enforcement will never come up or the courts will gut half of the provisions here.”Report
Federalism is a constitutional consideration in that it underlies the pre-emption doctrine. IMO there’s a very strong argument that at all of it would/will fail under a field pre-emption theory.Report
Yes, but there are still distinctions.
“Should we have a national drug policy or should it vary by state?” is an issue of federalism.
“Which level of government has the authority to make drugs illegal?” is also an issue of federalism, but a constitutional one.Report
Well, once upon a time it took a constitutional amendment for the federal goverment prohibit a drug, but then a few years later, it didn’t.Report
I’m just gonna leave this here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printz_v._United_StatesReport
That doesn’t make this law constitutional. It just suggests Sessions’s position isn’t.Report
Yup, that’s pretty much right. California tried this sort of thing once before, in the other direction, and we called it Prop. 187. The courts were very clear in their response: States don’t get to make their own immigration laws; this is a purely Federal area. Courts looking at Arizona’s and Utah’s laws have said the same thing.
The desired effect of this law is to make it more difficult for Federal law enforcement authorities to enforce immigration law in California. Much as I don’t like the direction that this Administration is taking immigration law enforcement, California is on the wrong legal side of this issue.
That doesn’t make the political fight not worthwhile, but for those, including those on these pages, who want to #Resist, be aware that this is a stopgap, a delay tactic, a stall, until and unless Democrats can gain some seats in the 2018 elections and the White House in the 2020 election. The ultimate solution here is necessarily going to be political, and it will necessarily occur at the Federal level.
And “ultimate” means “lasting about a generation.”Report
While the specifics are about immigration status and enforcement, the general principle is the balance between employees’ and employers’ rights/privileges. This law says, in effect, that employees have certain rights that their employer may not compromise (specifically, ICE agents’ access to non-public parts of the workplace and employee records). It’s not inconsistent, in my non-lawyer opinion, with the Dems’ long-term principle of siding with the employee. I suspect that when this gets decided in federal court, the arguments won’t be about federalism and California vs immigration policy; it will be about the balance between employee and employer rights. Does an employee have a right to know their I-9 form is being examined? Does an employee have a right to be secure in their person against an ICE sweep without a warrant?
I am generally clueless about the state of federal case law on such matters, but am pretty sure that questions about employee/employer rights and state laws affecting those comes up in front of the SCOTUS regularly.Report
I agree up to the point where I think the part about employee records may work out (like I said, I need to know more of the case history). There is a reasonable argument to be made for the expectation of privacy there (as with employee lockers). I don’t think that applies, however, to not letting them past the lobby at all. Employers let all sorts of people past the lobby. Making an exception to the general rule for the federal government, though, puts it in a different arena.Report
Man, that Damore thing couldn’t have happened at a worse time.Report
Quite possibly me being old and having one hippie foot stuck back in the 60s, but there is a difference between “all sorts of people” and law enforcement agents acting in an official capacity but lacking a warrant.Report
Yeah, me too. Of course “aging hippie” is also a “me too”.Report
This is going to be different. We’re talking about an enumerated power of Congress. An immigration attorney would know better than me but absent something in federal law explicitly providing an opening for states to do things like this I don’t see how it passes muster.Report
I’d say “putting the Constitution aside” is only really on the table if they somehow ignore the courts after they rule. And if Sessions really is overstepping his authority, I’m not sure I particularly blame them by forcing the issue while overstepping their authority, or even making a futile symbolic gesture in that direction.
The bigger danger is that they end up in court and win, but if that’s a significant possibility, it seems to argue against them putting the Constitution aside at all.Report
I’d say “putting the Constitution aside” is only really on the table if they somehow ignore the courts after they rule. And if Sessions really is overstepping his authority, I’m not sure I particularly blame them by forcing the issue while overstepping their authority, or even making a futile symbolic gesture in that direction.
The bigger danger is that they end up in court and win, but if that’s a significant possibility, it seems to argue against them putting the Constitution aside at all.Report
fwiw, I’m quite happy for you to be correct about all this (and I think you are) since in my view Dems are waaaaay out over their skis on sanctuary cities. Doubling down on it is doubly wrong. Bad governance and bad politics.Report
There are principles, strategies, and tactics.
Abstract legal ideas like federalism or states rights are tactics, meant to protect principles like the rights and dignity of people. They aren’t things in and of themselves that we should support or defend, because they can be used to strip away rights as easily as defend them.
And Saul is right, this is a fight to the death with no room for compromise.
The Trumpist position is that women, gays, and nonwhite people are lesser, unequal and unworthy of full status and respect.
There isn’t any halfway point to compromise with that.Report
Agreed. The only thing that separates Trump (and his allies) from literal fascism is incompetence. However, we shouldn’t count on lasting incompetence. This is a real fight between us and the same forces of darkness that emerged in the 1930’s.
Choose a fucking side.Report
You’re a Google programmer chip is an architect I’m a shlub that works in retail … (OK, I censored all of the rest of this because it’s hard to tell where the frustration stops and the unjustified personal attack begins. It was pretty directly insulting throughout though. – maribou)Report
Seriously, man, relax.Your enemies are not to be found here on this blog.
My wife, my son, my friends and I are all members of the “precariat” which is the modern translation of “proletariat”.
Yes, I have a fancy title and a snappy fedora, which has not translated into being anything other than another guy renting a small apartment, pushing 60, without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.
I don’t think either one of us should be engaged in a pissing match over who is the most authentically oppressed.
Maybe a better conversation is why somehow your rage seems directed towards people who wear silly hats and eat avocado toast, than the lords of finance who made all this happen.
And these brown proletarians picking lettuce and working in slaughterhouses knee deep in pig guts; are they your allies or enemies, and why?Report
Because I never interact with the lords of finance, on the other hand people urban liberals with professional jobs make me miserable on a daily basis.
I don’t have any problem with them my problem is with people like Bill Kristol and Erik Loomis who be their own admission support immigration because they hate people like me.Report
Jebus, Dan. First, what Chip said. Second, I’m a 57-yr old truck driver from western Kansas. Yeah, I went to college but life didn’t work out the way I planned. So it goes.
And, yeah, the commenters here are mostly urban professionals while I’m decidedly working class. But here’s the thing: I’ve never felt disrespected. I’ve had two essays published here, three if you count a comment rescue. These people aren’t your enemies. They didn’t fuck up your life. Chill out.Report
That’s a pretty strong claim. If you really believe it, let’s make some bets. Make some specific predictions about the next three years that would vindicate this claim, and I’ll give you good odds. If Trump dies or gets removed from office, I’ll give you the option to cancel any outstanding bets or keep them going under Pence.Report
(censored for being an unfair attack – Maribou) The fight over immigration is nothing but a front the war between hipster culture and prole culture. You hate my guts, I’d vote for Hitler before I’d vote for the same person as you, Hitler would hate a lot of people but he wouldn’t hate me. (Uh, I kind of want to censor this sentence for Dan d’s sake but I won’t. If you want to claim that about yourself I’m not going to hide it – maribou) (censored for being not just an attack but repetitious of the attack in the previous sentence that I left alone – maribou) I oppose open borders and would rather eat at Chili’s than some hot hipster spot. I didn’t used to be such an immigration hard liner but as I have become convinced that supporters of immigration are mainly motivated by a seething hatred of people like I have radicalized on the issue. If this is a fight to the death whoever has most guns will win. (I’m going to leave this as is, again, not to cover for Dan d – but Dan, seriously, if you want to keep commenting on this blog, saying you would vote for Hitler under the right circumstances and then talking about whoever has the most guns will win is *not* okay. not even a little bit. like how do you not think you’ll get instabanned for that? Jeez. I’m not suspending you ONLY because you are a long time commenter and you seem to be have gone off in some kind of personally offended rage spiral where you don’t know what you’re talking about, but do anything like this again and you’ll be suspended for a very long time. – maribou) And the police military and most civilian gun owners will be on team prole not team hipster.
Here
An immigration proposal, for every hipster/college educated urban liberal that renounces their citizenship and leaves the country two unauthorized Mexican immigrants will be granted citizenship.Report
Actually, I can’t dislike anyone who uses the word “prole” unironically.Report
“I’m not a bigot but really Hitler wasn’t so bad!”Report
@pillsy Once again, I’ll just ask that you give me some time (and or flag comments! flagging definitely works!) to respond to unacceptable comments/behavior before you engage.Report
Sorry. Itchy enter key.Report
That’s not what i said.Report
@dan-d I’m leaving what pillsy said alone (other than chiding him for not giving me some time to moderate first) because he was reacting to something pretty nasty that you did first. If you want people to not unfairly paraphrase you, maybe try not invoking Hitler as a preferential voting choice over … any imaginary choice of the people you’re engaging with, next time.Report
@dan-d Slow down, please. They are saying “that’s the Trumpist position, the Trumpist position is only separated from fascism by incompetence, etc.”
They’re not saying (though apparently you are, out of anger, perhaps? If you’re sincere I’d seriously reconsider your participation here – but I don’t think you’re sincere) that you’d vote for Hitler.
They’re also not saying that they hate you personally, that you personally are an agent of darkness, or whatever. You’re far overpersonalizing. I’m going to prune back your comment pretty severely in a minute because it’s extremely hostile, in response to mostly inferred-by-you rather than stated uncivility.
For the record many, perhaps the majority, of the people you see as “hipsters” in this comments section have some pretty darn solid prole roots, and connections. The idea that we/they all hate you is… you really have to reach to get there.Report
I said some things I shouldn’t have but Chip and Veronica also called people fascist and Veronica literally said that we are dealing with the same forces we dealt with in the 1930s. I oppose open borders they seem to think that all opposition to open borders is the same thing as Nazism. Neither Chip nor Veronica was charitable with people on the other side.
Can I see that I find this defense really weak? A lot of people look down their noses at the places they come from I hear people bad mouthing their hometowns and the people that live in them all the time. in a small minority of cases there is a good reason, such as the gay person from the homophobic town but mostly what they badmouth is cultural tastes that they consider “unsophisticated”.Report
They were talking about people in general terms and describing the way they see things going due to a particular group that only you are identifying yourself as being part of. (Trumpist doesn’t even == “voted for Trump” for Pete’s sake.) Also, your complaints about them here are much more reasonable than what you actually said in the censored (and/or so off-base I left them standing for others to see) parts of your comments. There’s nothing unacceptable about this comment, for example, even though I disagree with it.
Also, badmouthing cultural tastes and hating people aren’t the same. I know this because people badmouth my cultural tastes all the damn time. ALL the damn time. All kinds of people from all social classes (including hipsters). And yet, many of them are my friends. My good, close friends who just think I like dumb stuff. Hell, you should hear Jaybird make fun of the stuff I like and we’re happily married. Also, I’m a bisexual person from a homophobic town where my gay friend got beaten up every week during high school, and I don’t look down my noses at the people where I come from. I love and trust many of them, I think some of them are really fucked up and hateful, sometimes some of the ones I love are kinda fucked up and hateful about people they see as not-enough-like-them… it’s complicated.
Anyway, I don’t really want to get into this as a debate, I should focus on the moderation thing. I only brought it up because I was trying to help you feel less hated by / have a more realistic view of commenters here, since it seemed that that is where a lot of your over-the-line commentary was coming from. But regardless of how you feel about them, it’s really not okay to write at / about them like that.
Nor is it, literally, allowed.Report
If anyone doubts me here are some links to back me up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/opinion/only-mass-deportation-can-save-america.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs0h9ieLPyw&feature=youtu.be&t=54m15s
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/02/we-need-open-borders-in-order-to-cleanse-this-nation-of-the-eating-habits-of-old-white-menReport
@dan-d The sentence you quote here was literally one of only two-three sentences in that entire comment that (as a moderator) I didn’t have a problem with. I don’t agree, but (unlike most of the rest of your comment) it was about your beliefs/arguments/experience of feeling hated, instead of unjustified vitriol aimed at specific other people.
Maybe try to stick to that stuff, rather than the other stuff, if you want to stick around.Report
@dan-d Just to reiterate outside of my redaction/censorship glosses:
If you ever pull off a hate-filled you people are worse than Hitler rant like that again, you will be suspended for a very long time. Or quite possibly banned. I can imagine arguing that if someone else had let you off this lightly, they were being way way WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY too nice to you and too unfair to the people you attacked / anyone who really doesn’t want to hear someone ranting about voting for Hitler in this blog’s comments section, based on some kind of misguided sympathy for how persecuted you apparently feel.
I’m honestly not sure that not banning you for this is the right call.
I’m being so incredibly charitable and open-minded about your perspective right now, you can’t even imagine it.
Also, dude, before you get pissed off at my hipster leftist snobby elitism or whatever, you should probably know I worked retail and pink collar jobs for the first dozen years of my working life. Hell, I’ve cleaned dog kennels all day for months at a time, as a teenager. And this job I have now is technically a pink collar job, although I realize I get treated a LOT nicer than most retail folks and secretaries and I count my blessings about that regularly.
As Chip says, we’re really not your enemies.
But if you keep up this offensive shit about your fellow commenters, you won’t be commenting any longer.Report
@maribou @dan-d
So, I’m going to but in here, because I think Dan had a very interesting comment that deserves further elaboration: “You hate my guts, I’d vote for Hitler before I’d vote for the same person as you, Hitler would hate a lot of people but he wouldn’t hate me.”
We are not talking about voting for Hitler when the Nazi party was trying to win elections in Germany in 32, we are talking Hitler as the vessel for all the atrocities the Nazi’s committed during that era. Excluding the optimistic “but he wouldn’t’ hate me”, that’s a lot of RAGE, victimization, and desire for revenge, in that statement directed at the people he believes are responsible.
I understand that reaction and emotion. To the rest of the community, do YOU understand it? Do you know where it comes from? I’d urge you to think about that. You dismiss it at your peril.
You’ve got one side tired of a long history of certain policies that are viewed as not helping them while others get all the goodies. You’ve Veronica saying “The only thing that separates Trump (and his allies) from literal fascism is incompetence….his is a real fight between us and the same forces of darkness that emerged in the 1930’s.”—Basically calling anyone who’s been on the shit end of the economy as a bunch of Nazis and taking the potion that “You’re not important”–“I’m not listening to you”–or “fuck you!” (Not trying to single out V) It’s that type of attitude that just increases the rage. That just pushes people in the Hitler direction. And there’s a lot of that attitude going around.
The Left lost an election they thought they had in the bag. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” IS a thing. A whole bunch of sketchy guys got emboldened from the election and have tried pushing their fringe views on the rest of us. We’re heading faster towards the time when elections will depend upon whether or not the riots in the street prevent certain voters from voting, or if and when one side will decide to more serious violence is “justified”.
What’s more important? Your side winning at any cost? Think about it from a more strategic, long term perspective, not just the next election or two. “It could never happen here” is bullshit.
I don’t write well or clearly very often, but I hope my point made it across.Report
This is sort of what I alluded to above. It’s a shame the thread went down the Godwin’s Law rabbit hole. There’s a lot at stake with open borders (I think it’s bad, and most certainly untenable policy, but it’s effectively what happens if illegal aliens writ large become a protected class). The argument here shouldn’t be we accept anybody any time with minimal or no scrutiny vs. law enforcement has license to be as brutal as they want in the name of enforcing immigration law. Yet it seems like that’s where we’re heading.Report
Are open borders under serious discussion? The current sides seem to be:
* Make DACA a law
* Give aliens currently in the country a path towards legality
* Keep the existing H1B and immigration rules
vs.
* Build the Wall
* Severely restrict immigration
* Massive deportationsReport
No one is saying it bluntly but based on laws like the one discussed in the OP and the debates around the country of how/whether state and local authorities should cooperate with ICE I would contend yes. And this is coming from someone who has no taste for security theater like the wall and opposes restrictions based on race/creed or proxies for them.Report
Given that ICE was pretty fucking terrible even before Trump, and it’s now being run by an Executive Branch that thinks the likes of Steve Miller should be setting immigration policy, why should the people of California trust them any further than they should throw them?
Maybe in some ideal world local authorities could safely cooperate with them, but we clearly don’t live in such an ideal world. If the alternative is de facto open borders, even if open borders are bad policy, doesn’t the ultimate responsibility for having them fall on the people who decided to make working with ICE untenable?Report
It does and you can see above where I blame the GOP for this outcome. Obama got tougher on enforcement.
This needed to happen before figuring out how to handle the majority of people who have been here long term, many of which I concede it would be immoral or impracticable to deport. Of those the Dreamers represent the easiest cases, and the prior administrstion was right to protect them.
What I don’t think we should do is turn this from reasonable policy vs. brutality to open borders vs. brutality. This is especially true because brutality might win elections but I don’t think open borders ever will on a large scale. This is not only a problem the US is dealing with.Report
I’d like to argue against this view, but I think you’re right about the perception. The Dems haven’t articulated a comprehensive view of immigration which fits neatly in an easily digestible narrative and because of that lots of folks will view their default position as the nonsense going on with sanctuary cities.
Add: Trump has.Report
Obama sort of practiced a defensible policy but never articulated a broader vision. Of course the GOP gave him no reason to even try.Report
Back then pretty much the only immigration issue detectable by political radar was southern border security, and the GOP’s default position on that, despite the rhetoric, was to let em in. And the practical debate over “what to do” centered around whether or not employers should be punished for hiring illegals. (Liberals, at the time, thought they should be.)
Enter Trump. He correctly blasted the GOP’s hypocrisy on border security, but extended the debate in ways that only a True Nationalist would even consider. He and his surrogates included things I’d never really paid any attention to: “anchor babies” and “chain migration”. Couple that with a general antipathy for accepting refugees, a hightened emphasis on deportation of illegals, and a bias against the immigration lottery system (!!) and you’ve got yourself a comprehensive and compelling (even if objectionable) policy perspective on an important political issue.
The Dems don’t have anything remotely like that, but even moreso, I don’t think they have specific rebuttals to conservative preferences on many of these issues. Like, if I ask “what’s each sides view of so-called “anchor babies”?” you could easily rattle off the general conservative position on it. Is that possible for the Dem/ liberal view on the issue? I don’t think Dems have one, to be honest.Report
Yeah i have no idea what the generic D position is on solving our immigration problems. I know what many D’s want on specific issues but for a general solution i have no clue.Report
My guess here: most people who vote D (and I for that matter) believe that “chain migration” and “anchor babies” are bad and need fixed. Most D voters believe a merit-based immigration policy is perfectly reasonable in principle. Most D voters agree that illegals *have* depressed wages for working Americans (despite what all the Ricardo-spewing econ-geeks say…). Most D voters agree that strengthening the borders is an important (even if not *the most* important) issue.(The Wall is dumb and most everyone on both sides knows it.)
Alternately, most conservatives believe Dreamers and similar *should* be given legal status and a path to citizenship.
Dems have a week hand on immigration because most of the Dem base probably supports *most* of the provisions Trump is advocating for.Report
Really? I doubt many D’s have a problem with “chain migration”. Hell how long has that been a burning issue on the anti-immigration side. Maybe i’ve missed it, but it seems like a pretty new thing for them to be pushing big time. But “anchor babies” and “chain migration” don’t’ seem like the hot buttons on the D’s. I’m fine with them….so i got that going for me.
The (silly) Wall has taken on an outstanding importance with D’s because of it’s symbolic nature so most are super hostile to it.Report
I doubt many D’s have a problem with “chain migration”…. I’m fine with them…
Right. You’re “fine with them”. Conservatives aren’t fine with them and they are the ones driving the debate and overarching narrative.
Here’s what I’m saying: being fine with them isn’t a defense for *not* changing them. Dems need an affirmative argument on this and other issues, and they don’t have one.Report
Yeah i agree with that. The D’s don’t have a coherent policy or simple pitch on immigration. They have preferences about specific policies. They also have a strong constituency for pro-immigration policies.
Is chain migration a long standing grievance on the right? It seems like stopping CM is at least partially a tactic to discourage poor people from wanting to come here to build new lives since they wouldn’t be able to build a life around their families.Report
I came across a remarkably un-Vox piece on this issue. It’s very much worth reading.Report
“Chain migration” is a neat bit of branding, isn’t it?
Yet nearly all of us are products of this. My great-great-great grandfather, let’s call him Gunnar (because that was his name) came over. No visas or nothing, because that was how you did it back then.
Gunnar worked in a factory, saved up some money for a year, and bought a farm. Then he wrote back to the Øld Country to his brother Ole, and said, “Ole! Cöme ön över! I need yöur help.” So Ole comes over. After the next year’s harvest, Gunnar and Ole had enough money that they could write back to the Øld Country and bring over their wives. Who then came over and then they started having kids.
That’s “chain migration,” isn’t it? The fact that Gunnar and Ole were white Scandinavians doesn’t change that, so far as I can tell.Report
I think that’s exactly what conservatives object to: that the family members of an immigrant are prioritized in the immigration process.Report
In other words, tough shit, Ole. Get to the back of the line.Report
Why not?
That’s the question Dems need to find a compelling answer to.Report
I can totally appreciate the argument that we need to have the same attitude toward (government policy) as our great-great-grandparents did and anything else is bad, but sometimes that’s a tough sell when society has changed a lot since then.Report
Exactly. I’m not going to pretend there isn’t a generous dose of nativism and racism animating conservative activists on this but we aren’t living in anything like the same global economy as the 1870s or even the 1920s. What’s the argument for importing a bunch of low skill immigrant labor? How does it benefit citizens of this country?
I get why we want the doctors and physicists and coders.Report
@stillwater Because Democrats believe in families and they believe in letting people who love each other stay together and support one another as much as possible.
(Is this really hard for y’all? I mean, not that you can’t argue with what I just said but it’s the obvious political angle to take. Maybe it’s because Canada’s immigration policies are so different, but I’ve been hearing this stuff articulated forcefully for as long as I can remember.)
Bonus: “Why should I be welcoming instead of fearful of refugees?” even has a rather lovely if perhaps not convincing of anyone except wafflers song to go along w/it. (Um, except I suppose wafflers are who we need to convince.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTsdB8-1uLYReport
Because Democrats believe in families and they believe in letting people who love each other stay together and support one another as much as possible.
I can’t tell if you’re joking or not, which is why you haven’t heard anyone in politics use this argument.Report
@stillwater I 100 percent guarantee you I am not joking that I think it’s the best political argument to make for family-based immigration, and I think letting the right win the “family values” tag is one of the biggest mistakes the US progressives ever made. Like, it didn’t even *occur* to me that you’d think I was joking and only on reflecting on how f’d up the discourse is do I see why you would think I was. There was no tongue-in-cheekness involved.
I mean, this fits in with a lot of other things. “You’re not the family values party WE’RE the family values party, and also the valuing people party” used to be a thing Dems argued successfully.
It didn’t shake out like that on the other side of the 49th, where those arguments – the ones I’m referring to -were used across party lines against anti-immigration folks.
Like they are so bog standard elsewhere, that it didn’t even occur to me that they are weird here.
Even having reflected on the validity of your perspective, I would say that *if* the Dems want to be taken seriously by middle America, they need to be able to say that and mean it, without it being perceived as snark.Report
I also happen to think it’s a fairly true and important argument, that most progressives really *do* feel those things (leaving the political animals aside for the moment).
It has to be balanced against equality of opportunity and perceived need and political will and a million other things, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.
I mean, why did the US let me come to live in this country? I loved someone very much and I wanted to be with them. That’s not a statistic or a moral value or whatever, it’s a big fat squishy humanistic value that I (and most progressives of whatever stripe) want to see *expanded* not shut down.Report
Ha. That was 100 percent the wrong song. That’s what i get for putting out fires at work and posting here simultaneously. (at least the fires all got put out so my employer should be happy.)
It’s this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWieyTHSCi8Report
I have to say, most of the complaints I see about these things, like, for instance, “chain migration” or “anchor babies” make me wonder why I should care.
I don’t see how having Ole come on over picks my pocket or breaks my leg.Report
Um, because we Americans consider families important (remember family values). Making it hard for families to live near each other is kind of evil.Report
Last summer (or was it fall?), after yet another freaking police shooting, there was an interesting essay talking about how African-Americans need sanctuary.
Googled for it. Found it.
There’s a storm brewin’.Report
Damnit, @jaybird , I hate it when you sound like that because the last time I remember you sounding like that you were telling me to beware that Trump had a realistic path to actual victory to which I wasn’t giving enough credence.Report
It’s problematic electorally if the Dems lose support among African-Americans due to their support of Dreamers. The Dems should address this.
It’s a shame that there exists a perception and perhaps a reality that Black and Brown folks must vie for support from the same small pot. We all ought to address this.
It’s damning for the GOP that neither group seems to see them as concerned with their interests. The GOP isn’t moved by this.Report
It’s problematic if they do, but I’d like to see actual evidence beyond a single editorial supporting this.Report
Maybe, but I don’t think the appropriate response is, “Let’s see what the polls say.”
“Hey, what about us?”
“Let’s see what the polls say.”
Eash.Report
I mean, if you’re talking about electoral problems, asking what the polls say seems pretty reasonable to me.
If you’r talking about policy problems, it’s a different matter.Report
Speaking strictly electorally, sure. But do you want to let 2018 or 2020 be the test case?Report
No, but it’s a double-edged sword.
A huge chunk of the Dem base has gotten to be ferociously pro-immigration over the last several years. There’s peril in moving the other direction, as well.Report
Maybe there’s a middle ground.Report
A huge chunk of the Dem base has gotten to be ferociously pro-immigration over the last several years.
Pro immigrant-already-in-America, or pro immigration?
My own perception is that Democrats haven’t become ferociously pro-immigration but instead that the Democratic Party’s rather tepic support for immigration looks ferocious when compared to the xenophobic and extreme anti-immigration positions on the right.Report
Are “sanctuary cities” ferociously pro-immigration?
If not, I’d need an example of a policy that would be. (Germany with refugees being the baseline for “ferociously”, maybe?)
If so, I’d say that while the Democratic party does not, as an entity, agree monolithically on immigration, other than abortion, there isn’t anything they agree monolithically on. As such, I’d say that there are sanctuary cities and these sanctuary cities are associated with the democratic party and, from there, it’s assumed that that is something that the democrats are cool with.
In the same way that the Republicans are the party of racist xenophobia.Report
I’d say sanctuary city folks are ferociously pro-immigrant-already-in-America.Report
Sure. Fair enough.
You’re right, there is a lot of slop in the discussion.
There are the people who want more legal immigration (but want to deport “illegals”). There are people who want to legalize undocumented dreamers who just want better lives for themselves and their families who already happen to be here (but don’t think that anything needs to be done with the immigration process itself). There are the corporations that benefit mightily from the pressures that illegal immigration pushes on wages.
All sorts of “pro immigration” attitudes and not all of them are compatible with other “pro immigration” attitudes.
(And I remembered telling this story back in 2010. Kinda apt.)Report
Look at the last graph about polling on immigration levels from Gallup. Over the fifteen years or so, the GOP pretty much stays constant, with 80% or so wanting less immigration.
The Dems go from being just somewhat less opposed to immigration (~70% wanting less) to being overwhelmingly not-opposed (25% wanting less).
That’s not monolithic support or agreement, but it’s about the same split within the Democratic Party as there is on abortion.Report
Also, for all the complaints that the pro-immigration side doesn’t have a compelling argument, this is a strong indication that they’re actually winning the hell out of the argument.Report
I think the distinctions are rapidly eroding between the two.
I might even go so far as to say that maintaining a separation between the two is difficult as politics and difficult as policy. For all that I was arguing with @in-md elsethread, he’s not wrong that a lot of the Democratic Party is moving, slowly or not so slowly, towards support for open borders. Since I mostly do support open borders,[1] this strikes me as mostly a good thing.
I just think there’s enough other things going on with sanctuary cities and ICE that conflating them with open borders is misleading.
[1] I get that border control is important, and there are some people who are worth keeping out, and knowing what people are entering has considerable value. I just think that having permissive policies makes border control easier, since it gives fewer people reasons to enter the country illegally.Report
Google something like “hispanic black chicago tension”. A couple of Chicago’s black aldermen have been particularly outspoken.Report
I semi-regularly link to this report called “The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Wages and Employment Opportunities of Black Workers”.
It’s damning for the GOP that neither group seems to see them as concerned with their interests. The GOP isn’t moved by this.
I remember arguing about the whole “Fiscal Conservative” thing way back when. 2005ish, 2006ish, and I was arguing on Redstate. My argument was that if the Republicans betrayed the primarily fiscally-minded conservatives long enough, these same fiscal conservatives might start saying something like “you know what, neither party gives a crap about my most important issue… I’m going to vote on my second most important issue.”
They told me that fiscal conservatives who had second most important issues that weren’t social conservatism or hawkish things weren’t *REAL* Republicans and whatnot.
Anyway, 2006 and 2008 were interesting.
Full disclosure: I was banned from Redstate.Report
Not sure I follow.
My hunch is that most African-American voters who formerly felt at home with but are now feeling displaced by the Dems will just stay home; they won’t vote for anything close to the current incarnation of the GOP.Report
My hunch is that most African-American voters who formerly felt at home with but are now feeling displaced by the Dems will just stay home; they won’t vote for anything close to the current incarnation of the GOP.
So it’s not as bad as it could be?
I guess that’s a win.Report
No. It’s bad for a host of reasons.
And while it may be good electorally for the GOP, it’s bad for them as well.
A large segment of the population feeling displaced is bad.Report
Black folks not voting for two cycles would lead to the end of Democratic party as we currently know it. It might be worth a try. 🙂Report
Uh.
I get that you’re tongue in cheeking this but
Voting Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Voting Rights Act.
I get that I’m a latecome to this country but even in jest and in support of them, the idea of suggesting that black people abstain en masse from voting pretty much breaks my brain.Report
I hear ya. I just think African Americans have fully paid that debt.Report
Sorry – didn’t mean to double-comment that.Report
What? I don’t think they owe any debt. Zero debt whatsoever.
If anything the balance on African Americans and voting is still wayyyyyyyyyy us owing them a debt.
Was that a joke?Report
I’m confused now. You brought up the VRA as a reason why blacks vote D. I said that debt to the Dem party is paid. (Over-paid, by my lights. Dems owe blacks, as a voting block, much more in return for their persistent loyalty than Dems have delivered.)Report
@stillwater Oh, no, I brought up the VRA as a reason why I would never advocate even in jest for black people to not vote, to stay home.
They worked too damn hard for too long to be able to show up. Their rights are still too in jeopardy, also.
I didn’t think of it as a reason why black people vote D , let alone should be expected to vote D, at all. (I mean, obviously it is, but that’s not why I brought it up nor was I thinking about that.)Report
Ahh, that’s the disagreement then. I *do* think it’s worth making jokes about. 🙂Report
Yeah, I wasn’t saying you can’t, just that it breaks my brain to contemplate doing so.Report
*cough*
A reason why they DO vote D, not a reason why they SHOULD vote D. Hoisted by my own edit-hurrying-to-make-the-five-minute-window. I don’t have any intentions of saying who any African American person *should* vote for.
I’m just going to go sit in a corner till I’m less shook by Ursula Le Guin having died today (which feels dumb, to be so shook, she was 88 and I knew she was sick. But damn) – and then I’ll come back out when I’m competent at typing and making sentences. Maybe in a month or so.Report
Uh.
I get that you’re tongue in cheeking this but
Voting Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Voting Rights Act.
I get that I’m a latecomer to this country but even in jest and in support of them, the idea of suggesting that black people abstain en masse from voting pretty much breaks my brain.Report
When ICE gets the same kind of criticism for deporting someone who overstayed his visa a few months ago that they get for deporting doctors and grandmothers who’ve lived here for decades, I’ll be forced to agree.Report
I’m generally skeptical of law enforcement but I’m not sure what else they’re supposed to do. The Arpaio insanity is downright evil and anyone caught in the country illegally should be treated in a humane manner. It’s a disgrace that ICE can’t be relied on to do that but I see that as a seperate issue. They don’t decide who can and can’t be deported.Report
Why? The people making sanctuary city policies and the like don’t have the power to make ICE reliable, so if they can’t rely on ICE, I’m not sure why they shouldn’t… well, not rely on ICE. Especially when they have many other reasons to not particularly want ICE rounding people up and interfering with their own, pressing law enforcement issues.Report
I might buy this if virtually every sanctuary city didn’t have serious abuse problems with it’s own municipal police forces.Report
Municipal police forces are often, but not universally, terrible, and a lot of time you’re looking at a different pool of activists and even politicians pushing on different levers to try to achieve their ends.Report
I got that but are we really supposed to believe whats driving city governments in NYC and Chicago and Baltimore is ICE’s Dirty Harry act? The same Dirty Harry act agencies under their control mete out to their own voters? To me that stretches credulity.Report
Chicago and Baltimore? Nyah.
But I mean there was kind of a major voter’s revolt over a lot of the shit the NYPD is pulling. Some of that has been reined in (and crime has continued to fall in NYC).
And not all the major cities that have sanctuary cities have horrible police departments.
Not to mention that, from a more cynical standpoint, in most big cities (and not just there) the police force is a very politically powerful entity in its own right. Officials get less credit for taking easy steps than hard ones, but that doesn’t mean they should leave metaphorical money on the metaphorical table.Report
I get what you’re saying in theory but I still don’t think it’s helping the debate on what is and always will be a national problem. Any credit they deserve for limiting abuse by ICE is in my opinion outweighed by these other issues.Report
Look, the national problem is not going to be anything like solved when the people who have the most power and responsibility for solving it are the likes of Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, and Steve Miller.
So I really don’t expect activists, local and state politicians, or anybody else to even try to address it or advance the debate, since doing so is a transparent waste of time. I also don’t see why I, or anybody else, should accord any legitimacy to a political movement that not only made Donald Trump it’s de facto leader, but put him in de jure control of the immigration enforcement apparatus.
Given that that movement is the other side of the “debate”, the debate is worthless.Report
If we can’t win a debate with Trump then we have serious problems. The pro-immigration argument has economic sanity on its side, which means Money! which everyone likes. The anti-immigration side wants to rip apart families which isn’t going to be popular. And the bulk of the problems illegals bring to this country is because they’re illegal, not because they’re immigrants.
Immigrants add a lot to this country. Tomato pickers and doctors. They buy gas and groceries. They’re younger than most Americans so they pay into the social programs. Teleport every illegal out of the country and we’re staring at a massive recession, and the coal jobs still won’t come back.
Refusing to engage in the debate is yielding the argument to Trump.
(Moving to open advocacy): Save the dreamers. Engage in brain drain. Create a guest worker program. Staple a green card to every Diploma. Give out mass amnesty.
Build the wall. Restructure the lottery to openly do what we already see in the statistics anyway (i.e. most who come here are educated and productive).Report
This is… a pretty good point, actually.Report
I’m trying to clarify what I was trying to say to @in-md when I wrote my comment this morning, and the best I can do is, “I was grouchy and hadn’t had any coffee yet.”Report
I go back to this one again and again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLG9g7BcjKs
(Watch out, the language is crude and earthy.)Report
It’s not really. You can’t win a debate with a two year old either, or a coma patient, or a dog.
Or Sean Hannity, for instance. Not because they’re masters of rhetoric or have solid positions or good arguments or the facts on their side, but because toddlers, the unconscious, animals, and Sean Hannity are not actually capable of a complex give-and-take of ideas.Report
@inmd
ICE’s hard-line position is quite something. As far as I can tell, they think they are a rogue and independent part of the government and accountable to no one. Obama tried to put restraints on ICE and received no results.Report
Poor Obama. Accused of deporting more people than any other president in history when, really, it was just some rogue agency.Report
@leeesq
The problem is that it is not just evil but immigration hardliners are being actively stupid. As LeeEsq points out making illegal immigration a criminal offense will just kick in all the Constitutional rights that get attached to criminal proceedings. Keeping it as a civil offense puts the burden on the immigrant, requires a lower standard of evidence, and you don’t have detainees counsel.Report
Like any law enforcement organization, ICE has policies and priorities. I suppose it can’t ignore specific complaints; I don’t know how often those occur.Report
American law enforcement at all levels relies upon prosecutorial discretion (which, of course, is problematic because we don’t apply it fairly anywhere).
ICE is very bad at prosecutorial discretion.Report
ICE is very bad at prosecutorial discretion.
As I’ve said before, I’m coming around to the idea that any ‘law enforcement’ agency that is basically tasked with just breaking down doors and arresting people, no need to collect evidence or speak to victims or operate in a community, just grab people, lock them up, and that’s it…
…is going to drift pretty quickly towards behaving in a fascist manner, unless otherwise controlled.
Interesting fact: It is literally illegal for ICE to lock an American citizen up. Not ‘ICE has to allow access to a lawyer’, or ‘ICE has to hold a hearing’…it’s just flatly illegal, ICE does not have jurisdiction over American citizens, and it’s as illegal for them to detain American citizens as it would be for New Jersey police to wander into New York and set up a prison there and throw people into it.
And yet, it keeps happening. Not just for some sort of ‘reasonable’ amount of time. I mean, I’m not sure there’s a reasonable amount of time to illegally kidnap someone, but other law enforcement is given the ability to hold people for 48 hours or so, so such an idea wouldn’t be absurd, although the laws would need to change.
No, instead, ICE keeps holding Americans for weeks or months or in a few notable cases, years, and sometimes even coerces them into signing away their right to see a judge and deports them.
Why? Because the idea that someone would have access to a _lawyer_ or that ICE would have to _prove_ something about a person before doing things to them literally does not register on ICE. It is not part of the process. Yes, technically speaking, if people do not sign forms, they will _eventually_ end up in front of a judge…without a lawyer, and it could be months later.
ICE is a return to medieval justice, where the government decides people have committed a crime, and arrests them, and that’s the entire process…except it somehow exists within our current system, and it nominally follows due process on paper, while not actually following it in reality.
Of course ICE is going to be bad at prosecutorial discretion. They’re bad at basically everything besides ‘Guess someone is a bad guy, arrest that person, the end’.Report
Regarding worries about impending fascism, Matt Yglesias said the model Trump is trying to realize in the DOJ is exemplified by the current practices and culture exhibited by ICE.
I assume he meant the high-profile edge cases, like the ICE agent requesting papers from passengers on a FL bus.Report
Or pouring out water in the desert, and arresting those who leave it there for desperate immigrants.Report
That always makes me recall the “border patrol” checkpoints I’ve encountered 200 miles from the border.
Why, exactly, are you stopping cars 200 miles from the actual border? Do you not understand your job? Who lets you do this? Why are you allowed to do this? Do you not know where the border is?Report
The Border Patrol (Actually, Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency) are actually allowed to do that, according to court cases.
The CBP actually does have jurisdiction over citizens, because they also enforce customs. If you attempt to smuggle stuff through the border, they are the people who will arrest you, and obviously that applies even if you’re a US citizen.
Why the hell their jurisdiction extends 200 miles out is anyone’s guess.
ICE, meanwhile, has jurisdiction over immigration in the US. But, slight correction:
The article I read, with a quote from spokeman of ICE saying they did not have the authority to arrest US citizens. But I think the spokeman is _technically_ wrong, looking at Wikipedia carefully.
Parsing Wikipedia out, what seems to be true is that the part of ICE that does immigration law enforcement, which is called Enforcement and Removal Operations, does not have the statutory authority to arrest anyone not covered under immigration laws…and American citizens are not covered under immigration laws, duh.
However, there is a different part of ICE, called ‘Homeland Security Investigations’, that exists to investigate crimes. They are the people, for example, who investigate complicated smuggling ring. As opposed to the Border Patrol, who try to check by just looking at stuff, but don’t really ‘investigate’ anything.And legally they can enforce all the Federal criminal code (On top of immigration law), so in theory could arrest anyone.
So, technically, ICE can arrest Americans. But the part of ICE that enforces just immigration law cannot, just the part that does investigations…and that part would hopefully be smart enough to notice, uh, wait, the person they are actually investigating (Instead of just arresting in a sweep because they look Mexican and are standing near a bunch of presumed immigrants.) is an American citizen.
—
Anyway, I have, on occasion, talked about my idea that judges should be involved in the arrest procedure. Mostly I talk about my idea that we need a judge to sign off on _every single_ arrest, in real time. In some sort of emergency situation where they cannot get clearance first, officers would be allowed to hold someone in place, but they cannot even put someone in a patrol car without them explaining the crime supposedly committed and some low threshold of evidence, to a judge over the radio, and a judge saying ‘Yup, you have enough to detain them for 48 hours.’
But that’s actually my second idea in this area, and I have an older idea which also requires a judge on call….so frankly, we might as well do them both if there’s a judge available 24/7: The booking process should allow you a very short hearing if you assert one of several fundamental mistakes of fact have been made in your arrest. The examples I usually give are ‘The person named in the warrant is not me’ and ‘The thing I supposedly was arrested for is not legally any sort of crime’.
‘I am a US citizen and they arrested me for violating immigration law, which I am not subject to’, would seem to logically fit there, also. At which point you’d be allowed to present evidence that said fact was true. (And if you don’t have such evidence, you would be permitted to try to get such evidence, and then see the judge again.)
Unlike now, where law enforcement can make patently obvious mistakes during arrest that cannot be cleared up until a judge is seen, and that often takes days….or, in the case of immigration detention, weeks. Things that take literally five minutes to clear up in a courtroom.Report
Maybe they could just carry around a rubber stamp? If everything is an emergency then nothing is. If everything requires a judges approval…
The judge’s time is a limited resource, the time he spends on the phone approving the police putting someone in a car is time he doesn’t spend doing something else.
This hits the radar as a supply/demand thing. There are huge numbers of “criminals” (i.e. all illegal immigrants) and very few judges. Increasing the “what judges must do” seems likely to make that situation worse, not better.
Bad laws lead to bad outcomes.Report
That’s fair, but we still need an incentive to get the police to not make patently obvious mistakes and cause harm. The system assumes that a person spending a long weekend in jail is relatively harmless. Reality is not so forgiving to any not firmly in the UMC or better.
So either the cops have to take it on the chin when they cause unjust harm, or someone else does, either a DA, or a judge.Report
Mistakes and harm are direct consequences of bad law.
If the law assumes Trump is right and all illegal immigrants are rapists, then this harm is small compared to the problem the law is designed to fix. Of course the law is a total mismatch with reality, and all the other problems flow from that.Report
Maybe they could just carry around a rubber stamp?
Oh, I’m not arguing a high threshold at all. The judge should take the police officer _entirely_ at his word. If he asserts something is true, the judge should believe it and decide if the guy can be arrested based on that.
I mostly just want the police officer to explain exactly why he’s arresting someone _at the time he does so_, and the judge to say ‘Why, what you have described sounds like a crime, and your suspicion of that person is reasonable. Arrest authorized.’. I don’t even the person should be allowed to chime on this.(1)
But you would be amazed at how many times people are freed because the judge looks at someone who has been arrested and says ‘There doesn’t seem to be a crime here even if all facts are as described’.
Hell, you’d be amazed how many people are just _freed_ after being arrested, not even seeing a judge. Which, yes, some of that is because the crime really exists, but simply can’t be proven to the prosecutor’s satisfaction so they won’t take the case to trial. That’s…not the arrests I have a problem with.
The places I have a problem with is the arrests where there’s not even any vaguely plausible crime that could have ever hypothetically applied to the stated behavior. The police just wanted to arrest that person, and did.
I don’t think police should be allowed to do that. I’m not sure why the police have to run search warrants and other stuff past a judge and explain their reasonable suspicion, but they don’t have to explain their suspicion before detaining someone. They probably should have to.
1) The ‘get a hearing on a few specific things after being booked’ mostly only apply to people arrested by someone for someone else (Where actual factual mistakes in identity or whether warrants are still in effect are common.), though, not people arrested by the police for a crime that the police themselves are investigating.
The judge’s time is a limited resource, the time he spends on the phone approving the police putting someone in a car is time he doesn’t spend doing something else.
Time spent by judges: Limited.
Time spent by someone in jail because the police officer made a trivially obvious error, like arresting someone for something that isn’t a crime, that will immediately get the entire case dismissed when it ends up in front of a judge: Completely limitless.
And isn’t determining whether or not the government can detain someone _literally_ the job of a judge?
Increasing the “what judges must do” seems likely to make that situation worse, not better.
By that logic, the ‘best situation’ is one where judges are not involved at all.
In reality, if there is some sort of process where people who would immediately be let go if they would see a judge, can jump the line and see a judge, the system actually works better….as in, there is no measure by which it’s getting worse. Everyone is getting in front of a judge in the same amount of time _on average_. Meanwhile, people are being wrongly held less time.
The only people who come out worse off are the people who are going to eventually win immigration battles, but don’t have some sort of obvious reason why. Like if someone has been arrested for being in a green card marriage, but wants their day in court to prove it’s a real marriage, and will win in court.
They end up behind even more people this way…but the way to fix an extremely-broken-because-it-is-absurdly-slow system is not to argue that ‘Everyone needs to calmly stay in line for months in the order they entered, instead of sometimes people skipping around’. That doesn’t _fix_ anything. It might keep things ‘fairer’, but it’s not fixing anything at all. The only way to fix things is to add judges.
—
…actually, in what I’m arguing, government bureaucrats could probably do some of it. Some times these are just basic facts. If a Hispanic American guy arrested by ICE because he happened to be walking around, without his wallet, near where ICE arrested a bunch of people, is allowed by law to call someone and get them to bring a driver’s license and birth certificate proving he was born in the US, and they do, I don’t see why a ‘judge’ is needed to authorize the release of the guy. Just have the ICE office look at that, and say ‘Okay’, and release him.
You only really need a judge if ICE wouldn’t want to release him at that point even though it’s clear he’s an American citizen, or wouldn’t want to let him make the call even if the law said he could. I don’t see why ICE would do that unless ICE is being run by a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth racists.Report
I’m not opposed, but we have a lot of cops and not many judges. Judges are the legal system’s last “sanity” filter. By applying the “sanity” filter early, you’re making it harder to apply later. If the police+judge arrest someone, getting in front of the judge later will be MUCH harder because they’re busy micromanaging the police.
It’s possible that putting a judge in every police car is a good use of resources (in your situation the same judge is in a dozen cars or something), but nothing is free.
Maybe this would result in less abuse, but it also might result in more.
Yes. Ideally we’d reform these laws. Short of that, the police should be applying sanity filters themselves early and often. Judges should only be dealing with actual disputes and instances where the police fail.
You’re assuming the police never let people go without a judge telling them to. That a beat cop’s cop-boss doesn’t look at a situation and decide it’s not going to work so they’ll back off before a judge tells them to. That the beat cop himself doesn’t decide it’s not actually worth the system’s time and let him go by himself.
If the police do apply imperfect sanity filter(s) early, then having a judge review things before that just adds to the judge’s workload. Worse, Judges don’t like being overruled by beat cops. Everything that passes the judge’s filter also must pass the cop’s.
Exchanging “everyone waits for four months” for “some people get out in minutes and others wait for years” seems like an issue.
Get rid of the laws. Or make it clear to the police and to the bureaucrats they’ll be punished more for holding the innocent than for releasing the guilty. Or just do that for boss-police who are expected to review the work of their minions.
Screaming “racism” avoids sensible evaluation of both problems and solutions. Worse, if you’re wrong that doesn’t change it from being a bad idea. Worse yet, drumming out all racism from the system won’t fix anything if the root problem isn’t racism.
My expectation is ICE has bad incentives. “How many people did you arrest and ship back” rather than “how many criminals” style incentives. Ideally we’d only be using ICE for violent criminals, but those are rare and hard to get while random civilians who just want jobs are common and easy.
What is happening sounds like the “small town with a SWAT team” problem. They need to justify their existence, they’ll find things to do… and we end up having the heavily armed team serve warrants on 90 year old grandmas for parking tickets.
ICE needs something to do, wants to increase their metrics, and there aren’t enough criminal immigrants to occupy their time.Report
Short of that, the police should be applying sanity filters themselves early and often.
Yes, lots of things ‘should be’ happening.
I think, at this point, it is clear we cannot get the police reformed in any manner via a _response_ of the legal system. It’s hard enough to get them prosecuted for outright actual killing. (Because cops and prosecutors work hand in and hand so prosecutors will not go after cops.)
You’re assuming the police never let people go without a judge telling them to. That a beat cop’s cop-boss doesn’t look at a situation and decide it’s not going to work so they’ll back off before a judge tells them to. That the beat cop himself doesn’t decide it’s not actually worth the system’s time and let him go by himself.
Oh, no, I’m not assuming that at all. There’s plenty of circumstances where a judgment is made.
But there’s also plenty where it is not.
There’s also a hell of a lot of situations where the police arrest people basically just because they don’t like them, and then let them go without any charges at all. Which, again, is hard for people outside the system to prove (Vs. the police arresting a real suspect to a real crime, but then just not being able to build a good case.), but _would_ be noticeable if the police had to run all their arrests by an independent entity.
Hell, you know what? Forget the judge. Here’s a fun requirement I want:
Before the police act to arrest someone (Or if they have to act immediately due to threat or possible fleeing, as soon as the person has been constrained), they would have to use their radio to call in the crime they suspect the person of (If they are unsure of the actual crime, well, presumably there is someone on the other end who can tell them what crime that would be, and I’m not saying they have to cite the exact statute number.)
And what made them believe the person committed it. (Which obviously would often be ‘I saw it’, or ‘I am in a middle of an open police investigation about that crime and have a bunch of documented evidence in it that I think points to this guy’.)
That’s it. They say it over the radio, so it’s recorded. (I would say they have to use their body cam to do it, but body cams mysteriously keep not working and not getting turned on.)
Please note that, while everyone thinks that police officers already have to tell the suspect of what grounds they are being arrested, that’s only true in a few specific places, and nothing requires the police to create any sort of record of it, nor explain even vaguely what evidence they might have at the time.
And I’m not saying ‘This is the only thing they can get the arrested for’. But such a thing could be used in court, where the defense can say ‘The police officer arrested my client for jaywalking, but instead of charging my client with that, the police officer has made up vandalism charges that he says he saw my client commit at the time, but didn’t bother to mention on the radio.’
I would also have the notifications summarized and the statistics made public. ‘X number of people were arrested for Y with a rational of Z, and then not charged’ would be very interesting information, especially if the officer is listed. An actual way to find cops operating without any concerns of the actual law, either because they are malicious or just mistrained.
Or make it clear to the police and to the bureaucrats they’ll be punished more for holding the innocent than for releasing the guilty. Or just do that for boss-police who are expected to review the work of their minions.
…and how are you going to do this without someone saying ‘That was a good arrest’ and ‘That was not a good arrest’?
I mean, police departments aren’t even required to keep records of who they detain and how long without any charges being filed.
Screaming “racism” avoids sensible evaluation of both problems and solutions
Hey, I didn’t say they were racist. I said they would be racist if they continued to hold American citizens they knew were American citizens solely because those citizens were Hispanic.
Which, I mean, yes, they are doing. So I guess I _am_ calling them racist. Ooops.
My bad?
My expectation is ICE has bad incentives. “How many people did you arrest and ship back” rather than “how many criminals” style incentives. Ideally we’d only be using ICE for violent criminals, but those are rare and hard to get while random civilians who just want jobs are common and easy.
Ideally, we’d have a lot less people here illegally, so we’d just be using ICE to just keep track of people who overstayed their visa. And we’d use the actual criminal justice system to deal with violent criminals, and if you happen to be a not-yet-a-citizen immigrant (legal or otherwise), convicted of a serious crime, the sentence can include deportation.
Right now, even when they follow the ‘we only deport violent criminals’, this…doesn’t actually include any sort of trial to prove they are criminals. ICE just sorta says ‘We grabbed this person because they were linked with violent crime’, and then…deports them, which they can do because the person actually was here illegally.
Not only is this a dubious practice in a country of laws, but it actually is rather scary, because ‘punishing a person’ is not the only reason we have courts, so we can’t just skip a court because ‘we’re going to punish them with deportation anyway’. There are lots of crimes that ICE has just sorta asserted some illegal immigrant has done, without much evidence, and shipped them out without a trial, and we’ll never know if they were wrong and thus _we need to find the actual criminal_.
(We already have enough of that problem with wrongly convicted, which we can do something about, and suspects who die before trial, which we probably can’t as no one wants to hold trials of dead people, even though we really do need to know who committed various crimes even if they are dead.)
ICE needs something to do, wants to increase their metrics, and there aren’t enough criminal immigrants to occupy their time.
I bet there really are. It’s just that criminal immigrants, at least known criminal immigrants, like all known criminals who have the authorities after them, tend not to be easy to find.
Of course, as it currently stands, we have entire communities operating outside the law because half the people there are technically criminals in violation of immigration laws, which presents tons of easy place for actual committing-felonies criminals to hide.
But I’m pretty sure you and me basically think the same about that, in that it’s really bad to have those outside-the-law groups, and, as it’s pretty much impossible to deport them, and technically possible but really damn hard to convince them to leave(1), the actual solution is to legalize them and then arrest the actual felons wandering around inside them.
1) Wrecking our own economy in 2008 so it was less attractive vs. Mexico did that to some level, but…maybe we shouldn’t do that again? OTOH, at some point helping Mexico to make it more attractive to stay there wouldn’t be stupid, because having a neighbor controlled by murderous drug cartels in large sections is, uh, not good for lots of reasons.Report
Then judicial micromanagement probably makes the situation worse right there. My expectation is the system does things right more often than it does things wrong. Spamming the judges will make it harder for them to deal with the system’s outlier abuses.
Deliberately abusive cops will still find ways to abuse the system.
Now this sounds like a great idea. It’s a lot more workable and would gather data (probably down to the individual cop level).
Going down the “police racism” rabbit hole is a diversion because we instantly end up at “how do we make them not racist”. Hispanics are greatly over represented in the illegal alien community and are going to be over represented in the law’s problems. Police racism is the least of the problems, if we get robots to enforce these laws, Hispanics will still be over represented.
These are bad laws which should be pitched. Ignoring that and trying to fix the police so the laws “work” is a waste of time. And yes, agreed about the various other problems which result from these laws.
As far as what to do now… I think the most sensible solution is something like “if you live here illegally for 10 years then we’ll give you a pass on entry and give you a path to green card”.Report
We may not have open borders de jure, but we certainly have them de facto. How on earth could we ever defend them against unwanted crossing? They’re simply too long.
As someone who remembers the ’85 amnesty under Reagan, I see DACA and the DREAM Act as history repeating itself, and I don’t think there’s a way to stop it from happening again.Report
It would be terrible policy, but it’s almost certainly possible to make things bad enough that almost no one would come here to live on an undocumented basis. Internment camps of the worst sort. Civil penalties high enough that no one would provide employment.Report
Let’s see how the businesses who depend on undocumented labor (farmers, meat processors, landscapers) react to the new regime. That will probably dictate the direction of the enforcement. History has shown that Americans don’t want to do these jobs at the wages offered (and sometimes not even for more).Report
This hits on why I think the apparent position the Democratic party is taking is so crazy. I get that the activists and identity politics people think they’re defending a vulnerable population. In practice they’re taking the side of businesses exploiting illegal labor.Report
That’s an interesting take that I’ve never considered.
I did hear a story on the radio yesterday about a Dept. of Labor proposal to allow tip sharing for the back of the house staff at restaurants. It occurred to me at the time that it was a sneaky way for restaurant owners to try to get kitchen staff on the server minimum wage, thereby allowing wage costs to be driven even lower in that business. The proposed rule states otherwise, but I suspect it’s a camel’s nose in the tent kind of thing.
There is a chicken restaurant near my house that has food prices that are at first shockingly high. On the menu is a little note about the prices and how the allow the owners to pay the workers a decent wage. Are Americans willing to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to fair treatment of labor? The success of Walmart says otherwise, but this little anecdote has made me more considerate of the issue.Report
Without a path to citizenship, and doubly so without someone reigning in ICE, businesses can double down on exploiting illegal immigrants by threatening to have them detained or deported.
In practice, Democrats understand that, bluntly, there’s a lot of illegal immigrants here and it’s no practical to deport them all. So the best they can do is push for policies to make it harder to exploit them.
Which is pretty much where they’re at. Protection for dreamers, trying to reign in ICE, etc.
What other options do they have, realistically? Illegal immigrants exist. You can’t ship them all back. You can’t ship even a tiny fraction of them back.Report
And this is what I mean when I say the policy is essentially open borders. It’s like those illegal immigrants are just popping up out of thin air.
The Obama administration understood, or seemed to anyway, that part of actually fixing this involves enforcement. Otherwise history will repeat, with cycles of relatively unchecked illegal immigration followed by amnesty once the population reaches critical mass. By failing to do something to stop and deter the flow you are ensuring that businesses which exploit illegal labor will have a massive supply of it. Businesses need to be afraid to hire them and they need to understand there will be no work for them here if they come illegally. Only once you’ve done that can you find a humane way to handle the people here, which for most, means some kind of permanent status.Report
Yes and no. Business “exploiting” illegal labor is a serious problem, but “exploiting” means things like pay being withheld and sexual harassment. If we gave everyone involved access to the legal system these problems go away (at least to the same degree as for the rest of society).
Destroying voluntary jobs is something which should be reviewed with skepticism because the people involved believe, probably correctly, that they’ll be worse off, sometimes MUCH worse off. Typically they’re correct. Making min wage picking tomatoes is better than making a third of that and also needing to worry about drug gangs.Report
Any business who hires people not eligible to work in the US is doing so for their own bottom line. They are not doing it the benefit of poor foreigners. If people want to come here for low skilled labor that’s fine but there needs to be a controlled process established that takes into consideration the interests of citizens of this country. The fact that our federal government has failed to handle basic responsibilities doesn’t automatically give everyone else clean hands.Report
@inmd I could be way off on this – basically spitballing / musing, rather than stating anything I believe strongly – but by refusing to cooperate with ICE, isn’t California basically acknowledging that they need to take care of things themselves, in part *because* they know that ICE being awful doesn’t give them clean hands? Like, they have nearly 40 million people to work on behalf of, more than most of the world’s nations do – they can’t just stand aside while the federal government ruins people’s lives and runs amok. Taking control of the situation is part of taking responsibility for the situation.
On a different vector, It’s also probably relevant that LA has been a sanctuary city since 1979. This de facto independence on the part of California is not a new thing. I do think that passing law to direct employers *against* ICE is a new line they’ve crossed … but how do you suggest that ship can be turned around, given that it’s been steaming in one direction since the late 70s?Report
All of the above shouldn’t, of course, be taken as me thinking that’s what should or shouldn’t be done. Mostly it’s a “wow, is this country too big for its political infrastructure and has been for a long time,” thought, insofar as I know *what* to think.Report
@maribou
I think the people who passed the law probably are mostly well intentioned. As I said to Slade, most of those who favor it I think do so because they want to protect people they think are vulnerable. That doesn’t mean it isn’t unconstitutional or that it’s good policy. Also remember the last round of this activity at the state level was decidedly anti-immigrant. This isn’t the way to solve the problem.
On sanctuary cities I think it’s their prerogative as to whether or not they want their police to cooperate with the feds on something outside their jurisdiction. I only mentioned them because I think their rise in prominence is unhelpful and not really a solution that can be applied nationally.Report
Any business who creates a job is doing so for their own bottom line. We consider the creation of jobs to be a good thing, and we should also consider profit to be a good thing.
“Interests of citizens” is an exceptionally broad term. Fundamentally the government rules with the consent of the people, and if enough people are unwilling to follow the law then it’s a bad law.
Like many things, this is fueled by economics. We have jobs for them, telling a businessman he needs to go out of business because… well, just because, is something of a non-starter. Prohibition has failed. “Basic responsibilities” include passing laws that people will obey (or at least enough of them), and changing those laws if enough people are unwilling or unable to follow them.
That doesn’t mean “open borders”, but if we don’t deal with the demand then it will find a supply… and having gun toting cops run around destroying jobs because of who has them is a terrible solution. Whatever guest worker program we come up with needs to be run so it’s easy to follow, not deliberately painful.Report
I think we’re talking passed each other. I never said I think immigration needs to be banned I said it needs to be controlled. My ideal would be a merit based system like what other first world countries do. If that needs to be supplemented with a guest worker program with some path to citizenship for low skilled labor so be it. The point is it needs to go through the legislative process where these things can be debated with the interests of the citizenry in mind.
You make it sound like regulating immigration is as futile as banning whiskey. A severely broken system isn’t in itself evidence that there is no better one.Report
@inmd
Yes and no.
The issue for a lot of Dreamers is that they were brought here as children when they lacked agency. Some of them are working in low wage jobs. Others are students or well-educated professionals. But the issue is that it is morally wrong to send back these kids when they did nothing wrong themselves unless you want to be callous and cruel.
The other group is children and adults who come here fleeing failed states or where they have been targeted for violence.
What you are discussing exists but immigration is a whole mess of issues.Report
I’ve never said I oppose DACA in principle, as a policy. I have quibbles about the process, but that’s not really relevant to this discussion. Above I said Dreamers are the easiest cases and I don’t think it’s right to deport them.
My issue is that I want a policy (preferably merit based but leaving birth right in tact per the constitution). I dont want to use the bad situation we’ve created as an excuse for perpetuating it. This is especially so when it’s easy fodder for reactionaries who want to do all sorts of other things I disagree with.Report
Above I said Dreamers are the easiest cases and I don’t think it’s right to deport them.
The harder ethical question is what to do about their parents. Yes, you grew up here, you don’t speak any language but English, you’re not familiar with any culture other than that of the US. But once you turn 18/21/something, should your parents have to leave?Report
That is a really, really hard call. But that’s why enforcement has to be part of the pill. If we were in a place where the tide had stemmed and we were convinced places that traditionally hire illegal labor had been properly incentivized to stop…
As long as those parents had no felonies or outstanding warrants I’d be inclined to tell them they’re bad bad bad bad people, make them get their taxes in order, pay a small fine, and put them in the back of the line of the green card process.Report
@maribou
A bunch of my responses seem to be stuck in moderation. When you have a moment could you assist? Please and thank you!Report
If undocumented folks had a pathway to legal status, they’d be much less exploitable. That’s the idea with DREAM, for example.Report
Though, it seems that overstaying a visa is much more common than crossing the border illegally,Report
I’m more interested in where that rage is going than where it comes from.
The Trumpists tell us they are righteously angry at being on the shit end of an economy. They use all this loaded Marxist language like “proles” and “global elite” (Bannon called himself, what, a Leninist or something?) They use this economic anxiety argument to justify voting Trump as a big middle finger to the world.
Except here’s the thing. They aren’t believable.
Their litany of complaints is entirely cultural and ethnic- hipsters, immigrants, gays, feminists, black activists, Muslims, college professors.
I keep hearing that we need to pay attention to these people, and what they are saying.
We are. We really, really are listening.Report
Yes, yes, keep “listening” and hearing what you want. What could possible go wrong. It’s more important to deal with the direction of the rage than it’s source.
“Except here’s the thing. They aren’t believable.” Yeah, they are just nazis who hate gays and dark-skinned people. (I get why you used the slur, it wasn’t the n-word slur, but no, dude. it’s not actually cool to use that word here unless you are literally analyzing why someone was using a slur. -maribou). Covered in: ““You’re not important”–“I’m not listening to you”–or “fuck you!”Report
@damon I do understand what you’re getting at, and I appreciate you intentions. But please don’t fail to do for other commenters here what you’re advocating they should do for/in response to/etc Dan D. You’re not giving them the empathy that you expect them to extend.
I didn’t leave what he said standing so it could be repeated, supported-through-glossing-over, forgiven and used as an example of the failings of liberals, etc. I *really* didn’t. The only reason I left it is because if someone misses the expectations of this blog/commenting section powerfully enough to start invoking Hitler as better than their opponents’ hypothetical choices, I’m not going to hide that they did.
If he wants to make these points, he can do it without the rage spiral. Or he can do it elsewhere. People here have a right to not read this kind of hate-filled bullcrap and it is not conducive to conversation (It was certainly not *less* hatefilled before I readacted over half of it).
Let us not have the “Dan d has a point” debate now – it can be brought up at another time when we are not defending people valorizing Hitler.Report
M,
I appreciate your comments. It wasn’t so much about Dan d as it was the source of the rage and that we should pay attention to it. It’s a warning flag that I’ve seen all too easily dismissed, even in my plea for folks not to dismiss it. And that rage is only going to continue to grow unless it’s addressed. His post was a useful vector to my comment, it was not an endorsement.
I don’t want people to discuss this, I’m just suggesting that people should THINK about it on their own time away from this site.Report
It wasn’t so much about Dan d as it was the source of the rage and that we should pay attention to it.
Well, I pretty strenuously disagree with that. The source of the rage is Limbaughian “white men are the most oppressed people in America” nonsense. It’s bullshit.
That he *is* enraged is something to pay attention to and take seriously primarily because similarly enraged people are reshaping our political culture in dangerous and detrimental ways. DanD has said it many times: he wants to punish liberals, not improve his own condition. Irrespective of his personal psychology, that’s an expression of a deeply rooted pathology in our culture. Despite all the vacuous nonsense we’re supposed to believe about Americans being a kind and charitable people, we’re not. That’s why his rage should be taken seriously.Report
@damon See, but by engaging with what he said you are, actually, encouraging people to discuss and debate it (which I realize someone could turn around and point at me, just as easily). You’re also putting (some) people in a position where they don’t feel like they can argue with you without falling afoul of being moderated for specifically attacking Dan D which would make them even angrier.
And if you want them to separate the re-capturable spewers of hate from the non-recapturable, and figure out how to build a bridge to the re-capturable ones, or something along those lines, well, I’m sympathetic because I personally try to do that in my day-to-day life, and even online – but asking them to do that, making that ask *in the context of them having just been spewed hate at* is pretty unkind. And highly unlikely to *work*. I’d expect you to care about those two things.Report
M,
I understand your point, but it’s all to easy to just dismiss it and move on, until it happens again. The only real time to really think about it is when it’s right in your face. Otherwise, 24 hour new cycle, new outrage.
If a little “unkindness” is necessary to get people thinking, I’m willing to take the hit-nothing else seems to have worked. I’m not optimistic, long term, of our society surviving-but I’d be happy not having to watch/live through it’s collapse. 🙂Report
@damon Thinking that they’re not already thinking about it, and with some ensuing complexity about what they do as a result, to the point where you think it needs to be underlined at this moment, is a failure of empathy. The people who *truly* aren’t thinking about this, IMO, generally don’t come anywhere near this site. They live in walled gardens.
I appreciate that you are willing to push back on things, for real, but for the moment, in this thread, please stop.Report
Still, yes, it’s certainly possible that that’s the source. It’s also possible that the source is actual oppression or discrimination or something else. I don’t know his personal situation.
“DanD has said it many times: he wants to punish liberals, not improve his own condition.” Exactly. It’s the desire to inflict pain on “the enemy”. That’s exactly what we should be worried about. I agree completely.Report
The human instinct for “justice” is one of the big things that makes society possible and separates us from other apes. The freeloader problem basically breaks the system without some type of punishment. It’s the whole joke about gov being an effort by everyone to live at the expense of everyone else. Thus there’s a serious advantage for society as a whole if there are people who are willing to punish wrongdoers even if it doesn’t improve their own position, or even if it makes their own position worse off.
These instincts either go back to the creation of humanity or (more likely) they predate us and were built by our predecessors.
A number of the standard liberal platforms can be spun as freeloading or deeply unfair advantages. Affirmative Action can be used by elites to stay on top (witness Obama’s children, or if you prefer, the Black Middle Class). Various efforts to help the inner city are rewarding dysfunctional behavior in exchange for votes. BLM is an effort to have the police go easy on drug dealers.
HRC is the walking embodiment of all of this. Openly corrupt, given Billions of dollars by the other governments in exchange for whatever, and her followers breathlessly claim it’s legal. HRC’s daughter gets $600k by some TV network in exchange for no talent or effort. HRC openly admits her disdain for the masses and admits their jobs will need to be sacrificed to the gods of global warming. Oh, and everyone who doesn’t vote for HRC is a racist.
Trump tells people the game is fixed. Jobs are being sent to other countries and/or immigrants are imported to “steal” them. The rules are different for the elites. And the media elites laugh at Trump for daring to express what his followers feel and proclaim him a Nazi.
Some of this anger Trump stirred up, but some of it he’s just channeling. However these constant screams of “Nazi” are viewed by Trump’s followers as cries of “Wolf” and just irritate them.Report
@dark-matter “The human instinct for “justice” is one of the big things that makes society possible and separates us from other apes.”
Separating us from the other apes is a myth. It doesn’t even separate us from lesser primates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg
Hell, my cats can tell who gets more treats and express their displeasure about it.
It’s not an especially fancy response, it’s literally so unsophisticated that plenty of other mammals share it.Report
One of my dogs gets very upset when I let my other dog nap on my lap while I play video games.
I have tried explaining to him that, unlike my other dog, he weighs 60 lbs, and if I let him sleep on my lap, I will lose feeling in my legs, but I don’t think I’m really getting through to him.Report
Well shoot. I’ve seen that video before too. But remove the “separates us from apes” and the rest of that still works.
Those monkeys are wired for that reaction, so are we.Report
And we’re also capable of moving past it when it’s inappropriate and things are actually more complicated than that and it would just screw everyone up royally to give in to the urge.
Much like our great ape cousins the bonobos and orangutans and gorillas and chimpanzees (in descending order of skill) often are, and even lesser apes like gibbons and monkeys like macaques, frequently show strong signs of being able to do.
If you must run with the whole moral hierarchy of creation thing (thanks a lot, Aristotle!), at least go with something that keeps humankind at the top, yo.
(This is what drives me nuts about the EvoPsych people, of whom de Waal is not one, btw. It’s not the instinct to learn and generalize, it’s the completely flawed logic that gets applied and then generalized and then taken up into general culture as some form of scientific truth.)Report
@damon — I understand the rage. However, I straight up see it as the same rage of angry white men who lynched blacks in the 1960s. It’s hate, pure and simple. It is aggrieved entitlement. It is people with a deeply false view of the world, who believe minorities do better than them, when it is a measurable fact that minorities do not.
As @stillwater said, their beliefs are bullshit. Their pain is real, but their facts are not.
If someone falsely believes you have wronged them, and they hate you for it, you can plead your case, but in the end they are wrong.Report
Actually, V, in the “end” it comes down to who’s willing to do the killing That’s what I’m worried about.Report
My simple take on it is that the government can address a variety problems, but the fact that someone, somewhere is looking down on you culturally is not one of them.Report
The irony is, of course, that you’re often looking down at the other side while complaining they’re looking down at you.
As an example: “Flyover country” and “coastal elites”. “Rednecks” and “hipsters”, etc.
Offhand, I can’t think of a single group that complains about how much they’re looked down on and how much they hate it that doesn’t return the favor with equal vigor. (It’s different, they say, because it’s really true when they think it!).Report
Honestly, we try not to say out loud how if it weren’t for us the rest of you would still be living in caves.Report
“Offhand, I can’t think of a single group that complains about how much they’re looked down on and how much they hate it that doesn’t return the favor with equal vigor.”
I can think of plenty of said groups. Not “cultural taste” groups, but race groups, gender groups, sexual orientation groups… I 100 percent promise you that the complaints about “breeders” in the gay clubs I frequented in the 90s reached nowhere near the levels of vituperation of the vitriol and physical violence that we sometimes confronted in the streets outside the clubs. And plenty of people have faced far worse.
I”m assuming you were responding strictly in the context of what TF said but I think, tbh, that the larger context informs the cultural resentments – in that the cultural groups often form *around* the actually-physically-threatened groups – so I didn’t want to let it pass without noting that difference.
Especially given the comment this is all building up from.Report
I wouldn’t confuse intensity of feeling with capacity to act.
(And to be honest, I can think of several groups myself — but do I think it’s not the same fervor because I agree with one group? I mean I’ve never actually met a gay person that hated straight people in general like, at all. (i mean really disliked a specific guy, like Phelps, sure) But I’ve met more than enough straight people that just flat-outed hated all gays. Every one of them).Report
@morat20 I was comparing intensity of expression (whether speech or action) with intensity of expression (whether speech or action).
There’s no way to compare “intensity of feeling” unless you develop not just telepathy but some pretty darn accurate empathy as well.Report
Yeah, but not to be too blunt — a beleaguered minority, even in safe places, is far less likely to muster up the more violent rhetoric, and especially not the acts. Even if they feel equal levels of hate.
You’d think that’d apply to, say, the American Nazi’s — but there’s the “silent majority” delusion at play there. (Which, at least in America, seems to be the province of angry white males pretty solely). Those idiots at the Bird Sanctuary really did expect a mass outpouring of armed support, which lead to a certain lack of circumspection in word and deed.
I can’t really say who looks down on who more, without reading minds. So I’m back to the point where I’ve rarely seen an angry rant about “being looked down on” that didn’t include, at the very least, the implicit belief that the ranter was much better and superior than the people he was angry at.Report
“I’ve rarely seen an angry rant about “being looked down on” that didn’t include, at the very least, the implicit belief that the ranter was much better and superior than the people he was angry at.”
See, that I can agree with (I have seen them, but rarely). It was the “equal vigor” part that I was objecting to. Just doesn’t fit in my experience.
Perhaps somewhere you can find someone who hates back with equal vigor, I’ve certainly run into young trans / nonbinary kids who seem to have taken a temporary detour into violent hatred before, and spent time wooing them back to a place where they are more able to function and get things accomplished. But for the most part people in these groups are far more preoccupied with dealing with the crap they have to deal with and trying to be happy anyway, than on attacking the people they hate back – even if they do actually hate them, which isn’t always the case.Report
You haven’t been in the right (wrong) corners of the internets then. But in real life? No, ditto, I haven’t either.Report
If this blog and in particular the commenting culture that we’ve worked hard to cultivate here over the past ten years are about anything, it’s about toning it down so that we can understand each other. None of us, myself included, have always been perfect about living up to that ideal, but despite individual failures from time to time, this is very much what we’re all about.
So I want to acknowledge the message embedded in your comment that people ought to take the time to understand where the resentment and anger expressed in this thread come from. That’s a worthwhile caution.
To that point, it truly appears to me that the foundation from which this springs is an apprehension that history has passed these sorts of people by, that their way of life is somehow being criminalized and persecuted precisely because economic, technological, and cultural times have changed. This, to me, appears to be a comprehensive root cause analysis of where that anxiety comes from. I emphasize the word “truly” in the first sentence of this paragraph to underscore that this is an issue I’ve contemplated before and feel that I’ve reached a good, if provisional, understanding of the matter. If you think I’m wrong or incomplete in my analysis, I’m interested in hearing more.
I’d caution further that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” does NOT derive specifically from the fact that Trump won the election when Clinton was expected to. Certainly that was a surprise to nearly everyone and a great disappointment to many. But a grudge about this is not what’s animating even the #Resist! crowd.
Trump is behaving differently as President than did his Republican predecessors, and he is doing so coincident with and codependent upon a media environment different from anything in living memory in its partisan polarization, pervasiveness, provocativeness, propinquity, and potency. The specific norms Trump is shattering bear substantial resemblance to examples of authoritarian tactics both contemporary and historical.
We understand that Trump is President, for better or for worse. It’s that the “for worse” part of that reality appears to have a powerful gravity, notwithstanding the fact that he hasn’t crashed the economy… at least, not yet. The same sort of anxiety and anger we’re talking about at minimum seems to catalyze that gravity. So it takes pushing back against the “for worse” part lest that “for worse” become manifest. If some people indulge in hyperbole along the way, that too needs to be understood by those who do not share that attitude.
At least, that’s how I see it.Report
Well said Burt.Report
@burt-likko
Can you expand on this please?Report
Yes. I won’t be able to expand on it better than Amy Siskind, who has a 500+ page book compiled meticulously over the course of the last year. But here’s a few things that stick out in my mind:
1) Concentration of political power into a small circle dominated by the leader’s immediate relatives, specifically Jared and Ivanka Kushner, and his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
2) Holding media outlets and journalists up for ridicule as retaliation for running factually accurate stories critical of the leader.
3) Heavy reliance upon military rather than civilian aides with a strong selection emphasis on personal loyalty over competence.
4) Stoking xenophobia as a rallying point to inflame the partisan faithful; similarly, boosting the force of internal ethnic divisions to a simialr purpose.
5) Condemning others in power for not acceeding to the leader’s demands; related, challenging the neutrality of law enforcement and judicial officials who lawfully act in ways that displease him; also related, suggesting that governmental institutions be changed so as to expedite implementation of his preferred policies.
All of that is aside from likely legal but hugely dangerous deviations from the traditionally decorous standards of behavior to which his predecessors of both parties have held themselves. The best journalist I’ve seen approaching this angle of the Trump Administration is Sarah Kendzior, who has made a careful study of the rise of authoritarian leaders in numerous former Soviet republics and has done tireless work chronicling how Trump’s governing patterns, at least before they are checked by the courts, his own aides and Congress, appear to follow their pattern of achieving dominance over an ostensible democracy.Report
Actually, if your last name ends in, say, “ski” or “off”, Hitler would have been quite pleased to murder you and your entire family in the pursuit of lebensraum.
#notAllWhitePeopleAreWhiteEnoughReport
@dan-d Having slept on this. Having thought about how my choices about your comment were motivated by compassion for your anger (which I have seen people I care about go through, and get past to the point where they don’t use it as an excuse to be awful to other people). Having thought about how infinitely not-ok what you actually posted was…. and what our expectations for this space are and whether you’ve acted like you get them, or acted like you don’t care about them, and then moved back to a more reasonable position only when called on it. I want to clarify that I think I made the wrong call last night.
I won’t go back and suspend you because I don’t believe in saying a person won’t be punished and then punishing them – I have personal reasons for not being able to do that, and whether or not I’m right to not be able to, I won’t – but I really should have. For about a month, I think.
A month suspension actually seems pretty lightweight for what you did – part of me still agrees that you should have been insta-banned – and I’m hoping you get the message and find ways to express your class rage (which is understandable! hey, *I* have class rage, and I’m not talking the chipper kind I express here from time to time), and your political positions, without even a hint of scary alt-right, “I’d vote for Hitler if ANYTHING + we have all the guns” threatening crap, let alone out and out saying it the way you should have been severely censured by me for. I’m hoping that because I think somewhere under the lack of filters is a reasonable guy who isn’t actually like that. But your response to being censured didn’t actually give me a whole lot of hope that you are like that. And no one on this site should have to read the same kind of crap they would get from various neo-nazi sites I’m not going to name because I don’t want to summon them. I don’t care if you only said it because you were sick of being lumped together with those people at those sites – which remains my (extremely tentative at this point) assumption, that you AREN’T like those people you just were mad enough to lose your shit and act like one – you. are. not. allowed. to say. those things. here.
Consequently, I wanted to clarify my position going forward.
If you ever again say something here that I perceive as anti-semitic, racist, hate-filled, threatening to other commenters…. gosh, really a problem in any way other than me just disagreeing with it (which is and has always been fine – a person can be hard-line on immigration without pushing a single one of my moderator buttons, I swear to god) … it won’t matter why I think you said such a thing. It won’t even matter if I’m not *sure* if you meant it that way. It won’t matter if I think it’s a 50/50 toss-up whether you mean it that way. And yep, that means there are certain commenters you historically clash with, whom you might find upsetting for reasons pure of heart but don’t manage to communicate that about, but instead give off some kind of dubious vibe about why you are always clashing with them, that you just basically shouldn’t engage with any more …. It might even mean I’m *wrong* and flat out unfair to think that’s what you’re doing. And none of that will matter.
You’ll just be banned.
I realize this is very restrictive, harsh, etc., and will be perceived by some, probably including you, as unfair and by others at not nearly enough as a reaction to what you said. I realize it may be a way of making it so you don’t feel like you can comment while still maintaining a veneer of not insta-banning you, not going back on my word, etc.
But that’s how it’s going to go.Report
I mean, I rest my case. This is what fascism looks like. It’s here. It hasn’t fully taken over yet, but it is here is and it is a seething mess of hate.Report
Can you show me one example of where I have ever with less social status than myself? You can’t because I have not done so. I hate people who look down their noses at me that’s punching up.Report
Some comment about me posts last night,
I should not have made any references to Hitler. I apologize to anyone who was offended by my statement.
My statement was hyperbolic and motivated by how strong my dislike of the people who look down their noses at me and not intended to indicate support for Nazis.
It is clear that most of cultural hates the culture that I enjoy with the heat of a thousand suns and will stop at nothing to destroy it.
I will stop at a nothing to prevent that from happening and will align with groups of people that I would ideally not align with in order to do so.
Any harm that happens to other groups as a result of such an alliance is I believe not my responsibility but the responsibility of the people who forced me into this position. I will not under any circumstances enter into an alliance with people who hate my guts.
In my comments at this site I have only attacked those of higher status than myself; I have never attacked anyone on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation or anything else.
I don’t think this was intentional but the way my posts were edited may make it appear that I was attacking Veronica due to her Gender Identity, could you please clarify that I was not.Report
And what culture would this be and how are they trying to destroy it? Some details might help your case. What are they outlawing, precisely? Preventing you from doing via force?
And right into domestic violence logic.
Why, asks the poor victim, must you make me hurt you like this? Can’t you see how beating you senseless hurts me so much more? Can’t you see how I, with bloodstained hands, am the true victim here? Why do you make me do this, you horrible person you.
Watching a grown adult utilize the moral reasoning behind “Why are you hitting yourself” game to excuse his words and actions and try is pretty appalling.
I guess whatever your personal ideology is, it certainly doesn’t emphasize “personal responsibility” or “free will” or anything of that nature.Report
Prole culture, see the thread a linked above where Erik Loomis admitied that one reason he supports immigration is because the immigrants will destroy the food culture I enjoy. That’s his motivation for supporting immigration he hates to food I like and by extension me.
Gun control, fast food restrictions, tobacco taxes, fuel efficiency standards, tearing up vehicle lanes and replacing them with bike lanes, the war on coal, NEA subsidies for hipster art.
And right into domestic violence logic.
I’m the one being attacked, I’m acting in self defence. They attacked me I didn’t attack them. my job requires me to be subservient to those jerks every day. I’m not voting for the same person as the people who treat me like shit, I’ll vote for the guy they hate.Report
Loomis is pretty consistently bad. I’m a liberal and i find him annoying and over the top and with weak logic. And i’m a liberal who had been reading LGM for years. Why do you care about him? I don’t and i read that blog though for some of the other writers. So Loomis is a doofus, so what? It’s not like i couldn’t find conservative writers who hate me. Or that gay or trans or POC people can’t find bloggers or broadcasters who hate them.
As to the specific policy issues i get that you disagree. But disagreeing on policies doesn’t equal hate or your culture being crushed. You may not like a bike lane but you can still drive. Bikers can have a say and get something. It isn’t’ a zero sum game. You aren’t’ crushed by a bike lane you don’t like. Fast food restrictions? If there is something America is not short of, it’s fast food restaurants. I’m not even sure what hipster art is.Report
@dan-d
Speaking for myself, I was not offended, so we’re good on that.
As for prole culture, can you get how your list is essentially “white culture” complaints?
I mean, proletarian black folks don’t complain about bike lanes and proletarian Mexican immigrants don’t care about fuel efficiency standards and neither group have any desire to Make America Great Again.
And you know, I actually have some sympathy for the sense of unease at changing cultures.
I live in a majority-minority world, where often in meetings people have to stop and politely translate for me. I know how jarring it is to walk down streets of my hometown and not be able to read the signs.
I went to a George Thorogood concert, and saw that the audience was a sea of gray ponytails and bald spots, and I realized that the blues is slowly fading away as a living music form.
But that’s how culture works. It never stays the same, its always evolving and mutating into something new and different.
There is going to come a day when rock n roll will be that music your parents listen to, or a day when no one knows what NASCAR was and hot dogs are sold in the specialty food aisle.
This isn’t an attack, this is just life.Report
I don’t get the screaming rage about bike lanes. I don’t even own a bike, but I sure as heck prefer them on dedicated lanes rather than sharing the road with them. Seems safer, yeah?
I certainly don’t get going to a job you hate that much. I’m pretty sure if I’m filled with daily rage due to the customers I encounter, I am very much in the wrong place.Report
For the most part, bike lanes take up parking spots, which ticks people off more than taking away traffic lanes.
(Bicyclists are skeptical of many bikelanes because they’re often haphazardly placed next to a door zone and tend to be completely ignored by automobile drivers near intersections)Report
I believe its one of those totem things, where it is the harbinger of a larger shift.
In this case, from the automobile culture of the American Golden Age, to an emasculated America after the fall where bossy European bureaucrats tell you to ride your bicycle to the Gaia abortion clinic festival.Report
@morat20 Sometimes people don’t have much choice about the jobs they take, or at least don’t perceive much of one. I have known plenty of people, especially people without much money or skills that dominant culture values highly, but otherwise people across a wide range of experiences and cultures, to take jobs that fill them with rage on the daily. Because their other option is to starve or suffer.
Not getting why people would feel they had no choice but to do that is, on some level, an example of a real problem with people not really seeing each other.
That said, I wanted to remind you and @chip-daniels that Dan D is now banned, for reasons that are impervious to whether Chip was personally offended. So there’s not a whole lot of point in continuing to analyze and respond to his comments.Report
(Er, I mean on a personal level. Like discuss bike lanes all you want.)Report
Well the MN neighborhoods I live in have extensively eliminated car lanes and parking to add bike lanes. Obviously this has spiked congestion and I’m none to thrilled about that. Also this is Minnesota so as we sit in traffic in January and look at those entirely empty bike lanes I struggle to say that it is a wise use of urban real estate for this area. Maybe a horde of heavily insulated bikers are going to show up. That would be reassuring because right now it looks like an idiotic choice.Report
@dan-d
Being hyperbolic about Hitler is not just “my bad”, it’s pretty much inexcusable in a context where you’re also talking about having more guns than the other side. Saying, as you *just* did, that if other groups get harmed by your whatever-it-takes logic, that’s just too bad because it’s the fault of the people who made you do it, is, as detailed below, abusive framing.
Continuing to defend yourself and paint yourself as the injured party after saying things like that –
things so damn close to anti-Semitic (and frankly anti-gay, anti-black people, anti-disabled-people, anti-all the people that Hitler mobilized the anxious poor white people of Germany to support and participate in exterminating, despite whatever good qualities those anxious poor white people also had) that wanting to believe you aren’t being anti-Semitic by insisting on it is splitting hairs I have no more interest in splitting – that’s pretty much the exact opposite vector of whatever vector “civil” is.
Enough.
You’re banned. It’s too bad because there were interesting things we could have discussed. I don’t think you’re irredeemably awful and I don’t think your culture is either. There’s a lot about “your culture” as I understand it that I don’t hate, that I’m pretty sure plenty of people here love as much as you do, that I share for pete’s sake – and so do others here, and etc etc etc. I watch football and MMA and secretly judge anyone who can’t fix basic things with their hands, just as the tip of the fucking iceberg. The people you think hate you are not actually much different from you on purely *cultural* terms.
But this frame you are presenting is Not. Okay. Insisting that this will be your operating principle going forward is enough *all by itself* to mean you aren’t welcome here, that you aren’t willing to be part of a community of people who are trying to make things better, because you are *literally* saying that you will ally with whoever you want no matter how bad they are and how bad the consequences for others, based on your perceptions about who does and doesn’t hate you. That’s just…. *too far* from our consensus reality and our expectations of civility for you to be a productive participant here. I hope you find your way out of this, I truly do. You are better than the choices you are claiming to be making right now.
I’m happy to clarify that you didn’t say anything about Veronica’s gender identity in your posts. You 100 percent did not bring that up nor have I seen you ever. I’m not willing to clarify why you did or didn’t attack Veronica because I am not a mind reader and you are seriously out in scary bad-dangerous-guy-ville with your rhetoric on this post. Not saying you are that guy. Saying that you are repping for that guy and you need to rein it in, for your own sake as much as anyone else’s, because repping for that guy is how you turn into him. Neo-nazis today revel in it, but most Nazis in the 30s just… slid over the edge. From standing up for “guys like me who ‘those people’ look down on” into becoming those guys, into not checking themselves no matter how bad their atrocities got. It’s one of the few slippery slopes we have some historical evidence for, man. Pull yourself together and find some people you can trust to talk you out of this. But it’s not OUR job to have to do that.
I will say that I do not believe that you have any conscious prejudices based on any of the things you list. But you are still *acting* in ways that target people in certain groups – Jewish people as the most prominent example – more than people in others. And your declarations are hateful.
We don’t stand for that here.
Goodbye.Report
I apologize for having to edit my comment above several times for clarity. I just cannot even with this.Report
And another one gone
and another one gone
Another one bites the dust…
Another one bites the dust…
(increasingly echo-y effects)
another one bites the dust…
another one bites the dust…Report
@densityduck I miss the hell out of you but every time you show up just to point out how awful I am, I miss you significantly less. Would you either suck up your hurt over something you’ve been apologized to about 4 times by my count, and act like a person who understands that pro-Hitler hyperbole is a reasonable fucking thing to object to and exclude, and then move on to making some of the useful and interesting comments you used to make, or actually stay gone and leave us alone please? This showing up just to pout is a really bad look on you.Report
FWIW, I think calling @dan-d’s remark as pro-Hitler is a gross misreading of the sentence. Could he have used another name to illustrate his dislike of the candidate in the last election? Sure, but it wasn’t an endorsement of the Fuhrer.
I’m also not a huge fan of this kind of inside baseball derailing discussion of the OP, but there’s really nowhere else on the site to air such grievances.Report
@slade-the-leveller He wasn’t illustrating his dislike of the candidate in the last election, he was illustrating his hatred of the two commenters he was targeting and his claims about their hatred of him personally, by insisting that he would rather vote for Hitler than for anyone they would support, while also pouring out some vitriol about how much they were awful and targetable in his view that I elided. And combining that with references to having more guns than their side did.
Whether or not I believe he is pro-Hitler is not the point. I said it’s so damn close to pro-Hitler than I’m tired of attempting to split those hairs for him. The remark itself was, by a literal standard. (He didn’t say he was pro-Hitler, he just said Chip and Veronica were so terrible – which he elaborated on at length and I censored – that he’d vote for Hitler before anyone they’d vote for. This is the thing you are concerned we establish is not actually pro-Hitler? REALLY?)
He also *just* doubled down on his claims that there’s no line he wouldn’t cross to vanquish this mysterious and ill-defined *group* of people he claims hate his very guts which supposedly is, on the one hand, only people like the ones he links to but ALSO any number of people he has personally attacked in these very comment sections. And the commentariat at large which he’s brought up before.
As for the discussing inside baseball thing, the only place to air your grievances about it publicly is, yes, in public in the context where it happened. If you want to complain to me and the other editors, comments sent to the inquiry address are sent to every editor, and that form gets used frequently for all kinds of things including inside baseball – https://ordinary-times.com/contact/
That email goes to all editors. It’s highly likely, maybe about 70 percent chance, that I’ll answer anything about the comments that gets sent there, because the other editors mostly defer judgment on these matters to me – but we all do see it. And discuss it. If you’re feeling a need to air grievances and don’t want to do so on an OP, that’s where to go next.Report
@maribou I re-read the sentence and I can see how it could be interpreted as you did. I’m for giving someone the benefit of the doubt. I’m not really familiar with his commenting history, but this seems an aberration to me.
Once again, I’ll object to the heavy hand of moderation. We’re all grown ups here, and I think it can be left up to the reader to judge whether a contributor is advancing the conversation or not. If you find the comments of @dan-d to be superfluous, don’t address them.Report
@slade-the-leveller
I didn’t address his remarks because I found them superfluous, but because I found them to be in clear violation of keeping this space even a bit civil. As were the not-at-all ambiguous attacks that I *removed* because they didn’t have anything to do with Hitler and shooting people, but were merely lots and lots of really direct personal insult that was completely out-of-line.
I was trying to see if he could be talked into stopping behaving like this, or I wouldn’t have addressed him at all. Then, after he decided to double down, I was trying to communicate to everybody, for future reference, stuff like “It’s against the rules to negatively compare people to Hitler while making threatening noises about guns, whether I can make up a charitable interpretation of you doing that, or not” that you would really THINK no one in their right mind would need to be told if they weren’t raised in a barn [nb this is a country expression i grew up with, not an attack against rural people], let alone that people would step in and defend someone for doing.
“Civil” and “tolerant of people expressing extremist violent views against anyone who hates them, while claiming other commenters hate them, because we just really want to believe they don’t mean them that way” are pretty much diametrically opposed, for any meaningful variant of civil.
And I am very familiar with his commenting history. I read every single comment on this entire website 99 percent of the time. And no, it’s not the first time he’s been warned off behaving like this.
I appreciate your input, and your perspective, but I’m not going to value your judgment over my own.Report
I dunno. His only defense is that he was so consumed with rage he misspoke, but everything he said was an expression of that rage so the defense doesn’t make any sense. More generously, for me at least, is that what he said wasn’t pro-Hitler, but Hitler-sympathetic as an alternative to his perceived enemies.
{{I have to admit that when I first read the now heavily redacted comment I was pulled by the idea that Dand had (finally!) exposed himself as a contrived caricature trolling us for shits and giggles and not expressing sincerely held beliefs. The sentiments and views seemed too self-consciously outlandish to take seriously.}}Report
Somewhere on Reddit, circa 2048, someone will get overheated and write- “You are such a jerk, I would rather vote for Donald Trump!”
And the moderators will be all like, “Whoa, let’s not say things we can’t take back!”Report
@chip-daniels
I am pretty sure the moderators’ response, at least if they’re like me, will also depend on whether that person who gets overheated also brings up how their side has more guns and then doubles down the next day on how no, they really really meant the part about how there is no line they would not cross to beat those bad people who are trying to destroy everything they value, and they really really meant that they accept no responsibility for who gets hurt by them doing it.
If we have lines at all, that’s gotta be over them.Report
Godzilla Threshold
Or if you prefer, Ghostbusters.
Dr. Egon Spengler: [hesitates] We’ll cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: ‘Scuse me Egon? You said crossing the streams was bad!
Dr. Raymond Stantz: Cross the streams…
Dr. Peter Venkman: You’re gonna endanger us…
Dr. Egon Spengler: Not necessarily. There’s definitely a VERY SLIM chance we’ll survive.
[pause while they consider this]
Dr. Peter Venkman: [slaps Ray] I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it! LET’S DO IT!
(And experimenting with links here…)Report
And posted before I read some of the more recent stuff saying that aspect of the conversation was dead. Sorry.Report
Don’t miss me.
And hey, I’m not mad. I am amused to see, yet again, confirmation of the law that any discussion forum not militantly non-liberal will become default strongly-liberal. But, y’know, you’ve decided who you want to hang with and who you’d rather not have around, and I’m not going to tell you that’s a bad thing you shouldn’t do.
I will say that moderating by codeword is going to cause you a lot of trouble, and that if you’re moderating by “angry hateful remarks” then you’ve got a lot more moderating to do than you’re doing, but, hey, I can see how it would be harder to justify “I like these dudes but not those dudes” to yourself.Report
@densityduck See, now I miss you *and* I miss you having some sense of proportion and perspective.
Yes, I’m not wanting to have people around who respond to being moderated for attacking people by insisting on their moral right to attack people. Yes, I don’t like dudes when they are doing that. Attacking people is pretty much the only thing that makes me not like dudes (or people of other genders). I draw a line between statements that there will be war, we’re coming into a war, there’s only two sides, the other side, broadly painted by a shared choice, rather than something they can’t help, wants war – that I think aren’t true or wise, may be self-fulfilling, and irritate me considerably, but whatever, and paragraphs-long hateful attacks on other individuals. Stepping back to include all my moderation, I draw a line between people who say bad things and then walk them back with contrition (or even just shutting up for a while), and people who say bad things and then walk them back in a way that actually makes them worse, eg in this case, insisting that they aren’t responsible for any harm that comes now or in the future, it will be the people making them do it, by hating them, that are responsible, after already having made it clear that a) they aren’t clear on who does or doesn’t hate them and are quite sure that *people here* hate them, and b) they are talking about shooting those people as an option. That’s not moderation by codeword, it’s moderation by expressed threat level. Also, again returning to the general, I draw a line between people who settle down when told, and people who escalate when told to settle down.
On this site, in this one place that I put hours of energy into every week, up front and behind the scenes, I’m also making myself the arbiter of what’s mostly fear talking, and needs nudging at, and what’s too much hate served up with the fear, and needs excluding.
Once in a blue moon, I even make a mistake. It’s entirely possible I’ve made mistakes I don’t recognize as mistakes. But I keep letting myself make decisions anyway, about who can say what. Not by content, not by rules-lawyering, but by my own take on how awful they are or are not being.
And I do have a bias, in that I lean wayyyyyyyyy toward people who see themselves as moral agents (regardless of how many philosophical caveats they might attach to that) and act accordingly.
You got me. I like some dudes, and I don’t like other dudes.
But you can’t make me not miss you, other than in this slow attrition way I already mentioned, nor can you make me not wish you’d either get over it, or walk away.Report
“Requires employers to notify their workers before a federal audit of employee records.”
Seems a bit difficult….Since my company had contracts with Federal agencies, I personally participated in two DOL time keeping / “authorized” employee audits. In both cases, the Fedgov guy showed up at our door and asked to look at time cards and employee files. In one case, DCAA did a floor check and walked around talking to individual employees (with an escort). The other, the guy made an appointment and then asked for employee records. (I’m not sure he even stated his purpose or what he wanted to review in advance)Report
I think one of the things that a lot of people, including people here, still struggle with is whether Trump is a one off trick and/or a sign that something is deeply wrong. I like this essay from Professor Nexon of Georgetown:
Report
Here’s nullification from the other side of the political aisle. (fuller writeup )Report
I reached the conclusion quite a while ago that states rights was not a primary principle for anyone. The principle involved seemed to be “I don’t want to do that”.
I’ve watched countless bills go by at the State and Federal level that are obviously unconstitutional. Flag burning, for instance. The first redistricting of North Carolina, for another. BSDI, of course.
The way they seem to work is that said law generates a lot of attention and controversy, which benefits the politicians who authored it. It gives them press mention – “earned media” – and the attention if not the admiration of their party base. Often, I think they know full well it doesn’t pass constitutional muster, but it’s more of a gesture of defiance, which plays great with a lot of people, before it gets struck down. Political theater, not policy.
We have no policy any more, though. Just theater.Report
The problem is that a lot of voters reward politicians for this kind of stuff. People like symbolism even if it is futile.
I guess we can develop an education system designed to remove this but it seems hard and possibly cruel to do so.Report
The Democratic Senators have decided to take McConnell’s offer and fund government until February 8 in exchange for six years of funding on CHIP and a promised vote on immigration/DACA. I have some serious mixed feelings on this. The Democratic Party is the party of government, so it has a vested interest in seeing government function well. Providing healthcare to citizens, especially vulnerable ones like children, is also a Democratic goal. This deal theoretically takes CHIP off the hostage block.
McConnell really can’t offer any deal to the Democratic Party regarding immigration though. The Republican hardliners are only going to be moved by prolonged shut down/show of force and I think now is better than latter for that. They will always find a way to kick the can down the road. The hardliners are shameless. There could be mass rallies for DACA in all fifty states and they would still claim a mandate. They aren’t going to soften latter. Its better to have the fight now than latter.Report
At least the children are safe.
For now.Report
Schumer’s gambit in the shutdown was to gather moderate, bipartisan support for a bill passed thru regular order. In that sense, the shutdown was an attempt to reclaim the Senate from the hard right and McConnell’s lock on procedure. I think there’s more at stake here than merely the retail politics framed in simplistic “who won the shutdown” terms. The battle Schumer kicked off with the shutdown isn’t between Democrats and the GOP, it’s between regular order process-driven moderates and the hard right conservatives but also, by extension, McConnell’s unilateral lock on process. That second issue, seems to me, is the heart of this current dynamic. If the moderates can agree to a bilateral compromise bill that includes a DACA fix – Flake said he suspects there are 60+ Senators in support – and compel McConnell to put it on the floor, Schumer will come out of this looking like a genius.Report
Well I’m pleased to hear it since the original deal: short term funding extension plus long term CHIP sounded like a good deal to me. Schumer got that plus some kind of promise to vote on DACA? That’s more than before so good for Schumer!Report
We can’t get DACA by any tactic. We need to win lots of seats to get that. This was a good move by the D’s. We got CHIP, so that is a solid win. Any DACA win in the senate is likely doomed in the House. There is no “just be tough and hold out during a shut down” that leads to a DACA win in the current situation in congress. The best we can hope for is more pressure on the R’s but it has always been hard line anti immigration folks in the house that have scuttled immigration deals. Nothing has changed to make me think now is any different.Report
Also too, it seems to me that the closer we get to November the more the Democrats will have a stronger hand.Report
Well next month is fast approaching so we’ll see how it goes a lot sooner than november.Report
This.Report
I’m going to call that “better than nothing,” and “better than the way things were at 9:00 a.m. Eastern time this morning.”
I’m not going to call it a “win,” particularly given McConnell’s track record on ensuring that provisions and votes promised to members of his own caucus actually occurred. But I’m mildly comforted by the notion that the CR is relatively short and if he doesn’t follow through, Schumer & Co. can get back to this place again.
Politics is messy and when you’re in the minority, it’s hard to get everything you want.Report
For all that I see people complaining about Schumer et al. selling out, it seems like if they have to refight this in a month, without CHIP re-auth also at stake, they’ll have a somewhat stronger hand.
Still weak because, you know, minority party, but somewhat stronger.Report
Schumer’s playing a long game here. That doesn’t mean he’ll win at the end, but at a minimum he’s shifted the debate over the next few weeks such that the GOP will have to publicly defend their hard-line stances against popular immigration policies rather than stipulate them. Most people who demand a quick tally of points scored won’t see that. That includes the activist angry bases on both sides and the media.Report
One of the features of our current political landscape that’s bewildering when one stops to think about it (which one rarely does) is how short the timescales are now. Deciding to put off a fight for three weeks really is playing a long game.Report
I think Schumer’s game is longer than that, actually. He’s trying to change the procedural rules McConnell’s imposed and that means getting GOP Sens on board. My guess is that most of the Senate wants to go back to regular order as the norm.
Immigration is going to take more than three weeks, and Schumer’s positioned the Dems better for those lengthy fights, seems to me. Three weeks is just when government shuts down again. 🙂Report
Can you elaborate on the “Procedural Rules” that are different today than during the previous session(s). Not saying there aren’t any, just that you seem pretty specific on them and other than the Judicial nuclear escalations, I’m coming up blank.
I agree that Schumer is playing a long(ish) game – hence my bold prediction of a weekend shutdown was correct – but what is he doing that an ordinary bi-partisan group of 60 senators couldn’t do without the shutdown? Or, put another way, if there really is bi-partisan support and McConnell is running the Senate on Majority Lock-down (which is not new for either party)… then what procedural changes is Schumer shooting for?
Assuming my ignorance of the Procedural game… I think Schumer with a (paid?) weekend furlough might have just been signalling that this deal – which will pass with bi-partisan vote, is really *his* deal and not the *other* partisans’, whether they are bi or not. Shutdown not as leverage, but as exclamation point.
In the end, if he gets CHIP and DACA and a paid-vacation for one of his constituencies… that’s a pretty good political trifecta. I’ll even give it 5 Machiavellis because he steals credit for things that the Republicans could have (and by all accounts would have) passed anyway. Plus, he makes Trump look foolish along the way. Really he’s exploiting the chaos in the Republican party to his advantage.Report
Can you elaborate on the “Procedural Rules” that are different today than during the previous session(s).
Both the HC bill and the tax bill were written in secret (most if not all of the GOP caucus not only had no input, they didn’t know what was included until only minutes before they were asked to vote), passed procedurally thru committee without markups, and hit the floor for a vote without any debate or substantive amendment process. Lots of GOP moderates haven’t liked that process, McCain famously during the HC vote, but I’ve heard of similar grumblings from quite a few other GOP Sens – Flake, Corker, Kennedy, Collins, Murkowski, Cassidy and so on.
So, the procedural changes Schumer is hoping for would be a return to regular order potentially sparked by a bilateral agreement on immigration. As it stands right now, tho, all he’s gained from the shutdown is *pressure* applied by GOP colleagues on McConnell to allow at least a DACA bill, but maybe a comprehensive immigration bill if DACA can’t be cleaved off, to run thru regular order.Report
I see; but that’s a coup against McConnell, right? Not sure how DACA/shutdown get’s him from point A to point B; there’s no real leverage there (that I can see). But certainly, we can speculate that that is a chip he’s betting with.
Possibly he’ll have an opportunity in 2019 to improve the procedures to include minority voices and allow for better debate.Report
It’s not a coup since the caucus isn’t trying to oust him as leader. I see it more as an attempt to pull the Senate back from McConnell’s procedural extremism.Report
I assume demonstrating they were willing to shut down over this was part of the issue. Perhaps that’ll ease the sellout screams a bit.Report
I don’t get the sellout screams, to be honest. He was never – NEVER! – going to get citizenship for Dreamers outa the deal. Or anything. Only the ignorant would think he could. But he shifted the debate, demonstrated a willingness to draw a line in the sand, brought DACA back in play, and got (apparently) 20+ GOP Senators on board with a bipartisan immigration bill. That seems like something to be hopeful about.
Btw, I’d be *very* surprised if Dreamers get an instantaneous granting of citizenship outa these negotiations. That’s wildly optimistic. At *best* they’ll get a path to citizenship.Report
The question is how much of wedge can Schumer drive between senate and house R’s. They might, a big might, be able to get a DACA bill in the senate but it stands almost no chance in the house w/o some serious bargaining and being willing to have an actual bi-partisan bill that pisses off the hard liners in the house. I doubt that is going to happen. So we’re probably not going to get a good DACA fix no matter what the senate D’s do regardless of any shutdowns.Report
It’s not his job to drive that wedge. That’s on Ryan and Meadows. If he succeeds on the procedural stuff *and* the Senate passes a bipartisan bill, the House hard-right takes all the heat.
The wild card here is lyin Mitch McConnell, who won’t allow regular order unless there’s open revolt in his caucus, and maybe not even then.Report
Not his job but that would be a major goal in terms of actually getting a DACA fix passed in both houses. Getting the hard right to take the heat is likely enough of a win that can actually be accomplished since it appears Miller and Kelly in the WH are hard liners and have the prez’s ear.Report
He’s a wily old turtle. I know the odds are against it but it’d sure be lovely to see him lose his coveted Majority Leader office.Report
I am inclined to agree. I haven’t been particularly displeased with Schumer far.Report
The passion and enthusiasm of the Democrats has reached fever pitch…Report
I’m a pretty dispassionate liberal by nature.Report
Well, as of this morning:
On shutdown, Democrats have a lot of explaining to do – CNN
That was from this AM before things got passed. It is CNN, so take with a pinch of salt, but if what she is saying is true, things aren’t looking as good for Nov.Report
I’ve seen a lot of tweets explaining that the democrats shouldn’t be demoralized by this vote, they should see this as a move that will help guarantee a later victory.Report
I think that the problem is the sheer number of moving parts. People are looking at one thing, but missing another that is important over there, while those people are seeing it, but missing tomorrows headline, etc., etc., etc.
This is the game that moves as you play.Report
Jimmy Kimmel is unhappy.
Someone should do a better job of explaining to him that the democrats shouldn’t be demoralized by this vote, they should see this as a move that will help guarantee a later victory.Report
Yeah, that was always the thing. DACA is popular, but not popular enough to shut the government down over. In my opinion, the biggest risk the Democrats run is actually not on prospects in November but rather people souring on DACA. Immigration polling tends to be all over the place.Report
I think the D’s are doubly hosed on this due to everything they said during the last shut down. Hence:
There is video at the link, which is boocoo embarrassing.Report
They may well be hosed—DACA may just be too low-salience for the vast majority of people to justify a shutdown, as @will-truman says—but I doubt it will be over this kind of arrant hypocrisy.
And I don’t think I’m saying that just because I’m a Democrat or because I think arrant hypocrisy from partisan actors (even Republicans!) is, on balance, good.Report
Regional effects. McConnell has to worry that there are three Southwestern Republican Senate seats up in 2018 (four if McCain dies/retires) where DACA will matter. Increasingly, those seats are different from some policy perspectives from Southern and Midwestern seats.Report
If people cared about hypocrisy, the GOP would have ceased to exist a year ago.Report
The GOP will defend its hard-lined stance through the Senator Tom Cotton method. All they will say is that “we had an election in November 2016 and the American people voted for Donald Trump’s position on immigration.” Never mind that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million, those Americans don’t count because they aren’t real. The Republican Congress is shameless and will lie and lie to get what they want.
CATO has a good run down on how the Republicans plan to massively decrease legal immigration in very cruel ways.Report
I’m not sure why people are surprised that Utah is both conservative and pro-immigrant. Truly religious conservatives, such as Mormons, are generally pro-human, which includes being pro-immigrant, because, well., because Jesus.Report
But the way Trumpists loathe and fear immigrants, I mean, Jesus!Report
I see all this as more data to support my theory that Federalism/States’ Rights is a debating strategy, not a governing value.Report
It’s a logical fallback position.
“Hey, I’m now in a position where I need to either assimilate or die… I don’t want to do either… hey, I know! I’ll appeal to the importance of living and let live! And then, when I’m ascendant, I’ll be in a better position to make them assimilate!”
Unfortunately, if you find yourself an advocate of the whole states’ rights thing and, suddenly, you’re fighting against a bunch of people who don’t believe in it, then what? Where is your leverage when you’re losing?
It’s a sub-optimal strategy unless you’re playing against someone who believes in it.Report
Federalism, in that instance, is ultimately going to be a procedural appeal to a third party. To the extent that it can work in our system, and is important, it’s largely going to work because it gives an enforceable mechanism for people who don’t have any principled commitment to it, by having an institution (specifically the federal court system) that is committed to it by its very nature.
Of course, the nature of the court system is such that it isn’t going to be incredibly reliable in that respect, even if there weren’t a bunch of precedents that undermine federalism for better or worse.Report
The problem with Federalism is that it, implicitly, allows for other people to be wrong about important stuff.
I mean, sure, there’s plenty of unimportant stuff. Matters of taste, say. Nobody cares if someone else has a different matter of taste. This guy prefers black olives on a supreme pizza, that guy prefers pepperoni and cheese only, the other guy over there enjoys cheese only. You don’t *NEED* a rule for pizzas.
It’s when people want to do things that are matters of morality that one would need Federalism. Like, if a state wanted to legalize marijuana or something. You couldn’t allow them to do that because it’s *WRONG*. You can’t let one state do it when all of the other states aren’t doing it because it’s *WRONG*.
Why in the hell would you even consider letting people do something that is wrong? It’s not even victimless! Children are being neglected, spouses subjected to violence, people drinking raw water, and all sorts of awful things happening and you think that this should be left up to them? Would you have supported slavery in 1850?
Better to just get rid of Federalism altogether.
Unless the wrong people are in power.Report
Well, yeah. If it’s going to work, it will work by providing people who are opposed to a policy because they think the policy sucks a tool to hinder that policy that’s rooted in a principle that will serve them regardless of whether they’re committed to it.
But then you’re left with the question of what stuff people are allowed to be wrong about. And who is allowed to be wrong about what. As much as I dislike the results on policy grounds, I’m not actually sure that the states are allowed to be “wrong” about marijuana legalization if the feds disagree. I’m not just saying this because the courts say so (though that matters) but also because I think the underlying argument behind the precedents is convincing.
On top of that, a crucial element of our theory of government is that there are some things people aren’t allowed to be wrong about, at least if they want that wrongness to be enforced by the government. And as @mike-schilling says, there’s a long history of Federalism being used to allow states to be wrong about the stuff that the Constitution demands they be right about.
Which winds back to my point elsewhere, stripped of the religious references. Letting states violate people’s Constitutional rights in the name of “leaving people alone” is counterproductive.Report
Letting states violate people’s Constitutional rights in the name of “leaving people alone” is counterproductive.
Sure.
But we have to balance that counterproductive against other counterproductives.
We’re in a race to the counterproductive bottom.
Federalism’s upside is that it allows states to do the right thing when all of the other states are doing the wrong thing.
At the cost of allowing states to do the wrong thing when all of the other states are doing the right thing.
And there are a lot of things that will have input into making someone say “no, that price is too high”.Report
Anyway, DiFi is requesting that ICE brief her on any upcoming raids in California against people breaking Federal laws.Report
Since the arc of time is toward justice, allowing some states to get it wrong seems like a no brainier. If State A is doing it wrong, and all the other states are doing it right to varying degrees, then the people of State A will either demand change, or exercise exit in sufficient numbers as to cause pain.
All that is required is patience.
Or, if State A doesn’t change, tolerance.
What the disdain for federalism says to me is that people don’t trust the American political process at the state level, but somehow think it works at the national level.Report
You said “since” where I would have said “if” but, other than that, I agree pretty much wholeheartedly (though I brace myself internally for the “but what about slavery?” argument that is hiding just around the corner).Report
Exception to prove the rule. The arc was bending slavery and civil rights toward justice, just very slowly, and the harm of letting it creep forward on it’s own versus the harm of giving it a serious push was pretty stark.Report
State A “doing it wrong” covers a lot of ground, but some of that ground, including the most popular parts of it, includes wrongfully depriving people of the means to either demand change of to flee to State B.Report
@pillsy
Which is pretty much my point here. I think you have to make the case that the people who could be harmed by State A doing it wrong are being disenfranchised and/or denied a right of exit before you seriously start talking about over-riding federalism.Report
For me, I really think the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution must be binding on states, and am glad that we’ve (haltingly, and with copious instances of real backsliding) moved in that general direction since the Civil War.
One of the reasons for this is the reality of our already very federal system is that most of the laws you are likely to be charged with violating, and most of the armed people you interact with who carry out the government’s will are ultimately going to derive their powers from the state, rather than federal government.[1]
Maybe you can move somewhere else to publish your book or practice your religion or own a firearm, but the Constitution promises that you shouldn’t have to.
[1] AFAIK, there aren’t any states that do anything the protect the power of municipalities and other administrative divisions the way that the federal Constitution recognizes the prerogatives of states.Report
Speaking of which, here’s an article about how California is handling its recent weed convictions following state-level legalization.Report
Awesome. Won’t help if the conviction is federal, but if Popehat is to be believed, those are few and far between, so this is a good thing.Report
Thanks be unto Columbia, Minerva, and Iusticia!
I have a few acquaintances on the bench, and you should have heard the heat they vented for years at the District Attorneys “wasting [their] time with marijuana cases.”
It’s nice to see the courts taking the time to undo the needless imposition of felony convictions for something that is now perfectly legal (according to the state’s law, anyway).
May Minerva similarly bestow her blessing of wisdom on the United States Congress one day soon. Though I’m not holding my breath.Report
Neat.Report
With all due respect, to me, a lot of the discussions about Federalism, and about getting it right or wrong, takes place in such an abstract plane that do not translate to XXI Century America.
We live in an interconnected, interdependent, society (I was going to say integrated, but don’t want it to mean “integrated”). I cannot really think of anything that doesn’t interact with interstate commerce, and I definitely expect my kitchen appliances, and my accounting rules, to work the same in NJ as in IA.
We all share the same american culture, formed by common TV, movies, and internet. Whatever regional variations we have are more similar to matters of taste than to matters of significance; and our differences are more driven by class and education than by geography.
The idea that somehow things are different because I cross a state line really makes no sense to me. Perhaps because I live in Texas, the land of the largest city in the USA to elect (three times) a lesbian mayor.Report
@j_a
That’s a legit gripe, and given the modern era, the need for 50+ unique and conflicting regulatory schemes is pretty thin. That said, one size fits all is not a well proven scheme either. So split the baby wide scale. Have a federal schema that all states must follow, but the states can adjust for local conditions.
It’s either that, or just do away with the states altogether and have one big country. Of course, then we might as well just absorb Canada & Mexico so we can chuck NAFTA and ease up the regulatory differences across the whole continent.Report
“Have a federal schema that all states must follow, but the states can adjust for local conditions.”
That’s more or less what Canada does on most issues FTR. Overall it works pretty well although the country has veered very far away from it in one direction or the other fairly often, due to people having opinions and conflicting principles and stuff. It seems to rebound toward that center over time, albeit sometimes with the vigor of a kid overcorrecting a skid during a snowstorm.Report
@oscar-gordon – What the disdain for federalism says to me is that people don’t trust the American political process at the state level, but somehow think it works at the national level.
I’m just speaking personally, but I don’t think it “works” at the national level, it’s just slightly less terrible. After all, and you can change this argument for the partisan view you employ, the various terrible Republican state legislatures are full of the people who even more terrible and less able to win even congressional elections than the current crop of extremists they’re currently electing.
Here’s a good story on how the Alabama legislature drastically changed the moment the GOP too full control in ways that don’t even make sense strategically and politically –
https://newrepublic.com/article/119019/civil-rights-movement-going-reverse-alabama
Or for the TL;DR version – I don’t have a whole lot of trust of the current Congress to protect Civil Rights, but I have zero faith in an Alabaman or Michigan or other Republican dominated legislatures.
I’m sure a gun owner could say the same thing about say, Congress vs. the New Jersey or California legislature.Report
@jesse
Exactly! And, you will have probably noticed, I live in neither NJ, nor CA, and you’d have to cough up great big steaming piles of money to get me to move to either state.
And, I notice, you don’t live in AL, nor do I, despite having been offered some pretty impressive steaming piles of money to move to Huntsville for work.
As a matter of fact, I have something of a list of states where you’d have to shovel truckloads of money into my bank account before I would move there, because the state level politics are so distasteful to me.
So I have to wonder, since you don’t live in AL, and probably aren’t even thinking unseriously about moving there, why do you care if the people of AL have elected a backward thinking gang of GOP legislators? Sure, they’ll try to roll back civil rights, and I am certain they will do something pretty quick which hits my condition from up above (regarding interfering with political participation or the right of exit), but don’t the people of AL have the same right of self-determination we do here in WA (up to the point of infringing on rights)?Report
“don’t the people of AL have the same right of self-determination we do here in WA ”
The basic thing, is, we probably heavily disagree on this part. I think there should be floors on all social services and civil rights that even the most ruby red legislature can’t go past, because they legally can’t. OTOH, if California wants to expand a program and raises taxes too much, go ahead. If it fails, there’s still a basic floor.
Our basic floor in America is still way too low to trust Oklahoman legislatures, for example.Report
We’d probably disagree on what exactly that floor should be, but not necessarily on the idea of a floor.Report
blast from the pastReport
How unthinkable that seemed!Report
That’s a theory like gravity is a theory. It’s only called Federalism these days because by now everyone knows that States’ Rights means racism.
It is not a coincidence that a States’ Rights argument was used to gut the VRA.Report
I think most of these high concept things like “Federalism” or “Subsidiarity” are that way, because abstract concepts by themselves shouldn’t be embraced.
In other words, why should we support “federalism”, at all? Is it always a positive thing that produces justice and happiness?
Or is it a tool that can just as easily produce misery and injustice?Report
Oh, you already know the argument: we should support federalism because it puts the lawmakers closer to the people, that the law may better and more directly reflect the people’s wishes. Which is also the argument for referenda and voter initiatives, which has proven to be something of a mixed blessing here in California.
The real issue with “bring power closer to the people” is that the people are sometimes unwise. And it just so happens that when the people are unwise is a set of occurrences exactly coincident with those occurrences in which I personally disagree with the majority’s preferences.Report
Maybe less a matter of “unwise” so much as
“Power to the people”
is often in direct conflict with
“Our constitutional understanding of rights”
So in order to further those goals we have to sometimes use federalism, sometimes not.Report
Federalism was a good idea when it took 3 days to cross Rhode Island and electricity was a new thing. Maybe not so much in 2018 in a vastly more interconnected world.Report