House on Fire
While most of the commentariat were focused on the Democratic Debate doubleheader, that party’s house caucus was having a rough go of it. The House passed the Senate’s version of the border funding bill, and nobody on Team Blue seems to be happy about it:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her colleagues in a private meeting Thursday that she thought she had a deal this week with her longtime ally, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer: She would ensure passage of a more liberal border funding bill in the House, and he would back her up by persuading Democratic senators to fight for it.
Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) said, she was blindsided. Nearly all Senate Democrats voted for a Republican-backed bill that kneecapped the House and marked the most embarrassing defeat for Pelosi in the six months since Democrats took over the chamber.
“Schumer destroyed all our leverage on Wednesday by not being able to hold his people,” said a senior House Democratic aide.
Schumer (D-N.Y.), meanwhile, believed Pelosi failed to deliver on a deal of her own. After House moderates revolted Thursday, Democrats had to discard a plan to send the bill back to the Senate before an end-of-month deadline.
“They’re blaming everyone but themselves,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide. Contrary to Pelosi’s private assertions, the aide said, House leaders never asked Schumer to withhold votes in the Senate.
The breakdown between Pelosi and Schumer revealed the extent of the raw divisions among congressional Democrats and raises the possibility of more skirmishes to come as Congress barrels toward funding and debt ceiling deadlines this fall. Democrats in both chambers agree they have to be in strategic lockstep to have any hope of besting President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
The result was the bill passed with 128 Democrats supporting it, and the more progressive wing apoplectic at the moderates who were in open rebellion over it.
More than 90 Democrats voted against the Senate bill, including members of leadership like Reps. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico and David Cicilline of Rhode Island — a sign of the deep discontent simmering within the caucus. In a shocking move, Pelosi’s entire team of negotiators on the border aid bill, including House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey of New York and Reps. Lucille Roybal-Allard of California and Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut also voted no.
Progressives, including Pocan, said they felt stung by the stunning course-reversal by Pelosi, where she swiftly bowed to pressure from moderates who had threatened to tank the House version of the bill — which contained hard-fought wins for the liberal Democrats. And Pocan warned that it could fire up the 90-member Congressional Progressive Caucus to take more hard-line stances on key bills in the coming months.“I just think it’s hard to ask our caucus to help deliver votes to pass things,” Pocan said. “It’s just going to be a lot harder for us to care to help deliver votes.”
Multiple other liberal Democrats were also publicly seething at their centrist colleagues for forcing Pelosi to abandon her initial plan to vote on an amended version of the Senate bill that contained additional protections for migrant children.
The in-fighting, as such things are wont to do in this day and age, spilled over to social media.
Since when did the Problem Solvers Caucus become the Child Abuse Caucus? Wouldn’t they want to at least fight against contractors who run deplorable facilities? Kids are the only ones who could lose today.
— Rep. Mark Pocan (@repmarkpocan) June 27, 2019
.@RepMaxRose just talked with Pocan on the floor about this.
Rose tells me Pocan’s tweet was “crazy, crazy language.”
“Mark’s tweet just speaks to why everyone hates this place. He’s just trying to get retweets. That’s all he cares about.” https://t.co/LMUAwc5GNu
— Andrew Desiderio (@desiderioDC) June 27, 2019
Rep. Ilhan Omar reacts to the House passing the controversial border spending bill: “We had an opportunity to put forth a humanitarian policy and we wasted that opportunity, and it’s quite sad. And I hope that Americans are as appalled as I am” https://t.co/7gKZjFnPmH pic.twitter.com/akACnywwKU
— CNN (@CNN) June 27, 2019
This is what AOC’s Chief of Staff deleted https://t.co/ZR0sEThZTi pic.twitter.com/zZQ1dlaH0J
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) June 27, 2019
Chakrabarti’s boss, coming off a week where she sparked the “concentration camps” debate that had eaten up airtime and characters, was having her own rough day a few hours previously with Jake Tapper:
While this particular incident mostly stayed in the shade of the debates, this highlights some very real and glaring issues for the Democratic Party. Only 8 months ago, the taking of the House of Representatives was supposed to be the beginning of the end of the Trump Administration. It definitely feels very different today. This latest row over border funding in the wake of the supercharged emotional debate over the events, places, and people along the border has become indicative of high hopes meeting very challenging reality. Just blaming Pelosi is too simple, since once you start putting blown-up pics of drowned people trying to cross the border on the floor of the Senate not passing something was not an option. The in-fighting and machinations of legislative sausage making means things like this happen, but the reactions and vitriol is telling of fault lines within a party that is going to need unity, or at least some semblance thereof, to oust Donald Trump from behind the Resolute Desk.
Speaker Pelosi might be right about Leader Schumer not keeping his senators in line, but it’s abundantly clear the new progressives, especially the freshman that have garnered lots of press, are not going to be bridled in any meaningful way. Such unbridled language as invoking “New Southern Democrats” on Blue Dogs and New Democrats is not going to help anything. The problem with that idea is that in taking the House last November, a lot of those suburban districts that turned the tide, and the House blue, are closer to the Blue Dog/New Democrat model than the Justice Democrats model. And the moderates know it, and are tired of not just the constant press the latter is getting but the lack of anything to go home and campaign on besides various matters related to them.
Across the capital, a very sobering reality check lies for all those presidential candidates and a party that feels they have a great shot at taking the White House in 15 month: Mitch McConnell once again worked his Democratic colleagues, and baring something truly extraordinary, he will still be the Senate Majority Leader after the 2020 election:
In a statement Friday, Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said that “the Speaker’s focus has always been on Mitch McConnell. He shortchanged the children when he said ‘get lost’ to the House.”
“Senate and House Democrats are united in realizing Mitch McConnell is standing in the way of doing so much good for America, including doing even more for the children at the border,” said Schumer spokesman Justin Goodman.
Neither spokesman would address questions about the other leader.
All those big, bold plans the candidates are espousing on the network coverage of the horse race won’t mean a thing on C-SPAN over the next four years regardless of retaking the White House with Cocaine Mitch manning the senatorial ramparts. Barring them unseating him in an election — and don’t hold your breath for that — the math is just not there for the Democrats to retake the senate. Add in Joe Manchin’s likely move to go after his old job of Governor of West Virginia instead of its senator, and the long odds get impossible.
While making Mitch McConnell the boogeyman will do great with the base and donors for Team Blue, it probably also helps him get re-elected. Running clips of folks saying “Only Mitch McConnell stands in our way of getting all we want” from Pelosi, Schumer, and AOC can be taken by Team Mitch and just tack on the “I’m Mitch McConnell and I approved this message” for the Kentuckian’s ad buys. That same lesson can be extrapolated out to the 11 members of congress running for president. Donald Trump is going to run as “It’s me or the left” to try to hold his coalition together from 2016. The idea is common enemy makes common cause and, they hope, reel in some former Never Trumpers who hate progressives just sufficiently more than the president to turn out and vote for their former hobgoblin. A rebellious, uncontrollable progressive faction in congress fits that narrative rather nicely; while the true believers are burning down the democratic establishment for the greater good they are also probably helping the last person they want to.
Meanwhile in the chamber that Democrats took control of just 8 months ago, things are decidedly looking grim. The House has passed a flurry of its initial legislative agenda which promptly went across the way to die in the Senate, and now the monotonous routine of passing pointless legislation and frustration of doing so appears to be getting to the members. Nancy Pelosi did not suddenly forget how to run the House, so the answer must be in the new makeup of her caucus. The spat over the border funding bill is likely to be replayed on every divisive piece of legislation, and the harder edges of the progressive wing have shown they have no intention of surrendering an inch to Pelosi, Trump, public sentiment, or anyone else.
Donald Trump polling-wise is as weak an incumbent as we’ve seen in a while. But he is an incumbent, and like fighting the heavyweight champ you aren’t going to get a decision; you have to decisively defeat him. That is going to take all of Team Blue singing off the same song sheet, or at least faking it, for 15 more months. The pressure to beat Trump is only going to grow, and from the freshman congress critters hellbent on remaking the Democratic Party to Joe Biden, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and the other campaigning for the party’s future, that pressure will expose every possible flaw. How they react and overcome that will determine their and their party’s success both in their current roles and at the ballot box in 2020.
Plenty of work to do on that front.
Cocaine Mitch. God that is a good nickname. Love him or hate him, he’s got that going.
But anyway, the D’s kinda put themselves in a bad situation with the border issues. They have been saying for I don’t know how long that nothing was the matter down there, but, low and behold, the Ridiculous AOC tweets some hyperbole and causes a major cluster. So, the so-called centralists have to put the fire out, and out quickly, so as to not get burned. The hold the D’s have on the house is pretty tenuous and already looks to be everything they called the R’s at this point. Adding the idea that they want kids to sleep on concrete floors due to lack of funding is piss-poor optics.
Optics of the level of tearful photos of an empty parking lot, which are circulating about said Ridiculous AOC:
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Deny, dismiss, deflect, distract…Report
So you oppose the emergency spending bill that they had to pass because AOC had substituted “concentration camps” for “fake border crisis” as the Democrat’s talking point?Report
Spending more or less on the concentration camps won’t make any improvement in the children’s lives, because the suffering being inflicted on them was by design, not lack of funds.
The crisis on the border IS the concentration camps; without the deliberate policy choices of Trump to separate families and detain them needlessly, there would be no crisis.
Which is why we are in the “deflect, distract” phase. The next and final phase is “defy” where the Republican position will be to celebrate the suffering they inflict.Report
Should Pelosi be primaried for collaboration?Report
This is the whole “perfect vs. good (or at least “better”)” argument.
As much as I like something a LOT closer to “open borders”, Trump won’t sign off on that without huge public demand… which isn’t there and shouldn’t be expected.
For that matter it’s not even clear that the Dems, much less the GOP, would sign off on that.Report
That makes sense, if you start with the premise that any sane and reasonable system of processing immigrants and asylum seekers is categorically un-possible.Report
Sane and reasonable isn’t on the table. Worse, it doesn’t look like it will be for the foreseeable future.Report
Actually it’s rather the opposite of what they called the R’s in the past. The Dems, when they have defections or uprisings, break towards the center and bipartisanship compromise cooperating with the GOP. The R’s in the past when they had defections broke to the right for confrontations and showdowns (repeal the ACA or we won’t raise the debt ceiling ) etc.Report
This is a very good point. The far progressive wing of the Dem Party has been getting all the press, all the tweets and all the candidates genuflecting to them. But it’s not where the bulk of the party is, who tend to be center-left (and would be right wing in most countries). We’re in an odd moment in politics where I could see both parties disintegrating into factions.Report
I keep pointing out, over and over, that the majority of the Democratic Party, it’s past two presidents, all its past presidential nominees (since Clinton) and almost all of its leadership is center left but both the media, all conservatives and an assortment of online liberals keep pretending that is not the case.Report
I agree with you on that North. Unfortunately Progressives just have a bigger megaphone right now. You tell just by checking in with several of the other commeters here that they believe the SJ wing is the future of the party. I’m actually heartened by thst disconnect because it means the Democrats are’t that far goneReport
This might be true enough but this could still be an unjustifiable cave in the name of “getting things done.” We are still talking about making things slightly more bearable for kids in cages instead of getting rid of the idea of kids in cages. Incredentialism is not always a defensible position.
I think the nay voters were morally correct here.Report
The nay voters might be morally correct, or they might be taking payoffs from child sex traffickers or something.
This is why I raised the issue of Chesterson’s Fence somewhere in one of these threads. Instead of exploiting a gotcha moment, perhaps people should ask why Obama, Biden, and Jeh Johnson decided to put kids in cages. What problem were they trying to solve with such an extreme measure? Given the severity of the solution, I would guess it was a really bad problem that will recur absent their fix.
Now of course Trump is going to have a slightly different take on accommodations because he runs extremely high end hotels, so he wants to spend billions on amenities like nice children’s beds from Wayfair, which drove the far-left into fits of apoplexy, including strikes and work stoppages.
But does the cage-free outcome they demand lead to pictures of the desiccated corpses of thousands of children who will die in the desert? Perhaps so, since four times as many migrants were found dead under Biden’s first two years than have died under Trump’s.
Does it lead to massive exposes about child sex trafficking rings and child slavery, and how kids are being kidnapped south of the border and prostituted in the back alleys of Tuscon or Chicago? It might.
Could the far left position boomerang badly on Democrats in 2020? Oh yeah, because Trump has a megaphone and he’s not a bit shy about using it.Report
If we had just allowed the asylum seekers to stack up on the Mexican side of the border as we prcessed them, would you have had a problem with that?Report
They are stacking up on that side of the border. It’s Trump’s “metering” policy where only a certain number of asylum seekers are allowed each day. That’s why Ramirez was trying to cross the Rio Grande when he and his daughter drowned.Report
There are 4 million approved legal immigrants on the waiting list abroad right now. We’re going to see a continuing increase in immigration and asylum for the next decade. They have to have some kind of filter. I just don’t follow how Chip wants to handle that.Report
CBS was just allowed access into the DHS facility in Homestead Florida.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qDnHlzxK3kReport
Only 4 million??
Jeez, I thought it was much more.
By contrast, how many federal drug cases are processed each year? How many state and municipal criminal cases? How many civil court cases?
The idea that 4 million asylum cases in a nation of 330 million, represents some unfathomably huge number seems ridiculous.
And how far would that 25 Billion requested for a wall go in hiring attorneys, counselors, and clerical staff to process asylum claims?
Given that Trump is happy to spend 775 per day holding people in subhuman conditions, wouldn’t it be cheaper to let the families stay together and find foster homes and sponsors?
This whole argument seems fraudulent, like it starts from the premise that allowing more immigrants is un-possible, then proceeds from there.Report
Processing a drug case is a lot different than bringing a person here permanently (and everything that goes with that). Chip, I would really like it if you would A) acknowledge that are inbound immigration is about to hit a record high and keep going for the next several decades B) acknowledge that at the same time we’re going to lose a ton of jobs to automation and technology and then C) explain why we should speed up and increase immigration now. It just doesn’t seem like you have thought about this past the end of your nose.Report
Isn’t a large wave of immigrants arriving at a time of rapid industrialization, the exact condition which existed in the late 19th century, when we processed millions of people through Ellis Island?
How’d that work out?
If globalism has changed anything, it has shown that now, jobs move to where the lowest wage workers are.
Millions of Chinese people didn’t move to America and take over the steel industry. If you force Mexicans to stay in Mexico, the maquiladoras will just move south to find them.
Americans are competing with Mexican workers no matter where those Mexicans happen to be living.
The difference which you are not seeing is that when a Mexican worker lives in America, he also becomes an American consumer, an American investor, an American citizen…
Or…maybe that is the problem.Report
The average minimum wage in Central America is about $1.50 an hour. If the Democrats want to campaign on that for Americans, more power to them.Report
Do you want to compete against a Honduran fellow making $8.00 in California, or his brother making $1.50 back in Honduras?Report
LA already has 40,000+ homeless people living on the streets. Add enough Hondurans and the real average minimum in California will be $1.50 an hour, except for the fact that the real minimum is always zero.
The illegals from Mexico who were making $8.00 an hour aren’t too happy about having to compete with endless waves of Central Americans in a race to the bottom.Report
Ahh, so what we need is a labor cartel, where the government works to restrict employers from purchasing labor on the free market.Report
Hondurans aren’t supposed to be in our labor market, they’re supposed to be in Honduras.
Importing an uneducated easily-exploited underclass that employers can buy to fill the role once occupied by black slaves might certainly be a winning position in the Democratic primaries, and will certainly attract lots of donations from liberal elites, but is it really moral, sustainable, or good for Americans, American union members, American workers, or even Guatemalans?
Now sure, they’ll talk about how much better off Guatemalans are coming here than staying in Guatemala, but the same party said the same thing about importing unlimited numbers of Africans.
Just thought I should point that out.Report
Well by that logic, American factories don’t belong in Mexico or China or Bangladesh either.
What if instead of the government artificially restricting labor supply to force wages higher, what if the government just cut out the middle step and forced employers to pay everyone a higher wage?Report
“Won’t someone think about the corporations!”Report
“Isn’t a large wave of immigrants arriving at a time of rapid industrialization, the exact condition which existed in the late 19th century, when we processed millions of people through Ellis Island?
How’d that work out?”
It’s not the processing, it’s where they go afterwards. That’s what is taking so long for the 4 million waiting right now. My relatives mostly all came here in the 1840s and 1850s. There was a LOT of open country for them. That meant a lot of OPPORTUNITY for someone that came here with a tiny bit of money but was willing to work hard. Our current system doesn’t really facilitate moving to the frontier, living in a sod house or a cabin and hand-clearing 40 acres. Those people will end up on the low end of the trades or cleaning hotel rooms or at the driver-thru window at McDonald’s.
The fact remains that almost every other First World country has tight immigration controls. Finnland, for example, take about 1,500 Somalia refugees every year. They reassess that number annually and they are selective about who comes in so they can ensure A) They have good jobs available for them and B) Those people have the potential to do well for themselves without being a drain on the country.
I still don’t see anything other than emotion from your position Chip. You’re using logic from 100+ years ago and not acknowledging that the global economy has changed dramatically and is going to keep changing. I’m happy to have immigrants come here, but there has to actually be a plan to do in a healthy way and it seems like you just want to fling open the doors and hope for the best.Report
My relatives mostly all came here in the 1840s and 1850s. There was a LOT of open country for them.
I spent most of my time from age 6 to 21 in a part of the country that was settled largely by eastern and northern European immigrants from 1880 to 1920. The Great Northern Railway was recruiting Scandinavians and Germans to come to the northern Great Plains and become grain farmers — and the rail company was handing out free, no-longer-occupied land for that purpose. By 1910 or so the last of the free land was gone — and attitudes toward further immigration changed drastically.Report
Agreed. Things got a lot different when the US didn’t need thousands of settlers to send West.Report
OK, so if the argument against increasing immigration numbers comes down to “we have no where to put them” it has gotten so weak as to almost be self-refuting.
All across America there are thousands of small towns which are emptying out, deprived of young people. Some are giving away houses free to any young family that will move there.
In fact, much of the recent movement of immigrants has been exactly to these places, like Georgia and Ohio to work in poultry farms and slaughterhouses.Report
Yep. Lets import millions of uneducated people from some of the most violent countries on Earth, dump them in the heartland so they can destroy all the towns where Republicans live, so that we get cheaper artisanal soy lattes and free range organic chicken.
Liberals are now no different from British aristocrats who loved slavery, but were smart enough to ship the slaves to their Caribbean plantations, far away, so they could profit from the exploitation and suffering without having any negative impact on London’s party circuit.
The only question was how many slaves the Caribbean could hold.Report
“Destroy the towns…”
Please elaborate.Report
Gentrification.Report
Chip,
So all of the legal or illegal (doesn’t really matter anymore) immigrants you want to invite in go to these small towns…then what? Where do they work? Here in Louisville they will clean hotel rooms, do low-level construction jobs and work the drive-thru at McDonald’s. I’m not saying we can’t use their labor, but you have still not offered a plan.
Ny great-great grandfather came here in 1859 and his
occupation was listed as a ‘laborer’ on the 1870 census. Same with 1880 and 1890. It would have been the same in 1900 except he died that February at the age of 54. After 42 years in the United States he and my great-great grandmother were still renting a house and he was still doing very physical labor, but at least there was work building the country. Where is that work today? It feels very much like you just want to bring them in to prop up the same service economy that liberals complain so much about in terms of living wage. Do you have anything else?Report
Why the trafficking in hypotheticals?
They are already in those small towns, already working, already renting, already consuming.
If all the workers in a Hormel sausage factory were to suddenly get their citizenship papers tomorrow, how would America be different?
And in the future, who would come here is there wasn’t jobs available? We already witnessed after the Great Recession how millions of them just moved back home.
And if your point is that American is incapable of producing enough jobs, well, that is a much larger question that has little to do with who does it.Report
They are working in those towns at the very bottom of the economic ladder. You are advocating for a plan that gives them no upward mobility in their lifetimes.Report
If you want to argue that legalizing them isn’t a ticket to upward mobility, you have your work cut out for you.Report
It’s the path to upward mobility for their children, rarely for them.Report
And yet they’ll still vote with their feet for it in vast numbers.Report
Lump of labor fallacy. Make them legal and they’ll create jobs or jobs will be created to take advantage of them.Report
I would like to observe the almost utter dearth of actual solutions in the conservative and especially Trumpian complaints about immigration. If both of those actors truly considered immigration a problem and wanted to prevent those people from coming here there’s an obvious solution and one that would be very effective: Triple down on E-Verify and take aim at the -employers- NOT the illegal immigrants.
Illegal immigrants have virtually nothing and thus nothing to lose. You bust them in the country or at the border they either get a stint in jail or a camp and ultimately get sent home whereupon they just walk back up here again.
Employers of illegal immigrants, on the other hand, have lots to lose. They have assets, capital equipment, cash, businesses. A strong E-verify system and a painful financial penalty would get their attention really fast. Hell: offer a reward TO illegal immigrants to narc on their employers. Put em at the head of the line for green cards with a little share of the penalty their employer pays.
If this was instituted the job market for illegal immigrants would implode faster than a republican partisan trying to talk health care of fiscal policy. No job market for illegal immigrants would strangle the draw for illegal immigrants to come and they would stop (the economic ones anyhow).
Of course there’s problems with this:
-It’ll make the stuff expensive that illegal immigrants work at which neither wealthy conservatives (or liberals for that matter) like.
-It gouges businesses which Republicans almost never do and certainly not Trump.
-It’d fix the problem.
So instead the aim seems to be to keep employing illegal immigrants but keep em scared and working for nickles to the employers benefit. As the less polite liberals put it: the terror is the point.
But yeah, whenever I see conservatives avoiding the idea of aiming enforcement at employers instead of immigrants it’s like seeing environmentalists talking about global warming while avoiding the subject of nuclear.Report
But the business leaders donate!
(You’re absolutely right. E-Verify alone could mitigate this problem substantially even if you love CEOs and have no desire to see them harmed.)
We’re not even in a “Pass a Law!” place. We’re in a “Enforce the Law you already passed!” place.Report
Well yes, the business leaders do donate. And Trump and his right wing media co-critters need the problem to demagog about.Report
I don’t think it would do any good because liberal states would ban the enforcement of e-verify as a fascist imposition on the right of anyone to have a job, just as they refuse to cooperate with ICE or any other immigration measures.
The other problem is that many illegals don’t actually have employers, they’re doing pickup jobs for cash, or working completely off the books for various Hollywood celebrities and Democratic politicians.
And many have stolen Social Security numbers that check out just to get around e-Verify.
However, I’m all for strict enforcement of e-Verify, and would be happy if any employer who knowingly or unknowingly employed an illegal was hit with five years in jail and a hundred thousand dollar fine.
We could also have very stiff penalties for anyone who hires an illegal for a pickup job, or buys fruit from them at an LA off ramp, etc, and have the government hire Hispanics for sting operations, perhaps having some of the unaccompanied minors dressing up as girl scouts with ICE agents waiting in the bushes to bust anyone who conducts a business transaction with them.
But most importantly, we should be jailing anyone who knowingly protects illegals from law enforcement, which is already a very serious crime. Trump could send scads of mayors and state Representatives to jail for that one.Report
I’ve not heard of liberal states banning enforcement of e-verify and if you think liberals will go to the mat to protect businesses and rich people who employ illegal immigrants (and often treat them poorly) then the tin foil is probably on tighter than usual. Normal conservative dogma says liberals love terrorizing job makers (and that’s even for legal employees); so suddenly that’s magically inverting because a Hispanic is involved? It’s a July 4th miracle!
Illegals, of course, have tons of employers. You are focusing on what a small subset of liberals tend to employ them for and ignoring the construction work, cleaning work, base line fast food work, farm labor and slaugherhouse work that employs an overwhelmingly larger number of illegal immigrants and are generally company or conservative employer based.
Stolen Social security numbers! Ah so that’s where all that “immigrants are using wellfare” nonsense comes from! If illegal immigrants were either inventing fake SS numbers or creating a system where e-verify wasn’t noticing that your great Aunt Enid is doing an awful lot of chicken cutlet processing in New Mexico then we should be employing them as electronic security experts instead.
And then you pivot back away to chasing after illegal immigrants instead of their employers again. Does Sean Hannity ghost write for you sometimes?Report
North, I think you’re right on the policy merits but what George is saying isn’t as far fetched as you may think. Like, is the movement that seems to believe any enforcement of immigration law is ipso facto immoral and wants to hand out drivers licenses to illegal aliens, include them in universal healthcare, etc. really going to sit back and let them and their families go so broke they self deport?
After watching members of the left vanguard trying to outdo each other on crazy over the last week when it comes to this issue, well, color me skeptical. And I say that as someone more than a little heartened by the moderate left standing up for something resembling sanity. The right has managed to almost perfectly tap dance on immigration so that it can channel xenophobic rage with one hand and protect the corporate interest in cheap illegal labor with the other. If I didn’t know any better I’d almost think the policy free histrionics we’ve been seeing from the woke were designed to protect the status quo.Report
Like, is the movement that seems to believe any enforcement of immigration law is ipso facto immoral and wants to hand out drivers licenses to illegal aliens, include them in universal healthcare, etc.
There are very good, very sensible, reasons while locals communities would rather accommodate the fact that undocumented immigrants are among us than to try to eradicate them.
Take driver licenses. Everyone in America, outside of a handful of cities, needs to drive. Having undocumented immigrants pass a driving test makes the community safer. It’s exactly the same reason we require everyone to have a driver license. To make sure they know how to drive.
Same with the local police not checking the immigration status of people. You want undocumented immigrants to call the police when there’s been a crime. You want them to collaborate when they have witnessed a crime. Your community will not be safer by making sure a non negligible portion of it avoids any contact with law enforcement.
Same arguments you can make about providing health care, at least in the same amount as you provide other uninsured populations, about not having firefighters check immigration status of the inhabitants of a house in flames, etc.
It is not a matter of virtue signaling, it’s a matter of what makes the community more or less safe.
The argument that mass raids to get rid of every single undocumented immigrant will be what will make us the safest, I don’t think it passes the laugh test, but YMMVReport
Dude, did you actually read what I wrote or just cut and paste that question begging sophistry from another conversation? Like I said to North, the real answer is enforcing the law against employers, not abusing individuals.Report
“Having undocumented immigrants pass a driving test makes the community safer. ”
A) it’s cute how you think passing a driving test means something about whether someone is a safe driver
B) given the way that a driver’s license is assumed as a proxy for identification of citizenship, “driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants” would be a de facto mass legalization
C) what do you do with people who don’t pass the exam, do they get deported?
D) how long before we start seeing claims that the licensing exams are too “citizen-focused” and “America-biased” and too difficult for illegal immigrants to pass, and the exams are relaxed or removed entirely because “the point here is that they SHOULD have licenses, not that they SHOULDN’T”Report
“Take driver licenses. Everyone in America, outside of a handful of cities, needs to drive. Having undocumented immigrants pass a driving test makes the community safer. It’s exactly the same reason we require everyone to have a driver license. To make sure they know how to drive.
Same with the local police not checking the immigration status of people. You want undocumented immigrants to call the police when there’s been a crime. You want them to collaborate when they have witnessed a crime. Your community will not be safer by making sure a non negligible portion of it avoids any contact with law enforcement.
Same arguments you can make about providing health care, at least in the same amount as you provide other uninsured populations, about not having firefighters check immigration status of the inhabitants of a house in flames, etc.”
The problem is that all of those things normalize illegal immigration as the status quo and support it. You’ve got remove the carrot while also applying the stick if you actually want to change things.Report
The problem is that all of those things normalize illegal immigration as the status quo and support it.
That, exactly, is the argument of social conservatives opposing sex education in school. That it normalizes teen sexual activity.
But teens while continue having sex, teen pregnancies will continue, abortions while take place, but, for sure, it’s all a good price to pay for not normalizing teen sexual activity.
The undocumented immigrants are here. That is what it is *normal*. Since they are here, and they are driving, is it better that we test their driving aptitude, and allow them to get liability insurance? If you are against that, is there an argument besides “I don’t want no normalize it”?Report
A world in which teenagers didn’t have sex, and where all the crops were picked by American citizens would be a freaky bizarre world straight out of a science fiction novel.
Its not even a conservative argument, where there was some golden age in which we could return to. At no period in our history did citizens pick crops (usually slaves, or indentured servants, or sharecroppers did most of it).
And it doesn’t stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
How much would a tomato cost if you had to pay American style wages to everyone involved in its production?
Would we ban imported tomatoes which would be half the price? What sort of black market in cheap imported produce would arise, and what would be the ramifications?
Its these sorts of things that make people like me realize that the most fierce objection isn’t to immigrants being here, but to their being here legally with full rights as human beings.Report
InMD, the thing is that an EVerify system with fierce penalties against employers is not something the woke left is going to be able to strongly muster the will to fight against. Busting people hiring illegals to work in horrible conditions for low pay? Yeah… just no. Also if you integrate a reward for illegal immigrants turning in their employers into it then this system becomes one that privileges some poor illegal immigrants over rich companies or employers. That’d shatter any consensus on the far left as to if it was hateful or not. Also we know that the left wouldn’t interfere with self deporting because they have failed to do so before when there were economic downturns. Their passions are ethereal, and the internet is always serving up someone using the wrong pronoun or something somewhere.Report
I imagine that there would be a #metoo-esque aspect as well. (The part that got Franken and Weinstein cancelled without a sufficiently large scalp from The Other Side.)
“We instituted this policy to punish Republicans! Not to get Amber Heard’s housekeeper to go to the police!”Report
When the left imagines employer sanctions, we imagine the executives of ADM and Hormel being perpwalked to jail. When the right imagines it, they think of a yuppy mom busted for her nanny.
Which only illustrates why no one anywhere really wants immigration to actually stop.
Immigrants are too deeply embedded in our economy for us to function without them.Report
“When the left imagines employer sanctions, we imagine the executives of ADM and Hormel being perpwalked to jail. When the right imagines it, they think of a yuppy mom busted for her nanny.”
True, true. Now, which of these has actually happened?Report
I can’t recall either happening, at least not in sufficient amounts to change behavior.
Sausage still gets made, and no one seems too perturbed by how.Report
Hee hee! We’re all in agreement on what will happen!Report
There’s a huge disconnect between the law and the reality.
You’re a farmer who grew tomatoes. Your choices are letting them rot in the field and hiring illegals. Are you not supposed to be growing tomatoes? Is picking tomatoes such a horrible crime that the pickers should be sent to prison? Should you the farmer be sent to prison?
The law needs to deal with this sort of situation without trying to brutalize everyone involved or it just won’t work. A guest worker program that put business needs first would work… but that means no artificially low caps on the numbers of workers, and no making the program so complex and burdensome that no one can participate.
The solution when dealing with vast amounts of illegality is to make the legal systems less burdensome to the illegal alternatives.Report
American tomatoes are an interesting example. If it’s going into a can, sauce, paste, ketchup, any of those things, the tomatoes are picked by huge mechanized combines. It requires scale to remain profitable — something like 90% of California tomato growers sold out to someone bigger after the combines were introduced.
For the ones still hand-picked, putting cheap conveyor belts down between the plant rows more than doubled productivity.
Robots that can recognize ripeness and pick “by hand” with less bruising than humans are in final testing. The developers eagerly await elimination of cheap illegal labor.
Isn’t this the American Way since forever? If labor becomes more expensive, business finds a way to spend their labor dollars much more productively.Report
I hope you’re right, assuming it’s ever on the table that is.Report
Well the left isn’t going to put it on the table obviously. The far left thinks that illegal immigration is an unalloyed good; the moderate left thinks it’s an unalloyed economic good and probably neutral socially. It’s on the right that all the anti illegal immigration huffing is going on so they’d have to be the ones putting it up. I simply note that for all the supposed horrors of illegal immigration the immigration restrictionists sure go to a lot of trouble to avoid talking about something that’d actually be effective in addressing the problem. They would rather get dressed up in militia suits and chase Latinos across the desert in ATV’s.
DD, Chip, Jay: Yeah so the left isn’t in any hurry to propose beefing up e-verify… but the left doesn’t inveigle on illegal immigration either; it’s not a glaring concern for them. What is the rights’ excuse?
PD Shaw: That is fascinating, thank you. I am not surprised at all to see IL, the loony left state of the mid west, to be getting up to that nonsense.Report
What is the right’s excuse?
I already gave it. Business leaders are the ones who donate to the righty politicians.Report
” the left doesn’t inveigle on illegal immigration either; it’s not a glaring concern for them. What is the rights’ excuse?”
“You’re the only one here who’s complaining about this,” said the man to the woman who’d just had a hand slide down her ass.Report
So the right doesn’t propose going after employers because it’d rather fuck over its base who cares about the issue while disingenuously using it as a rallying cry to rile up that same base? Yeah I guess you’re right.Report
And here you put your finger on exactly what Trump tapped into. If the militia ATV stunts illustrate the stupidity of a substantial conservative constituency (and boy oh boy do they) then what of the decision to support someone outside of the establishment, who apparently didn’t get the memo about GOP nativism being just for show?
I guess even folks on the wrong side of the bell curve can figure out when they’re being played.Report
Yes, the divide between the GOP’s money people and party leadership and their actual voting base has been festering worse and worse. Trump is just one of the many opportunistic infections that are invading that wound.Report
The goal isn’t to actually have immigrant labor go away. The goal is to keep them around as a terrified and easily exploitable army of replacement workers.
No one can ever quite explain why it would be a problem to legalize the people who are already here working and living among us. And no one can ever explain what would happen if they somehow disappeared.
The concentration camps are intended as a display of arbitrary and awful brutality, to make the rest shrink into the shadows in fear.Report
That appears to be the hypothesis with the greatest overlap with the observed facts. I don’t think that’s what the great masses of Republican voters are thinking but I would not be shocked at all if it factored into what the GOP’s leadership and their money community thinks.Report
Chip,
Here’s the truth on legalizing the people here and opening the border to asylums: They don’t actually want to stay here. As I wrote about here on the site sometime back, most of them see themselves as migrant workers and want to go home at will. I’d bet my left arm that if we offered guest worker status to most of the asylum seekers they would take it, even the ones from scary countries.Report
Illinois enacted a law prohibiting private employers from using E-verify, and the Obama administration took the State to court and eventually won. It was replaced with a system of regulations and private lawsuits that (similar to pro-life regulation of abortion) is intended to accomplish what it cannot do directly. In the meantime, the African-American population in Illinois has declined 25%.Report
That is the same kind of insanity we get here. God help you when one of those dudes without insurance or property rear ends you with a ‘federally non-compliant’ drivers license issued by the state then vanishes into the ether. And thats not even getting into the ones that are obtained fraudulently. Who even knows what happens with those.Report
“The cruelty is the point.” This is why they don’t have solutions. Everything you wrote is correct but unlikely to change the minds of anyone disinclined to give Democrats any credit as multiple people keep proving themselves of doing.Report
My policy preference is robust migrant worker programs for the Southern border paired with increased security, better facilities, etc. For other countries I want their best and brightest.Report
All well and good Mike but that entirely elides the point. If conservatives and Republicans are so exercised about illegal immigration why are they spending 99% of their energy chasing illegal immigrants around, which is a fool’s errand, and entirely ignoring the illegal employer element?
Illegal immigrants are hard to catch, hard to penalize (especially not ethically) and endlessly replaceable. Illegal employers are easier to catch (super easy if you incent the immigrants to turn them in), easy to punish and if you hammer them soon they’ll disappear and they’d take the main incentive for illegal immigrants to come here with them. And you can nail illegal immigrant employers to the wall with punishments and run virtually zero risk of getting busted on camera putting children in cages or killing people.
So why is the conservative mantra all about “Build the wall” and terrorizing immigrants of all shapes and sizes (both policies which are wasteful, cruel and ineffective) while the employers who use illegal immigrant labor skate off easy? Jay and Chip have uncharitable answers up above but I am more curious as to how conservatives justify it to themselves.Report
They are viewing the wall as the Alpha and Omega of enforcement. I agree it’s misguided and no better than the liberal proposals.Report
How is it better than Liberal proposals exactly?Report
North – re-read my comment. I said ‘No better’.Report
Okay. But it’s liberals who’re excoriated for their position on illegal immigration?Report
Just this week. I’m fairly sure the Right has been the ones taking it on the chin regarding immigration since 2016.Report
Well, the best solution is to have Mexico put them in Mexican prisons.
*Trump threatens Mexico with tariffs*
*Mexico agrees to put the migrants in camps or deport them, and stop them with tens of thousands of troops*
Whew. It’s a win-win!Report
As I necroposted a couple days ago, it wasn’t too long past that everyone was praising Pelosi’s political mastery. She sure did put Trump in his place, everyone said, holding strong to the shutdown until he backed down on his border-wall funding.
And now, well, here we are. Federal government workers whose credit ratings went to shit, satellites lost in orbit, national parks wrecked, and the border wall got funded anyway.
I mean, it’s exactly how the last shutdown went as well; after a couple of months the Republicans got what they wanted all along. Maybe it’s time to just stop doing that.Report
Should have left it dead. The wall got “funded” by throwing a supposed GOP principle on the bonfire and then promptly got tied up in court where it remains to this day. So Pelosi achieved what she set out to do when she refused to let Trump dragoon her into putting a Democratic sign off on his wall nonsense. If his wall was so important he had two years to get it done under unified republican control.
As for current affairs? Well Schumers Senators compromised first and she has to think about her moderate caucus which is A) bigger and more important than her left wingnut caucus and B) wanted something done to address the shit show Trumps been rolling in on the border. So she didn’t have a lot of options at that point.
I mean all she did is fail to exact more Democratic priorities from the GOP in exchange for the bill passing. Not exactly a disaster.Report
“So Pelosi achieved what she set out to do when she refused to let Trump dragoon her into putting a Democratic sign off on his wall nonsense.”
…i guess that’s true if what she set out to do was put the whole thing off for a few months and then let the rest of Congress fuck her over and give Trump what he wanted, sure
like, do you honestly think that this will not be presented exactly as I put it in my comment?Report
The wall still isn’t funded and Trump didn’t get any of the other stuff he asked for. There’s spin and there’s reality. And since you’re basically asserting that the Dems should just meekly give the republicans whatever they ask because otherwise the Republicans will win anyhow; I just don’t see it.Report
“since you’re basically asserting that the Dems should just meekly give the republicans whatever they ask”
I’m not asserting jack shit, I’m saying that everyone who talked about Pelosi’s political mastery now looks like an idiot, because she’s appearing to be less of a manipulative genius and more of a dangerous egotist who couldn’t consistently outmaneuver Donald J Trump.Report
Well you’re wrong there too then. Good Lord(Lady?) does she have to win every encounter? Pelosi ran her caucus well and won the confrontation with Trump last time and prevented him from accomplishing his ends. And she got plaundits for it and rightly so.
This time she the Senate Democrats jumped on board a bipartisan bill that didn’t have what liberals wanted in it and Pelosi wasn’t able to contain an insurrection in her moderates ranks.
That doesn’t say anything about Pelosi’s mastery or the people who praise her. Sometimes ya win; sometimes ya lose in DC. Is Cocaine Mitch an imbecile because the ACA got signed into law or because he’s failed four times to repeal it? Of course not.Report
“Pelosi wasn’t able to contain an insurrection in her moderates ranks. That doesn’t say anything about Pelosi’s mastery…”
(emphasis added)
god you’re dumbReport
I will reiterate; you can’t win every political fights in DC. Especially not if your Senate colleges deal you a bum hand. I’d think a republitarian like you would be happy in principle that a rational centrist like Pelosi is running the show in the house though I suppose if some raving left wing moonbat was in her chair it’d make it easier for Republicans to get anything done. *looks at Paul Ryan* Ok I take that last bit back.Report
Kentucky Senator Alben Barkley told this story in 1938:
***
I would relate to the crowds how I called on a certain rural constituent and was shocked to hear him say he was thinking of voting for my opponent. I reminded him of the many things I had done for him as prosecuting attorney, as county judge, as congressman, and senator. I recalled how I had helped get an access road built to his farm, how I had visited him in a military hospital in France when he was wounded in World War I, how I had assisted him in securing his veteran’s benefits, how I had arranged his loan from the Farm Credit Administration, how I had got him a disaster loan when the flood destroyed his home, etc., etc.
“How can you think of voting for my opponent?” I exhorted at the end of this long recital. “Surely you remember all these things I have done for you?”
“Yeah,” he said, I remember. But what in hell have you done for me lately?”
***
The punchline is still widely used.Report
That anecdote is pure gold.Report
There are also some interesting takes on Ted Cruz calling for federal prosecution of the mayor of Portland over the attack on journalist Andy Ngo by Antifa, digging into the battle between the far-left and the center-left. After Hillary’s defeat, the far-left, already in the streets and delivering beat-downs and assaults during the election, became even angrier, and the hands-off policy of many left leaning mayors further emboldened the new brownshirts.
That mirrors the far-left’s rebellion against Nancy Pelosi, who is fighting an insurrection in the House.
Ted Cruz is probably on firm legal ground because of the long history of Democrat mayors and police standing idly by while mobs of angry, hooded, violent white men attacked and terrorized journalists and racial minorities. Currently the masked Democrats claim they’re fighting fascists as they brutally beat up Asians, whereas they used to claim they were fighting communists as they brutally beat up blacks.
The optics aren’t good for the party, and I don’t think Nancy is going to defend the modern Bull Connors and intersectional insurrectionists, because their actions will give us more Trump.Report
Oh, I’m sure there were good people on both sides.Report
Well, on one side we had a gay Vietnamese-American journalist who works for Quillette, and on the other side we had a bunch of privileged white thugs in masks who put him in the hospital for a brain injury.
So Andy’s lawyer, Harmeet K. Dhillon, said:
She runs Dhillon Law Group, which takes on companies like Google.Report
Good, I hope she plows those Antifa imbeciles into penury.Report
Rope
Tree
Journalist
Some assembly required.Report
Meh, that won’t come to anything. The mayor of San Jose was on record as telling the cops to back off and let the Trump supporters get beat up, and the lawsuit over that was dismissed because seeing racists get hurt feels good man.Report
Kto kogo?Report
My guess is Donald J Trump wins this one.
I would venture that a whole lot of people in Portland are fed up with anarchist violence, assaults, and lawlessness, no matter how privileged and white the perpetrators.
I’d also guess that if there is any federal intervention, the reaction throughout much of the Portland police department will be “Oh thank goodness! We can start protecting the public again!”Report