"In July 2023, Texas began deploying a floating barrier of buoys designed to maim or kill whoever tried to get through the Rio Grande River along a 1000-feet stretch of the border in Eagle Pass, Texas, an area that had seen a particularly high number of border crossings. Within weeks, the Justice Department sued Texas...
...in December, a Federal Appeals Court ordered Texas to remove the floating barrier. Instead of complying, Abbott announced massive new funds for more border barriers shortly before Christmas and signed a law making it a state crime to illegally cross into Texas, declaring that Texas had a right to apprehend people who do, put them in jail, deport them, make all of these decisions on immigration on its own."
"The Texas Border Standoff Is an Acute Crisis with Terrifying Implications: Is this how America ends? Echoes of nullification crises and Civil War, and the dissolution of the Union." Thomas Zimmer. Democracy Americana (Substack). January 29, 2024.
Then, on January 11, Texas declared a disaster and took over control of a park near the Rio Grande River, kicking out federal agents. On January 22, the Supreme Court sided with the federal government. On January 24, Governor Abbott issued a statement: "The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States." As Mark Joseph Stern explains in Slate, Abbott appears to have borrowed language from "the very first line of the secession ordinances passed by slave states when they purported to leave the union."
Zimmer explains: "Abbott declared that the 'lawless border policies' by the 'lawless president' Joe Biden had failed to protect the state of Texas from the 'invasion' of migrants." Abbott said Texas has a right to self-defense, i.e., in Zimmer's words, "the right to ignore the decision of the Supreme Court as well as that of a Federal Appeals Court and to continue to militarize the border without permission from the federal government, under whose purview immigration and border protection clearly fall. 'Self-defense' means open defiance of the president’s authority and nullification of federal law."
Zimmer goes on to explain: "As of right now, it is basically a standoff between Texas, which has the explicit support by 25 other Republican-led states, and the federal government; and, on the ground, between federal border patrol agents on the one hand and the Texas National Guard, state troopers, and Texas Department of Public Safety officials on the other. This might well go back to the Supreme Court soon. It might escalate on the ground or it might not."
Adam Serwer begins his article: "Ulysses S. Grant once said that the Confederate cause, the defense of chattel slavery, was 'one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.' Texas’s embrace of neo-secessionist rhetoric in defense of letting children drown in the Rio Grande belongs somewhere on that same list." Let's think about this: "The Civil War settled this question; the union is perpetual, the federal government is sovereign, and states do not get to defy federal law simply because they don’t like when their preferred candidates lose the presidency. Perhaps the most significant through line between these two statements is the assertion that states are entitled to ignore the Constitution and the federal government if the rival party wins elections."
The Supreme Court Has Itself to Blame for Texas Defying Its Orders [gift article]: Greg Abbott is taking a stand to protect his state’s right to let children die in the Rio Grande, and four justices of the Supreme Court are encouraging him to do so. Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, January 29, 2024
This is also standard-issue Republican hypocrisy and refusal of bipartisan work to accomplish anything real
Republicans Who Screamed About A Crisis On The Border Now Oppose A Plan To Fix It
Many on the right claim the U.S. is being "invaded" by migrants but also want to wait until Donald Trump is elected president again to stop it. Igor Bobic, Arthur Delaney, Kevin Robillard, Daniel Marans. HuffPost, Jan 29, 2024
Republicans Agonize Over Supporting Bipartisan Border Bill They'd Insisted On: A bipartisan bill to address the surge of migrants at the southern border is sowing discord within the Senate GOP as Trump urges them to kill it. Igor Bobic, HuffPost, Feb 1, 2024
"For House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who saw his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), unceremoniously ousted for allegedly being too cooperative with Democrats, votes like Wednesday’s [January 31, 2024 tax bill] are preferable to getting nothing done or facing the same fate."
— House Republicans Are Such A Mess They’re Accidentally Doing Bipartisanship. But the right-wing House Freedom Caucus still has a final say. Jonathan Nicholson, HuffPost, Feb 3, 2024
Also
On February 1, 2024, Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) suggested murdering a reportedly undocumented migrant.
— GOP Congressman Shocks With ‘Pinochet Air’ Idea For Migrant, Then Makes It Worse: MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said the call “for murdering people using the Pinochet regime’s preferred method of dropping them out of helicopters is really not great.” Lee Moran, HuffPost, Feb 2, 2024It's about the 2024 election
Robert Reich says: In the compromise bill, "Biden and Senate Democrats have caved to Senate Republican hardliners. Among other restrictions, the bill would make it much harder for people to apply for asylum." It also gives the president emergency authority to close the border.
BS on the border: Trump’s biggest issue in the campaign is neofascist bupkis, Robert Reich, Jan 30, 2024
Trump characterizes the bill as a "horrible, open-borders betrayal of America."
Hypocritical? Yes. "Just last year," Reich says, House Speaker Mike "Johnson argued that Congress must tighten immigration laws to strengthen the president’s hand. When he was president, Trump sought similar additional authority from Congress."
I'm sure Trump has no idea what's in the bill. He just doesn't want voters to think 'Biden' when they think 'border'. Trump wants to own that issue in everyone's minds. Whatever he says is good, whatever they say is bad.
See what other bipartisan plans they don't want
As HuffPost explains: A bill with changes to the Child Tax Credit was approved 40–3 by the House Ways and Means Committee and "would likely pass the House in a similarly overwhelming bipartisan fashion," but "if Johnson allows the House to vote on something bipartisan, then far-right members of the House Freedom Caucus might retaliate against him for collaborating with Democrats." In other words, if he stopped it from coming to a vote in the House, it would have nothing to do with whether the bill is good for U.S. parents, just whether it's good for Democrats.
"Freedom Caucus member Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) complained on Friday, for instance, that the legislation will allow 'illegal foreign nationals' to claim the credit, even though the bill does not change the requirement for children to have social security numbers to qualify.
'The Child Tax Credit reforms in this bill are pro-family policies that maintain the child tax credit structure of the Trump-era GOP tax reform,' Ways and Means chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who negotiated the bill with Senate Finance chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), said in a statement pushing back on the criticism. 'It halts any push for monthly checks and provides no special loopholes for illegal immigrants.'"
Returning to Serwer's article in the Atlantic, he says: "As with terrorism or crime however, for some people the metric of success for a particular policy on immigration is not whether it fixes the problem but whether it is sufficiently cruel."
Or whether it helps their team by giving them power to do anything (openly or in secret). Or whether they can take the credit for anything anyone else achieves.
Well, they did allow a vote. On January 31, the bill passed the House 357-70. This is how the GOP forms its agenda: "Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)...suggested that he opposed the bill because passing it 'makes the president look good' by allowing him to 'mail out checks before the election'..."
It's unclear if the Senate will pass the bill, with one Republican saying it “makes the president look good” by letting him “mail out checks before the election.”
Here's the compromise that President Biden says is great, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson says is terrible:
"On Sunday [Feb. 4], a group of Senators — James Lankford (R-OK), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) — announced that they had reached a bipartisan "compromise" on a bill to overhaul the nation's immigration system and provide more funding for wars in Ukraine and Gaza. ... the proposal would create severe restrictions on asylum-seeking migrants that are similar — and in some ways harsher — than those imposed during the Trump administration. It would upend a bedrock principle of American immigration law: people who come to the country seeking asylum have a right to have their claims adjudicated." — Judd Legum, "The immigration 'compromise,'" Popular Information, February 6, 2024
HuffPost explains that Republicans:
"Lankford said he anticipated that Wednesday’s [Feb. 7] vote to advance the bill would fail. Moreover, he repeatedly declined to say whether he would vote in support of his own bill. [Lankford asked rhetorically:] '“Why would we force a vote on something that would kill it...' ... [Lankford] tried to argue that even if he votes against advancing his own bill this week, that it wouldn’t necessarily mean that he opposes it since it could still come up at a later date....[Republicans] were the ones who initially demanded linking border policy changes with the passage of aid to Ukraine. More time isn’t going to change anything, and many in the GOP would like to keep the border issue alive so they can hammer Democrats over immigration policy in the November presidential election."
— "In Huge Reversal, GOP Poised To Kill The Border-Ukraine Package It Demanded": Republican Sen. James Lankford, who spent months negotiating the border provisions the GOP demanded, said he may vote against his own bill this week. Igor Bobic, HuffPost, Feb 5, 2024
On Feb. 7, Lankford said in a speech on the Senate floor that, four weeks earlier, an unnamed "popular commentator" had warned him: "If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election." Radio host Jesse Kelly immediately said he was the one who said it.
Impeaching the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
On January 31 (HuffPost), Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee
"approved two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — an entirely baseless effort aimed at helping Donald Trump look tough on border issues ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
The committee voted 18 to 15, along party lines, to approve the GOP’s impeachment resolution, which accuses Mayorkas of 'willful' refusal to comply with immigration laws and breaching public trust. The full House could vote as soon as next week to impeach him."
Did Republicans once care about "security issues"? Wasn't DHS a creation of the George W. Bush administration, supposedly to "fight terrorism"? Well, now Republicans just want to break government. If it's a government thing, and if Democrats wield any power within it, they'll smash it.
On the Department of Homeland Security
it's wild that DHS will have survived two presidential transitions to a Trump administration. It's a Chekov's gun of reactionary tools, and rather than dismantle the org, both Obama and Biden treated it like as dull and normal a part of day-to-day governance as NOAA. newrepublic.com/article/1470...
— Kelsey Atherton (@atherton.bsky.social) November 18, 2024 at 9:34 AM
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This excellent @mford.bsky.social piece will be 7 years old in February, goddamn newrepublic.com/article/1470...
— Kelsey Atherton (@atherton.bsky.social) November 18, 2024 at 9:35 AM
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"DHS was a bipartisan mistake. It’s made it harder for FEMA to respond to national disasters. It’s enabled a culture of impunity and aggression among our immigration officers. It has a history emerging from a specific historical context and time. I believe that as the decades pass, historians like me will look back in sadness at the years after 9/11, when national unity was squandered in persuading Americans to abandon their civil liberties, plunging the nation into endless war, and laying the groundwork for our new regime of concentration camps (as some genocide scholars characterize them) on the American border."
It’s time to break up the Department of Homeland Security, David Perry, CNN, July 10, 2019
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