Democrats to Try Again on Immigration
Plus: Rudy Giuliani puts the last nail in the coffin of his 'law and order' reputation.
Enormous news out of Iran over the weekend, where President Ebrahim Raisi has been confirmed dead this morning after a helicopter crash. Vice President Mohammad Mokhber is acting president for now; a new election will take place in the weeks ahead. Per CNN:
The loss of Raisi—a conservative hardliner and protege of Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei—is expected to sow further uncertainty in a country already buckling under significant economic and political strain, with tensions with nearby Israel at a dangerous high. His death has already triggered international reaction with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India and the UAE leader expressing their condolences for his death. Lebanon has declared three days of mourning.
And there’s this from an Israeli official, per Reuters: “It wasn’t us.” Happy Monday.
Immigration Week 2: Electric Boogaloo
Democrats in Washington are gearing up for another crack at immigration. Here’s Politico:
The Senate is expected to vote on a standalone border policy package this week, reviving a bipartisan compromise that collapsed in the upper chamber earlier this year.
The move to take up the legislation, which isn’t expected to pass, comes as President Joe Biden prepares to issue border-focused executive actions that will almost certainly draw progressive ire.
The chances of a magical revitalization of the border package Republicans already killed earlier this year are zero. Even James Lankford, the Republican negotiated the package in the Senate and tried in vain to sell his party on its merits, is a “no” this time around, arguing negotiators need to go back to the drawing board and figure out something that can pass.
But the point for Democrats right now isn’t to pass something. It’s to underscore again that Biden can’t count on Congress’s help for immigration as he finally starts to roll out actions he hopes will assuage the border crisis on his own.
It’s a nasty political bind Biden’s in. There’s little question he needs to do something to change up the narrative on illegal immigration, which a number of polls this year have shown to be voters’ top concern ahead of November’s elections. Border crossings may not still be smashing records on a monthly basis like they were at the beginning of the year, but they’re still historically high.
The systems in place to sort and process crossers are comically inadequate: Those migrants who get immigration court dates go into a system where each immigration judge on the bench has a backlog of more than 4,500 cases; average processing times have ballooned to four years. Many, many more never get court dates at all—they’re simply released into the country by a Border Patrol buckling under the strain of the brutal math problem of crossers divided by officers.
The level of dysfunction and chaos is tough to wrap your mind around. “AP visits immigration courts across US, finds nonstop chaos,” reads one Associated Press headline—from January 2020. At that time, new quarterly immigration-court cases only rarely topped 50,000 and had never exceeded 100,000. Last quarter, they were at nearly 450,000.
Something has to change. But Republicans have stonewalled legislative efforts, ostensibly on the grounds that Democrats haven’t been willing to accept nearly stringent enough changes, more realistically on the grounds that it’s poor political practice to throw a drowning enemy a life preserver. That leaves executive action—but any action Biden takes now has its own political risks.
Take last Thursday’s newly announced action, for instance, of a new fast-track “recent arrivals” docket. Per the AP:
The Biden administration said Thursday that a new fast-track docket in immigration courts will cut the time it takes to decide asylum claims from years to months for some single adults.
Migrants who settle in five cities—Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York—will be placed in a “recent arrivals docket” that aims to have judges rule on their claims within 180 days, instead of the four years or so that it currently takes. The bottlenecked courts are believed to be a significant incentive for more people to come, especially those with weak claims.
The Justice Department has assigned 10 judges to the effort. Authorities said they didn’t know how many cases they would handle, making it difficult to assess the potential impact.
Drop-in-the-bucket actions like that won’t create an immigration-politics sea change, and could even be politically counterproductive: “a superficial Band-Aid on a gaping wound,” in the words of retired immigration judge Dana Leigh Marks.
But if Biden takes a page out of Donald Trump’s book and tries more hard-edged, disruptive executive action, as he has reportedly been mulling for months, he runs the risk of running aground in the courts. And he’s hemmed in on that front too by political realities of his own making, as the White House has continually insisted it is already doing all it can to stem the flow of migrants absent further congressional action. So any major new move invites the immediate critique: Okay, so why didn’t you do this before?
—Andrew Egger
How Low Can Rudy Go?
If there is one political figure who personifies what it means to be a Law & Order Republican, it’s probably America’s Mayor turned America’s Slurrer, Rudy Giuliani.
His clean-up of New York City is still referenced regularly on Fox News in tones that make Times Square during his mayorship sound like an American Valhalla, pushy cops and all. (Reality: there were substantially fewer murders, rapes, and thefts in 2023 than in Rudy’s 2000s glory days.)
The mythos surrounding his success undergirds much of the party’s framing of the issue, especially for the presidential nominee whose cultural touchstones are preserved in amber in 1989 Manhattan. Rudy’s L&O brand is so strong that the TV show theme song can conjure his image in the mind’s eye.
It’s easy to lose track of each humiliating moment in Rudy’s long-running, slow-motion demise—the dribbling hair dye, the farting in committee, the Borat hotel scene, the butt dialing, the Ukraine paranoia, the scotch swilling, Four! Seasons! Total! Landscaping! The complete and total submission to a two-bit real estate huckster. Through all that, it’s the brazen undermining of the U.S. legal system that fortified his entire hero arc that might be the most damaging.
Rudy’s latest ignominious faceplant came just this weekend, at the hands of the law he once pretended to care so deeply about.
In response to an indictment from the state of Arizona related to his role in a scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, Rudy sent this Na-Na-Na-Boo-Boo level tweet (now deleted) about how he could avoid the indictment if the state didn’t serve him a subpoena this weekend.
Just a few hours later, Rudy was served that very subpoena at his 80th birthday party, hosted by Caroline Wren (whom you might recall from a certain book about my questionable life choices).
There’s much to laugh at about this scene. The speed with which the authorities punctured Rudy’s social media bravado. The contrast between the surgical smiles of the bleach-blonde cougars in the taunting tweet and the reports of those same guests wailing and gnashing their teeth when Rudy got served.
But the serious offense beneath the farcical embarrassment is the attempt to undermine the whole legal system, now that it has come for him. He now argues that the system is rigged. That the cops who are just doing their job trying to protect our constitutional order should be mocked and belittled. And that those who make the rules can and should be ignored if they are not in his political tribe. (There were early signs of this mindset when Rudy helped spur on a police riot against city leadership back in 1992.)
There is a direct thru-line from Rudy’s imbecilic taunts to Greg Abbott’s despicable pardon of a vigilante murderer in Texas. In both cases right-wing leaders have embraced the idea that their team must be protected from consequences. That the Law and Order street only goes one way.
The natural landing place for this worldview is anarchy or authoritarianism, not constitutional law-and-order. It’s Oscar Benavides’ “For my friends everything; for my enemies, the law” all the way down.
And it’s Rudy Giuliani leading the descent.
Catching up . . .
International Criminal Court prosecutor requests warrants for Netanyahu and Hamas leaders: New York Times
Judge in Trump New York case says closing arguments will start next week: Washington Post
UN says 800,000 Gazans have evacuated from Rafah: Times of Israel
House GOP to Senate Dems: Your border vote is political ‘cover’: Politico
U.S. to complete troop withdrawal from Niger by mid-September, Pentagon says: Politico
Container ship set to be moved 8 weeks after Francis Scott Key Bridge crash: NBC News
WikiLeaks founder Assange wins right to appeal against an extradition order to the U.S.: AP
Quick Hits
1. Hey, Mr. President, Why Not?
“Donald Trump’s defence lawyer won plaudits for his aggressive handling this week of Michael Cohen, one of the key witnesses in the ongoing ‘hush money’ case against the former president,” Benedict Smith writes in The Telegraph:
But now Todd Blanche has a bigger battle on his hands: convincing his client not to take to the witness box himself in Manhattan Criminal Court next week.
Mr. Trump still has not decided whether he will testify in his own defence, Mr. Blanche said on Thursday. . .
John C. Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School, said the former president would be ‘mad’ to expose himself to questioning by the prosecution.
“He would open himself to a perjury indictment, even if he won in this case,” he said. “An early question on cross [examination] if Trump testified would be whether he ever had sex with Stormy Daniels.”
Let us just say: We don’t agree at all! Mr. President, if you happen to be reading: You really think these pencilneck lawyers can defend you better than you can defend yourself? Not likely! Get up there and show ‘em how it’s done!
2. Pro-Israel, Anti-Blank Check
Fellas, is it pro-Hamas to think the president’s allowed to try to influence an ally’s foreign policy decisions? Will Saletan has a great piece up this morning breaking down Republicans’ arguments that Biden has no business holding up 2,000 pound bombs to Israel:
Gaza presents an exceptionally difficult moral problem. Hamas, the fighting force that’s supposed to protect Palestinians, instead deliberately endangers them. That leaves Israel with the burden of trying to fight Hamas without killing the innocent people Hamas has cynically put in its way. Israel deserves patience and leeway as it tries to mitigate the resulting harm.
But that doesn’t erase Israel’s duty to mitigate the harm. In a war against terrorists, defeating them is only part of the job. It’s also important not to become like them. Sometimes it’s tempting to think that because the enemy is evil, you can cut moral corners. But when you find yourself arguing that civilians are fair game or that Hiroshima is a good model, it’s time to acknowledge that the good guys need red lines, too.
Cheap Shots
The kids of the alt-right are not alright:
The choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden would be an easy one for a people possessed of sufficient civic virtue. If Trump wins, it will not be because of Biden not adjusting immigration policy here or there, ,or how many times he visits Wisconsin. It will not even be because of who Trump is. If Trump wins, it will be because of who WE are.
On "Republicans Against the Rule of Law": The original embrace of Trump required a choice to declare that ordinary standards of moral judgment must be suspended in the case of Trump, because he is allegedly so uniquely suited to accomplishing "conservative" purposes -- and because the opposition is allegedly so evil -- that it would be wrong to hobble him with rules. But the Trump apologists back then insisted that he would honor the rule of law and restore constitutional governance.
Then Trump told federal officials to violate law and said he would pardon them. He asked "Who would prosecute me?" when an aide told him that what he wanted done was illegal.
He openly demanded "the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution" in order to reinstall him in power after losing an election.
He defied a subpoena to return highly sensitive documents he willfully and unlawfully pilfered, and he falsely claims that the law allows him to do whatever he wants with them. He is arguing in court that he should be free to violate laws without consequence while wielding the powers of the presidency - and claiming that being a presidential candidate should immunize him from the law too.
All of this is defended by people who have claimed to believe in the rule of law and to oppose the tyranny of rulers unrestrained by law. Now they claim that any effort to hold their side to the rule of law is just malicious, political "lawfare."
The turn against the rule of law as it applies to their political allies is a natural corollary of the demand that their political standard bearer be exempt from ordinary ethical judgment.