US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4439

On October 11 2024 19:47 oBlade wrote:

This is about who, if anyone, is exploiting the border for political gain. Not "who is exploiting the border for political gain, but only the evidence I want to look at." You could also read it. Have you read either of them? The Senate not only didn't pass it, they didn't debate it, try to amend it, or even vote on it. Why not?


Why didn't he shut down HR2 in 2023 before it passed the House for the same reason?

On October 11 2024 22:20 oBlade wrote:

Okay. Sounds like it would matter if the Democrats literally didn't vote for God's gift for some kind of evil political reason.

1) Drumpf did not have a "supermajority." A supermajority in the US Congress is two-thirds of the votes of the legislature.
2) Drumpf had many successful policies which, combined with just his presence, led to the lowest illegal immigration in decades, including Remain in Mexico, safe 3rd country, Title 42, and others. One of Biden's actions on his very first day was to revoke this executive order broadly enforcing immigration law.

After revocation of which illegal immigration increased, ICE detainers dropped, and bullshit asylum and refugee claims ballooned, but this last part was also due to other Biden executive orders expanding or removing limits on numbers of "refugees," and allowing the government to directly fly people into the US.

Before mocking the idea of presence I mentioned, remember people lose against Magnus Carlsen not just because he's the best, but because they know he's the best. Messaging has its own effects. A lot of people just didn't bother crossing the border when Drumpf was there because his existence factors into people's decision making. From whether an illegal immigrant chooses to smuggle themselves and their whole family across the border or not, to whether a guy pretends someone put a noose around his neck. You seem to be at the naive level 1 stage of like, if you pass a law, it instantly changes the world, and the only way to change the world is pass laws, and that's all the government does, and the only thing you have to do is find the right law. That's not it.

Like imagine you're on a boat, and it has a hole in it and it's leaking water. You take a vote of all the sailors on the boat on whether to plug the hole completely and fix the boat so it doesn't sink. The House of the boat votes yes because almost all the sailors wearing red shirts said yes, and they slightly outnumbered the sailors wearing blue shirts. But the Senate of the boat locks their door, drinks rum, and plays poker. Later, some people from the Senate say they have a possible idea to plug 10% of the hole while sending sixty billion dollars to Captain Zelensky of another boat called the SS Ukraine. Your boat's previous captain (where is the current captain?) says that sounds fucking retarded, because the boat will still sink, just slightly slower, and furthermore if you ever try to plug the other 90% of the hole the blue shirt people will just call you racist because we already passed the Boat Hole Act to supposedly take care of that situation and there's no longer a path to bargain or compromise, and it will never seem as urgent despite nonetheless sinking. And also he points out that the Captain is the one sitting on a box of hole patch kits eating an ice cream cone so the whole conversation is a fucking distraction anyway.

Other minutiae include things like why the Boat Hole Act includes a provision to throw a bucket overboard, reel it back in, and manually dump more water into the boat.

By the way, I'm not being rhetorical when I say read it. The US Congress publishes everything transparently. Read it, or read the summary, looking at every specific and detailed too land solution it includes, and tell me what you have a problem with, or what you conjecture the Democrats had issue with - remember not a single Democrat in the House voted yes - that they didn't have a problem with in Lankford's bill, which you also haven't read. But since you have yet to familiarize yourself with the content of anything you're talking about I'll endeavor to debunk you just in the confines of your own logic. You seem to think HR2 must be more "despotic" (I'll take that to mean you meant "stronger" because you probably didn't mean to call Joe Biden a despot for the Republicans voting on a bill in 2023) than Lankford's bill which passed no votes.

Here are some of the provisions of Lankford's section of the Ukraine border bill:
1) Make chain migration easier
2) Allow up to 1,824,635 migrants to cross per year without qualifying as an emergency (My standard is 100,000 - previous number is calculated from under 5000 daily max times the number of days in a year).
Full text is here but Congress's summary is not as helpful as the summary I linked, although it does capture the contrast of the fact that the Lankford bill didn't fucking do anything, unlike HR2.

Like Mayorkas has been in there for years, lying through his teeth that the border is secure while his friends get NGO kickbacks, and now in an election year some random guy on the internet calls me evil because the Republicans don't care about an issue that they've been called racist for 10 years for caring about. So your gaslighting attempt is ill-advised.

On October 11 2024 22:32 oBlade wrote:

Yes, that's called first safe country, or similarly safe third country. I'm inclined to agree with you on this. I expect Democrats would take for granted that the US is supposed to be the final destination of every so-called refugee and asylum seeker in the world, and they would never be safe anywhere else, and die on that hill to the detriment of protecting their own border.

The fact that it passed on partisan lines is just as easily explained by the fact that Republicans were the only ones who voted to solve "the problem," and Democrats wanted to perpetuate it - how has it taken this much to reveal this obvious possibility. But what is "the problem," how does the Border Act of 2024 solve it, and how does HR2 not solve it?

On October 11 2024 23:18 oBlade wrote:
I've annotated the passage here to explain my reading of it:
+ Show Spoiler +


Biden and Harris created CHNV to reduce illegal border crossings from people coming from four amazing countries that I would obviously be racist if I said had problems and that people needed to escape from, by recategorizing the people previously crossing the border illegally as paroled guests of the executive branch of the federal government. Trump had safe third country deals with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Biden undid them almost immediately also. By the way, crossing borders illegally is not how you get refugee anywhere in the world, you go to ports of entry and apply like a man.

The problem is the Sinaloa cartel controls the area opposite the US's southern land ports of entry. In a country where 30+ candidates were just assassinated. Like this is tipping beyond the point of passing a nice little border law in our air conditioned office with suits and aides, at some point or other Mexico is going to get invaded.

So you ask me oBlade, what about just getting a ticket and flying into a US Airport? Well, unfortunately you're probably not boarding a flight, not unless you have a visa - in which case you probably weren't a refugee, but still could be - or if you have visa free travel to the US, which the US only accepts from countries that have no outflow of refugees because they aren't countries that have problems that people need to escape from. Then instead of $1k or whatever for the equivalent flight, you get to spend $10,000+ (only part of which is direct fees to the cartel). In which case if you have tens of thousands of dollars and the ability to "trek" as you say through various countries on the way to the US, you also have the ability to try to apply in one of those. One closer to the country you fled. If your house has an emergency, you call your neighbor. You don't drive to Hollywood and knock on the doors of random far away rich people for help. This applies internationally. I'm truly sorry the world sucks but everyone has their own problems.

Lastly, before going further I'm not sure I understand your use of the word "previous." HR2 was first. The Democrats didn't even try to amend out the part you found objectionable.

*I should be more clear. Obviously in the world there are situations where you have relationships with people who are not walking distance away. Similarly, when the US left Vietnam, or Afghanistan, there is not only an opportunity but an obligation to fulfill a humanitarian need by repaying the help you received to people whose safety is in question or jeopardy. But these are situations and not a constant flow of "refugees" from random countries to the US just because the US is better, it's not the evil genius of the world that's responsible for everyone's problems.

On October 12 2024 00:48 Acrofales wrote:
I'm sure the Democrats also have some DOA bills that propose changes to immigration. The difference is, of course, that the Republicans are the ones not considering those bills, because they propose less restrictions on certain aspects (reducing *illegal* immigration, but not overall immigration). But DOA bills aren't worth discussing. What was different about the more recent one is that it had bipartisan support in both chambers and would easily have passed the House if Trump hadn't decided it was not politically useful to pass that bill before elections, and instructed his proxies to kill it.

On October 12 2024 04:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
What's going on with Trump and Putin and covid tests? I think a journalist recently wrote a book, claiming that Trump gave Putin covid tests when they were scarce in the United States during the height of the pandemic, and then Trump denied it, and then Russia confirmed it? Is that the gist of it, or is there more to that story?

I don't understand why Russia would confirm it, since it could make Trump look bad (Trump's mishandling of covid was one of the reasons why he lost last election).

I don't understand why Trump would deny it instead of making up some alpha reason like "I traded a few covid tests to Putin for even more covid supplies because I'm such a great dealmaker, and the deal helped more Americans."