See, no amount of turd polish is gonna make that turd shine. You can’t paper over the poison that the bill is laced with and expect to be praised for stumping/voting for it when people who are the unwilling recipients of the poison get strapped down to the table for no other reason than an absolutely abominable ploy to “paint the other guys as hypocrites” or to shut down “the whiny complaints of Trump”—a guy who, by the way, isn’t even in the government. The bill:
- Changed to asylum rules that would have risked removing the legal review of cases by judges (which lots of mainstream press disgustingly dressed up as “speeding up the process”)
- Included billions in additional funding for the fascist border patrol and the private companies operating the concentration camps
- Revived construction of the wall Trump wanted
- Imposing dystopian levels of round-the-clock surveillance (also run by private prison corps) on immigrant families
Then there’s the provision that would give the president unilateral power to restrict asylum whenever they get nervous around one of the White House’s maintenance workers (and of course Biden made this even more draconian in his executive order by halving the number of crossings that would allow the president to trigger the closure).
The spoonful of sugar the Democrats managed to get into the bill effectively pits different sets of traumatized groups (that we had a hand in traumatizing) against one another: The party can sing the praises of the “good” parts of the bill while anyone pointing out all of the fashy shit in it that’s actually really fuckin’ bad can be refuted by referring back to the few issues Dems didn’t agree to allow the GOP to fully steer. That Biden seemingly believes the executive order will be struck down anyway just continues to affirm he’s just as willing to toy with people’s lives, enact racist and inhumane policy out of moral cowardice, and waste time on a lark as the GOP is, while facing far less scrutiny for doing so because “it could always be worse!”
I’m old enough to remember when these policies were as sickening to the current president and his party as they were and still are to me. Democrats like Biden and Chuck Schumer were quite vocal about the the previous regime’s border policies and how needlessly harmful they were. Now that it’s more politically advantageous to jump on the mixed austerity-and-manufactured border “crisis” bandwagon, the most vulnerable people, their families, their relatives, and the advocates that do crucial work filling in the gaps the US government refuses to fill are left high and dry wondering where the party that was supposed to be there for them went and why they’re now pawns in an electoral gambit that didn’t even fucking pan out!
Now we’ll get to watch the GOP draw a new line in the sand and demand the Dems step over it so they can meet in the middle, and because they have no answer that will satisfy their base/protect the vulnerable and satisfy their business partners, friends, future and former employers, or the industries that thrive on exploitation of the most vulnerable. Or they win this year and just do this shit anyway—after all, any Democrats in Congress who get re-elected and supported the 2024 bill will be on the back foot for explaining their flip-flopping to the far-right opportunists who will absolutely drag them through the mud over it, and batting away an empowered Republican party even more eager to maximize the suffering of brown people instead of shifting things back into their own favor for once.
Personally I’d prefer if the campaign and party that keeps caterwauling over how much more rational, composed, and committed to truth they are than Trump would stop acting like Trump in both word and deed. It would really make their deranged, existential fears about “democracy” being “under attack” seem more credible.