This week, the Supreme Court sided with federal agents to remove razor wire put in place by Texas along the Rio Grande. The state is using wire and state agents to block Border Patrol from accessing a section of the border in Eagle Pass. Homeland Security is demanding access to the area by Friday, but Gov. Greg Abbott is doubling down. Laura Barrón-López discussed the dispute with Stephen Vladeck.
The troops are already there – the President can federalize the Texas National Guard and give us a look a what a modern-day Little Rock High School looks like. Garland should be seeking an arrest warrant against Abbott for insurrection, as well.
Does the Texas National Guard fall under the regular Military Chain of Command? Could, say an Army General, order the guard to stand down/withdraw or face court martial?
I really wish Texans would take a page out of French protestors and just start setting things on fire, spewing trucks full of animal waste all over the unecessarily fancy government buildings, and finally put Abbot and his entire wealthy billionaire grifting affluent family under the guillotine, done all in Minecraft.
Wouldn’t go over well in the end. “Antifa has started burning cities down, and is using biological weapons against the government. We are taking action against them.”
We’ve already seen black vans grabbing people in Portland during protests, what do you think will happen when their claims are only mostly baseless, and not completely baseless?
By that logic, I guess we should all live our lives in fear of the potential backlash of fascists to any social action. Wait, doesn't that just result in them deciding how we live our lives anyway?
Abbott’s a bigoted demogogue asshole, but this entire thing feels way overblown, thanks largely to poor reporting.
The Supreme Court ruling in question was one of those zero-commentary “shadow docket” things that simply struck down a lower court injunction holding that the federal Border Patrol was not allowed to cut razor wire laid by the Texas state guard. The clear implication is that the feds have ultimate jurisdiction and the state needs to stay in their fucking lane. But because of the ruling’s terseness, there’s wiggle room for Abbott to say that they didn’t explicitly order Texas to stop placing wire or to obstruct Border Patrol operations, only that the feds were permitted to remove it if they wanted. So he takes that legal loophole and uses it to give a big middle finger to the administration and the Court using the same hysterical rhetoric he always has.
Problem is all the reporting on the Court ruling glossed over the mechanics and interpreted it as saying more than it actually did, which in turn makes Texas’s obstinacy look less like legal trolling and more like a full-blown constitutional crisis. But Abbott has not (yet) directly disobeyed a Supreme Court order, and I expect the administration will petition the Court for an expedited slapdown of his semantic bullshit. If he ignores that, or right-wing threats pressure the Court into reversing their prior decision, then we’re really into nullification crisis territory. But the freakout roiling progressives is, at this point, premature.
But that’s the problem. Democrats aren’t heroes. They’re just regular politicians trying to climb the ladder and maybe do a good thing for people they care about personally. They stand in opposition to evil, sometimes, but that’s not the same as actively trying to make things better for everyone. You could count on one hand the number of leaders we have actively working towards a better world, and most of them would be considered crackpots.
They’re literally only less corrupt enough (and not an ounce more) such that they don’t get laughed at when they say you should vote for the lesser of two evils.
Can you explain how managing legal immigration is evil? I’m sure Texas would be happy to bus them all to your house. I trust you have the resources to take care of them.
Are you proposing that the average citizen should have the capacity to house immigrants and refugees, equal to, or surpassing that of one of the largest states in the country?
No but I’m shocked by how many people want to just throw open the border doors. Have you seen the numbers flowing in? It’s only going to get worse as the world economy crumbles. The money used to support it comes from our taxes. Do we need infrastructure? To take care of our own disenfranchised and needy? Provide services to tax paying citizens? The states have limited resources as well. Unmanaged immigration is not good. Immigration laws exist for a reason. I should know, I went through the entire US immigration process legally myself and even sponsored an immigrant while providing support for them. Open borders are no bueno.
The only thing I’ve been able to find is 2,2 million “encounters” in a high year, over the whole country.
Germany takes in a million immigrants per year by itself, and has at least a handful of encounters per immigrant to process them. Also has a bunch of encounters with illegal immigrants.
This is what gets me. People like the person above have a sense of grievance blown all out of proportion in comparison to the reality of the situation. Yes, I’ve seen the numbers but i don’t think the people panicking about immigration in the US have.
You realize e have money for all of that yes? Some FEMA style camps to house folks safely until they are deported or processed is a nothing. A speck. A crumb.
The reason the roads are bad in your town, your locals are unhoused or needy is because of local mismanagement, and federal logjamming.
Lastly, we claim to be the best on the planet. Time to act like it
The money used to support it comes from our taxes.
It is a design choice - a Republican one - that we make legal immigration so difficult and time consuming that immigrants can’t quickly get through the legal process and then pay for the process with their taxes. This argument lets the GOP design their own problem and then complain it isn’t solved.
Unmanaged immigration is not good.
Straw man. No-one is arguing for unmanaged immigration; they are arguing for more immigration that is managed.
Immigration laws exist for a reason.
Yes, but you are talking like you don’t know what that reason is, so I’ll tell you. Per the Constitution, the number of House members a state gets depends on its human population, regardless of status. That means immigrants of all sorts, even illegal ones, count for it while standing in the state. The GOP and DNC both assume that districts with high immigrant populations will vote for the DNC, so the DNC always fights for making immigration easier and the GOP always gights for making it easier. Immigration laws are about preserving political power, not protecting your tax dollars.
I should know, I went through the entire US immigration process legally myself and even sponsored an immigrant while providing support for them.
Then how is it you seem to labor under the misapprehension that legal immigration is implemented in a practically functional way? Its backlog is quite infamous.
You're right, the guy who wants to murder people at the border is probably that way for super legit non racist reasons, the media has just been a big meany pants to poor Greg Abbott
I get that you're not really arguing in good faith, anyone who has read anything about this bastard knows this stuff, but at least try and do a better job of acting like you don't know anything.
No, you see I do know. I was able to get many people to go searching for some examples because they were so sure but came up empty handed just like you. Throwing around terms of murder and racism in here like they lost their true meaning.
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