The Grand Illusion
I seem to be missing something. As I write this, TSA employees are unpaid, and consequently many TSA agents can’t pay their bills and are quitting or calling in sick/unavailable. The administration’s latest proposal appears to be sending ICE agents to airports, as if ICE presence could do anything other than make the situation worse.
The Democrats refuse to allow consideration of TSA and other DHS funding until the funding legislation contains legal requirements for ICE agents to wear name badges, carry body cameras, NOT wear masks, and have legal judicial warrants to break into houses and buildings. In other words, to operate under the same legal requirements as all other U.S. law enforcement agencies.
Yet the Republicans and the President find these modest requirements so repugnant that they’re willing to paralyze scores of major airports rather than agree.
In short, the Republicans and the President are demanding funding for a federal law enforcement agency that is exempt from the protections embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, effectively supporting an agency that provides the President with the powers of an authoritarian dictator.
What I fail to understand is why all the law-and-order Republicans are supporting something that is essentially unlawful.
Oh, yes… I suppose it’s no different than ignoring that the President remains a convicted felon and that the man who ran on not getting us into foreign wars has gotten us into Gaza, Venezuela, and Iran, as well as attempting to annex Greenland, Canada, and now Cuba. Did I mention spending a billion dollars a day bombing and otherwise assaulting Iran and its proxies, without even going to Congress in advance? And with no real plans for actually stopping Iranian terrorism or for ensuring we’re not in another long-running war?
But… according to the Republican Congressional leadership and the President, the Democrats are the unreasonable ones for insisting ICE adhere to the Constitution.
Tell me how that’s unreasonable.
Unfortunately, the inability to achieve political compromise for the good of the nation has been a casualty of our polarized political climate for several decades now, on both the left and the right. There are many causes of this, of course, and most have been described (and lamented) at length for just as long. But the upshot is that the true believers on both the left and right (and the ones who most often vote in primaries) now regard compromise with one’s opponents as surrender to a demonized enemy. This tends to overshadow any rational discussion of the merits of the proposition.
Compromise also requires some measure of respect for and trust in your political opponents, trust that they won’t just take whatever compromise is offered and then say, “Thanks, suckers!” and cram another unacceptable bill down their throats.
I wish I could see a clear way out of the present situation. America has been in bad places before and managed to work through them, albeit sometimes at a terrible cost. My prayer is that enough Americans will rise up in revulsion in the coming elections and actually elect decent candidates who care about our country more than pandering to the extremists.
Nah, disagree. You’re right enough about the polarization, but, seriously, the left should never compromise with someone who violates the Constitution on a routine basis. If the right wants to work with the left, then it needs to abide by the checks and balances that every president not named Trump followed.
“Obey the Constitution” is hardly “pandering to extremists.”
This!
Well said.
The problem in most modern western democracies is that the main left parties HAVE compromised on a regular basis, but the main right parties have not. So the Overton window has shifted significantly right.
The radical left are largely irrelevant in every nation, because they’ve never been in power. The moderate left tend to be coalition partners rather than leaders. The moderate right tend to dominate leadership.
The radical right in most nations are a concern, because they have been in power, and have demonstrated a consistent history of self enrichment, disenfranchisement of their opponents, and reluctance to gracefully accept defeat.
Body cams are reasonable. Judicial warrants are usually reasonable, although I’m not going to assume their absence is always unreasonable; reducing the situation to a single phrase leaves out a lot of details that are probably too long for here.
OTOH, given that ICE agents are doxxed and they and their families threatened (and some of the left believe that any measure that interferes with deportation is justified), and there are people organized and exchanging information with apps to track them, requiring name badges and no masks means they’re targets, which gives the far left what they have always wanted, lawless chaos as a prelude to communist takeover.
You mean if the public knows where the ICE personnel live they might come to their house unannounced and possibly break into their home wearing masks and upset their families? No one would do that would they?
Oh yeah, that’s exactly what ICE does to other people. Not what people do to ICE. Geez. Give me a break. You folks defending the poor helpless people with all the power and authority never get tired of that argument. It’s quite similar to the old trope of the husband beating the wife and claiming that she made him do it by being such a nag.
It’s not? Google
ICE death threats
and you’ll find out that ICE agents most definitely are being targeted. Look a bit more, and you’ll see that at the very least, tracking them (if maybe not threatening them, that’s not clear yet) is definitely an organized activity.
As for the illegals or those who interfere with law enforcement on their behalf, ZERO sympathy. We CANNOT accommodate all the world’s victims, or even those from the American continents.
Take that obsolete poem by the statue down; with no frontiers left we don’t need huddled masses, we need a relatively few people willing to assimilate, reliable, and with scarce skills. The rest can meet their fates elsewhere.
Citizens are the only priority of a government. Others, though doubtless just as human, are NOT OUR PROBLEM, at least not on the level of letting people stay here that arrived and stay contrary to our law. You want compassion, find a respectable private charity and support it.
Vigorous enforcement does not imply jackbooted thugs.
R, right now we’re a lot closer – a *whole* lot closer – to a far-right fascist takeover than we are to the far left managing anything that promotes communism.
(I realize you’ll probably dispute the danger level. But LEM himself has alluded to it, remember. Even if you doubt it, you have to grant that at least one very savvy person doesn’t.)
We need to worry more about the present danger than a distant one that may never come to pass.
Look up Neville Roy Singham, an American multimillionaire that moved to China and seems to be sponsoring assorted far left groups. Very convenient how that happens, and how the ultimate sponsors are affiliated with adversaries – just like a lot of cybercrime is used by adversaries but with deniability.
And don’t forget the billions in damage previously done by those who the MSM insisted on calling “mostly peaceful protesters”.
Since we don’t have a time machine to retroactively erase them, we need to expose those who organize and support the far left. And who probably support a few very provocative folks elsewhere on the spectrum too, just to maximize division. I think the Chinese want everyone like a subordinated version of themselves, but Putin would be content for us to be divided enough to neutralize ourselves.