What a deal! We give Ukraine billions of dollars in return for a border deal, which makes the open borders exponentially worse! Our GOP senators are handing us a Schiff sandwich and inviting us to take a bite. Come on, people, tell them how yummy it is!
Now, when something like this abortion of an immigration deal comes down the pike, and the Republican dealmakers are super proud that they negotiated a handful of magic beans, you have to wonder if they are truly as dumb as they seem or if they just believe we are that dumb.
It is a conundrum.
There is plenty of evidence to support the contention that they are, in fact, that dumb. Just look at the history of GOP immigration compromises. Every single time some Republican senatorial stiff presumes to negotiate some sort of comprehensive deal, he comes back without his pants. And then, a few years later, somebody tries it again. They never learn. It’s like Ned Beatty telling his buddies, “Hey, why don’t we take another canoe trip next weekend? Because last weekend went great.”
You remember when this happened a decade ago? It went poorly. Marco Rubio was one of The Gang of However Many and, like the current crop of smug senators pushing this pile, he was greatly offended that us peasants started pointing out the myriad flaws in his terrible, terrible bill. That fiasco changed Marco Rubio from a potential presidential contender into just another second-tier Senator, one who is as likely to be president someday as Kamala Harris is to get a Nobel Prize for particle physics.
Sadly, she is nearly certain to be president someday, but that’s an entirely different disaster.
It’s not hard to find out what the GOP base thinks about illegal immigration. You could, you know, talk to actual Republicans instead of donors, sycophants, and staff flunkies. The base is tired of the country being flooded with Third World peasants. It is tired of the crime and social pathologies and paying people who should not be here to be here. We are spending money we borrow to subsidize other people’s citizens at the expense of our own citizens. You don’t have to spend a lot of time listening to Republican voters to find out that they’re not interested in making the tsunami of fake asylum seekers more efficient. They are interested in stopping it.
So, when the senators crow that they are limiting the flood to a mere 5000 people a day – 1.8 million per year – that’s not a selling point. That’s the opposite of a selling point. That is an unselling point. Their most prized achievement in this dung heap of a bill is literally the thing the base hates the most. And then you add in the fact that the terms of this garbage deal allows Biden and Mayorkas to waive these bogus limitations and it’s a zillion times worse.
The problem right now is that Biden and Mayorkas are illegally not following existing law. This deal gives them a law that makes it legal for them not to follow existing law, which is exactly the opposite of actually stopping illegal immigration. Oh, and the cherry on the cake is making any legal challenge to the bill not be heard by the very conservative Fifth Circuit down in Texas but in the hard-left District of Columbia Circuit. Yeah, the only place people can challenge Biden for not abiding by these ridiculous standards would be the most liberal circuit in the country, the circuit that the Ninth Circuit considers a bunch of communists.
Great work, everybody. Unless you wanted these insane results, you are very stupid people.
But then, there’s the possibility that this is exactly what they wanted. After all, the giant corporate donors love the idea of a bunch of illiterate vagabonds flooding the country so they can toil for sub-minimum wage. These Republican senators know it’s garbage. They know we in the Republican base don’t want it. They know we’re going to be angry. But they think they are smart enough to fool us. They think we are stupid. They think we’re such idiots that we can’t read the bill and find the little landmines about liberal courts construing it and waiver provisions and millions upon millions of dollars for lawyers to defend these intruders. They think we will be distracted by a few shiny pennies for a wall that will never get built because there’s no way to force Biden to actually build it and for – get this – ankle bracelets. Yeah, that’s the ticket. We don’t mind illegal aliens being here if they have ankle bracelets on!
Maybe these people think we can’t read. Now, that is a possibility, considering the fact that these spineless Republicans refuse to take on the garbage teachers’ unions and allow them to keep turning out illiterate pseudo-citizens, which is another disaster. They think we won’t read it and will just listen to them. They think we’ll just go along with whatever they say because senators are smart people who deserve our obedience and respect. They know that because all the little minions around them are telling them how smart they are all the time. They have their own elevators and their own special rooms and their little pins on their lapels, and everybody kisses their Chuck Schumer. They think they are geniuses, and because we aren’t senators, we must be idiots.
It’s always amusing to be looked down upon by people whose peers include Mazie Hirono, who is dumber than most minerals. This unearned self-regard makes them presume that they can fool us again. But they can’t fool us, and they’re not going to fool us, which is why they’re getting mad. Senator James Langford is the guy spearheading this nonsense. He went on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program where Hewitt, a friend of his, addressed him as Jim, and – this really happened – he said, “It’s always James, never Jim.” Yeah, he’s that guy. It went downhill from there.
Aside from the fact that he doesn’t seem to know what’s in his own bill, and the fact that he had to reluctantly admit that he didn’t actually ask for the things we in the Republican base actually want, what really came through was both his arrogance and anger. He was mad. He was mad that he was being challenged. He was mad that he was being criticized. He was mad that we weren’t lining up to thank him for being served this steaming pot of boiling feces.
This bill will almost certainly go down in defeat. The scam won’t work. I don’t know whether James Langford – Never Jim! – is stupid or thinks we are stupid. I think I’m going to put my money on both.
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