Intellectual bankruptcy of GOP and immigration agenda
Joe Biden is about to pass some sweeping spending bills. Unlike the usual stuff these bills are supposed to focus on infrastructure and climate and building somethings that do not need building.
This is terrible news for USA. Anything that federal government touches turns into shit. Biden’s new bills are going to put too many restrictions on businesses, government will gain more control of infrastructure and will slow down US economic growth.
One would expect that his political opponents might be criticizing him for this or analyzing these bills. But none from GOP has managed to offer even basic criticism of Biden’s spending bills and its contents.
The person who is standing up against Senate Democrats is Joe Manchin. A moderate democrat.
https://reason.com/2021/09/30/joe-manchin-is-forcing-congress-to-think-about-the-deficit-good/
As Manchin also pointed out, the government is already going to need a lot of dollars to fix the trajectories of the major entitlement programs—Social Security will be insolvent in the early 2030s and part of Medicare will be unable to fully pay benefits in just five years.
One would expect someone from GOP to be making these points but they aren’t. Key conservative websites barely have any analysis of Biden’s plans ant its impact on US economy.
National Review had exactly 0 articles about spending plan today when I checked. It was mostly concerned with vaccines and abortions.
The Blaze was busy with California and immigration issues.
American Thinker was all about masculinity, critical race theory and other conservative talking points. But 0 articles on spending.
This is a sign of slow decay of American conservatives where they seem to rather live as victims in their own eco chambers of irrelevant talking points and unrealistic analysis of issues that are essentially temporary (covid restrictions).
Florida’s weird laws around denying businesses freedom to enforce their own policies regarding covid while pretending to be on the side of freedom is great example of how intellectually dishonest GOP has gotten in recent times.
Texas’s abortion laws too appear to be far heavy handed, has very little impact on actual abortion rates but would rather appear to be focused on human misery rather than sensible policy or protecting lives. Texas’s politicians pretend to be “pro-life” but would do everything in their power to harass the immigrants on their southern border who are fleeing violence from central America. Somehow their ‘life’ is not much of a life.
Donald Trump appears to have emasculated this party and its leaders. The usual loudmouths like Ted Cruze or Marco Rubio are completely silent on key issues and do not take any position on any issue mostly revolving around semantics.
The hallmark of GOP policy these days appears to be “hurt people we don’t like”. Donald Trump was anti-immigrant person but he was pretty incompetent at enforcing immigration laws. His policy appeared to be to harass and create needless misery for immigrants.
This had good political dividends for him. The pictures of kids put in cages, immigrant people losing jobs, DACA kids crying, businesses complaining about inability to hire, families being separated, families stuck abroad etc. etc. actually made Donald Trump more popular among the core white voters.
One can look at people like Stephen Miller or Chad Wolf and see that these are not particularly bright individuals. They are not even very smart or politically savvy but their usual incompetence with unrealistic policymaking lead to enough misery in US society for non white people that it made Trump very popular.
Blatantly fake news, completely baseless propaganda and delusional self centered behavior has become hallmark of Trump and his henchmen. Rest of the GOP appears to be following the same script trying to outdo Trump in Trumpism.
What all this means for Immigration ?
Historically Conservatives have been anti non-white immigration but pro-business where as Democrats have been pro illegal and poor people immigration but anti affluent people immigration.
This had put Indian immigrants in the crosshair of both the political parties as Indians are non white and yet fairly rich when they make life in USA. While younger Indians and first generation Indian immigrants tend to be democratic they are mostly conservative as they get older and rich. Second generation Indians are not as easily brainwashed into left wing ideology as rest of the young folks going to college.
Conservative shift towards “misery inducing immigration policy” deeply hurt Indian immigrants as Donald Trump led administration continued to wage war on Indian immigrants adding more paperwork, separating families and creating procedural delays while violating their own laws.
This trend is likely to continue. Someone like Senator Mike Lee did show some spine and principled approach towards immigration but folks like Grassley, Rand Paul, Tom Cotton and Tim Scott seems to have sided with Trump on these matters.
We can not expect much from conservatives when it comes to immigration now. It is a lost cause unless we see someone strong challenging Trump and Trumpism in GOP.