The scary, real reason a border deal failed | Will Bunch Newsletter

We are at war in the Middle East, to paraphrase George Orwell from 1984. We have always been at war in the Middle East. My adult children, now just on either side of 30, have rarely known a time in their lives when America hasn’t been dropping bombs on Iraq, or some nearby country. For who? For what? Maybe their generation will finally figure out where we went wrong.

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America needs a robust debate over how to handle the humanitarian crisis that keeps sending waves of desperate Central Americans to our southern border. The deal that was negotiated over the weekend between a bipartisan gaggle of senators and President Joe Biden should have been the place to start it.

My heart is with the American Civil Liberties Union, which on Sunday night blasted the plan as “deportation without due process,” but my head knows that if Biden doesn’t make some compromises, the hot-button issue could guarantee a Trump victory and the rise of an American gulag archipelago for refugees by this time next year.

But here’s the real deal: None of this matters.

House Speaker Mike Johnson and other key House Republicans have made it clear that the Senate-Biden border deal will never pass the chamber they nominally control. Johnson — who’s been in over his head like he’s in a Hollywood Hills mudslide since becoming the capital’s most powerful Republican and who, once upon a time, said the House GOP needed immigration action before it could deal with crises in Ukraine and the Middle East — now says the Senate’s scheme would be “dead on arrival” and “won’t come close to ending the border catastrophe” he blames on Biden.

You’d think the Donald Trump-swooning MAGA wing of the GOP would love anything that pisses off the ACLU, but, nope. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia tweeted that the deal is “a border SURRENDER!!,” while her colleague Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida joined a number of too-online conservatives insisting it’s “the Senate Amnesty Bill.” That fallacy — just one of many flooding the internet — is especially rich since the plan does not aid the millions of undocumented migrants already on U.S. soil in any way. What the bill would do is enshrine a lot of longstanding Republican ideas on limiting the number of migrants entering America and making it easier to deport those who do.

But as political pundits have been quick to point out, there’s one important thing for today’s Republicans that an immigration deal with the Biden White House would not do: help Trump get elected 47th president in November. Remember: Plan A for the GOP was to cruise to victory on the back of a lousy Biden economy — a dream that has been dashed by record-low unemployment, a record-high Dow, and shrinking gas prices. But Plan B — relentless hyping of a border crisis, amplified to “11″ on the national speakers by Fox News — might work, but only if Biden can be portrayed as the problem and not part of the solution.

Failure on Capitol Hill seems to help the odds of a Trump victory, but — to keep repeating the mantra of journalism guru Jay Rosen — we need to stop focusing on the odds and keep talking about the stakes, especially for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free on American soil.

One very immediate consequence involves the situations in Ukraine and Gaza, which would have received billions in U.S. aid as part of the “dead on arrival” Senate package. Johnson’s actions will do nothing to silence fears that the Louisiana Republican is repping for Trump’s pro-Putin policy tilt of going soft on Russian aggression. The House Speaker does back Israel — where he hobnobbed with far-right extremists on a 2020 sponsored trip — which is probably why he’s pushing a $14 billion standalone plan to aid the Netanyahu government, which would also conveniently kill any progress on the border or Ukraine.

But the real issue that Johnson, Greene, Gaetz, and all the others have against a deal for a less-chaotic border in 2024 is that — even if Trump were still able to pull off an election victory — it would put the kibosh on the centerpiece of the GOP candidate’s plan to become a dictator on Day One in the White House, and certainly beyond.

A deal now would thwart the extremist zealots on Team Trump like Stephen Miller, his once and future immigration czar, who are promising a campaign of mass deportation as their opening-day gambit of “Red Caesar” autocracy, with middle-of-the-night door knocks in heavily Latino neighborhoods across America and massive detention camps to hold the large throngs awaiting deportation. As Greg Sargent wrote recently: “If a bipartisan deal passes and it persuades swing voters that the border is being stabilized without excessive anti-immigrant cruelty, that opportunity could vanish.”

I suspect the motivations are arguably more sinister than that. An ongoing border crisis — or at least a reasonable facsimile of one that can be broadcast on a loop on Fox News — is the necessary ingredient for Trump 47 to claim even broader emergency powers that he could abuse on a range of issues, from siccing federal troops on protesters to locking up political enemies. A blocked immigration deal is a wannabe dictator’s chance to fail upward.

Question: Do you think the Supreme Court will disqualify Donald Trump or do you think they will punt? — Via Bailey_PO1135809 (@Bailey1050) on X/Twitter

Answer: Well, Bailey_PO1135809 (if that, indeed, is your real name), there’s no doubt that the case regarding the so-called Insurrection Clause of the 14th Amendment that comes up before the High Court in oral arguments on Thursday morning is one of the most consequential in the long history of SCOTUS. The nine justices might pretend to be legal umpires calling balls and strikes, but the reality is that when the fate of democracy is on the line, they tend to be more like meteorologists, holding their fingers to the political winds. Not only does the current Supreme Court lean heavily to the right, but it’s likely Chief Justice John Roberts is working overtime to see how the presidential election can be decided by voters and not by his beleaguered court. They may punt by claiming that Congress would have to vote that Jan. 6 was indeed an insurrection (which will never happen) — stay tuned.

Last week’s question about the humanitarian crisis at the southern border brought a batch of thoughtful responses. Readers agree that President Joe Biden should respond forcefully — perhaps federalizing the Texas National Guard — to Gov. Greg Abbott’s defiance of federal authority to control immigration along the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass. Writes Greg Berta: “By showing that he [Biden] is willing to risk the election to do what is right will put the presidential election exactly where it should be — who is the candidate that will do what is right, not just popular?” Margaret Dowling suggested federal penalties for Texas, perhaps canceling some infrastructure projects. “The problem with MAGA states is that they behave badly but still get all the rewards of being part of the United States,” she wrote. “Maybe it is time for some consequences.”

📮This week’s question: Long-time (and I mean loooong) Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels created a campaign mini-flap when he invited GOP White House hopeful Nikki Haley onto last weekend’s show to poke fun at Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Did SNL just platform a racism denier, as some critics maintain, or do we need to lighten up? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Haley SNL” in the subject line.

As pop music devolved into the autotune era, I mostly stopped watching the Grammys. This Sunday, the TV alternatives were so bleak, and the prospect of falling asleep by 8:45 so high, that I tuned in. I watched country singer Luke Combs do a nice video praising Tracy Chapman — whose 1988 smash “Fast Car” was remade by Combs into this year’s biggest country hit, in what some identity-minded critics blasted as cultural appropriation — and assumed this was merely his rebuttal. Cut to the stage, a strumming guitar, and then a beaming, grey-maned Chapman, making her first public appearance in ages to join Combs for a duet. The L.A. arena crowd went crazy — with a standing ovation — but so did America writ large. By midnight, Chapman’s 36-year-old single was the No. 1 song on iTunes.

But the duet launched nearly as many internet hot takes as downloads, and it’s not hard to understand why. In a nation where the chasm between red and blue America is starting to resemble the front lines of a civil war, here was Chapman — a Black woman folk singer from the streets of Cleveland, an LGBTQ icon — finding harmony with the white, reigning rural king of the Chevy truck crowd. But I think it went much deeper. Remember Tom Hanks on “Black Jeopardy,” SNL’s best sketch of the 21st century, in which a countrified Hanks reveals the many things that blue-collar whites have in common with working-class Black folks — and the one thing they don’t?

“Fast Car” was written at the end of a Ronald Reagan era that saw a surge in homelessness and rising inequality. Chapman’s narrator works the checkout at a convenience store and lives in a shelter. “You got a fast car/Is it fast enough so we can fly away?” she asks her male friend. “We gotta make a decision/Leave tonight or live and die this way.” For an ever-shrinking middle class, regardless of race, those lyrics hit just as hard driving through the dilapidated Appalachian hollows of Combs’ native North Carolina in a pickup truck as they did blaring from a Cleveland boom box in 1988. Swimming against the atmospheric rivers of hate and division, Chapman’s masterpiece brought us together in an American Dream that could only be sustained for four minutes and 57 seconds.

Is it ever acceptable in war to kill civilians and, if so, how many? It’s a question that didn’t start, unfortunately, with Israel’s brutal retaliatory assaults on Gaza. Eleven years ago today, I pondered what Ronald Reagan — born on Feb. 6, 1911 — might have thought on what was then his 102nd birthday about the “forever war” of deadly drone strikes that Barack Obama was continuing to wage on the other side of the world. I repeated what I’d learned researching my book about Reagan, Tear Down This Myth: The Gipper abhorred U.S. military action that might cause the deaths of noncombatants. I cited the 40th president’s biographer Lou Cannon, who wrote “the president had to overrule a military response to an attack on Marines in El Salvador, and ... Reagan asked [National Security Advisor Robert] McFarlane whether an attack could be carried out without killing civilians.” Read the rest: “Reagan would have turned 102 — and totally opposed Obama’s drone policy — today.”

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