The Perils of Victory

One final comment on our side's success in staring down Trump and winning the shutdown.

Victory can be dangerous.  Defeat leads to regrouping and new planning. Victory breeds complacency.  Losers learn lessons from their defeat.  Winners don't see the need.  Winners end up fighting the same fight all over, only to learn that the losers have adapted.  This applies in war and in peace, in international politics and domestic.  Examples are legion.

Republican supreme organization and list of Federalist Society candidates for Supreme Court is the fruit a a long string of defeats in which the federal courts seemed like an insurmountable stronghold for liberals.  Ditto conservative think tanks.

The first, failed attack on the World Trade Center no doubt inspired the second.  It also led to much better evacuation plans and made the second attack less deadly than it would otherwise have been.

Winning the Cold War convince the Blob both that global hegemony is our right, and that we can topple governments at will.

And so forth.

So by all means, let us relish this win.  And then let's start planning for the next confrontation and not expect the other side to make the same mistakes twice.

Comment on Immigration

NOTE:  The information here comes from by classmate, the great Allegra Love.  All mistakes are my own.

Donald Trump's whole Presidency in general, and the shutdown in particular, has been about one issue --  immigration.  In particular, excluding illegal immigration and making anyone coming here get official permission first.

But Trump either does not understand, or does not want to understand, or is deliberately leading his followers not to understand, some basics of how the system works.

There are three legal ways to be admitted to the United States.

The first is by our family unification immigration -- what opponents call chain migration.  To qualify, an applicant must have a sponsor who is a nuclear family member who is a citizen or permanent legal resident of the United States and apply for a visa at a US diplomatic facility in his/her home country.  Applications are processed on a first-come-first-serve basis. There is a quota for each country.  This means that if the number of applicants exceeds the country's quota, there is a wait.  How long a wait depends on the country.  But in the case of Mexico, the time exceeds 20 years.  This goes a long way toward explaining why many people are not willing to stand in line and wait their turn.

The second is skills-based, or merit based immigration.  To qualify, an applicant must have a skill that cannot be met by US citizens, must have a prospective employer as sponsor, and apply for a visa at a US diplomatic facility in his/her home country.  The decision whether to admit is based on how much the US needs the skills being offered.  Many immigration critics want to eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, family immigration in favor of skills-based immigration.  They refer to this as immigration based on the interests of the US, not the interests of the immigrants.  It is fair to point out that US restrictions on family immigration are (presumably) an attempt to balance US interests and the interest of the immigrants.

The third is asylum seeking.  Asylum seekers must prove they face persecution in their home countries.  This has traditionally meant persecution by the state, not by private actors such as family members or armed gangs.  It has traditionally meant that the applicant is singled out for individual persecution, and not simply facing a generally unsafe situation.  Both these traditions are facing challenge and modification.  Asylum seekers are not required to apply in the countries where they are in danger and wait for approval of their application.  Asylum seekers my come to the US without prior authorization and present themselves to the authorities to request asylum.  Traditionally, asylum seekers are detained when they present themselves.  They then appear before a judge to present evidence that they face a credible fear of persecution if returned and are not threats to national security if released.*  Traditionally in such cases asylum seekers were paroled but required to show up for future hearings.  The Trump Administration is seeking to end the practice of parole and detain all asylum seekers until their application is either approved or rejected.  To do so would overwhelm existing facilities.

What Trump is unable or unwilling to understand is that asylum seekers are not required to apply for admission in countries where they are not safe and wait in these unsafe conditions until their application is decided.  Asylum seekers may legally enter the US without prior authorization, so long as they then present themselves to apply for asylum.  Whether Trump has not had this explained to him, whether is is to ignorant to absorb the information when it is explained, whether he closes his mind to what he does not want to hear, or whether he is deliberately misleading gullible followers I do not know, although all of these seem quite plausible.  My guess is also that to Trump and the people he is appealing to, the whole idea that people may legally enter this country without prior authorization seems like an intolerable affront to our sovereignty.  Yet such is the law.

Another point Allegra has made is that in the Mideast or in Africa there are refugee camps.  These camps are operated by the United Nations and provide for refugees until they can either return home when the danger is over or be accepted for asylum, either in the host country or in some third country.  Refugee camps are not pleasant places to live, but when the alternative is home in the grip of civil war, famine, natural disaster, etc, they may be the lesser evil.

No such system exists in the Western Hemisphere.  One may make the argument that such a system should exist.  Certainly Central America and Venezuela are creating plenty of refugees these days.  There is some evidence that Trump is putting pressure in Mexico to establish such a system to hold Central American refugees while they apply for admission to the US.  I do not know, and do not pretend to have the knowledge to understand, the merits of such a policy.  To make it work, though, will require international cooperation, working with the UN, and spending taxpayer money to support refugees -- all the sort of things that would be anathema to Trump and his followers.  But perhaps they may decide that, compared with a massive, disorderly influx of asylum seekers, to do so is the lesser evil.

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*Some asylum seekers legitimately pose such threats.  The terrorists who made the original 1993 attack on the World Trade Center were asylum seekers.

On Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

So, while I am here, why not weigh in on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Is she the Democratic Trump?  Should she run for President?  Is it unfair that the Constitution does not allow her to run since she is only 28 years old?

It is true that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or AOC, as she is so often called) resembles Trump in certain ways:

• She is a newcomer who doesn't understand how government and policy work
• As a result, she doesn't understand how complex politics and policy are and offers oversimplified politiphobic suggestions
• She is a publicity hound
• She understands social media and knows how to drive debate and dominate on Twitter
• She really triggers opponents
• The base loves her for it

However, she differs from Trump in other ways:

• She is 28 and he is in his 70's
• She actually cares about policy and its real-world consequences
• She appears appears willing and able to learn
• She (presumably) has normal impulse control and attention span
• She is capable of being a team player
• She understands the concepts of rule of law and public good
• She doesn't have his massive potential for conflict of interest
• Etc.

In short, AOC has media and publicity skills that are useful in politics today.  They will doubtless be useful and maybe even necessary in a future President.  But being good on Twitter, even if necessary in a present-day President, is emphatically not sufficient.  AOC and her supporters may dismiss criticism of her unwillingness to respect Washington custom as hidebound relics and obstacles to progress.  And doubtless Washington has some customs and traditions that are obsolete and we could do without.  But the fact remains that policy making is hard, that it means complex tradeoffs, winning over multiple stake holders and competing interests, and distasteful compromises.

AOC is currently useful as a backbencher who can stir up trouble, change the terms of the debate, and fight Republicans in general and Trump in particular on their own turf.  But until she has experience in the painful realities of policy making and learns to navigate them, she is not ready to be entrusted with real power.

Final Comments on the Shutdown

Presumably Donald Trump would not have gone on national television proclaiming his responsibility for a government shutdown if he had recognized how unpopular it would be.  Nor would Republicans have shut down the government all the other times they have done so (and, at times, led chants of "Shut 'er down!" if they had recognized how unpopular it would be).

The reason for this should be obvious.  Economic royalists, being opposed to all government on principle, simply want to destroy it without recognizing its importance.  They simply assume that all government is bad and should be destroyed.  Orderly dismantling is best, of course, but wrecking through corruption and incompetence is still preferable to allowing the existing system to continue.  And if wrecking through corruption and incompetence doesn't do the job, why not shut it down to speed things up.  Many are openly saying so.  If the prospect of frequent work without pay discourages the best and the brightest from government work, so much the better.  The worse the quality of government employees, the less popular government will be and the more pressure to shrink it.  If keeping parks open but unstaffed causes damage to the ecosystem, so much the better.  Destruction of the ecosystem will end all rationale for the park and justify auctioning it off to the highest bidder.  And so forth.

The shutdown should prove once and for all that, even if you want to massively shrink government, simple wrecking is no substitute for careful planning and orderly dismantling.  Thoughtful libertarian Megan McArdle painstakingly explained this during the last shutdown/debt ceiling crisis:

We could certainly do less, and I agree that we should. But we cannot do it instantly. It is not politically possible, and it is not even fiscally possible. It would, for example, be eminently possible to have a private air-traffic control system. But we cannot privatize the system by August 3rd [two weeks from the date she was writing].

And as for just firing all the air traffic controllers and trusting in the free market to find something better to take their place -- well, good luck surviving the mob reaction that would follow.

The same applies to regulatory agencies.  I get that economic royalist don't believe that these should exist.  But as the law presently stands, companies are still required to apply to these agencies for permits to do various things.  Shutting down the agencies does not end the permit requirement; it just prevents anyone from getting a permit.  Shutting down the agency is no substitute from repealing the actual law requiring a permit.

Finally, I will note that this funding goes for three weeks.  Donald Trump expects there to be an acceptable bill in that amount of time.  There won't.  Trump may very well think he won this standoff and be prepared to do another shutdown at that time.  My guess, though, is that cooler heads, in the form of Republican members of Congress, will prevail.  One of them recently tweeting that if negotiations do not yield a wall, executive action remained a possibility.  Conspicuous here is what did not remain a possibility.

Further Thoughts on the Shutdown

A few points here.

Trump's wall is simply not important.  It is a policy symbol, not a matter of substance.

His proposal to make it out of steel slats instead of concrete is also meaningless.  No one cares except for Trump himself.  Besides, he has been saying for a long time that he wants a wall we can see through, or drug smugglers on the other side will drop 60 pound bails of drugs on citizens' heads.  (Seriously!)

I have no objection to trading the wall for DACA and therefore think it was a mistake for Nancy Pelosi to say that she would not agree to the wall even after the government reopens.  Taking what the other side wants most absolutely off the table removes all incentive for them to negotiate.  In the last showdown over the wall, pro-immigration Democrats vowed that they would personally break ground on the wall if only they could have protection for the Dreamers.  But then Trump torpedoed the deal by insisting on major cuts to legal immigration be part of any agreement.

Trump's first proposed "compromise" of wall for DACA and reopening of government sounded at least possibly reasonable and possibly something to at least think of voting for.  Once it turned out that Trump wanted major restrictions to asylum seeking, Democrats quite properly considered it totally out of the question.  Any changes of that sort must be decided by normal procedures, not forced under the gun.

And now Trump has agreed to open the government for three weeks in exchange for some sort of bipartisan negotiations for a compromise on immigration.  Well, long story short, it won't happen.  Democrats have taken a wall off the table as an unacceptable symbol of exclusion.  Given that the wall is substantively meaningless, I think this is a big mistake.  And Trump rejects any passage of DACA without major immigration restrictions, which is a strict non-starter for Democrats.

Look, comprehensive immigration reform is hard.  It proved impossible when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.  Under the Hastert Rule, the Speaker would not introduce any measure unless it had the "majority of the majority," i.e., the majority of the Republican majority.  A majority of Republicans opposed any bill that could be taken as granting "amnesty" to people who arrived illegally, even as children, so no bill including amnesty could ever pass the House.  In the Senate, the filibuster forbade any measure that could not garner 60 votes, so the Democratic majority was able to block any measure that did not include an amnesty.  In effect, both house had house rules preventing passage by simple majority.

Even if we removed those restrictions, comprehensive immigration reform would require long, painstaking tradeoffs hated by the more hardcore members of both parties including (at present) our President.  Even if Trump were somehow convinced that the pageantry and glory of signing comprehensive immigration reform, and the bragging rights of boasting that he succeeded where Obama failed, is more important that what is actually in the bill, negotiations are going to be a long, painful haul. 

A rough, DACA-for-wall trade with further changes to be deferred would strike me personally as both doable in the next three weeks and a good idea.  What a shame Trump as ruled out DACA without major restrictions and Democrats have ruled out the wall altogether.  And anything further has proven impossible as a matter of bipartisan compromise and will have to be passed when one party has not only the Presidency and a majority of both houses, but a 60-vote majority in the Senate -- or the filibuster will have to be abolished.*

But even then comprehensive immigration reform is going to be the result of long, hard work.  It absolutely should not be the result of any actor deciding to shut down the government until his/her/ its preferred plan is passed.

And just for the record, this does not mean just Donald Trump announcing that he will shut down the government unless the budget contains not only funding for his wall, but major restrictions on immigration, as his proposed "compromise" did.  It would also be improper for Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats to pass their dream plan for immigration and then shut down the government unless Republicans pass it in the Senate and President Trump signs it. I do not expect such a thing to happen, but it would be a clear abuse of power if it did happen, and I would expect both the Democrats to lose and public opinion to be against them.**  And rightly so.

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*I think that is probably a good idea in the long run, but too alarming in the short run.
**And to be clear, this is what the Republican House under John Boehner attempted to do in the second Obama term.  They proposed either a ransom note requiring passage of the entire Republican platform as a condition for raising the debt ceiling (admittedly only as the opening ploy in a bargaining gambit, with the expectation of ending up with less), or a menu of options with a longer extension the more of the Republican platform Obama agreed to.  The attempt failed because the Freedom Caucus refused to sign off on any extension of the debt ceiling no matter what the ransom, so Boehner was forced to pass it with Democratic votes only.

Trump Imitates Russia in a Way No One Foresaw

Look, I know analogies of this kind should not be made lightly.  But when I hear of more and more federal employees being forced to work without pay, I think of a historical stretch in a certain country -- Russia.

In Russia in the 1990's, the IMF required as a price for lending Russia money that it make deep cuts in expenditures, including pay for coal miners.  Fearing the consequences to the economy if coal production fell, the Russian government resorted to the truly desperate measure of running the mines but not paying the miners.  It went on for years, and spread throughout the economy, until the ruble collapsed altogether and the country resorted to barter.

So clearly, analogies of this kind should not be made lightly.  The economy remains strong, although the shutdown is causing problems.  Certainly I am not in the least bit worried that we will face anything like the economic crisis that Russia faced.

It nonetheless remains true that the comparison keeps popping up in the back of my mind.

The Ghost of Shutdowns Past

Fans of American exceptionalism can point to one way we are exceptional among advanced democracies.  We are the only one to have government shutdowns.  Parliamentary democracies often have deadlocks in which they are unable to form a government, but the state bureaucracy marches on, carrying out its every day tasks, but without direction from the top.  This can continue for a long time without serious inconvenience, although ultimately it can cause trouble direction is needed.  But shutting down the bureaucracy of the state is a uniquely American pathology.

The United States has had short lapses in funding before, for a few days, but only two shutdowns that were serious crises. 

The first was under Bill Clinton in 1996 and lasted for 21 days.*  The shutdown was the result of a budget standoff.  I constantly hear that Republicans assumed that Clinton would be blamed and found they had miscalculated, but I think that is incorrect.  Economic royalists are opposed to government on general principle, of course, but Republicans had managed to make some degree of peace with it until Clinton was elected in 1992.  Then they discovered to their horror that having a federal government means that sometimes a Democrat can be in charge of it.  This led to a complete freakout on their part an unleashing of the economic royalist instincts they had kept in check till then.  Republicans ran not just against Clinton, but against government in general.  They denounced government as a monstrous parasite, draining our life blood, trampling liberty underfoot, and giving us nothing in return.  They ran for office promising to cut government, not with a meat ax, but with a chain saw.  One (state) candidate ran on a promise to eliminate her office altogether. 

The tactic proved wildly successful  Denouncing government as a pure an unmitigated evil proved an effective campaign strategy, and the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.  So naturally they assumed that if the American people hated government so much, shutting it down would be popular.  The American people, in turn, assumed that if government was a monstrous parasite draining our life blood, trampling on our liberty, and giving us nothing in return, then shutting it down would not be accompanied with any inconvenience.  When it turned out that shutting this monstrosity down cause problems, shutdown quickly lost its popularity and went out of practice for another 17 years.

The other shutdown to cause a crisis was the next one, the one that happened 17 years later in 2013, under President Obama and lasted 16 days.  Adding to the crisis was that it was not merely a shutdown, but also a threat to breach the debt ceiling.  The two events became blurred together in the public mind.  During the shutdown, Obama closed national parks and museums and non-essential services.  Republicans cried foul, saying that he was making the shutdown more painful than necessary to put pressure on them.  They had part of a point.  There can be no doubt that Obama really did want to make the point that a lot of government is more popular than most economic royalists think.  But they were dead wrong if they believed a shutdown could be made painless.  Far more dangerous than the shutdown was the threat of a default on the debt, a danger which ultimately led Republicans to back down.  Republicans went on to major victories in 2014, but did not shut the government down again throughout the Obama Presidency.

However, they do not appear to have learned the same lesson in 2013 as in 1996.  Instead of seeing shutdowns as an evil to be avoided, Republicans -- at least their right wing -- came to see them as the most emphatic way of stating their principles.  Quite a few times before this shutdown, when Trump failed to get funding for his border wall, he said that what we needed was a good shutdown to get it -- and this while the Republicans still controlled Congress!  There was a brief shutdown early in 2018, with parks and museums not closed, and minimal inconvenience.

And, most famously, at the beginning of this shutdown Trump said loud and clear on national television that he was proud to own a shutdown.  I can only assume from this that he expected shutdown to be popular, at least with his base.  And he left the parks and museums open -- only to find out that the Obama Administration closed them for a good reason.  Museums and parks deteriorate fast when open to the public but without maintenance staff.  And no end is in sight. 

Let's hope that this shutdown has a stronger impact than even the 1996 shutdown, and even leads to passage of the Stop STUPIDITCY Act to prevent any more of this uniquely American pathology.

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*There was an earlier shutdown in 1995, but not long enough to rate as a full-blown crisis.