RZehr wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2024 7:21 pm
Ken wrote: ↑Wed Mar 06, 2024 1:41 pm
Of course what do I know? The next presidential term could be hugely consequential. But I doubt it.
Presidents really don't have that much power. At least not the power to make any lasting changes on their own. And not much usually happens in presidential 2nd terms.
About the part of your post that I underlined:
Presidents may not really have that much power to impact border policy? That may explain Trumps lack of success. It appears to me that the real power to impact border policy might be held in the clammy grip of
ex-Presidents. For reference see how he torpedoed the recent border legislation that the Republicans negotiated with the sitting President.
Ex-Presidents, not Presidents are the ones with power.
Trump is a case in point. He came into office and tried to make a variety of changes to immigration and border policy. To very little permanent effect. We can go through them one by one:
Muslim Ban During his first days in office he implemented his famous Muslim Ban by executive order. After a first couple of weeks it was eventually tied up in court and basically set aside. The Trump Administration fought with the appeals courts and came up with several revisions until the Supreme Court eventually ruled in his favor about a year or two later at which point he had already abandoned the policy. I'm not super solid on the timeline so feel free to look it up as I'm too lazy. But I think my summary is more or less correct.
Increased ICE detentions and deportations. ICE under Trump did ramp up more immigration raids across the country and wound up detaining more people for deportation. But they didn't actually accomplish increased deportations because of immigration court backlogs. So they just spend an enormous amount of money building private prisons to house immigration detainees Federal expense. More illegal immigrants have been deported under Biden than Trump by a long shot. From the Cato Institute:
https://www.cato.org/blog/new-data-show ... rump-biden This is from the Washington Post last month:
https://www.verifythis.com/article/news ... d4f235d07e
Family Separation Policy: This was kind of a stealth policy that was rolled out by the Trump Administration early on without any real public notice until it finally started getting a lot of negative news coverage and attention. The policy generated endless legal challenges and lawsuits, was revised several times by the Trump Administration and then eventually abandoned after restraining orders were issued by various courts and there was some kind of consent decree by which DHS agreed to cease the practice.
Title 42 Border Closures: These were the COVID related border restrictions that were legal as long as the nation was in a declared public health emergency. There was lots of back and forth and most of the hostility to the law was related to vaccination requirements for incoming immigrants and travelers. This policy rolled into the early years of the Biden Administration but was ended when the declaration of Public Heath Emergency was rescinded. It was effective during the height of COVID. But was never going to be any sort of permanent change to US immigration policy.
Build the Wall and get Mexico to pay for it: After obsessing about his wall for four years, Trump accomplished the following:
- The land border with Mexico is 1,954 miles long. In 4 years, Trump managed to build his wall along 455 miles of the border or only 23% of the southern border. However only 47 miles of that was actually new wall where none had existed before. It was mostly just upgrade and replacement of existing border fencing and walls.
- Mexico has yet to pay a single dime for any of Trump's wall building
- After Congress failed to provide funding, Trump tried to reallocate existing funds that were earmarked for improving military bases and that pretty much fell through
- In 2018 he got McCarthy to introduce The Build the Wall, Enforce the Law Act of 2018 in the House of Representatives but it stalled in the Senate after Trump refused to endorse a deal with Democrats to fund the wall in exchange for passing the Dream Act. Trump threw a temper tantrum and tried to shut down his own government over wall funding but caved when Congress refused to go along
Basically after all that sound and fury, Trump actually didn't accomplish much in the way of immigration and didn't leave any lasting changes because he never managed to pass any new immigration laws in Congress. The numbers in the last year of his administration only look good due to the Title 42 COVID restrictions which were unprecedented and worldwide. Many countries were locked down much more rigorously than the US.
So yes, I'm skeptical that Trump will accomplish much of anything when it comes to immigration should he get re-elected this fall. Since he has torpedoed the bipartisan immigration bill that was in Congress this past winter I doubt Democrats will be amenable to going along with any new Trump-proposed border legislation or funding. And why should they? Why reward Trump for his bad behavior? At least not without extracting major concessions that Trump and GOP in Congress will likely go for (such as passing the Dream Act). So that will once again leave him with only executive actions at his disposal. And I see no reason to believe they will be any more effective than his past efforts to change immigration policy without Congress. He can say a lot of things but actually doing them is a different story.
Presidential power is really the art of persuasion. And effective change requires an amenable Congress. Trump will have neither if he wins in 2024. And neither will Biden for that matter. So I frankly don't see either of them getting much done in terms of policy changes during the next term.
And that is just for Trump's signature policy of immigration. I expect he will get even less done in other areas of policy such as revising environmental laws, repealing/replacing Obamacare, restructuring the Federal Government, Changing Federal education policy, or anything else he mentions at random. Because all of that is going to require Congress. And Trump is a notoriously bad legislator. His one and only signature accomplishment was his tax cuts in 2017 during the first year of his first administration. He got little else done his first term, even when the GOP held both houses of Congress from 2017-2018. I think he has even less chance of making any significant changes as an instant lame duck should he win again. Since he won't have much leverage at all against Congress this time around. And many of the prominent Senators will quickly be shifting to campaign mode for 2028 and will be less inclined to try and get things done during a lame duck Trump or Biden presidency.
That is how I see things based on having worked in government for about 15 years and following it pretty closely for decades.
The one wild card is some enormous national emergency. Like some new major war, or another national emergency on the same order as COVID. Then all bets are off. Major crises are when things actually get done. Like the Great Depression, WW2, Civil War, etc.