Here comes Justice Jackson

How to lose the immigration debate
With immigration getting more and more attention, Texas governor Greg Abbott has sought his moment in the limelight with an eye-catching proposal for what to do with illegal migrants when they are intercepted at the border.

In a response to the White Houses’s decision to lift Title 42, the pandemic-era health order that empowered border agents to turn migrants away, Abbott announced that his state “is providing charter buses to send these illegal immigrants who have been dropped off by the Biden administration to Washington, DC.” Migrants relocated from the border…

How to lose the immigration debate

With immigration getting more and more attention, Texas governor Greg Abbott has sought his moment in the limelight with an eye-catching proposal for what to do with illegal migrants when they are intercepted at the border.

In a response to the White Houses’s decision to lift Title 42, the pandemic-era health order that empowered border agents to turn migrants away, Abbott announced that his state “is providing charter buses to send these illegal immigrants who have been dropped off by the Biden administration to Washington, DC.” Migrants relocated from the border to Texan cities like San Antonio, Abbott said, would be put on buses, driven north and dropped off at the Capitol.

This is not the first time Abbott has stepped in, using the power and resources of the state of Texas to plug the gaps where he thinks the federal government has failed. Last year, Abbott directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to close points of entry along the border with Mexico. The Texas National Guard is running “mass migration” rehearsals ahead of the expected influx after Title 42 is lifted.

With his latest move Abbott, who is running for a third term as governor, has taken his approach firmly into publicity stunt territory. The “bus them to Washington” grandstanding may not make Abbott the “most evil governor in America” as a Rolling Stone headline claims. But it is a callous move that badly misreads the politics of border security.

Central to the case for a secure southern border is the basic truth that, for all the ostensive compassion of the open-borders side of the debate, a porous US-Mexico boundary has been a recipe for human suffering. It incentives criminal cartels to exploit poor and vulnerable people, some of whom are children. Moreover, as too few pushing for high levels of legal immigration, including more generous refugee and asylum policies in the US numbers, realize, those goals will remain a fantasy as long as the border crisis continues.

Instead of building from that compassionate starting point, Abbott’s stunt does nothing to disincentivize dangerous border crossings. It treats migrants as pawns in a political game, rather than human beings. But the move isn’t just needlessly callous. Dropping immigrants off on the streets of Washington may make a fairly blunt point, but that doesn’t mean it’s good politics.

Republicans have a winning argument in the immigration debate because Democrats have tended to put politics before people: too wedded to ideology to take the practical steps needed to prosecute the basic task of securing the nation’s border, too obsessed with an anti-Trump administration narrative to recognize the inhumane consequences of their own preferred policies. Abbott’s move falls into a conservative equivalent of that trap. The way to win the immigration debate isn’t with cruel stunts. It’s with a clear-eyed focus on what works. As long as Republicans remember that, they will remain the more trusted party when it comes to the border.

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Introducing Justice Jackson

The Senate will vote on Ketanji Brown Jackson this afternoon and, barring a meteorite striking the Capitol, she will be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice (even if she will have to wait until Stephen Breyer’s retirement this summer to actually take up her seat). Three Republicans have pledged their support for Jackson: Susan Collins, Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski.

As anticipated, the fight over Jackson’s confirmation lacked the drama that surrounded some of her future fellow justices. Republican attacks focused on her sentencing for child pornography offenses failed to capture the public imagination. Liberal defenses against these attacks were overblown, reducing the row to nothing more than race, as though Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley wound’t have gone after a white Biden nominee. Ultimately, Jackson’s demeanor and solid answers to hours of questioning made it hard for any of this to stick. And, for that reason, the Biden White House will congratulate themselves on their choice and bank a rare political win.

Fox news

Cockburn reports on the wild beasts of Capitol Hill: not Blue Dogs or squawking chicken hawks but a rabid fox that has been wrecking havoc for days. The creature managed to bite nine people, including Representative Ami Bera, before it was caught and euthanized by Washington health officials. As the authorities decide what to do with the vixen’s newly orphaned kits, Cockburn wonders whether the fox’s Hill residency is a byproduct of Covid: “Is it any wonder that wild animals took up residence in a place that was a veritable ghost town for two years,” he asks.