Saying what we mean about ICE

Plus the under-appreciated Hakeem Jeffries and some Epstein takes

Finneas O’Connell and Billie Eilish accept the award for song of the year at the 68th Grammy Awards. (Photo by Kevin Winter)

Everyone is pretty sour toward Democratic Party leadership and “the establishment” right now, but I think it’s worth noting that Hakeem Jeffries has done an impressive job in the least powerful of the four congressional leadership posts.

That starts with the basic reality that the job of the minority is to win the majority, and he is the odds-on favorite to accomplish that. It’s true that House Democrats face a more favorable map than Senate Democrats. But this is not entirely out of the hands of leaders. Last summer, it was thought that Republicans would manage to use unusual intra-census redistricting to score themselves a potent gerrymandering advantage, but Democrats successfully blocked and countered that effort with Jeffries leading the way. House Democrats also got an Epstein files bill passed via discharge petition, and then got a health-care bill passed the same way.

If you’re not super-familiar with how Congress works, this may not seem like a big deal. But for essentially my entire career it’s been understood that the discharge petition, though theoretically available as an option, is in practice a dead letter.

The way the House works is that the majority party controls the floor, and if the speaker doesn’t want something to come up for a vote, it doesn’t come up for a vote.

But one reason that this party cartel dynamic holds firm is that it benefits frontline members. Any kind of “wedge issue” that generates bad politics for the majority party’s frontliners is kept off the floor. If you want to engage in gestures of rhetorical moderation, that’s a freebie because there’s no actual vote. But once the Epstein discharge petition passed, that created a new expectation that discharge petitions can be used. That generated pressure on frontline Republicans to do a health-care discharge petition in response to the unpopularity of the G.O.P. stance on health care. And now that that discharge petition has passed, it’s valid to raise the discharge question on basically any issue that’s inconvenient for Republican frontliners. Speaker Mike Johnson is facing a serious collapse of party cartel discipline.

And that health-care vote reflects the fact that Jeffries’s strategy of focusing a government shutdown on the A.C.A. subsidies issue basically worked.

This was a bit of a tough call. The people most eager for a shutdown wanted to do it over something weightier like immigration abuses or something more logically tied to the appropriations process like rescissions. The people least eager for a shutdown basically just didn’t want to do a shutdown.

Doing the shutdown but doing it over the issue that vulnerable Democrats were most comfortable with put the G.O.P. in a genuinely bad place, tanked Trump’s numbers, and would have worked even better politically had various senators not developed a guilty conscience about it. I personally talked myself into Jeffries’s strategy after conversations with members of Congress, but then talked myself out of it on the basis of abstract logic right as the shutdown was happening. The fact that it worked is a reminder that legislative leadership isn’t really about making logical arguments; it’s about managing people and he’s done the job well.

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Maia: I’ve begun to sense that the machinery of perennial left omnicause activism is turning back towards immigration (for obvious reasons), after cycling through ACAB/”white supremacy,” COVID dead-enderism, and then Palestine since the mid-late 2010s. You’ve written about what Democratic candidates, elected officials, and spokespeople should do to avoid the missteps of the Biden administration this time. Do you have any advice for people trying to navigate this on an individual level, especially those whose Slow Boring-aligned views put them on the right end of their social milieu? It keeps coming up in conversation, invitations to anti-ICE events that seem to be asking for quite a bit more than for the Trump administration to follow the law are circulating, and so on. The vibes are getting pretty intense.

Without coming across as too pedantic or disagreeable, I want to express my outrage at the behavior we’re seeing and make clear that I’m so pro-immigration, I literally want the country to have a billion people in it, without losing the fact that putting together a pro-immigration majority through politics is the only way to get there, NOT demanding that legal status be de facto optional because the implications of enforcing it are too icky and changing policy is too hard. I don’t want to end up at a protest thinking we’re demanding that ICE behave themselves, only to have people around me start shouting about how immigration law as such is racist oppression or whatever. It seems like No Kings has done a fine job of threading this needle, but overall the types who put this stuff on tend to take it as a given that everyone in the room is onboard with the whole slate of usual causes...

Advice on how to handle interpersonal relationships is not really my forte, but what I would try to urge on people is the idea that the worst stuff that Trump is doing is, in fact, really bad.

There is reasonably broad social consensus that he has “gone too far” and a strong possibility of building a majority consensus around things like immigration officers wearing proper uniforms, eschewing racial profiling, and facing accountability if they kill civilians. So people who agree that the worst stuff is very bad should ask themselves if the ideas they are putting out there in protests and public communications reflect that consensus or break it.

When Billie Eilish goes on stage at the Grammys to say “no one is illegal on stolen land,” I think that she — like most celebrities who try to get involved in politics — is operating in good faith and genuinely trying to make the world a better place.