So how big is this thing at the border?
So how big is this thing at the border?
6 states siding against a supreme court decision to deny access to federal authorities seems big, if thats happened in my lifetime I've not heard of it before
No it hasn't happened in our lifetimes. This should be massive. It is a constitutional crisis, technically. But none of the parties are engaging in this for those reasons. It is 100 percent pandering and grandstanding, and is only about bullshit electoral agendas. So it probably won't actually be anything, even though it is technically massive lol
Edit: the only important impact could be later on down the line. Like every escalation of cynical Republican pandering to their genuine fascist base. Eventually the hogs won't be happy until they order tge national guard to open fire on feds. Which will be mostly hilarious when it first happens. Itll be another Jan 6 kind of thing where its technically treason, but no one involved understands what they are actually doing or than it is treason or what comes next. They're just in it for the spectacle with no actual politics or understanding of the implications of the thing they're howling for
I can guarantee you that no balkanization is going to happen in the US.
Why? Because this is no longer the time period where individual states can build up their gold reserves as a store of their wealth. No, the US dollar is unparalleled in history in the sense that it allows the US to get “free lunches” from all over the world with junk papers.
I love quoting from this article from 2022 because the Californian finance department accidentally revealed a very crucial fact:
If you look at all of the personal income tax returns that were filed in California in the year 2020, just 1% of the total number of income tax returns that were filed were responsible for more than 49% of all of the personal income tax that was paid in that year. And unlike most of us who get our income from wages and salaries, that very narrow band of taxpayers derives a lot of their income from things like capital gains, stock markets [and] bonuses that are tied to corporate or stock performance. So when the markets are doing very well, those individuals are doing very well and state revenues are doing very well. Conversely, when the markets go south, their fortunes don't do very well and the state's revenues decline as a result.
Let’s parse this paragraph: California, the richest state in the US, derives much of its tax revenues from capital gains such as stocks and bonds. Yeah, good luck losing access to the dollar, if any US state even dares to contemplate about seceding for real. Their wealth and living standards are going to plunge overnight. Good luck with that.
This has the potential to be the tankie Biden moment, but he's only militant about doing violence to foreigners.
The most recent example of something similar I can think of is Eisenhower ordering the national guard in to force Arkansas to allow Ruby Bridges into a previously all white school. Of course, that that had a much narrower physical scope than the border. I don’t think the number of states whining means that much as several of them aren’t Mexico land border states so as a practical matter they’re just complaining/engaging in political theater.
Actual enforcement of the Supreme Court order is a mixed bag. It’s easy enough to have the feds reclaim specific crossing sites, and as this is more about political theater I think Abbot will buckle before actually telling the Texas National Guard to fire upon federal agents (and for that matter, those guardsmen risking themselves like that in the name of an election year stunt). The larger border with the razor wire is a different story as it’s easy for Abbot to send people back in to replace the wire after the feds remove it, and the federal government might decide it’s not worth the cost to keep removing it.
Probably it'll blow over in a couple of weeks. The feds next step for things like this is usually to find something they fund and pull funding...probably in this case they could just pull any border funding they give to Texas, and that would be enough for Texas to say "fuck it, we can't buy more razor wire without the funds" and give it up. That's almost always how these things end up.
If not, next step would be to use force, which at worst would result in a minor skirmish at one or two spots between the local forces and the feds. The local forces would lose that fight pretty much immediately. I would guess most of them are all talk and as soon as the feds roll up with tanks and start shooting, they'll give up because they'd rather not die for some stupid border skirmish. The feds may not even have to shoot, what tools do the local forces have to stop an APC from just running over the razor wire? The die hards might stick around and they would die, hard. Perhaps there will be some token fall guy somewhere that spends a long time in jail afterwards, we don't know about him yet because he's not going to be anyone relevant. Nobody that matters will be punished for this in any capacity, just a few local goons will die and some middle manager soldier type will be made an example of.
Either way it ends with Texas and their allied states using this as yet another campaign talking point to show how the fed is doing le government overreach, push their agenda as usual, and the racists will eat it the fuck up forever. There's no way in hell this is anything more than a political stunt, even if it gets a few folks at the border shot by the feds. A small price to pay for the GOP to push their agenda. Sure, their stunts are getting flashier and flashier because they need to, but the GOP doesn't want to balkanize so there's no way it'll go that far.
Libs are already doing the "we can't do anything or republicans will call us authoritarians" line.
So it's not like it's going to start a co flict but it's just going to demonstrate with extreme clarity that democrats are literally completely useless for foreign affairs and also will not do literally anything even when multiple republican states are explicitly ignoring federal law to murder vulnerable minorities.
Basically it's just gonna knock dems down another 15 point in the polls and all those "moderates" libs are obsessed with are just gonna sneer even harder when a liberal explains to them how letting Republicans do literally whatever you want is the pragmatic and reasonable decision.
I mean it's giving Ted Cruz the opportunity to look like he's actually standing for something lmao.
In the meantime they might literally start gunning down migrants approaching the border while liberals tell you you're a child if you think k Biden should do anything about it.
Nothing ever happens.
I really want to see at least one shootout between state and federal agents, but it's probably not going to happen.
Seems like the US version of brexit in the making: Some right-wing politicians are grandstanding to their base, the neolibs and the cons don't expect it to escalate further, but their rabid supporters want it to, so it will, completely surprising all at the head of this movement.
Or maybe they manage to roll a
once more, and this whole crisis is delayed a bit further againNot by itself enough to cause balkanization or civil war, but still represents growing divisions in the US-American bourgeoisie which could lead to those events in the near future.
As a Texan, I would like them to take away our electoral college votes for failing to comply. Lets see the orange fatty win the presidency without Texas's 40 electoral votes. Abbot should be held in contempt and indicted.