This White House’s staff can’t seem to tolerate it when progressives experience even a moment of modest discomfort with their leadership.
An impromptu focus group of Democratic voters recently convened and conducted by Mark Halperin found that the president’s State of the Union Address had the effect his speechwriters so clearly intended: It made Democrats feel better about Biden’s capacity to run one last campaign.
Those voters said they were enthused by Biden’s renewed vigor. They appreciated the record of legislative achievements Biden pursued in office, and they were energized to vote for Biden again. Many of them cited specific policies they wanted Biden to either pursue in the future or preserve from Republican adulteration. Most expressed their abject fear of a second term for Donald Trump. What none of them even referenced was Joe Biden’s extemporaneous riff in which he branded Laken Riley’s alleged murderer an “illegal.”
But that is what so many in the press focused on in the aftermath of Biden’s speech — a myopia fueled by prominent progressives, for whom Biden’s salty language was the lowlight of the speech. Predictably, because this White House’s staff can’t seem to tolerate it when progressives experience even a moment of modest discomfort with their leadership, the president was soon compelled to deliver an embarrassing mea culpa for the sin of sharing just some of voters’ hostility toward the effects of the migrant crisis. Those same progressives are at it again, busily leading the president astray.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court dismissed the Biden administration’s emergency appeal aimed at putting a halt to a Texas law that would allow state and local officials to enforce immigration law in ways federal officials won’t. The matter was sent to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which issued a cursory injunction as it prepares to hear arguments next week. Still, Texas Republicans were elated. “We still have to have hearings in the 5th circuit federal court of appeals,” Texas governor Greg Abbott wrote. “But this is clearly a positive development.” Not according to the Left.
“Horrible,” wrote former San Antonio mayor Julian Castro in response to an NBC News item on the Court’s decision granting Texas law enforcement “the power to arrest migrants.” Castro savaged the “Trump-stacked” Court for failing to block Texas’s “dangerous and blatantly unconstitutional law,” which “puts a target on the backs of all Texans of color.” These sentiments were shared by much of the progressive commentariat. “Good luck to all brown-skinned folks in Texas,” Wajahat Ali warned. “Indeed,” longtime Democratic strategist Karen Finney agreed. “As we saw in Alabama w/ HB56 and AZ w/SB 1070, this bill means ‘show me your papers’ and codifies racial profiling. Disgusting.”
The analogy Finney drew between the Texas law with Arizona’s controversial S.B. 1070 is a useful one. In the summer of 2012, the Supreme Court struck down several of that law’s provisions that were in conflict with federal law — including parts of what progressives derided as its “show me your papers” provisos that they believed authorized racial profiling at scale. That provision, Section 6, was found to be too broad because it gave local law enforcement the power to arrest and hold for removal migrants in the absence of a warrant or the reasonable assumption that a detainee was an escape risk.
But the Court upheld S.B. 1070’s provisions that allowed local officials to stop and arrest suspected illegal immigrants as long as they are required to verify a suspect’s immigration status with the federal government, “which is something that police officers could do on their own initiative anyway, “SCOTUSBlog’s Amy Howe observed at the time, “(and which Congress has in fact encouraged state and local governments to do).” The Arizona law managed to avoid running afoul of federal anti-discrimination statute because the law expressly prohibited the consideration of race, color, or national origin outside ways permitted by the Constitution in its enforcement. The Obama administration’s argument — that its enforcement priorities, which amounted to the non-enforcement of immigration law, should enjoy the Court’s deference — did not win the day.
Texas’s S.B. 4 seems to have cleared a similar hurdle — at least, for now. Texas police officers are still not allowed to engage in illegal discrimination, nor are they authorized to stop suspected illegal immigrants purely on the basis of their immigration status. They cannot prolong a suspect’s detention only to investigate their immigration status, and they aren’t even required to do so. They merely can run those checks and transfer to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s custody migrants subject to a detainer. The law also prohibits local officials from shielding migrants from ICE.
This could be a godsend for Joe Biden if he can summon the courage to ignore his progressive critics. The president cannot exactly come out in favor of a decision from the Court his administration argued against, but he can mute his objections to Texas’s efforts to enforce immigration laws in ways progressives resent. But if the Fifth Circuit sides with Texas lawmakers in the end, the effect would be to mitigate the migrant crisis — even at the margins — in ways Joe Biden desperately needs.
The president can and almost certainly will demagogue the conditions from which he would benefit. He can insist that his hands are tied by a reckless Court, and he is reluctantly obliged to watch helplessly as Texas’s ruthless Republicans go to work managing the crisis over which Biden has presided. This White House cannot help but flatter the pretensions of the progressive activists that so torment it. But what Biden needs is for Americans to feel some relief from the crisis at the border, the effects of which have spilled over into almost every community in the country. As much as the Left resents it, Texas is willing to do its part to rescue Biden from the bad judgment of his progressive allies.