A Moment for Biden

How Strong Against Iran and the Border Bullies?

This week is a big moment for Joe Biden, perhaps the most difficult of his presidency. He has to make two decisions about the use of force—one on the Southern border; and the second against Iran. He also has an opportunity to make Donald Trump seem a fool on immigration policy. The public sense of how strong—and vital—a President he is will be strongly influenced by those decisions. Let’s take a look at them:

The Senate Immigration Bill

Donald Trump is an idiot savant when it comes to self-promotion. He is not so good at other things, things that do not involve the immediate aggrandizement of his own succulent corpus. Things like political strategy or policy. Indeed, he has a tendency to propose actions that only make sense—if they make any sense at all—insofar as they relate to his own prosperity, political or otherwise. And Trump’s prosperity doesn’t always track with that of the organization laughingly known as the Republican Party. So he has led the GOPs into a cesspit when it comes to denying the facts of the 2020 election. And he has led the Republican Party down a series of ratholes when it comes to endorsing candidates he has promoted for high office. You remember Herschel Walker, running for Senate in Georgia. And Dr. Mehmet Oz, running for Senate from Pennsylvania. And Kari Lake in Arizona. Trump cost Republicans the Senate in 2022.

He is doing something similar now on immigration: he is encouraging Republicans to tank the bipartisan border legislation, which is about to emerge from the Senate. The bill is essential. It would establish not just stricter immigration controls, but also provide military support for Ukraine and Israel. Trump opposes it for all the worst reasons, of course. He wants his buddy Vladimir Putin to swallow Ukraine. And he wants to use illegal immigration as a bludgeon against Joe Biden in the fall—but he may only be hurting himself. By refusing to close the border now, Trump is limiting his ability to demagogue the issue in the general election. He is empowering Biden, who’ll be able to say when/if they debate: Wait a minute, Don, what on earth are you talking about? You opposed the Republican bill to shut the border down!

Trump is alienating all those moderate Suburban Republicans and independents, and yes, Sanity Democrats, who want to see immediate action. But he is also weakening—and, one would hope, pissing off—Senators like Oklahoma’s Jim Lankford, a longtime Trump toady who roused himself from his orange stupor and made a good faith effort to negotiate the border bill, the toughest immigration bill in decades, only to be censured by the Republican Party of Oklahoma, acting at Trump’s behest.

If the Democrats play the issue effectively (a huge if, given the Dems), the Republican Party should be mocked and humiliated from now to November. These are, after all, the folks who have been yowling about border insecurity for three years. These are the Republicans who are impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for not doing enough to stem the illegal tide (an entirely spurious proceeding, another ridiculous impeachment). And now, here comes the border bill the GOP said it wanted, a bill that represents a near-total capitulation by the left wing of the Democratic Party—and they’re going to oppose it, just to help Trump! The Democrats should be willing to get boring about this, to repeat the message—Trump is keeping the border open for his own personal benefit—until the public has it seared in its collective brain.

That should be easy. Trump’s Border gambit is an act of transparent cynicism, of profound disrespect for the American people. Even the Proud Boys should see through it. If Democrats are savvy, this will be their poster policy of 2024. Republicans refused to close the border because of politics. The ads should be everywhere, starting now. And Biden should take action, starting now. He already has said the Republicans are preventing him from shutting down the border, which is nice but not quite accurate. The President has the power to call a national security emergency, send troops to the border and close the southern ports of entry to refugees as I argued here last week. (He also has the power to federalize the rogue Texas National Guard.) If a Senate bill emerges, over Trump’s objections, Democrats should work to win over moderate House Republicans—like Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, who has already spoken out in favor of border action now—and get them to break with the leadership followship of poor Mike Johnson. The Senate bill should pass with a bipartisan coalition in the House. The Problem Solvers caucus should be all over it. The For Country military caucus should be on it, too. It is time for the moderate bipartisan majority of the House to emerge. No effort should be spared in exposing the wall-to-wall nihilism of Trump’s Republicans. You simply can not run a country like this.

More Border Nonsense

Even worse, and sort of terrifying, are the efforts of Texas Governor Greg Abbott and 25 other Republican governors to ignore the Supreme Court ruling that confirmed the President’s Constitutional authority to control border policy—in this case, the federal Border Patrol’s right to get rid of the razor wire that Abbott had the Texas National Guard string along the Rio Grande. (My podcast partner John Ellis has a Political News Items post today about Abbott’s vice presidential ambitions, and speculating about Elise Stefanik and Robert Kennedy Jr. as other possibilities. I suspect that Senator Katie Britt of Alabama might be the stealth candidate.)

But let me repeat: 25 Republican governors are standing against a constitutional decision reached by Trump’s conservative-majority Supreme Court (voting 5-4, in this case). Wow. What happens when the Supreme Court rules that Trump doesn’t have the power, as his lawyers affirmed, to send SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political opponent and has to face the charges Jack Smith has brought against him? If Glen Abbott can ignore the Supreme Court, why can’t Trump? Why can’t he just refuse to stand trial? What happens then?

What I’m saying is this: the rule of law is on very tenuous ground in our country right now and it is up to Joe Biden to enforce it. Donald Trump, who has tried to destroy the credibility of every government institution that has opposed him, may soon try to destroy the credibility of a Supreme Court he created.

And also this: What if Biden moves to federalize the Texas National Guard but the Texans refuse to comply? This is how close we are to chaos.

The Iran Crisis

Iran is not like other countries in the Middle East. It is a real place, an ancient civilization. Its borders were not drawn by colonizers, but by Iranians. I’ve been there twice and I love the place—the two-thousand years of civilization; the culture, from Rumi to the indie filmmakers to the rock bands my friend Nahid Siamdoust has written about. It is a middle class country, the best-educated populace in the region, outside of Israel, especially its women—who have long led the fight for liberation from the vicious military dictatorship that pretends to be a theocracy. In my experience, Iranians love western culture, especially American music and film; they have a deep, dark ironic sense of humor. But they are not patsies. They are extremely sensitive on one point: they won’t tolerate western interference in their governance.

This is understandable given the recent history of British and American skullduggery. If you want to understand the Persians, you might check out the comic novel My Uncle Napoleon, which was made into a very successful Iranian TV series before the Ayatollah came along and ruined all the fun. Its title character, a paterfamilias nicknamed Napoleon by his family, is convinced that everything bad that happens in his life—down to the squeaky front gate, if I recall correctly—is attributable to British interference. The Brits were The Great Satan, back in the day. They plundered the country’s oil. The overthrew the elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, with the help of The Little Satan (the American CIA). And so this point can’t be made too forcefully: As much as Iranians hate their government, they hate the idea of western interference in their affairs even more. If there is to be regime change in Iran, it will have to be accomplished by the Iranians.

So Joe Biden has to be very careful now. He must absolutely ignore the chorus of Republican mega-hawks:

“Target Tehran” after this past weekend’s drone strike on a U.S. base in northeastern Jordan, thundered Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.). Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) sneered that President Biden would be “a coward unworthy of being commander in chief” unless he attacked Iranian forces and their proxies, inside and outside the country.

Of course, hawk-nutter Lindsey Graham had a few choice words as well. (Parenthetical observation: How does Lindsey square his extravagant nuthawk tendencies with his support for Trump who, in one of his rare visits to the world of sanity, has been opposed to American adventurism overseas and chose not to attack Iran?)

Anyway, Biden:

He must respond to the lethal attack by Iranian-backed militias in Jordan. But he can’t overreact. He might visit some serious hell on the Houthis in Yemen and Iran’s militia proxies in Iraq and Syria; he might target a leader or two of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, as Trump did successfully; he might even sink an Iranian Navy vessel in the Persian Gulf. But he can’t hit the homeland. He must not target Iran, lest the Iranian people—who quietly sympathize with us—be dragooned into a furious anti-western imperialist response.

And he must not allow Greg Abbott to defy the Supreme Court.

And he must not allow Donald Trump hornswoggle the Republicans on the border.

Easy-peasy, right?