On Thursday, the Supreme Court stripped Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of people. 350,000 Haitians and Syrians will now meet the same fate as the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans whose temporary protected status was allowed to be revoked by the Supreme Court in October 2025. The New York Times dutifully recorded the 6-3 vote as “along ideological lines” but it would be preferable to see it for what it is, a party-line vote in which the six Republican appointees voted to reinforce a Republican president’s control over immigration. That the rogue supermajority casually upended hundreds of thousands of lives with seemingly no consideration whatsoever of the human cost of their extremism should no longer surprise us. But it is also true that no one should be surprised by this outcome and that leading Democrats should have anticipated it.
The Biden administration’s immigration policies have taken heavy flak. Its expansion of TPS to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants was one of the worst decisions he made in the White House, right up there with his unfathomable indifference to Israel’s rampage in Gaza and selfishly choosing to run again in 2024. It’s not that there was no case on the merits for taking in desperate and innocent people fleeing the political and economic collapse of Venezuela. And it’s not that Biden listened to “The Groups” and made a bad judgement call to appease progressives, as many on the center-left would have us believe. It’s that he strained TPS well beyond its practical and conceptual breaking points and that by failing to budget the appropriate resources to deal with the unprecedented influx of people and refusing to spend the political capital needed to fight back against the cynical GOP migrant busing campaign from red states to blue cities, he unwittingly created the very nativist backlash that contributed to Trump’s 2024 victory.
Inviting people into the United States only to see the next administration gleefully toss them out is a bottom-tier outcome. It is not good policymaking, it did not serve anyone particularly well and it makes the United States look morally corroded and dysfunctional, which it is. And while TPS may have been the most convenient way to address the Venezuela crisis, Biden used it without providing the public a rationale, his allies any talking points or his critics any evidence that it was working or even heading off an even worse outcome. That left Democrats with the worst-case scenario — an unpopular policy with Biden’s fingerprints all over it that neither he nor anyone else bothered to defend in public or meaningfully address in ways that voters could see.
But one additional point sticks with me, as people who have been in the U.S. for years or even decades prepare to be hastily returned to their countries of origin: Democrats should have seen this coming. Given the immovable roadblocks of former Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and their implacable hostility to nuking the legislative filibuster, no pathway to citizenship was ever getting through Congress even when Biden nominally controlled a governing trifecta. That reality, and the increasing possibility that the malodorous Trump was going to somehow get himself back into office, should have been part of the calculus guiding the Biden administration’s policies. And should the Democratic nominee win the presidency in 2028, this problem of anticipating Republican mayhem is unfortunately going to have to have a long-term seat at the policymaking table.
It’s not that Biden was incapable of foreseeing what his successor was going to do in other areas. Fear of Trump’s wrath was the rationale for the slew of pardons Biden issued on his way out the door, including to his son Hunter (who is currently reinventing himself as a lefty social media hero). And of course, Biden had no such easy button to push for the many immigrants dependent on TPS for their presence in the U.S. nor could he single-handedly grant them all citizenship or green cards. But there has been a distinct lack of energy on the left and among leading Democrats to do anything beyond grant a path to citizenship for DACA recipients or to make the case for a larger, swifter naturalization for the millions of undocumented or as we might think of TPS recipients, under-documented immigrations. In my 2018 book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics, I called for an amnesty and a swift move toward citizenship for undocumented immigrants who wanted it. Yet it is still one part of the structural reform project that remains under-conceptualized and without the kind of broad left consensus that court expansion now enjoys.
I don’t have easy answers here. But this is my website, so I can think out loud right? I guess my point is that what you might think of as Third Rail-ism is dead and buried. It’s the idea that if you put popular policies in place and they become reasonably well entrenched, the political costs of rolling them back will be too high. But Trump II Republicans have eighty-sixed one entrenched, long-standing program after another, from USAID to Obamacare subsidies. Once the GOP survived Dobbs by recapturing the presidency two years after depriving millions of people of their reproductive rights and autonomy, it became clear that you can do more or less anything to the American electorate and get away with it, as long as you keep them angry about something else and blame the right people. That’s why GOP leaders seem so comfortable canceling green energy projects that benefit red states and on which billions have already been spent. So if Republicans are a good bet to torch even popular, successful policies initiated by their predecessors, and if that is even more true of things like TPS, which had support that was probably pretty thin to begin with, where does that leave us?
This is something that has been rattling around uncomfortably in the back of my head when we think about big progressive policy priorities like Medicare For All. Even if Democrats managed to get it done, would it survive long enough to be fully implemented? Will anything? This problem can be ameliorated, but not eliminated, by structural reform efforts like court expansion, DC and Puerto Rico statehood and proportional representation. And that is one more reason why I’m gravitating toward a model that gives blue states some power to Republican-proof policy gains (and red states some power to pursue a different path) and to avoid the policy whiplash trap set by what Morris Fiorina presciently called “Unstable Majorities.”
That is actually the ostensible reason that I set up this newsletter. So expect to hear more about that in the months to come.
Writing round-up
For The Nation, I continued writing about the disastrous Iran War, and how Trump is caught between the GOP’s political interests and the Iran War Industrial Complex, headquartered at DC think tanks whose mandarins simply cannot admit that the war failed and that US objectives cannot be realized with military force. Keep an eye on Liberal Currents, where I have my first piece coming out soon on how to prevent the 2028 Democratic primaries from getting hijacked by gadflies and waylaid by cable news provocateurs.
Stray observations
With the superb Widow’s Bay wrapped up, I found myself in one of those periods where none of the available new releases seemed like it could remotely compete with what I had just watched. So I decided on a full rewatch of Chernobyl, the riveting and justifiably lauded 2019 HBO limited series. While it still made some significant scientific mistakes (I’m thinking of the preposterous scene where Emily Watson’s composite scientist character Ulana Khomyuk claims that Lyudmilla Ignatenko’s life was saved because her fetus absorbed all of the radiation for her), the core thesis is more relevant than ever, sadly.
I was newly struck by the scene where apparatchik-with-a-heart-of-gold Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) and nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) arrive at the ruined plant the day after the catastrophe to be greeted by corrupt local functionaries. Under threat of being thrown to his death, Legasov has just given Shcherbina a crash course in nuclear power on the helicopter ride, and Shcherbina shocks him, and the audience, by confronting the power plant quislings about why there is graphite on the roof of the destroyed building, which could only have come from the reactor core, which means that it had indeed exploded as no one seems willing to admit. Trapped in an absurd web of lies Viktor Bryukhanov (Con O’Neill) turns to Nikolai Fomin (Adrian Rawlins) and asks him, “Fomin, why did the Deputy Chairman see graphite on the roof?
(If you look closely, you’ll see the reflection of the episode my daughter is watching)
Of course, everyone watching knows the reactor core has exploded. Legasov knows it, and in fact Bryukhanov and Fomin know it too. They can see it with their own eyes. They are corrupt and cowardly but they aren’t stupid and they believe they are playing the roles assigned to them by the system itself. As Masha Gessen noted in a fairly critical review of the show, “The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.”
It is really shocking how much closer the United States is now to this rancid system of institutionalized lying than it was in 2019. The reflecting pool caper is a representative example. For Trump, there is nothing at stake other than some mild embarrassment. A normal person would simply have hired a new contractor or accepted that there might sometimes be algae in the pool. Does anyone really care? But MAGA’s power rests on this ability to redefine “ever-shifting reality” for its hardcore supporters, and they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in being able to manipulate the narrative so completely that millions of people can be made to believe obvious lies that are contradicted by a glance out the window, or to support policy decisions that just the day before they would have denounced as calamitous.
Gessen disliked the way the show scapegoated the plant operators rather than the Soviet system itself. I don’t actually think that’s what the show did—on the contrary, the indictment of the system was the whole point—but their words are still haunting anyway. “It would be harder to show a system digging its own grave instead of an ambitious, evil man causing the disaster,” they noted.
Trump is our ambitious, evil man. But the problem will always be bigger than him. His legacy will be handing all of us the shovel and telling us to dig, and seeing how many of us, heads full of mush, will indeed comply without question.
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