Enforcing immigration laws and fiscal responsibility
The Tea Party movement is truly dead, and any pretense of fiscal responsibility is dead.
Illegal immigration presents a number of problems, such assimilating immigrants into our culture and preventing violent gangs from entering the country. It is good that President Trump is leading a crackdown on illegal immigration and deporting illegal aliens. But is that the only issue we should be concerned about? Obviously not. There are many things we should be considering.
When the riots were raging (again) in Los Angeles, I saw a photo from the riots on social media with this comment: "I don’t care if the Big Beautiful Bill raises the debt ceiling by $10 Trillion." This mentality represents everything that is wrong with the modern conservative movement and Republican Party. This "all or nothing" mentality is destroying everything we claim to believe.
Here is the dirty little secret no one in Washington wants to admit: It actually is possible to crack down on illegal immigration and also be fiscally responsible. There is no legitimate reason we have to increase immigration enforcement as part of a giant pork-filled abomination that mortgages the future of our great-great-grandchildren by spiraling the budget deficit and national debt to even more ridiculous levels.
If this "big beautiful bill" magically gave President Trump the power to snap his fingers like Thanos and instantly send every illegal alien back to his home country, it does not matter if we spend ourselves into permanent bankruptcy. When we do not have a country any more because our fiscal insolvency has led to societal collapse, who cares if people cross the border illegally, abuse the asylum program or overstay their visas? No one will want to come and live in what used to be the United States of America and is now a third world country. That solves the illegal immigration problem, I guess.
Republicans used to at least give lip service to fiscal responsibility, even if they were actually terrible at following through. In the age of Trump, despite the theater of DOGE, they do not even pretend to care about restraining spending or protecting the future. It is all about the now. With Trump leading the way, Republicans have become what the Democrats were under President Obama. The Tea Party movement is truly dead, any pretense of fiscal responsibility is dead, and we have sold the future of generations not yet born to get what we want right now. This is generational theft, and it is shameful.