History has seen myriad legislation make it through Congress despite deep doubts that the implementation of the law would proceed flawlessly. Anybody travelling through Mississippi in 1963 — or simply having a familiarity with the work of Nina Simone — would have known, for instance, that the Civil Rights Act that passed Congress in 1964 was not going to be easy to enforce.
It still isn’t. Sixty years on, the Civil Right Act that “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin” remains a work in progress, since if — as Martin Luther King Jr asserted — the long “arc of the moral universe bends toward justice,” it bends slowly at times.
In the case of the Civil Rights Act, the inevitable challenges regarding its implementation didn’t become an excuse for Congress not to pass it. But that’s a lesson that Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) evidently didn’t internalize, as in vowing to vote against the Senate’s bipartisan border fix plan — which included major concessions to right-wing interests — Tillis squirmed out of his responsibility to genuinely consider the bill by essentially saying it didn’t matter what the bill had in it.
Tillis instead cited unspecified objections and blamed his decision to vote “no” on his suspicion that the Biden administration wouldn’t enforce the new rules anyway.
Tillis 11 days ago: “We are here. We were elected. When you have an opportunity to make this country safer, you do it.” https://t.co/DkYYheMA3a
— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) February 6, 2024
“After reviewing the bill text, there are provisions that are highly problematic, especially considering the fact that President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas caused this border crisis and have refused to use existing laws already on the books to address it,” Tillis wrote. “It is hard to trust that the Biden Administration would even implement this bill in good faith. I will vote no.”