"You can't detain someone for being Latino" is a law worth shutting down the government for

The Democratic Party once again cannot decide if it should fight Trump, and if so, what about.

With the government approaching a funding deadline in three weeks, congressional Democrats have been - once again - gifted a brief moment of leverage over Trump’s administration. And - once again - congressional Democrats appear to be at risk of talking themselves into preemptive surrender.

Others have covered the looming decision in greater detail. Suffice to say that if Democrats think they infuriated their base by surrendering in March, they haven’t seen anything yet: this time, even establishment-friendly voices like Ezra Klein seem prepared to fully abandon party leadership unless it stands up and fights. A few days ago, Klein wrote:

Democratic leaders have had six months to come up with a plan. If there’s a better plan than a shutdown, great. But if the plan is still nothing, then Democrats need new leaders.

But while even more cautious Democrats agree it’s time to fight, there’s a second problem: what should the fight be over?

It’s easy to say that congressional Dems should demand a sweeping rollback of all Trump has done, an end to the president’s authoritarian attack on American society, and the restoration of everything he has broken. As a personal matter, I don’t even disagree — if I was in Congress, that’s the only funding bill I’m voting for.

But as a practical matter, our actual elected Democrats are unlikely to take up that kind of all-or-nothing fight. They are probably not wrong to note that it’s effectively unwinnable: Republicans would not agree, the government would shut down, and Congress would be pitched into an irresolvable fight with no clear exit strategy. The public’s attention would certainly be drawn, but the outcome would be deeply unclear, and at the outer limits it risks a fullblown constitutional collapse.

In practice, elected Democrats would also prefer a set of demands that is narrow enough to convey to the public, and coherent enough to animate favorable, easy-to-understand headlines. They should position the Democrats as the good guys, and seem worth a massive fight with nationwide consequences.

On the other hand, certain Democratic-leaning pundits have tried to push the party towards fighting around bog-standard policy issues - such as “healthcare subsidies,” in the words of one analyst. They note that these often poll well, and the kitchen-table theme fits nicely with decades of Democratic messaging on mundane policy topics.

But to the base, this would be almost as unacceptable as not fighting at all. And rightfully so. Trump’s assault on America is not captured by his kitchen-table policy positions, however bad they might be. Trump is building an authoritarian state, attacking basic American values of rule of law, fairness, tolerance, and democracy. Focusing on a dull set of kitchen-table concerns not only avoids the true objection that Democrats have to Trump, it actively normalizes his tyrannical, anti-constitutional behavior. Saying that the most important concern facing America is healthcare subsidies or some similar mundane policy question suggests to the public that the core conflict Democrats have with this administration remains the precise set of conflicts that Republicans and Democrats have had for our entire lives.

Focusing on mundane policy issues also undercuts the primary goal of a shutdown standoff: garnering attention. The public is not overly inclined to pay attention to a rehash of years of policy debate over grocery prices or healthcare costs. These familiar topics, constantly retrodden every election season, are rhetorically coded as Boring Politics Stuff. The public’s attention is more likely to be attracted to novel conflicts and crises: the sense that something new and bad is happening, something that places us in a unique and frightening historic moment.

Finally, Democrats need demands that are worth fighting for, even if they lose. It’s impossible to know the outcome of a shutdown fight in advance, and Democrats are the minority. They may not win. Causing chaos for some inscrutable policy provision that will be forgotten in a month is an opportunity wasted. Democrats minimize their risk by seeking demands that will position the losing side as the heroes, for having fought in the first place.

In short, the Democrats need a demand that:

• captures the authoritarian and exceptional nature of Trump’s regime

• focuses on an issue that benefits from increased public attention

• is easily conveyed to the public

• places the Democrats on the side of justice

• is narrow enough to fight over

• communicates something even in defeat

And yesterday, the Supreme Court provided them with exactly the opportunity. In its already-infamous stay in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, it implicitly granted ICE permission to attack and detain Latinos on the basis of little more than being Latino, requiring them to provide proof of citizenship. It provided no reasoning for this decision, and DHS has already celebrated it as a “major victory.” It seems clear the decision will be treated as a blank check for the racialized government harassment of Latinos nationwide, and presages an increase in the number and brutality of brutal ICE raids of Latino communities by armed federal agents.

Worse still, there is no particular reason the decision - which again, contains no reasoning whatsoever - could not be expanded to the profiling of any and all nonwhite Americans, including by targeting Asians with similarly brutal “immigration enforcement” raids, or simply subjecting black Americans to even-more-overt police scrutiny because of their race.

This is the fight Democrats need to take.

Demanding an anti-discrimination provision as a condition of any funding deal meets all of the conditions that congressional Democrats are seeking to satisfy.

It is narrow, focused on a specific abuse of the Trump administration. But it is an abuse that captures a larger and more frightening dimension of what Trump is attempting to build: his desire to turn America into a racialized police state, where minorities are targeted for the crime of being minorities.

It is easily conveyed to the public. “We will not fund the government until you agree to stop arresting Latinos for being Latino” is not a hard demand to grasp, but a hard demand to object to.

It draws attention to a set of abuses by Trump (and the Supreme Court, as a bonus) that need wider public recognition. As the conflict escalates, so does awareness of the underlying objection that Democrats are making. When asked why they’ve chosen this fight, Democrats can point to the endless images of masked men viciously beating delivery drivers or construction workers, pulling men and women into vans. They can point at the US citizens and permanent residents who have been disappeared for months. “We are fighting to ensure that Latinos in the US are not subjected to this kind of tyranny” is a simple, persuasive answer.

It clearly places Democrats on the side of justice. Very few Americans will admit to being in favor of overt discrimination; the idea of detaining someone for their race is anathema to the American self-image and few will admit to favoring it.

And it communicates something even in defeat. Trump’s racist war against America’s Latino population is a high-risk political endeavor. The GOP cannot survive a Latino realignment against it. If American Latinos come to see the GOP as anathema to themselves, as black voters did in previous decades, the party cannot remain nationally viable.

But Trump is doing everything in his power to weaponize the US government against Latino Americans as a group. He is doing this because he and many of his cronies are repulsed by nonwhite people and want an America where being white is the primary criterion for first-class citizenship.

By forcing this fight, Democrats make these battle lines explicit. They can demand the codification of the principle that race is not a valid criterion for detention — and importantly, this would all-but-force the majority of the GOP, which cannot and will not oppose Trump, to take the opposite view. For the GOP, winning a prolonged national fight over whether Latinos could validly be detained for their race, during a government shutdown, with wall-to-wall media attention, is close to a pyrrhic victory. Yes, Trump can continue his terror campaign. But now everyone knows where you stand.

And by the same token, by fighting to protect Latinos from government persecution, Democrats prove to these voters that they are the party of pluralism, the party who sees them as full members of American society. Even in defeat, the fact that they fought can be remembered.

This is the fight Democrats need to take, and the time for them to take it.