Vincent Law is impressed with this new Trump ad.

Needless to say, I’m not convinced that Trump is officially /ourguy/. We’re in an election year and it is normal for the Republicans to release these red meat campaign ads. They’ve had a year now to “build the wall” and all they have to show for it are the prototypes that have been gathering dust in the San Diego desert while border crossings have surged back to Obama levels. The ad also features one of the Angel Moms who Trump has screwed over by offering amnesty to DREAMers.

Why didn’t they build the wall after the 2016 presidential election? The wall was the defining issue of the Trump campaign. The answer is that they used the political capital and the budget reconciliation process to do healthcare reform and tax cuts. The House passed Kate’s Law, the No Sanctuary for Criminals Act and $1.6 billion in border wall funding in 2017. All three measures have sat in the Senate gathering dust while Kate Steinle’s murderer walked free in San Francisco. The same is true of the RAISE Act which Tom Cotton has introduced twice now. It has also gone nowhere.

In order to get through the Senate, these bills need either 60 votes to get past the filibuster or it needs to be scrapped in favor of a 51 vote majority to pass legislation. Neither party has had a 60 vote Senate majority since the 95th Congress from 1977-1979. In between partisan Democrats and cucked Republicans, the MAGA agenda is spinning wheels in the Senate.

Consider the hurdles to reforming the system:

1.) If your candidate wins, he can always be bought off by a big donor.

2.) If your candidate wins, the party leadership which answers to the donor class sets the agenda and can ignore your priorities.

3.) In order to pass major legislation without the budget reconciliation process, you need a House majority and 60 votes in the Senate to get past the filibuster.

4.) In the rare event all that happens, your reform has to get past all the federal judges.

5.) If your candidate wins, he has to get past the opaque opposition of the Deep State.

The system is hopelessly dysfunctional. It wasn’t built for this period of extreme polarization:

This is the “democratic process” we boast to the rest of the world about. It is a rigged system that is virtually 100% insulated from the will of voters. Administrations come and go. Elections change almost nothing. It is a system which protects entrenched elites and their policy preferences.