Invasion and Insurrection

The Rule of Magic Words

Some words are magical. Upon uttering them, you are blessed with an ancient, profane power. Two systems work this way: high fantasy magic and the Western law. 

A centrist Republican myth has been that if one party uses power, the party will copy them. In the past few decades, that myth has mostly been busted. Democrats kept taking power while Republicans didn't copy them at all. Four days ago, that changed.

The Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, invoked the self defense clause of the constitution by calling illegal immigration "an invasion". I'm not here to examine the precise pedantry of what constitutes an invasion, but to explain why Greg insists so much on using an oddly specific phrase.

The long story short is if you change the definition, you change the law. If you call illegal immigration an invasion, then you get the same powers that you would in Red Dawn.

Greg's creative new definition is a new spin on an old tactic. Politicians, mostly left wing politicians trying to expand the scope of government power, have been using this tactic for decades. Richard Hanania wrote an entire book about how leftist lawyers expanded the definition of racism dozens of times by fiat, either using the courts or executive agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. More recently, the push is to redefine climate change as a "national emergency". Left wing media called the Jan 6th riot an "insurrection" specifically to give left-wing judges the signal to disqualify Trump from ballots, despite him never being convicted or even charged with the legal standard for insurrection.

What Greg Abbott is doing is no different. Of course, the left-wing propaganda machine will insist that Abbott is violating some sacred norm that Democrats would never trample over. This is simply noise. Greg Abbott should turn their volume to zero. At the end of the day, the most important check on government is whether politicians can win elections. When it comes to climate, even left-wing writers such as Matt Yglesias point out that Biden's agenda is extremely unpopular. On the order, the optics of Biden using physical force to override Texas' policy is a political winner.