David Brooks:
I’m still in pre-panic mode. I haven’t panicked yet. I thought the Fauci, Bolton, and Pompeo, taking away the security detail was small and vicious and ugly.
There are other things I liked. They reformed NEPA, which is the National Environmental Policy Act, which is a Nixon era thing that got expanded under Carter. And that really was, these are environmental regulations that really did restrict home building. They restrict green energy plants. They restrict manufacturing.
And so one of the reasons we have high housing prices is because it’s very hard to build in a lot of places, especially places like California, because of NEPA and other things. Kamala Harris said she was going to deregulate. I’m not sure she could have been able to do it, but Trump did it. And so we have much greater grounds to hopefully the home building.
And housing can be affordable for young people. So that’s a very positive thing that Trump people did. On immigration, I obviously don’t approve. He’s doing what he said. And I understand why people who are undocumented in this country, the 13 to 15 million are scared, terrified out of their minds. I totally understand that.
But it should be said that the way politicians talk about immigration and the way policy experts talk about it is totally different. They can talk about mass deportation. But we have 750 immigration judges for a country of 330 million. Some of these judges have backlogs of like six years, eight years.
Who’s going to pick up people? The military, the National Guard, they don’t want to do this. They have a recruiting crisis already. So the changes that are going to come on the immigration front are going to be a lot slower and more drawn out than a lot of people may think.
