Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson. You can follow the show on Twitter and Blue Sky at CitationsPod. Facebook, Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com slash Citations Needed podcast. We are 100% listener-funded, so all your support is so incredibly appreciated.

We do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes of Citations

Needed. And today, Adam, we want to talk about how the Democratic Party is suggesting

so-called reforms to the Department of Homeland Security and border patrol, things that can be done

in the wake of ice killing people on the street, of destroying families, of kidnapping kids.

The Democrats have a plan to speak to this outrage, and it comes in the form, as you note in a new piece of a kente cloth moment.

You wrote recently on the column, which is columnblog.com, this article, Senate Democrats,

DHS reforms shaping up to be another kneeling kente cloth moment. So Adam, let's talk about

what has been proposed and what it kind of

means in terms of how the democrats are positioning themselves as the quote unquote opposition

to the administration well i want to back up here do a little bit of ontology because i think that

when leftists criticize liberals for being too incremental or too weak or to whatever you want to name it, I think some people, they roll their eyes and they say, well, you're not satisfied unless we abolish ICE or abolish everything.

First, they came for the powerless opposition party that funds the overtly fascist party.

Well, I'm trying to sort of pin down what we mean by insufficient reform, right? Because I think that there's a bit of what the ancient Greeks called Sorties paradox, which is if I have a grain of sand, at some point that grain of sand becomes a heap of sand, but a grain of sand in and of itself cannot make a heap. So at what point in putting grains of sand together does something become a heap, right? When does it become a hill? When does it become a mountain? How do you define significant reform, right? Major reforms. People rely on these weasel words to kind of convey meaning to what they're saying. Now, what I argue in my piece is that the reforms that are on offer, which will be watered down in the event anyway, right, are not meaningful reforms.

That is an ideological claim that I don't have anything to really pin to.

It's other than the fact that, and I go through the reforms, and we will go through the reforms

and talk about why we think they're not meaningful.

And this leads to the next question, which is what would be the ask?

So in general, Democrats approach negotiations, such as they exist, such as they're in good faith, which is what would be the ask. So in general, Democrats approach negotiations, such as they

exist, such as they're in good faith, which is something we're assuming for the sake of argument.

They start from a non-maximalist position. They start from a already fully formed compromise

position. Republicans, in general, start from, especially in Congress, especially MAGA Republicans,

...