Thursday, 1/22/26

Political Theory

The next two items, though illustrated by our present political circumstances, are intended to make points that will continue to be important in new circumstances.

Integrity matters

The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized.

We trusted that presidents would impose accountability on the executive branch. We trusted that presidents wouldn’t abuse their pardon power — or, if they did, then Congress could impeach and convict any offenders. And so we manufactured doctrine after doctrine, year after year, that insulated the executive branch from legal accountability.

It’s hard to overstate how much this web of immunities — combined with the failure of Congress to step up and fulfill its powerful constitutional role — has made the United States vulnerable to authoritarian abuse.

In Federalist No. 51, James Madison wrote some of the most famous words of the American founding. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” Madison wrote. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

David French (shared link)

The Prerogative State

The David French column continues. I broke it in two because I thought it was important, once again, to warn against ever again electing high officials of such low character.

But there’s a specific ramification I hadn’t identified:

[Y]ou can see the emerging dual state in action in Minneapolis right now. In much of the city, life is routine. People create new businesses, enter into contracts, file litigation and make deals as if life were completely normal and the rule of law exists, untainted by our deep political divide.

But if you interact with ICE, suddenly you risk coming up against the full force of the prerogative state. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ICE agent’s video of the fatal encounter between Renee Good and ICE is that it’s plain that Good thinks she’s still in the normative state. She has no idea of the peril she’s in.

She seems relaxed. She even seems to have told the agent that she’s not mad at him. In the normative state, your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands.

But she wasn’t in the normative state. She had crossed over the border to the prerogative state, and in that state you can be shot dead recklessly, irresponsibly and perhaps even illegally, and no one will pay the price. You might even be rewarded with more than $1 million in donations from friends and allies.

David French (shared link)

Competing, revealing, metaphors

In February … I spoke at a gathering of conservatives in London called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship …

As the conference went on, I noticed a contest of metaphors. The true conservatives used metaphors of growth or spiritual recovery. Society is an organism that needs healing, or it is a social fabric that needs to be rewoven. A poet named Joshua Luke Smith said we needed to be the seeds of regrowth, to plant the trees for future generations. His incantation was beatitudinal: “Remember the poor. Remember the poor.”

But others relied on military metaphors. We are in the midst of civilizational war. “They”—the wokesters, the radical Muslims, the left—are destroying our culture. There were allusions to the final epochal battles in The Lord of the Rings. The implication was that Sauron is leading his Orc hordes to destroy us. We are the heroic remnant. We must crush or be crushed.

The warriors tend to think people like me are soft and naive. I tend to think they are catastrophizing narcissists. When I look at Trump acolytes, I see a swarm of Neville Chamberlains who think they’re Winston Churchill.

David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming, April, 2025.

Occasionally, I achieve a complete mind-meld with Brooks. This was one of those times, at least for the first third of his article; after that, he notes some things that I hadn’t noticed until he pointed them out.

Sanctuary City primer

So-called “sanctuary cities” and “sanctuary states” choose not to assist the federal government in finding or deporting illegal aliens, and they have a constitutional right to make that choice.

What does noncooperation look like on the ground? A flash point involves immigration detainer orders, which call on state and local law enforcement agents to transfer into ICE custody illegal aliens who are about to be released from state custody.

…

The administration says that Minnesota is refusing to honor ICE detainers and has released hundreds of illegal aliens “onto the streets” instead of turning them over to ICE. Minnesota denies this accusation and insists that it’s honoring all immigration detainers.

Whichever side is correct, federal courts have held that ICE detainers issued to state agencies are “requests,” not “orders.” …

…

The federal government does have a mechanism for getting states and cities to voluntarily do what they can’t be forced to do. It’s called money. Congress could deny states or cities certain funds unless they abolish their sanctuary policies. There are limits to this strategy: Washington can’t shut off unrelated funds that states or cities need to keep functioning. But immigrant-related federal funding—for example, money devoted to sheltering new, legal immigrants—could presumably be denied to states and cities that maintain sanctuary policies.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump declared that after February 1, “We are not making any payments to sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities.” But while Congress could condition state and local funding on cooperation with ICE, the president’s powers are more limited. Trump has tried this strategy before. Both in his first term and second, he issued executive orders calling for sanctuary states and cities to be denied federal monies. Except in narrow circumstances, courts have not been receptive, holding that without congressional approval, the president could not unilaterally deny states money that Congress had already appropriated for them.

Jed Rubenfeld

The name “Sanctuary City” has always struck me as a bit preening, but the principle that that cities and states are not (normally, though if there are exceptions, I can’t think of one) obliged to assist in enforcement of federal law or in advancement of federal priorities. A non-immigration example is marijuana legalization by the states, whereas marijuana remains illegal in national law. If and when the DEA comes to bust up a dispensary, local officials presumably won’t help, but the principle doesn’t allow them to interfere, either.

Of being a conservative radio talk-show host back in the day

So for years, when someone sent me something that was a conspiracy theory, or false, or just misleading or unfair, I would be able to push back and say “this is not true; there are not bodies stacked up in the Clinton warehouses; no this is not happening over here,” and people would say “thank you, Charlie for setting me straight” …

[I]n 2015 and 2016, what I found, very gradually but very forcefully, was that it became harder and harder to push back; it became harder and harder to give them any information that would change their mind.

And that’s when I realized that we had been too successful, that we had destroyed all the immune system to false information, to this kind of propaganda. And this was kind of an “Oh, shit!” moment for me.

Charlie Sykes, interviewed by Andrew Sullivan.

Morality, Law and Religion

The public should be absolutely concerned about whether a nominee for judicial office will be willing and able to set aside personal preferences. That’s not a challenge just for religious people. That’s a challenge for everyone.

Amy Coney Barrett (italics added)

Pet peeve: The idea that “separation of church and state” requires religious public officials and employees to set aside their religious beliefs when conducting public business. The tacit message in that is either that (1) morality and law are completely separate or (2) that religion is inherently irrational whereas other moral beliefs are not. In truth, there is no neutral, preference‑free judicial standpoint, and the available standpoints all are larded with moral intuitions that either can be accused of irrationality.

Yes, I have advocated in public meetings where I wished that others on “my side” would shut up if all they had to contribute was dubiously-applicable Bible proof-texts. But those kinds of folks never get nominated for any federal bench, and they’d be eaten alive if they were.

Consequences

The yield spread between three-month Treasury bills and 10-year bonds has widened by some 0.6 percentage points since early November. “The Fed may want lower interest rates, but the market ain’t buying it,” said Willian Adler, an Elliott Wave technical analyst.

He warns that the conditions are in place for a serious sell-off across risk assets. It could be similar to the bond rout that spooked Trump after the “liberation day” tariffs.

This rising spread may simply reflect fears of resurgent inflation as front-loaded stimulus from the “one big beautiful bill” juices the economy over the coming months, with the risk of full-blown overheating if Trump hands out $2,000 a head as a pre-electoral bribe.

But it may also be the first sign that America is starting to pay a price for the collapse of political credibility.

(Telegraph UK via John Ellis)

Unpopular opinions

I keep a private list of my truly unpopular opinions – opinions so far outside the Overton Window that I could lose friends if I voiced them.

I review and supplement the list occasionally, but never before have I decided that something doesn’t belong on the list any more (or maybe never belonged on it in the first place). This one probably never belonged on the list:

1. Subsidies for pro sports, including stadium construction, are damnable boondoggles. I would vote against every one of them until the franchise-owning billionaires ran me out of office.

While I’m at it, these too can come off the list:

2. Abolitions I supported that may well have hurt America:

The military draft Politicians who have anything to do with war policy should have skin in the game, even if it’s the skin of their descendants.
The Fairness Doctrine. We opened Pandora’s box before cable TV and the internet obliterated it. I don’t see a way back to sanity through reinstating the policy.

While I’m on a roll, here’s one that’s never been on the list:

3. The states should stop running primary elections. Neither major party is worth the powder to blow it up. Let them run their own elections or go back to “smoke-filled rooms” (which incidentally yielded better candidates than crackpot “base voters” have been yielding).

Logic mincing

Q: Which is better: a ham sandwich or complete happiness in life?
A: A ham sandwich, of course! Nothing is better than complete happiness in life and a ham sandwich is better than nothing.

Something must be done!
This is something.
This must be done!

Shorts

No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom. The assertion that “foul is useful and fair is not“ is the antithesis of wisdom. (E.F. Shumacher) Small Is Beautiful is a classic for good reason.
The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency. (Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, citing the president’s authority to impose tariffs in an economic emergency, arguing that America’s supposed need to control Greenland is a national emergency.)
The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized. (David French)
The pervasiveness of legal sports gambling can make an undefeated season and a 6-point victory in the national championship game feel like a loss if “the margin” was 7.5. (Moi)
At some point, we’ll reach the bottom of this dystopian populist abomination, but no one thinks we’re there yet, do they? (Nick Catoggio)
“The Trump Denmark letter is his Biden debate moment,” one Twitter user claimed.
Donald Trump is a peacock among the dull buzzards of American politics. (Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium).
A clown with a flame thrower still has a flamethrower. (Charlie Sykes to Andrew Sullivan)
When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
TikTok is still a danger. America no longer cares.
The souvenir is a fetish object that substitutes for the finite experience of the destination. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Sunday evening

“We took the freedom of speech away …”

At the round table … he diverted to a tangent about flag burning, saying he had instituted a “one-year penalty for inciting riots.”

“We took the freedom of speech away because that’s been through the courts and the courts said, you have freedom of speech,” Mr. Trump said. “But what has happened is when they burn a flag, it agitates and irritates crowds.”

Charlie Savage, Trump Baselessly Claims He ‘Took the Freedom of Speech Away’ From Flag Burners.

Trump’s word salads are incoherent, but I think he’s saying that he recognizes a heckler’s veto on flag-burning, like the one he tried on Colin Kaepernick for kneeling.

Sorry, Donnie: Street v. New York (1969).

Quick, easy, and stupid pigeon-holing

Using the old Left-Right duality distorts our political thinking. Consider what counts as “Leftist” today: Open immigration, transgenderism, antiracism, gay marriage, opposition to Israel’s incursion in Gaza, violence against conservatives and Christians, unbending support for Ukraine, pro-choice, anti-Trumpism.

Once these positions are grouped as “Left,” anyone who holds one “Left” position is labeled a “Leftist.” If you have reservations about Trump (as I do), question Trump’s immigration policies, believe African Americans have suffered and still suffer injustices, or express sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza, you’ll get lumped in with transgenders and homosexuals, rioters and assassins.

…

Everybody but everybody condemns “third way” Christian political agendas. That condemnation is childish, first because it’s utterly unhistorical. The specific contours of the American Left and Right are entirely contingent, constantly shifting political outlooks and moods. They don’t exhaust our political options.

Peter Leithart

Losing the real storyline

Ross Douthat is definitely one of my favorite journalists these days, but, bless his heart, whenever I see a column about Donald Trump’s “policies,” I get the feeling that the author is trying too hard to make him a normal President.

Setting the record straight on “sanctuary cities”

I have very high regard for professor J Budziszewski, who writes on natural law and blogs at the Underground Thomist. But his latest post blows it, not because of illogic, but because of a badly mistaken premises. I write because his mistake is very wide-spread.

The topic is so-called “sanctuary cities.” Here’s Budziszewski’s false premise:

So called sanctuary cities … claim … that … any locality may invalidate federal laws within its territory. This isn’t about the form of the federal union. It is a rejection of federal union.

Sanctuary cities claim no power to invalidate federal law. What they claim is the power to refuse cooperation in the enforcement of federal laws (typically involving immigration) that they don’t like (or even, during the reign of terror of Trump 2.0, if they don’t like the way the feds are enforcing the law via jack-booted, masked goons).

I don’t want to get into the weeds too far, but:

States are not obliged to cooperate with the federal government in enforcing federal law. “Commandeering” is the term frequently used to describe federal efforts to force cooperation.
Cities, as subdivisions of the state and as entities that normally have a degree of home rule to determine their financial priorities, are not necessarily obliged to cooperate with the federal government in enforcing federal law. This only becomes controversial when cities engage in grandstanding like “sanctuary city” declarations.
Non-cooperation isn’t the same as interference, which would be dubious at best.
States may forbid cities to withhold cooperation with the feds because cities are not in themselves sovereigns. Some states have purportedly done so, though laws forbidding sanctuary cities could easily stumble over their own sort of grandstanding.
Feds probably can retaliate by denying some or all federal aid to sanctuary cities.

I have not been a fan of sanctuary cities because they made a big, virtue-signaling deal out of what could be done quietly. The tactics of ICE under Trump is unlikely to change my mind, though even then I’m inclined to favor quiet non-cooperation. Trump, after all, is itching to declare insurrection and to impose martial law, and virtue-signaling declarations of non-cooperation provide a readier excuse than passive-aggression.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, 7/22/25

L’affaire Coldplay

If there’s a truly compelling reason not to normalize shaming as a global, always-on public spectator sport, it’s not that it degrades the humanity of the shamed; it’s not even the trite “who among us has not canoodled at a Coldplay concert with his sidepiece” justification. It’s simply this: When we take joy in the distress and ruination of other people, we make monsters of ourselves.

Kat Rosenfield

Apart from taking joy in distress and ruination, I have no reason to seek out the mêmes and other drollery about the ColdPlay kisscam. This, though, came to me unbidden:

Who’s killing the liberal arts?

An unpleasant truth has emerged in [the University of] Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.

For those who do care to see liberal learning thrive on our campuses, the work my colleagues and I did at Tulsa should be a model. How did we do it? We created an intentional community where our students lived in the same dorm and studied the same texts. We shared wisdom, virtue and friendship as our goals. When a university education is truly rooted in the liberal arts, it can cultivate the interior habits of freedom that young people need to live well. Material success alone cannot help a person who lacks the ability to form a clear, informed vision of what is true, good and beautiful. But this vision is something our students both want and need.

Jennifer Frey, This Is Who’s Really Driving the Decline in Interest in Liberal Arts Education

Voting consequentially

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ can teach us about U.S. politics, Christianity and power

I met Jessica some years ago at a conference where she was the Protestant keynoter. We spoke a bit because she was teaching at a University that I don’t even bother putting on my resumé despite spending three semesters there in the very late 60s. I dare say her scholarship was an order of magnitude higher than any of the mediocrities teaching when I was there.

Even the one prof to whom I owe a debt of gratitude earned that by a pretty banal observation that just happened to be what I needed at the moment — and I can’t even remember his name because at the time I didn’t realize how consequential that moment would prove to be.

Shorts

We’ve been telling kids for 15 years to code. Learn to code, we said. Yeah well, AI is coming for the coders. They’re not coming for the welders. (Mike Rowe)
I grew up in San Francisco, walking with my family by the Golden Gate Bridge. I still remember the thick and iconic chain railing that gave the place a sense of distinctiveness. Now the chains are gone, and they’ve been replaced by a soulless metal railing that’s colder than a hospital waiting room. … This is how a culture loses its charm: slowly, quietly. (David Perell).

Quotes via Andrew Sullivan

The convoluted feelings behind the right to be killed

Let us first note that the demand for legal assisted suicide addresses not the legality of killing oneself, but the legality of assisting others to kill themselves. The suicidee (patient? victim?) is secondary. The primary object of the right-to-die movement is the living.

People may kill themselves at any time, without permission or even much pain. Even where it is not legally permitted, suicide, once accomplished, is beyond the reach of legal consequence.

… We must … focus on the desire for someone else to do the killing. Alongside fear of a botched attempt or leaving behind a mess for others, I suggest that the desire for assisted suicide is a perverse expression of the need for recognition. People who wish to kill themselves also want their choice to be socially approved.

… Its advocates say they wish to die with dignity, and then they ask to be euthanized like pets. … [T]he “right” to assisted suicide can only be the right not to be recognized as a human being.

When black Americans were struggling for civil and human rights—for the recognition of their humanity— they arrived at the profound conviction that it was dignified to risk death in that struggle. Assisted suicide represents a perverse inversion: a renunciation of dignity, the demand that one’s humanity go unrecognized. A society that honors that demand will not, in the end, recognize the humanity of anyone.

Matthew Burdette, The Right to Be Killed

From “worst of the worst” to “anybody will do”

Earlier this month, 25-year-old George Retes was arriving for work at a Southern California marijuana farm when federal agents circled his vehicle, broke his window, and sprayed him with tear gas and pepper spray before taking him into custody. Retes, among the more than 360 people to be arrested in the large-scale immigration raid, went on to spend three days in a Los Angeles detention center.

The problem? Retes is a U.S. citizen and Army veteran, and was not charged with breaking any laws. “I want everyone to know what happened. This doesn’t just affect one person,” he told reporters following his release, sharing plans to sue for wrongful detention. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a veteran or you serve this country. They don’t care. They’re just there to fill a quota.”

…

It’s now been six months since President Donald Trump entered office with a promise to remove “the worst of the worst” from American soil. And indeed, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have shot up as illegal border crossings—and, consequently, detentions by Customs and Border Protection—wane. Yet a significant portion of ICE detainees have no criminal record aside from being in the country illegally, with the Trump administration’s sweeping roundups seemingly targeting individuals on a more or less random basis.

The Morning Dispatch

I don’t particularly care if Trump deports everyone who is in the US illegally, though I doubt that any President will do that as long as we want people to do unattractive jobs for “dirt cheap” — including, I suspect, at Trump’s own Casinos and resorts. On the other hand, I’m not eager for him to do it.

What I definitely object to is the apparatus of terror, with masked ICE agents more-or-less indiscriminately grabbing and gassing people who just might help them meet quota. Or even doing that more discriminatingly, come to think of it.

Dreaming of Europe. And waking up.

Whenever I’m down; whenever I’m blue; whenever I think e.e. cummings retired the poet trophy with one poem; especially whenever I wonder whether it’s too late to become a naturalized Frenchman (or Italian, or …); I should by all means remember this: more Europeans die of heat death—largely due to lack of air-conditioning—than Americans die from gunshot wounds. (Factoid via Tyler Cowen)

I’m not so stupid as to think this is the ultimate answer to whether we’re the greatest country in the world. But even if it’s the best argument we’ve got, it’s not nothing.

It was and is ever so

You can take this to the bank: If the New York Times notices the Buddha, the enlightened one has already left town.

Ted Gioia, The Ten Warning Signs

Two political items

Jonathan Rauch had Trump 2.0 pegged years in advance

In August, 2022, Jonathan Rauch delineated what would happen if America elected Trump again: We Don’t Have to Speculate About Trump’s Next Term

I thought at the time that he was uncharacteristically shrill, even if he was right. But I came across it again, and he was remarkably accurate.

The (In)Effective Executive

President Donald Trump has a couple of problems when it comes to being an effective executive, the top two being: 1) He is an ignoramus and 2) He insists on surrounding himself with yes-men who are too afraid to tell him that he is an ignoramus.

Kevin D. Williamson

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

Immigration

The firehose of commentary on last Thursday’s birthright citizenship/nationwide injunction Supreme Court argument is now more a squirt gun. But I’ve had two very smart takes clipped for days now, and I think it’s time to get them out to readers:

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson put it well in [last Thursday’s] argument:

[T]he real concern, I think, is that your argument [meaning that of the federal government] seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a “catch me if you can” kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights.

Justice Kagan says let’s assume for the purpose of this that you’re wrong about the merits, that the government is not allowed to do this under the Constitution. And yet it seems to me that your argument says we get to keep on doing it until everyone who is potentially harmed by it figures out how to… file a lawsuit, hire a lawyer, et cetera. And I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law

This is especially true when, as in the birthright citizenship case, there are hundreds of thousands of victims of the government’s illegal policies, and many of them are poor or otherwise unable to readily file a lawsuit.

Ilya Somin, A Simple Defense of Nationwide Injunctions

Only the Supreme Court, the Administration asserts, can declare the policy unconstitutional as to persons who are not party to any lawsuit, and only the Supreme Court can enjoin the government from revoking the citizenship of persons similarly-situated to Able, Baker, and Charlie but located in other judicial districts.

It’s not a totally unreasonable position: only the Supreme Court has truly nationwide jurisdiction, and it alone should be permitted to decide “the law of the land,” not some district court in Texas or Massachusetts or Colorado.

But Justice Kagan identified the fatal flaw in the argument:

If [the government] wins this challenge and we say that there is no nationwide injunction and it all has to be through individual cases, then I can’t see how an individual who is not being treated equivalently to the individual who brought the case would have any ability to bring the substantive question to us…. In a case like this, the government has no incentive to bring this case to the Supreme Court because it’s not really losing anything. It’s losing a lot of individual cases, which still allow it to enforce its EO against the vast majority of people to whom it applies. . . . I’m suggesting that in a case in which the government is losing constantly, there’s nobody else who’s going to appeal; they’re all winning! It’s up to you, [the government], to decide whether to take this case to us. If I were in your shoes, there is no way I’d approach the Supreme Court with this case.

Which is exactly what happened here! …

… paradoxically enough, the more egregious the executive’s conduct – the more obviously and incontrovertibly unconstitutional it is – the more likely it is that it will lose every case, which will mean that the question of its constitutionality never gets to the Supreme Court for a conclusive ruling.

Clever, no? Another seam, or fault-line, in the web of constitutional protections and the separation of powers has been exposed.

I regard this as a fatal objection to a rule prohibiting non-party injunctions in all cases because it fails what we might call the Hitler Test: if we are ever so unfortunate as to have a president who wanted to do Hitler-ian things, would this rule help to prevent that from happening or not? It’s not a terribly high bar, but a rule prohibiting non-party injunctions in all cases doesn’t make it over.

David Post, Nationwide Injunctions and the Rule of Law

I have almost no doubt that the Trump administration will never bring the merits of its absurd birthright citizenship theories to the Supreme Court so long as it can continue acting on them against everyone who lacks the moxie or the wherewithal to file a lawsuit and get an injunction preventing enforcement against them personally. It will feel just fine if 10,000 successful plaintiffs can’t be deported so long as hundreds of thousands or millions can be plausibly threatened because they haven’t sued.

By the way: there are almost no honest politicians in the immigration fights. Everyone knows how to reduce illegal immigration to almost nothing: Congress must make e-Verify mandatory. They won’t do it because the economy relies on the mostly-menial labor of illegal immigrants, but they will bluff and bluster. And I’d give you pretty good odds that Donald J. Trump won’t deport them all for that reason, too. There will be just enough performative cruelty to keep MAGA happy.

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.

A sense of foreboding

9. In the final weeks of the election, Donald Trump and JD Vance are blaming a broad array of the nation’s ills on immigrants, betting that doing so will help them win over voters angry about the uptick in illegal border crossings that has dogged President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for much of their term. The Republican presidential nominee and former president has long held sealing the southern border as his signature issue, but he is now drawing a direct line from immigration to more of society’s ills than ever, casting himself as the only one who can fix it. Trump and Vance, his running mate and the junior senator from Ohio, have alleged migrants are to blame for unaffordable home prices, high unemployment, infectious diseases, rising car insurance, unsafe elections and, perhaps most infamously, missing house pets. (Source: wsj.com)
10. More than 660,000 criminal foreign nationals identified to be deported by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement are freely living in communities nationwide. Among them are those convicted or charged with violent crimes, including homicide, sexual assault and kidnapping, according to information released in response to a congressional request. ICE was requested to provide information about the number of noncitizens on its docket for removal who are convicted or charged with a crime. As of July 21, 2024, “there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket, which includes those detained by ICE, and on the agency’s non-detained docket. Of those, 435,719 are convicted criminals, and 226,847 have pending criminal charges,” ICE Deputy Director Patrick Lechleitner said. This includes criminal foreign nationals convicted of, or charged with, homicide (14,914), sexual assault (20,061), assault (105,146), kidnapping (3,372), and commercialized sexual offenses, including sex trafficking (3,971). (Source: baltimoresun.com)
11. More than 13,000 immigrants convicted of homicide — either in the United States or abroad — are living outside of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, according to data ICE provided to Congress earlier this week. The immigrants are part of ICE’s “non-detained” docket, meaning the agency has some information on the immigrants and they have pending immigration cases in the U.S., but they are not currently in detention either because they are not prioritized for detention, they are serving time in a jail or prison for their crimes, or because ICE cannot find them, three law enforcement officials said. Two of the officials said it is not known how many are incarcerated because ICE is not always privy to that data from state and local law enforcement agencies. The 13,099 immigrants convicted of homicide living in the U.S. may have never had contact with ICE, the two law enforcement officials said. (Source: nbcnews.com)

John Ellis News Items

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Saturday, 7/23/22

Jordan Peterson

Beloved or reviled, there seems to be little in between when it comes to the Canadian psychologist.

Sage Showers, A Christian Woman’s Remarks on Jordan Peterson – Juicy Ecumenism

Well, that makes me special: I’m an occupant of the "little in between." I pray for Peterson because he is so consequential (as I characterized Billy Graham a day or two ago), and seemingly for good, but I’m not certain he is great or good.

Why am I not certain? Partly because I’ve seen too many heroes knocked forever off their pedestals when some secret came out or some latent flaw was made manifest.

Such guardedness may come from being (1) sentient and (2) 73 years old.

Life in six words

… the joke about the man who walks into the house with his hands full of dog turds and tells his wife, “Look what I almost stepped in,” which sums up much of life in one sentence.

Garrison Keillor

Monster education endowments

Harvard is very upset about paying any taxes: Those no-good Republicans in 2017 passed a tax on universities with mega-high endowments—those whose investment assets are more than $500,000 in assets per student. It impacts about 100 schools. Harvard, which as a nonprofit pays no federal taxes, has an endowment of more than $53 billion. Under the tax, Harvard has to pay a 1.4% tax on net investment income. The school is apparently lobbying Democrats in Congress hard right now.

Nellie Bowles. I did the math, and Harvard’s $53 billion would subject it to tax unless its enrollment climbed above 106,000!

I knew that taxing monster endowments was a desiderata of a few on the Right, but I hadn’t known that it passed.

I love immigration; it’s immigrants I can’t stand!

Wait, New Yorkers, I thought you wanted an open border? After asylum seekers from Arizona and Texas started showing up on buses in Washington, D.C., and New York City, our very welcoming friends on the east coast began freaking out. Here I thought we all agreed on an open border! And I’m pretty sure the consensus was that all complaints from southern states about a strained social safety net and the need for federal help were just that old Texas racism. Now, NYC mayor Eric Adams, citing the strain on the social safety net, has this to say: “We urgently need federal support.” The D.C. mayor’s Muriel Bowser also wants the federal government involved. “We have called on the federal government to work across state lines to prevent people from really being tricked into getting on buses.”

Nellie Bowles

Sully Synopsis

Andrew Sullivan leads Friday with a convincing, and thus depressing, account of how Putin stands to win in Ukraine. Then he moves on to other things.

Backlash to gay civil rights?

One more thing. We are not living through a huge, belated backlash to gay civil rights. The polling and the politics show a majority consensus on the established civil rights of gay and trans people. What we are living through is a potent reaction, laced, alas, with resurgent homophobia and transphobia, to a new and utterly different campaign to abolish the sex binary in biology, law, education and society. That campaign has nothing to do with civil rights for gays or for trans people.

It is about the indoctrination of children and the abolition of women, rooted in an illiberal ideology that rejects the entire concept of civil rights as a mere mask for white, cis-hetero oppression. It rejects the very premise of a same-sex marriage, because it denies the reality of binary sex. And it is led by those who strongly opposed the goal of marriage equality — the queer left — in the past.

How dare she leave the reservation!

“So far this summer the far left has referred to me as: Far Right Latina, Not The Real Deal, Breakfast Taco, Unqualified opponent for being born in Mexico, Miss Frijoles. This is what happens when you stray from their narrative and start to think for yourself!” – Mayra Flores, the first congresswoman born in Mexico.

A case for proofreading before posting

“This is misinformation about monkeypox. The outbreak is occurring almost entirely among men who have sex with me,” – Benjamin Ryan, typo-wounded science reporter.

WordGunplay

Performative insecurity

A high-level-of-generality description of today’s gun culture — open carry and such.

It feels a bit Freudian to me, but we are living in a war of slogans (along with other wars), so that’s fair.

(H/T @rcrackley on micro.blog)

Vice signaling

An alternative description of today’s gun culture, care of Mennonite @toddgrotenhuis on micro.blog.

I think I prefer it. It’s less specific than performative insecurity, being applicable to vices other than preening gun displays, but it loses the Freudian snark.

Brandishing culture

@JMaxB’s refinement on the offerings of @toddgrotenhuis and @rcrackley. I intend to keep "vice signaling" and "brandishing culture," "performative insecurity" falling away as a spent catalyst. (Now if I can only remember the verb "brandish" more reliably.)

It’s a long way to Heaven dear Lord,
it’s a hard row to hoe
And I don’t know if I’ll make it dear Lord
but I sure won’t make it alone.

SmallTown Heroes, Long Road, from their one-and-so-far-only "byzantine bluegrass" album Lo, the Hard Times.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.