Democracy is a Kitchen Table Issue

Photo by Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via NPR.

From the TPM Morning Memo, a little vignette of presidential lobbying:

During an interview with CNBC this morning, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) alluded to an assurance he received from Trump — that the president would fix whatever issues Republicans had with the legislation he wants them to pass via executive action.

“We met with President Trump, and, you know, he did a masterful job of laying out how we could improve it, how he could use his chief executive office, use things to make the bill better,” Norman said Thursday morning. “We accepted the bill as is. What’s different is President Trump is going to use his powers.”

Oh well, in that case. If he's going to use "his powers". Superstrength? X-ray vision? Spidey sense? Can he grow instant wolverine claws? 

I imagine he was talking about Article II of the US Constitution, of which he said during his first term, "I have an Article II that lets me do whatever I want." That's legally as ridiculous as it sounds—the specification of the "executive power" in the oath doesn't really mention powers so much as duties (to "faithfully execute the Office, and "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution), and the only explicit powers are those of making treaties, naming officers, and issuing pardons, all but the last with the advice and consent of the Senate. There's not even anything in Article II on the veto—that's in Article I, as a check on the Congress, as Article II has a congressional check on the presidency, in the procedure allowing them to be impeached and tried for "high crimes and misdemeanors". The way it really works in the system of checks and balances has traditionally been that each Branch can do whatever another Branch can't stop them from doing—Congress can stop the president through the impeachment process, the Supreme Court can stop him (if somebody sues) by examining the legality of his behavior, including whether it's constitutionally permitted or not. It's infuriating that we should even have to be talking about this, as if there were some possible universe in which Trump's assertion could be correct. But here we are.

Election Eve

 

It's finally starting to look really possible that Zohran Mamdani will win the Democratic primary in the New York mayoral race: in its final poll before Election Day tomorrow, Emerson College's simulation of the rank choice outcome has him winning, for the first time, in the eighth round, 52-48. It's a nice illustration of how the system works, with the lowest-performing candidates dropped out and the votes distributed to voters' second and third and so on choices, until one of the candidates crosses the 50% mark:

I had a sense of how something like this could happen; Cuomo, running especially on name recognition, is mostly a first choice, more often of voters who didn't rank anybody else—he has fewer votes to pick up in the subsequent rounds. Mamdani, attractive but seen as a bit of a gamble, gets a lot of third and especially second choices behind candidates seen as safer, Adrienne Adams and Brad Lander, the best qualified by conventional measures. I can see my own vote (in the end I decided to rank Lander first) moving into Mamdani's column in the last two rounds. In that big jump putting Mamdani over the top, you can see how the cross-endorsement strategy was supposed to work.

I Know Everything

 

Drawing by Patrick Chappatte/Globecartoon.com, Switzerland/CagleCartoons.com 2018, via Washington Post.

David Rothkopf may be the most respectable person coming out to say this, and he says it well:

as much as we may condemn the actions of the regime in the Islamic Republic and feel its government is a threat to the stability of the region, Israel started this war. Furthermore, Israel started it not for the reason it gave—the imminent threat posed by the Iranian nuclear program. That threat has existed for many years and U.S. intelligence did not feel Iran had made any notable new strides recently. Rather, Netanyahu decided to strike for three reasons. 1.) He remains in political jeopardy and war has proven an effective means of helping him to stay in power. 2.) Rather than fearing an Iranian breakthrough on nukes, he feared one on a potential nuclear deal. He opposed the one negotiated under Obama. He goaded Trump into abandoning it. And he was deeply troubled that Trump was now advocating re-entering just such an agreement. 3.) He has made the conflict between Israel and Iran a centerpiece of his politics throughout his career. He is Ahab. It is his Great White Whale.

Of which point (1) is the most obvious to me, as you might expect, and the most offensive to the respectable, because of the moral implications that that is the kind of person the Israeli prime minister is, OK with killing a substantial number of human beings (something like 600 in Iran as of yesterday, including at least 239 civilians, and 24 in Israel, under Iran's retaliatory strikes, which seem to have been more effective than usual), as the price of office, and escaping prison in his corruption cases. That's exactly how I've seen him, though, for the last 18 months of slaughtering Gazan civilians (something like 50,000 at this point) and abandoning the kidnap victims from Israel still held in Gaza, so I'm not especially shocked.

Point (2), on the possibility of a US deal reviving the 2015 JCPOA or something like it, in which Iran would stop enriching uranium in return for some sanctions relief, hasn't been taken very seriously by the punditry at large, though newspapers loyally reported the five rounds of talks between the two countries in April and May, of which the last, held May 23 in Rome, was described by the Americans as "constructive—we made further progress" and by the Iranians as "one of the most professional rounds of negotiation," though they held out little hope of an agreement any time soon. 

New York Note

@zohran_k_mamdani

Los neoyorquinos latinos son el corazón de esta ciudad y merecen un alcalde que les hable directamente. Este vídeo es un esfuerzo a presentar nuestra visión a la comunidad latina, para que podamos trabajar juntos para construir la ciudad que todos merecemos. Latino New Yorkers are the heart of this city — and they deserve a mayor who will speak to them directly. This video is an effort to introduce our vision to the Latino community, so we can work together to build the city we all deserve.

♬ original sound - Zohran Mamdani

This is pretty irritating, from the New York Times Editorial Board keeping its promise not to endorse any candidates in local elections any more:

Given those polls [showing Cuomo and Mamdani dominating over the other nine candidates] the crucial choice may end up being where, if at all, voters decide to rank Mr. Cuomo or Mr. Mamdani. We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots. His experience is too thin, and his agenda reads like a turbocharged version of Mr. de Blasio’s dismaying mayoralty. As for Mr. Cuomo, we have serious objections to his ethics and conduct, even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.

For any voters tempted to leave both off their ballots, it is important to understand that this decision would be tantamount to expressing no preference between the two. It is similar to voting for neither major-party candidate in a traditional election. 

"We refuse to choose, because it's beneath our awesome dignity, but if you follow our example you're a moral coward. Also, you should choose the ethically challenged Cuomo." As they make clear by devoting three paragraphs to Zohran Mamdani's shortcomings, condemning his ideology, policy ideas, and inexperience, and the way he reminds them of de Blasio, and just one to Andrew Cuomo's—the issue of his weird though probably not criminal mistreatment of women, over which he resigned from the state governorship four years ago, on the advice of this same editorial board, which now seems to think that was less serious a fault than advocating a minimum wage hike or free buses, as Mamdani does.

In the first place, the argument is bullshit. It's a rank-choice vote among 11 candidates, and it is not similar to voting for neither major-party candidate in a traditional election. With the much smaller (and better informed) turnout you expect in a primary, and only Democrats voting in New York's closed-primary system, it's easy to imagine one or two of the other candidates emerging if enough people decided not to rank the two frontrunners, and if the frontrunners are as bad as the board seems to think they are, that's what the board ought to call for, instead of using this backhanded technique of pushing us in one direction.

Then, Cuomo's ethical failings aren't limited to the #MeToo moments that helped to drive him out of office. In the middle of his first term as governor, in 2013, he named what's called a "Moreland Commission" in New York to fight corruption in state government, then abruptly shut it down halfway through its 18-month appointed lifetime. It later became apparent that Cuomo and his aides had never really allowed it to function, as The Times reported:

Send the Marines

I'd been wondering if Hegseth was freelancing, volunteering out of the blue when he said on Saturday he was ready to deploy Marines to Los Angeles, the project sounding so off the wall, even more illegal than the National Guard proposal, and I had trouble imagining they'd allow Trump to call him up and ask for them. "Hey Pete! They're burning down Los Angeles! Send the Marines!" And indeed, on the Sunday, Trump didn't seem to have heard of it, suggesting, as he often does when asked about some abuse that he hasn't thought about, that he hadn't made any decisions but definitely could if he felt like it: 

When asked what the threshold is for sending in the Marines, Mr. Trump said Sunday: "The bar is what I think it is."

If I'm reading that right, he was saying the only consideration would be the presidential will. When he found out how he felt, what he wanted to happen, that would be the thing that would happen.

Wall Street Journal (gift link) confirms what you probably have been suspecting, that the ICE push over last week in Southern California, where they raided garment factories and warehouses, car washes (nabbing customers as well as workers) and at least one day care center (where they grabbed a mom dropping off her four-year-old), climaxing with Friday's and Saturday's assaults on Home Depot parking lots in Westlake and Paramount, was engineered by Reichskommissar Stephen Miller as part of a general strategic shift away from trying to deport gang members and criminals to deporting any unauthorized immigrants at all.

The somewhat amusing part is that it was motivated by jealousy, of Joe Biden:

Belated Memorial Day

Philipse Manor War Memorial, Yonkers, New York, via.

David Brooks writes about the thing that made him angriest last week, something he says William F. Buckley, Jr. advised him to do when he first entered into punditry, but doesn't often get the chance, because it's so rare that anything makes him angry at all, but apparently he did this time ("The Trump World Idea That's Pushed Me Over the Edge"):

Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”

This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth.

I think we can assume "communing with my phone" means "googling desperately, having forgotten for the past three days that Memorial Day existed, for something I could hang a belated Memorial Day column on". I'm not sure what "the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism" is (postliberalism with accordions and a bubble machine metonymically representing Champagne?), but "postliberalism" is Brooks's current term for the bothsides thing that gets him sort of quietly irritated just now, not angry of course, the thing that JD Vance and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do where they object to "neoliberalism", which seems in his view to be when they are pushing "populism", which seems to me (a non-bothsiderist) to refer to two quite different responses to income and wealth inequality, depending on whether you have ideas for doing something about that (as Ocasio-Cortez does) or not (like Vance) and thus different sides, but maybe that's just me.

Birthright Citizenship Redux

Wong Kim Ark, from a 1904 US immigration document, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Revised and expanded from the post of January 26, with what I think is a somewhat new argument up in front, inspired immediately by an irritating Bluesky post. 

Maybe the birthright citizenship order will ultimately be held unconstitutional, but I find it highly embarrassing for a judge to say something so unequivocally at a preliminary stage without the slightest acknowledgement that there is an entire literature that disagrees. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/2R4OE9lT8a

— Ilan Wurman (@ilan_wurman) January 23, 2025

The "entire literature" (which seems to consist of a single book by Peter Shuck and Rogers Smith, Citizenship without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity, Yale University Press, 1985, and its brief recap in the American Enterprise Institute's magazine National Affairs, summer 2018, presumably published in the hope of attracting attention from President Trump and his factotum Stephen Miller), is fatally flawed by its failure to recognize the significance of an obvious fact: there were no "illegal aliens" in the United States at the time the 14th Amendment passed Congress in 1866 and was ratified two years later, only millions of immigrants who might or might not choose to be naturalized (white immigrants, that is, under the terms of the Naturalization Acts of 1798 and 1802).

And when those immigrants had children, as they often did, no reason to question their citizenship or "naturalize" them; as affirmed in an 1844 New York state case, Lynch v. Clarke, in which a state judge held that a woman born in New York City, of alien parents temporarily sojourning there, was a U.S. citizen. They were "natural" already; for the children of immigrants, birthright citizenship was the universal norm (local governments could order the deportation of obnoxious individual immigrants, but there wasn't a national policy). Miller's scenario is completely irrelevant to the realities of the time when the 14th Amendment was written.

The hard cases before 1866-68 were not immigrants, but people whose parents were born within the borders of the US: citizens of the Indigenous nations, and the freed descendants of enslaved Africans.