The Stupid--It Ken Burns!

 

Unionist soldier's postcard, via PBS Learning Media.

Jamelle Bouie was writing about Vice President Vance, who seems to have been quietly and gradually  disappearing from public life in recent months (it's pretty funny by Bouie standards), and his bizarre speech at the Claremont Institute earlier this month attacking the 14th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship:

At one point in Vance’s speech, when he’s scolding Mamdani for ingratitude, Vance asks whether Mamdani has “ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again.” It is striking that the vice president invokes the Civil War to make his point.

The great ideological victory of that conflict was to establish the United States as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” When, at Gettysburg, Lincoln pronounced a “new birth of freedom,” consecrated by those who “gave the last full measure of devotion,” he meant the egalitarian freedom that [Chief Justice Roger] Taney and others like him sought to deny.

Because, as Bouie shows, in his arguments against birthright citizenship, Vance is aligning himself with Taney, and the Dred Scott decision, against Lincoln and the outcome of the war.

Shande

 

Children waiting to receive food in Gaza,  Tuesday, photo by Mahmoud Issa/Reuters via Haaretz.

So you're maybe 13, 14 years old, in a tent somewhere in southern Gaza, watching your parents die of hunger, maybe your grandparents, and you haven't eaten anything yourself for three days, and they all try to stop you from heading out to one of the three or four distribution sites of the US-sponsored Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the southwest of the territory, perhaps four or five miles away, from which you might be able to bring back a box of pasta and rice and lentils and some cooking oil, if you're lucky (and have access to cooking gas, and water, which the displaced hardly do). Because that's not a sure thing; there's never enough there for the people who need it, and there are gangsters there with muscle to take more than others get, and the Israeli Defense Forces mobilized nearby who might start shooting live ammunition at any moment, that's a constant at all of the sites—the IDF say they're just firing "warning shots" but dozens are getting killed that way every day. Of course you're going to go anyway.

Via BBC.

And the American mercenaries, nobody knows who's paying them, armed as well, with bullets as well as stun grenades and pepper spray:

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.