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Chinese EVs can save Detroit
Semafor • 3 weeks ago

Chinese EVs can save Detroit

After rolling across Southeast Asia, Europe, and Latin America, the Chinese electric vehicle juggernaut is targeting the US.

The Epstein Scandal Reveals the Dark Side of Bipartisanship
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

The Epstein Scandal Reveals the Dark Side of Bipartisanship

Among the most staggering revelations in the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein document release are the details that have recently emerged about the treacly relationship between Epstein and attorney Kathryn Ruemmler. The emails between Epstein and Ruemmler range from the inexplicable to the inexcusable, with Ruemmler routinely referring to Epstein as “sweetie” and “Uncle Jeffrey,” and even advising him on “how to respond to tough questions about his sex crimes,” as The New York Times reported. Naturally, the most notable thing about their relationship is precisely who Ruemmler was. While hardly a household name, Ruemmler was widely considered one of the titans of the Democratic legal establishment. Serving most recently as Goldman Sachs’s top lawyer (until she finally stepped down last week), Ruemmler originally made her name in a different role: White House counsel for President Barack Obama, whom she served from 2011 to 2014. Ruemmler was viewed as such an important member of Obama’s inner circle that she nearly served as his attorney general—and by extension, the most powerful legal professional in both the Democratic establishment and the country writ large.So much for all that. Rather than overseeing the Department of Justice, Ruemmler is now a case study in how Epstein’s network spanned all partisan divides, snaking across the most prominent parts of the American political spectrum. Indeed, it’s almost breathtaking to consider just how wide Epstein’s network truly was: It somehow brought together everyone from Ruemmler, Bill Clinton, and Noam Chomsky to MAGA and Republican stalwarts like Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. As Anand Giridharadas, one of the most trenchant analysts of this kind of cross-partisan elite networking, said earlier this month, Epstein created a network that was “coast to coast, industry to industry, right to left—as far left as you can go, as far right as you can go.” All of it created, as Giridharadas said, a “diversity [that] masked a deeper solidarity” among all of these Epstein-connected elites. As academic Seva Gunitsky added, it paints a picture of a “borderless elite [who] profit from weak institutions and enjoy getting paid.”Giridharadas and Gunitsky have this precisely right. The files, and Ruemmler’s central place therein, have revealed that the bipartisanship so revered by the chattering class is fake and fraudulent. It’s all a masquerade, a play-act of elite Americans pushing nominally different policy prescriptions and strategic directions, while nonetheless embracing one another when they think no one is actually looking—all providing a duck blind behind which the levers of elite impunity are toggled. Epstein was a collector of confidants, yes—but he was also someone who, in a single tranche of emails, could reveal an American elite that had far more in common with one another than with the rest of us, even to the point of aiding and abetting monsters. This may be shocking for some Americans. But for those who’ve tracked how much of the American elite has made money servicing the most horrific regimes abroad, these revelations are hardly news.Look, for instance, at the foreign lobbying industry; specifically, at all those American elites who’ve spent years willingly signing up to work for the most ruinous, most tyrannical regimes on the planet. For decades, the American foreign lobbying industry—full of former members of Congress, former administration officials, and even the occasional former president—have sucked in billions of dollars, often from the most heinous dictatorships on earth. This practice has somehow become normalized, even though many of the regimes in question are responsible for, if it can be believed, even worse crimes that Epstein was accused of. This industry has hardly been the stock of only one political party alone. Republicans and Democrats alike have raced to lobby on behalf of despotic regimes around the world, from expansionist autocracies in places like Rwanda or Morocco to decades-long dictatorships in places like Tajikistan or China. Former presidents like Bill Clinton have willingly opened up their foundations to accept tens of millions of dollars from some of the world’s most horrific governments, while former GOP stalwarts like Bob Dole preferred to make money laundering the images of authoritarians, rather than ride off into retirement. And this isn’t even considering all of the related think tanks and policy shops, across the political aisle, who’ve willingly opened themselves to dictatorial cash—and to servicing those dictators’ needs, regardless of American interests. All of these elites and related institutes have lined up to help the modern-day fascists and tyrants topping regime after regime around the world. Dictatorships like the UAE, currently responsible for inflaming genocide in Sudan, have managed to find friend after friend across the American political elite. So too have nearby regimes like Saudi Arabia, inking agreements with former GOP and Democratic policymakers and congressmen—despite all of Riyadh’s rank anti-gay, anti-woman, and antidemocratic crimes. Hereditary dictatorships like Azerbaijan even managed to not only bankroll secret trips for Democrats and Republicans alike, but allegedly recruited current members of Congress, as seen most recently in the charges against Representative Henry Cuellar. When Trump dropped the charges against Cuellar, he earned a plaudit from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—just a couple of buddies doing the ruling class’s work.Time and again, regimes have found friends among America’s elite, regardless of political affiliation. As Epstein well knew, and as regime after regime has discovered, America’s leaders could be bought with surprising ease. All it took were a few trips, a few small payments, and a few choice words—and America’s rotten elite would be there with bells on. Perhaps a more specific example will illuminate things further. Take a look at who preceded Ruemmler as one of Obama’s White House counsels: Gregory Craig. Like Ruemmler, Craig was never known widely outside of policy circles. But in Washington, few compared in the early 2010s to his reach, his reputation, and his record of policy success, especially on the Democratic side of the ledger.Which is precisely what Paul Manafort, perhaps the most infamous lobbyist in American history, wanted when he recruited Craig to aid a budding Ukrainian autocrat named Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort’s story—how he spent years helping entrench Yanukovych; how it all blew up in Ukraine’s 2014 revolution; and how Manafort then raced to help launch Trump to the White House in 2016—is at this point well-known. It’s a story of just how impactful a single American lobbyist can be in aiding the demolition of a country’s democracy, and just how dangerous a foreign lobbying industry left unchecked can truly be. But Manafort’s story was something else—something far closer to Epstein’s, at least when it came to highlighting just how quickly America’s elite could align with a brute. Despite the Ukrainian leader’s obvious authoritarianism, Manafort managed to recruit a remarkably cross-partisan class of supporters for Yanukovych. On the Republican side, there was Rick Gates, a lobbyist fresh from running John McCain’s 2008 campaign. And on the Democratic side, there was Tad Devine, a prominent Democratic pollster and Bernie Sanders’s future 2016 campaign manager. So too was there Tony Podesta, a leading Democratic fundraiser and brother of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager. And then there was Craig. As federal filings later detailed, Craig left the White House and soon began helping Manafort to help spin Yanukovych’s regime. Working with the Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom law firm, Craig helped create an “independent” report analyzing Yanukovych’s move to toss a key political rival in prison. Unsurprisingly, the report itself effectively absolved Yanukovych of authoritarianism, contending that his efforts to target political opponents were hardly draconian, and would have been upheld in American courts. But it wasn’t just publishing the report; as later filings made clear, Craig also discussed the report’s rollout with Manafort, including calls with American journalists, especially at The New York Times. As Skadden saw it, if they could get the Times to repeat the report’s findings, their job—and Manafort’s efforts to keep Yanukovych in power—would be complete.Which is precisely what happened. The New York Times wrote that, according to the report, Yanukovych’s effort to jail his opponent “was supported by the evidence,” and that there was “no evidence” to any of the claims that it was political persecution. Manafort could not have asked for more. As he wrote later to Craig. “People in Kiev are very happy. You are ‘THE MAN.’” Manafort, of course, spoke too soon; less than a year later, protests against Yanukovych’s regime began, quickly curdling into a democratic revolution that overthrew the regime, sparked Russia’s initial invasion, and opened a new chapter in geopolitical history. And it also resulted in the eventual conviction and jailing of Manafort himself, as well as a multimillion-dollar settlement from Skadden (though Craig was eventually acquitted of related charges). The model that Manafort highlighted—a bipartisan, elite sprint to aid autocrats, creating a “vivid picture of the ruling class at its avaricious worst,” as the Times recounted—still resonates, over a decade later. It’s a model that Jeffrey Epstein would have well recognized; the smiley face glued atop greasy corruption. And it’s a model that everyone from convicted sex criminals to kleptocrats of the world have all taken advantage of—democracy, decency, and even American interests be damned.

Americans Are Dying Early. There’s a Way to Fix It.
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

Americans Are Dying Early. There’s a Way to Fix It.

Last month, headlines announced that U.S. life expectancy has finally recovered from the pandemic. A new report from the National Center for Health Statistics showed national life expectancy at a record high, and this news has been greeted with cautious optimism.But that news reflects only one side of the story. Other estimates, such as model-based work from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, or IHME, show that even with this rebound, the United States has suffered one of the most severe peacetime declines in longevity among wealthy nations and continues to lag far behind its peers. Taken together, the data suggests that while life expectancy has recovered relative to recent American history, the U.S. is experiencing the most dramatic peacetime decline in longevity when judged against other high-income countries.According to IHME’s newest projections, the United States is expected to plummet from forty-ninth in global life expectancy rankings in 2022 to sixty-sixth by 2050. We now trail Cuba, Estonia, and Saudi Arabia. We’ve already lost more than 2.5 years of life expectancy in a single decade—an unprecedented collapse that would have been unimaginable just a generation ago. The only comparable situation in modern times is the decline in longevity after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, when men’s life expectancy plummeted by six years, driven by sudden massive increases in poverty and inequality.While our peer nations continue extending the lives of their citizens, the U.S. is moving in the opposite direction. And we’re barely talking about it.Public health researchers have a name for what we’re losing: the “missing Americans.” A 2023 study by Jacob Bor, an epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health, and his colleagues examined international mortality databases and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics for every year from 1933 to 2021, comparing America’s mortality rates with the average of those of Canada, Japan, and 19 Western European nations. What they found, said Bor when I interviewed him for my recent book, “was shocking.”If the United States had mortality rates comparable to other wealthy nations, we would have prevented more than one million deaths in 2020 and 1.1 million deaths in 2021, according to Bor’s findings. These aren’t deaths at the end of long lives—about half occurred in people under age 65, those who should be in the prime of their lives, raising families, contributing to communities, building careers. In 2021 alone, Bor and his colleagues noted, these preventable early deaths represented more than 25 million years of lost life.To put that in perspective: We’ve created the statistical equivalent of wiping out a city the size of Austin, Texas, every single year.And that doesn’t include the years preceding these deaths, when people were hobbled by disabilities, illness, and despair that stopped them from fulfilling their potential and robbed us as a society of what they might have contributed. There is a ripple effect across communities and generations—the effects these early deaths have on children who grow up without a parent; families that become mired in poverty after the untimely death of their primary breadwinner. We’re talking about millions of missed soccer games, high school graduations, camping trips, and anniversary celebrations: all the unrealized milestones of fully lived lives.The disparities are staggering. Life-expectancy gaps among American populations have nearly doubled since 2000. Native Americans in the Western U.S. now have life expectancies below 64 years—on par with Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Black and Native Americans bore a disproportionate share of these excess deaths. But the real surprise in Bor’s research was how poorly white Americans are doing too: In 2021, they comprised 70 percent of those missing Americans. In that year, young white Americans died at three times the rate of their counterparts in wealthy nations, according to Bor and his coauthors’ calculations, while death rates for young Black and Indigenous Americans were five times and eight times higher, respectively.This reveals something we’ve been missing. “Using the experiences of white Americans as a benchmark in studies renders the trends in the white population invisible,” Bor said in a recent interview. “In addition, it woefully underestimates the grim circumstances of Americans of color, in terms of their mortality shortfalls, because the baseline you’re using is already substandard.”The inescapable fact is that millions of white Americans are dying too young, their lives cut short by the same policies and institutions that are killing Black, Latino, and Indigenous populations. As Bor puts it, we’re all frogs boiling in that pot of water—it’s just that white people are boiling a little slower. Yet somehow, they are led to believe they’re better off, and we continue to muddle through this metastasizing crisis without doing anything about it.How did we get here? This crisis began more than 40 years ago, when our peer countries recovered from World War II and began surpassing us in building social safety nets, providing universal health care, and enacting policies that protected their most vulnerable citizens. We went in the opposite direction. Our mortality numbers began to diverge sharply from those of other wealthy countries in a downward slide that coincides with the dismantling of the social safety net that began in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s, according to Bor and colleagues.The chief culprits are familiar: structural racism, economic inequality, lack of access to quality health care, a bloated-broken national health care system, and chronic underinvestment in public health and social safety net programs. People die because of gun violence, traffic accidents, heart disease, diabetes, suicide, substance abuse, and drug overdoses. A wave of deregulation left working-class Americans vulnerable to unhealthy foods, workplace dangers, environmental toxins, and the unchecked spread of guns and opioids.Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton identified one critical piece of this puzzle in their landmark 2015 paper on the so-called “deaths of despair.” They found that working-age white men and women without four-year college degrees were dying at astonishing rates—more than 600,000 excess deaths between 1999 and 2017 among Americans aged 45 to 54. Death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related illnesses were directly correlated with chronic joblessness in regions hit hardest by globalization; communities set adrift by the export of once-stable jobs in mining, manufacturing, and heavy industry.The pandemic merely accelerated an already widening gap. As science journalist Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic, “COVID simply did more of what life in America has excelled at for decades: killing Americans in unusually large numbers, and at unusually young ages.” The numbers behind this, as he noted, are stark: “From 2019 to 2021, deaths among working-age Americans increased by 233,000—and nine in 10 of those deaths wouldn’t have happened if the U.S. had mortality rates on par with its peers.”Now, at precisely the moment when we should be mounting an aggressive response to this mortality crisis, the current administration is moving in the opposite direction. Proposed cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs will strip health care and nutrition support from millions. Attacks on the Affordable Care Act threaten to eliminate coverage for tens of millions more. The dismantling of public health agencies and the sidelining of scientific expertise leave us more vulnerable to the next pandemic and less equipped to address ongoing health threats.This isn’t happening in a poor country with limited resources. This is happening in the wealthiest nation on earth, one that spends more on health care per capita than any other country. Yet 66.5 percent of all bankruptcies are tied to medical issues, and every year, 530,000 Americans file for bankruptcy due to medical bills.Other wealthy nations have proven that a different path is possible. Countries with strong social safety nets, universal health care, investments in public health infrastructure, and policies that reduce inequality consistently see their citizens live longer, healthier lives. They spend less on health care and get better results. The solutions aren’t revolutionary—they’re already working elsewhere.What’s needed now is the political courage to acknowledge that America’s mortality crisis is neither normal nor inevitable, and the collective will to demand better. We need health care as a right, not a privilege. We need robust public health systems with the resources and authority to protect communities. We need policies that address the root causes of premature death: poverty, racism, violence, and environmental degradation. We need to strengthen labor protections and ensure living wages. We need to measure national success not by GDP growth or stock market performance, but by how long and how well our people live.Every year we wait, another million people die who shouldn’t. Another 25 million years of human potential—of birthdays and graduations, of art and innovation, of love and laughter—vanish. These aren’t statistics. They’re our neighbors, our colleagues, our families. They’re us.We can accept this slow-motion catastrophe as the price of American exceptionalism, or we can recognize it as the moral emergency it is. The question isn’t whether we know how to save the missing Americans. We do. The question is whether we care enough to try.

Clarence Thomas Has Lost the Plot
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

Clarence Thomas Has Lost the Plot

Justice Clarence Thomas’s preferred theory of constitutional interpretation is often said to be originalist, but it may be more accurately described as personalist. To Thomas, almost every American judge who served over the past two centuries wasted their lives and careers. Rather than try to determine the Constitution’s meaning to the best of their ability, they should have all waited for Thomas to tell them what it actually meant.The senior-most justice’s approach is hardly new. Thomas has spent decades calling for dozens, if not hundreds, of prior Supreme Court precedents to be overturned. He writes separately more often than any of his colleagues to expound upon his particular view of the Constitution, replete with numerous citations to his own work. As his own colleagues have said, Thomas does not believe in stare decisis, or in constraining himself by the court’s prior decisions. Even by that standard, his dissent last week in Learning Resources v. Trump is astounding. In a 17-page opinion, Thomas sketched out an utterly alien vision of the separation of powers, the scope of the legislative branch’s powers, and the founding era, to argue that President Donald Trump had broad powers to levy tariffs against the American people—far beyond what any of his conservative colleagues could stomach.“As a matter of original understanding, historical practice, and judicial precedent, the power to impose duties on imports is not within the core legislative power,” Thomas claimed. “Congress can therefore delegate the exercise of this power to the President.” Justice Neil Gorsuch, a frequent Thomas ally, broke with him to describe this approach, in a separate opinion, as “a sweeping theory” that “presents difficulties on its own,” in what can only be described as serious understatement.All of this is far afield from what the other justices were talking about. At issue in the case was whether Trump’s tariffs issued through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, of 1977 were lawful. Last week, in a 6–3 majority, the court said no, they weren’t. The prevailing opinion of the court used neither the “major questions” doctrine nor the nondelegation doctrine to rule against the administration. Instead, the tariffs were invalidated under what Kagan described as the “ordinary rules of statutory interpretation.”The most notable part of the ruling, aside from the outcome, was the split between the court’s six conservatives. As I noted last Friday, three conservatives—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett—wanted to invalidate the IEEPA tariffs on major questions grounds. The other three—Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh—wanted to uphold it by finding a national security exception to the major questions doctrine. (Kavanaugh himself had proposed this in an unrelated case last summer.)That left the three liberals as the deciding bloc, and they cast their lot with the Roberts-Gorsuch-Barrett troika, albeit on different grounds. That decision has the most bearing on future legal disputes involving IEEPA and Trump’s powers to levy tariffs through other statutes. Thomas joined Kavanaugh’s principal dissent, but also wrote one of his own. It is one of the most bizarre opinions written by a Supreme Court justice this century.What Thomas and Gorsuch argued about is known as the “nondelegation doctrine.” The most fundamental version of that doctrine is that one branch of the federal government cannot permanently delegate its powers to another branch. Congress could not pass a law, for example, that says, “All of the president’s nominees are automatically confirmed without individual Senate votes,” or “The commander in chief can pay soldiers at will without congressional appropriations.”At the same time, basic governance requires a certain amount of discretion and adaptability by the executive branch on Congress’s behalf. In 1928, the Supreme Court set forth a test to determine what counts as a constitutional delegation versus an unconstitutional one. So long as Congress articulates an “intelligible principle” for the president or an agency to follow, the court explained, the delegation is constitutional. In the century that followed, Congress generally followed this test when crafting laws on workplace safety, environmental protection, consumer welfare, and so on.In recent decades, legal conservatives have proposed a much stricter version of the nondelegation doctrine as part of their campaign to curb federal regulatory power. Many observers wondered if the post-Trump conservative supermajority might replace the “intelligible principle” test with something more restrictive. (I was among them.) A fair number of petitions reached the court asking them to do just that, but almost all of them were turned away. A rare exception was Gundy v. United States, a 2019 case involving federal sex-offender regulations, in which Alito joined the four liberals to leave the status quo intact.Americans always operate with incomplete information when dealing with the Supreme Court. Perhaps that outcome reflected deeper fissures among the conservatives. Perhaps Alito simply voted that way because of his general deference for law enforcement throughout his tenure. Whatever the reason, it soon became clear that the Roberts court had settled on the major questions doctrine as its preferred tool for trimming back the administrative state, and a new version of nondelegation was not on the horizon. Kavanaugh admitted as much in last year’s aforementioned concurring opinion in Consumers’ Research.“Many of the broader structural concerns about expansive delegations have been substantially mitigated by this Court’s recent case law in related areas—in particular (i) the Court’s rejection of so-called Chevron deference and (ii) the Court’s application of the major questions canon of statutory interpretation,” he opined. (Chevron deference, which ended last year, required courts to defer to agencies’ interpretation of their authorizing laws under most circumstances.)Under the major questions doctrine, the question shifts from constitutional grounds to statutory ones. Imagine that the president were to use a hypothetical New Deal–era law to seize old pumpjacks in western Texas with compensation for their owners. Let’s say the law was intended to allow oil-field workers to keep their jobs at underproducing wells during the Great Depression. Now a new Democratic president wants to use it to combat climate change by shutting them down altogether.That move might survive judicial scrutiny under the normal rules of statutory interpretation. But the major questions doctrine allows conservative justices to probe deeper. Did Congress, the doctrine asks, “speak clearly” enough in the law in question to authorize the executive branch to make a decision of “vast economic and political significance”? If the answer is no, then the president’s action can be invalidated without striking down the law itself.One can see the appeal of this doctrine from the conservative justices’ perspective. On a superficial level, the major questions doctrine protects legislative power from executive branch abuses and thefts. But in practical terms, it retroactively applies a vague and mercurial standard—How “clearly” is clear enough? What counts as “vast”?—to a century of existing laws enacted by the people’s elected representatives. That discretion amounts to a massive agglomeration of power by the judicial branch and, in particular, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court.To that end, the Supreme Court has used this doctrine to invalidate a wide range of major policy decisions by Democratic presidents. For the Biden administration alone, the conservative justices used it to nix national vaccine-or-testing mandates from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration during the Covid-19 pandemic, a moribund Obama-era plan for regulating carbon emissions at power plants, the Biden administration’s largest effort to forgive billions of dollars in student-loan debt, and more. The major questions doctrine, in its fully articulated form, has never been used against a Republican president. As a result, it often appears to be nothing more than a freewheeling veto on progressive policymaking that the conservative bloc can reach for whenever it suits them.Thomas agreed with Kavanaugh’s dissent, which argued there was a national security exception to the major questions doctrine and would have decided the case on those grounds. At the same time, he sought to shift things back to the constitutional level of analysis, which he argued was highly favorable to the executive branch. In doing so, he sought to carve out a major new exception to the nondelegation doctrine.“The power to impose duties on imports can be delegated,” he declared. “At the founding, that power was regarded as one of many powers over foreign commerce that could be delegated to the President. Power over foreign commerce was not within the core legislative power, and engaging in foreign commerce was regarded as a privilege rather than a right.”First, Thomas argued that the nondelegation doctrine did not apply to all of Congress’s powers, and instead only limited Congress’s “core legislative powers.” What counts as a core legislative power, you might ask? To Thomas, the “legislative power” is “the power to make substantive rules setting the conditions for deprivations of life, liberty, or property,” borrowing language from the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. He describes this as the “Blackstonian sense of generally applicable rules of private conduct, the violation of which results in the deprivation of core private rights,” referring to a prominent English judge and scholar.There is some discussion of the Magna Carta as well, and of one of Stuart-era English jurist Lord Coke’s most famous rulings on the royal prerogative in 1611. Thomas ultimately suggests that the “core legislative powers” are those once held by the British Parliament, while the noncore powers were those once held, claimed, or asserted by the British monarchy.“These include the powers to raise and support armies, to fix the standards of weights and measures, to grant copyrights, to dispose of federal property, and, as discussed below, to regulate foreign commerce,” Thomas wrote. “None of these powers involves setting the rules for the deprivation of core private rights. Blackstone called them ‘prerogative’ powers, and sometimes ‘executive.’”There are a few problems with this approach. One is that it has no basis in the Constitution’s text at all. This seems like a significant oversight on the Framers’ part, given the vast importance of this core/noncore division that Thomas has expounded upon. But the list of congressional powers laid out by the Constitution makes no such distinction. (Indeed, they might all be reasonably described as “core powers.”) Justice Neil Gorsuch, who frequently votes with Thomas, sounded almost taken aback when describing his colleague’s theory in his own concurring opinion.“If all that’s true, what do we make of the Constitution’s text?” Gorsuch wrote. “Section 1 of Article I vests ‘[a]ll legislative Powers herein granted’ in Congress and no one else. Section 8 proceeds to list those powers in detail and without differentiation. Neither provision speaks of some divide between true legislative powers touching on ‘life, liberty, or property’ that are permanently vested in Congress alone and ‘other kinds of power[s]’ that may be given away and possibly lost forever to the President.”This is a polite way of saying, “You’ve made it all up.” (None of the other justices addressed Thomas’s dissent, perhaps because saying nothing would be the most polite option.) Gorsuch went on to explain how Thomas’s vision of congressional powers is unsupported by the Framers’ own words and writings, and early congressional debates. Nor can any support be found from the court’s own precedents on congressional delegations, “which have never turned on Justice Thomas’s view of life, liberty or property,” Gorsuch noted.The most bracing part of Gorsuch’s concurrence is when he reaches Thomas’s argument that Congress could delegate “the tariff power” because, as Gorsuch summarizes, it “was considered a ‘prerogative right’ of the British King.’” This is an absurd framework to apply to the United States, which does not have royal prerogatives or a monarchy. (At least, not yet.) But it was the historical errors that truly stood out.“That seems doubtful,” Gorsuch explained as politely as possible while citing historical scholarship. “Tariffs may have been among the King’s prerogative powers during the reign of Edward I. But even before the year 1400, Parliament had achieved some ‘victory over the King in the matter of imposing import duties.’ And after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, as this Court has put it, Parliament ‘secured supremacy in fiscal matters.’” In other words, Thomas has profoundly misread the arc of Crown-Parliament relations in English history.Other flaws abound. For one, even if you somehow accept Thomas’s argument, Trump’s IEEPA tariffs should still meet the threshold he describes. Surely the president’s ambitious plan to collect trillions of dollars in tariffs, which are paid by American businesses and individuals, counts as an infringement on the private right to “property”? Not so fast, Thomas said in a footnote.“I refer to charges on imported goods as ‘duties,’ not ‘tariffs’ or ‘taxes,’” Thomas explained, citing Noah Webster’s dictionary from 1806. “When the government charged money for importing goods, that charge was historically called a custom or impost, each of which was a kind of ‘duty.’” He argued, citing sources like Benjamin Franklin, that while the revolutionary generation opposed “internal taxes” levied by the British government, they accepted Parliament’s power to “[lay] duties to regulate commerce.”This is absurd on a few levels. First, the IEEPA tariffs are plainly meant as taxation, and they operate as such, no matter what Noah Webster wrote 220 years ago. Second, Thomas’s history is once again deeply flawed. Gorsuch noted that the few revolutionary-era leaders who saw differences between “internal” and “external” taxation abandoned it as independence neared. “And, of course, it was duties on foreign tea that triggered the Boston Tea Party,” Gorsuch pointed out. “Are we really to believe that the patriots that night in Boston Harbor considered the whole of the tariff power some kingly prerogative?”Gorsuch’s bafflement is palpable. He and other legal conservatives had spent years sketching out a vision of the nondelegation doctrine that could constrain federal regulatory agencies at the root. Now one of his closest allies has gone on to articulate a weirdly monarchical vision of the Constitution that treats the presidency as a kingship-in-waiting and Congress as a supplicatory medieval Parliament, one that appears to spring entirely from his own mind. (In addition to his various historical citations, Thomas cites his own previous opinions on 17 separate occasions, more than all of the other justices combined.)One might be tempted to conclude that Thomas’s dissent exposes the flaws in originalism as practiced by legal conservatives and the high court. Similar criticism has been leveled against a 2022 decision that Thomas wrote about the Second Amendment and an individual right to bear arms. But that would almost be unfair to originalism and those who champion it, especially since none of the court’s other originalists found it persuasive. The only Constitution that seems to matter to Thomas is the one that exists in his imagination.

The Fight Against Trumpism Can’t Wait for Election Day
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

The Fight Against Trumpism Can’t Wait for Election Day

I found out about Chairman Paul Birdsong and the new Black Panther Party the same way everyone else did—very suddenly, and via Instagram reel. Just days after Renee Good was shot dead by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Birdsong and his group of organizers went viral at a protest in Philadelphia—dressed in all black, toting semiautomatic weapons, and daring federal agents to try them. “Won’t no ICE agent ever run up on me. I guarantee you they won’t, I’ll put a hole in their chest the size of a fucking window,” Birdsong said. “An unarmed woman was killed by ICE. If you think you about to come and brutalize people while we’re standing here? Fuck around and find out. We patrol the community, and we hold [ICE] accountable.“We’re the same Panther Party from back in the day,” he continues. “But we’re a little more aggressive now, ya dig? Carry bigger guns and we don’t take no shit.… Places where there’s immigrants at, I think that the community around them needs to … start escorting them everywhere to make sure they’re safe. Because them ICE agents ain’t gon’ act like that if there’s a bunch of people standing outside with assault rifles and shotguns.”  The clip triggered a good week of heated online intra-left discourse. Who did this Paul Birdsong guy think he was, trying to take up the sacred mantle of the Black Panther Party? He had to be some kind of COINTELPRO psyop, right? Or at the very least a grifter who only showed face in tense times to generate clicks and sow discord. And even if he was genuine, why should Black people invite danger upon themselves to protect immigrants? More importantly, why did he say he had songs with Snoop Dogg and Gucci Mane coming out? And was it true that he infiltrated the Piru Bloodz in Compton?These are mostly all sensible questions to ask, especially given the Black Panther Party’s unexpected return to the zeitgeist, along with its many aesthetic choices—the gaudy AI event flyers, the tactical garb, the bravado that accompanies every Instagram video announcement. The group has already elicited both positive and negative reactions from former original Black Panthers. All of which led them to make a hasty rebranding shortly after Birdsong’s clip went viral: That’s right, the New Black Panther Party is actually now the “Black Lion Party for International Solidarity.” Look, maybe those who find this all a bit suspicious now will be vindicated in a year or so when they find Birdsong guilty of embezzling mutual aid funds or something. But right now, to their neighbors—especially those who are poor, homeless, and most at risk of deportation—the Black Lion Party is stepping into the breach at a time of need. And they are just one of many examples of the kind of direct action and community organizing that can arise when the inadequacy of traditional politicking becomes something that people feel viscerally. What may look extreme viewed through the lens of viral social media can feel vital to those closest to the conflict between the Trump administration’s masked goons and their neighbors and families.“I definitely felt like there was actual work being done. There was food for the drives all over the place.… And there was a charity food organization that was helping. They seemed genuinely connected to their neighbors. People were walking up, not just for the food drive, but just to offer help, just to talk,” said Temple University student journalist Connor Pugh, who spent a day with Birdsong and the Lions directly. “It definitely felt like an authentic, real thing that was happening, even if there’s not a direct connection to the original Black Panther Party from the sixties.”Nonelectoral action is nothing new, and the Black Lion Party is really just one more organization of note performing this kind of activism, from Occupy Wall Street to the Iraq War protest movement, to Black Lives Matter. And while they—and their guns—have generated real attention toward nonelectoralism, it’s the residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul that have spun up the blueprint for this current version of neighbor-to-neighbor, permitless, confrontational activism.  I spoke to Southeast Minneapolis resident and Popular Democracy organizer Greg Basta on February 12, the same day Tom Homan announced that ICE would be ending Operation Metro Surge—a drawdown that has yet to materialize.“These last couple of weeks in particular, I think there’s this frustration that’s set in with a lot of the national media and, frankly, with a lot of national progressive organizations,” Basta told me. “There’s this sentiment of ‘alright, things are starting to settle down in the Twin Cities, and we gotta start looking where [ICE and BPD] are gonna go next.’ But they’re still abducting people left and right. It feels like a pretty low bar—like yeah, they haven’t murdered somebody in the last two weeks. The abductions and detentions are still happening at a fairly large scale. Day to day, it hasn’t felt much different here than it did three weeks ago.” This frustration—with the media, with local and federal government—was voiced by everyone I spoke to from Minneapolis, particularly those participating in these ICE-watch Signal chat groups. The way they see it, federal agents shot and killed two people in their city, and Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer have responded by asking these marauders to wear bodycams, while handwringing about the long-term implications of abolishing ICE. For some reason, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz trusts that the alleged bribe-taking Homan “knows right from wrong,” despite all the evidence to the contrary. And while Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has received standing ovations from crowds at three separate events for his leadership in a time of crisis, even that feeling of ballyhoo has started to fade. “In the moment when things first started to escalate, with [Mayor] Frey in particular, there was a ‘wow,’” Basta recalls. “His first statement where he was like, ‘Get the fuck out of our city’? We’d never seen that side of him. “From there, it was just a gradual downward slope of disappointment,” Basta said, referring to Frey’s requests for protesters not to give federal agents any “fodder,” after they shot a man in the leg in the majority-Black area of North Minneapolis. “With Democratic leadership, there’s just been this undercurrent of like, ‘We’re not going to wait for you all to do something about this.’ We’re not looking to you for leadership right now,” Basta continued. “In the last several years of the [Walz] administration, resistance from Democratic leadership has been disappointing, and it’s reflected in this moment of organizing. People are [realizing] we’re not gonna solve this with elections. We’re not gonna solve this with lobbying a politician to do better. We just have to go out and do this.”If you truly believe that ICE really is done terrorizing Minneapolis with its Operation Metro Surge—many residents don’t—it wasn’t the Freys or Walzes who forced them to respond. There was no vote, no referendum. ICE’s problems arose simply because normal people, having watched their friends and neighbors kidnapped and shot in the street by masked men, decided to act of their own accord—from parents organizing school safety group chats to businesses that closed for the general shutdown, to the thousands of people who woke up every day to observe, film, and prevent abductions. Without these citizens, their smartphones, and the videos documenting their relentless pursuit of federal agents, we might not have the footage directly contradicting the government’s nauseating claims that Good and Pretti were “domestic terrorists.” Absent the evidence that ordinary people collected, sometimes at great risk, what pressure would there really be on Trump to even make a withdrawal announcement? The vast majority of these ICE watchers, or “commuters,” are not activists at all. They’re just people Trump tried, and failed, to break. “Everybody is involved, whole communities. It’s like my neighbors, you know, they’re not activists. They’re doing communal work, and they’re trying their best. It’s not perfect, but whether they’re doing know-your-rights training, whether they’re being observers, everybody in my area is engaged with that, and I wouldn’t say they’re activists at all,” Aminah Sheikh, a member of the Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America steering committee, told me. “I think people are pulled in this moment because we are living through a stage of fascism.… It’s on ordinary people. And I think Alex Pretti and Renee Good are a symbol of ordinary people. They were just regular people trying to defend their neighbors and their community.” Sheikh, Basta, and thousands of Minneapolis residents have been involved in these observer, or commuter, networks. They are the mostly Signal-based network of neighbors who do the grueling work of trailing and reporting federal agents. “You have a patrol route that’s near your neighborhood … so the idea is you’re not going into some other neighborhood where no one knows you. This is all with your neighbors. If you observe and say, ‘OK, this vehicle looks suspicious,’ text that to the chat, and say that. And you’ll kind of have this, like, back and forth with the other patrollers and dispatchers out being like, ‘Does this seem like a threat?’” said Ky, another Twin Cities DSA steering committee member. “[Federal agents] drive really aggressively. We live here every day. We know what our neighbors look like and what our neighbors drive like, and what their tendencies are. When a foreign occupier comes into your city, you really do recognize minute differences.” They also noted that while some agents were obvious—with blacked-out SUVs and face coverings—others were plainclothes and trickier to spot. The bulk of this organizing is ad hoc and unofficial. Still, I’ve been struck by how many on the right are convinced that these Minnesota Signal chats are evidence of some well-funded, Soros-backed, left-wing insurrectionist network. It seems that it’s impossible for those with MAGA predilections to even imagine this all might simply be a natural, organic reaction to tyranny by a community of ordinary people—that neighbors would look after one another without their palms being greased. “This is just not Minneapolis—this is an organized, well-thought-through effort to invade the country,” MAGA operative Steve Bannon said last month. “They wanna put the people that defend the American republic on trial. Double down, triple down. Sending Homan there is a good first effort. This is a Marxist—this is the red-green alliance coming together to try to take down the American republic.” Fellow right-winger Jack Posobeic echoed Bannon’s warped version of reality, stating that leftist insurgents were flooding into Minneapolis on “Soros buses.”“We’ve got evidence of people coming from Boston, people coming from New England who are now flooding into Minneapolis,” he said, a claim that has not been corroborated. “If you blink now in Minneapolis, they’re gonna send the insurgents to Maine.… If you blink in Minneapolis, you’ll never make it to Detroit, to Chicago, to Philadelphia, to Los Angeles, to New York. Take the fight here.… Put the insurgency down immediately.”The far right has given the left a lot of credit here, so much so that it almost feels like reverence. But it’s telling that they just can’t comprehend the notion of ordinary Americans being united around—and inspired to defend—some simple civic ideals. “You can tell where someone’s  morals and values are if they cannot even fathom what a community coming together looks like. That has to be funded from outside resources, right?” Sheikh told me regarding the Soros accusations. “It just shows how alienated you are from your own community and your own kind of  humanist identity, even.”The Bannon crowd is right about one thing, though. By forcing the people of Minneapolis to come together, the Trump administration has inadvertently helped create a blueprint for community resistance that will almost surely meet them wherever their next immigration operation is. “There isn’t any sort of centralization, there’s no shadow committee that’s running these chats,” said Sheikh. “It really is like neighbors next door doing this work because they have some rough idea of a framework, but they understand the mission, right? They understand the goal. The purpose is to observe, document, and prevent abductions, and it’s shown to be really effective.”I don’t think any of the parties involved in the defense of their neighbors are going to completely give up on electoralism. They might be giving up on the Democratic establishment, however. From the gun-toting Black Lions in Philly to soccer moms in Minneapolis staking out at elementary schools, Americans are realizing that a midterm election won’t protect them or their neighbors, and they are acting accordingly.Minneapolis is still occupied, and it will be some time before they finish picking up the pieces. As the Trump administration grows more bellicose, and bent on causing more suffering—which it surely will in these next three years—these various nonelectoral strategies will become more prominent, and more necessary. It’s important that we pay attention, share notes, and expand our communities’ ability to defend themselves. Your neighborhood could be next.

Trump Angered by Fresh Slide in Polls as Even Fox Admits He’s Tanking
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

Trump Angered by Fresh Slide in Polls as Even Fox Admits He’s Tanking

A new CNN poll finds Donald Trump’s approval at an abysmal 36 percent. And a Washington Post survey finds him absolutely tanking on just about all major issues. But to Trump, this cannot be real: He just issued an angry, rambling tirade about how such polls are fake. He even declared that his support is “silent,” while insisting he got many millions more votes in 2024 than he actually got. Amusingly, this came even as Fox News aired a striking graphic showing Trump’s approval on tariffs at an abysmal 34–64. This isn’t the first time Fox has admitted how badly things are going: The network’s own recent poll found him deeply underwater on the economy, tariffs, and even immigration. We talked to Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari, author of a good new piece explaining how Trump operates outside the Constitution. We discuss how this extra-constitutional governing is itself rendering him deeply unpopular, why Trump’s poll denial reflects a refusal to acknowledge legitimate opposition, and what it all tells us about the current state of the American experiment. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

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