Very nice. Some of those takes (e.g. around project 2025) managed to be novel to me, and they were nearly all ones that I could agree with.
Edit: oh, I'd wanted to say that repellent has three instances of E in it. And I found it harder to respect the liberals after they said that a city banning homeless encampments violates the 8th amendment.
“It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness” … so it takes a large amount of imagination? I feel like that’s the opposite of what the court is trying to say. Incredibly petty thing but it irks me how often US courts don’t seem to care about the specific phrasing of legally binding decisions
Yeah, Wilkinson clearly got this wrong. Give him your sympathies, though: DoJ appealed to CA4 on April 5, response came in April 6 (1:48 P.M.), the amicus brief from Chemerinsky/Tribe came in April 7 (8:23 A.M.), and the opinion was published on April 7 (11:01 A.M.) -- which means the opinion was presumably finished at least an hour earlier to allow for uploading and so forth.
That means CA4 had to carefully read and review the arguments from both sides and write/revise/publish their responsive opinions, within about 22 hours, most of which are off-hours for normal people.
On that timeline, I think some typos are inevitable.
(I speak here as someone who carefully checked this entire article for typos twice before publication, which takes a good couple of hours to do, hit publish, and, lo and behold, instantly found several more typos.)
It's much more worthy of criticism when the case has been on the docket for months, and judges have had weeks to revise.
On a similar matter, one of my bugaboos is the widespread misuse of the "Hobson's choice" concept. For example, "This pro-abortion law would make Catholic doctors choose between living by their moral convictions and losing their jobs." Thanks, I'll choose to live by my moral convictions, especially since I don't want to lose my job...
Still reading, but the JGG order literally let Trump continue the deportation, that was the effect of the order, as it vacated the only thing stopping him: the TRO. The media coverage was correct. SCOTUS dicta aren't binding orders by themselves without an injuction or something. Maybe it would only be useful in a Bivens suit if it managed to get through. And the admin isn't really acting in good faith.
I still don't think it's correct to say that "Court allows deportations to proceed" when the ruling specifically cites the government's concession that its deportations *cannot* proceed, and spends half its controlling opinion emphasizing that point, even if that holding is *technically* dicta because not *directly* related to the TRO.
It would have been unreasonable to expect any deportations to proceed after that order, no deportations *did* proceed in fact, and deportations were timely blocked by a new injunction exactly as SCOTUS had suggested. If we agree on all of those things, then shouldn't we also agree that the headlines implying that the deportations *would* proceed were, at the least, very misleading?
I think given what the White House had represented (both in statements and to the DC circuit) to that point the deportations proceeding was a reasonable prediction, which luckily didn't happen. But cynically I think the opinion itself is the court's attempt at PR damage control about which was IMHO a horrible consequence from which we were saved by a sudden glimmer of good faith within the Trump admin, and that should not be expected to happen again. (Also I think if your country is at the point where people are being sent to a foreign dictaror without any process, it is generally fair to panic and you have too much conservative brainworms on that front.)
I also think the court wanted the admin to listen to it, and it did, but it did nothing to actually bind the admin and it barely cared. (Maybe they could have stayed their own order to give time to file for habeas either class action or for the plaintiffs for example.)
> (Also I think if your country is at the point where people are being sent to a foreign dictaror without any process, it is generally fair to panic and you have too much conservative brainworms on that front.)
Here is my thought process:
1. We have a process for dealing with unlawful arrest or imprisonment: the writ of habeas corpus.
2. The courts are saying that the immigration prisoners have access to habeas corpus, and the prisoners are exercising that right, even from CECOT.
3. Therefore, due process is still occurring, and panic therefore premature.
The fact that it's a foreign prison, rather than a domestic prison, adds a wrinkle, but not, I think, a *relevant* wrinkle. I'm not aware of statutes that prevent federal prisoners from being held by allies. The fact that it's a torture prison, rather than a normal prison, means (it seems to me) that anyone illegally shipped there stands to make a lot of money when they get out, and may make it illegal to have them there at all, but that (it seems to me) is something that can and should come up in their habeas hearings.
Basically, as long as habeas is still up and running, I think we still have a rule of law, and therefore I do not need to buy a gun.
Of course, this only heightens my anxiety about the Administration's claim that everyone in CECOT is, in fact, beyond the reach of the courts, because that would mean habeas is disabled after all. But the Garcia case is ongoing, and I really strongly think they are going to lose it and be forced to cough up Garcia.
P.S. This thread makes me think of another red line I should have included: suspension of habeas corpus, especially by presidential decree (without an actual honest-to-God rebellion or invasion that justified it).
James, agree with your thoughts regarding due process still happening in theory, whereas I agree with Sathya about what is happening in practice.
Habeas corpus forces every prisoner to challenge their confinement or deportation individually, as opposed to challenging whether groups have been detained and deported unlawfully. This means each individual must retain counsel and convince a judge, usually in the most Trump-friendly districts in the country.
Given the shell game the administration has been willing to play with the locations of its prisoners, even making the habeas claims will be difficult. If the administration shuffles people around, or even simply lies about having done so, it can claim that no petition was filed in the appropriate district, ship people off to CETO, and then say it's out of their hands.
This makes the dissent's essay, as you call it, extremely relevant, since it examines what the legal ruling means in reality.
Every story I read made clear what the Supreme Court had ruled, so perhaps this is because I read past headlines, but the impression of misreporting doesn't resonate with me. We're already at the point of the Supreme Court upholding *any* kind of due process counting as a victory, and we're only a few months into the administration. Trump today doubled down on the idea of "deporting" US citizens. How much you panic at this point would correlate meaningfully with how likely the administration is to round you up if it does openly reject court control.
I confess to having had you in mind when I wrote Footnote 11.
I would be more worried about potential deportees not being able to get secure counsel if any of them were not successfully securing counsel. So far, at least, it *appears* that everyone is getting counsel (though I'm keeping tabs because it is impossible to trust the Admin at this point).
A lot hinges on whether this ridiculous "oh no Bukele has 'em I guess they're gone forever!" thing pans out or not, as you indicate. It seems overwhelmingly likely that it will not, but the fact that it's even being attempted (something that has become rapidly clearer even in the few days since I started writing this article) is a giant escalation. Andrew McCarthy of National Review has been hammering home how legally absurd it is, and he is fairly sympathetic to Trump: https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/04/what-the-abrego-garcia-dispute-is-really-about/
Footnote 11. Do I understand correctly that you're drawing an equivalence between active duty military who refuse an order losing their jobs and immigrants who attempt the legal processes for residency being rounded up without being even accused of a crime and shipped to a torture prison? If this is the argument for people having something to fear from the other side also, it seems mainly to prove the utter lack of equivalence in proportion.
It's not even equivalent with the more obvious Trumpist parallel, the summary separation of all trans people from the military. Troops could change their mind about refusing the vaccine and keep their job, whereas Trump's order does not allow troops to revert to their birth pronouns and stay in the military. (Forcing them to do this would be based in pseudoscience rather than acting on a clear health risk to the entire unit, but at least it would be more comparable.)
Meanwhile, footnote 19 similarly implies a false equivalence with the idea that our systems are holding better against Trump than they would be against Harris, as if Harris would be systematically dismantling republican institutions or receiving half the lenience from the Supreme Court that Trump is. She would most likely be continuing the trend we've seen under W. Bush, Obama, and Biden--which as you observe has been alarming for quite some time. But there's no reality where a Harris administration would lead to a scenario where, as you put it, you buy a gun. Padme Amidala could not be a Republican in today's Congress.
We're basically in agreement about our current state and where the red lines are, even if we seem to disagree about whether those red lines would be remotely as realistic under any electable Democrat. I'm not as confident as you that our institutions will hold--I think we need to stop underestimating Trump, or overestimating the extent to which maturity or other normal metrics of statesmanship matter for the kind of movement Trump is running. But it's not a foregone conclusion either. We have some decisive battles for rule of law ahead--and we have four years left of the same.
How do we know everyone is getting counsel, by the way? I'm not aware we even know the identities of everyone ICE has snatched up, much less whether they're all finding representation.
I don't know Eighth Amendment case law practically at all, so my honest answer is "maybe." It *sounds* right, but how that plays out in cases, I don't know.
Should have branded this as a ‘Worthy Read’ since it was just that! A great collection of disparate-ish (all Trump related) topics with all sorts of great footnotes and links to follow.
Some jotted thoughts as reading:
1. I had to go look up both “poast” and “abjure”, only one of which appears to be a real word though I’ve already forgotten what it means
2. You think of that horrid “water water” song twice a WEEK?!? Fix your damn roof my man! If you need to pass a hat around to call in a plumber please do so, I can’t imagine a non waterworld-world where that song should come up twice a decade
3. I didn’t know the people were saying Trump can’t read (footnotes 10 and 20) but really enjoyed that Samantha Bee clip! Am I just not online enough to still be seeing echos of that pieces 8 years later? Or did she just not leave any sort of impact on the hive mind?
1. Yeah, "abjure" is the real one! I only remember it because of D&D: the "abjuration" school of magic is the school of shielding and damage prevention.
2. The problem is that it was a childhood thing, so it is hooked up to very deep places in my psyche. I am specifically triggered to think of it whenever anyone, including me, uses the phrase "get wet." Fortunately, I have learned to keep it inside my own head, or you can imagine the NSFW consequences.
I am also triggered by any two-syllable word with a first-syllable stress followed by the word "everywhere." "Turkeys everywhere" sets me off. "Climbing everywhere" does the same. However, this comes up less often than "get wet."
3. I think Sam Bee has faded into complete irrelevance, and resurrecting her jokes somehow makes them funnier than they were when she was alive.
(n.b. as far as I know, Sam Bee is actually still alive, but who can say for sure?)
James, thanks for the megapost. I agree with and appreciate most of it, though I would never buy a gun because I'm reasonably sure the first thing I'd do is shoot myself in the foot. I do, however, know which of my fellow local parishioners have them and know how to use them.
On Trump's statement about grabbing women in, um, extremely inappropriate places, I remember reading that it was more of a hypothetical: That someone with his wealth and power COULD do this without serious consequences. That would still, of course, be grossly crass, but not a confession of a past deed. It would be something like the old (also extremely crass) joke that a certain person could not lose an election unless he were found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy.
On Mexico City, I certainly agree, and I would note that Trump did something in his order that pro-life groups had urged George W. Bush in vain to do: Extend it beyond population assistance to our foreign aid's health care budget. (I think this means that, among other things, it covers PEPFAR, assuming that this very good program survives at all.)
IIRC, the genitalia-grabbing comment was phrased in such a way that while you can read it as a hypothetical, it sounds very much like a hypothetical borne out of personal experience with such matters.
To Tom's comment (with which I agree) I add the full quote:
"I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."
Now, if you or I said this, it would be disgusting, but we *might* successfully argue that we only meant that this is a power stars have, not that we were endorsing it. It would be a stretch but maybe we could sell it.
But since this is Donald Trump saying it -- Trump of the adulterous, covered-up affair with a porn star; Trump whose own ex-wife Ivana called him a rapist "in a non-criminal sense"; Trump the pal of Jeffrey Epstein; Trump who was found to have probably sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll by a jury of his peers -- I don't think that holds up.
You are right that Trump went further than Bush did on Mexico City. He also revived the Rust v. Sullivan regulations in his first term! That was pretty good stuff, too. There was indeed a very great deal for a pro-lifer to be happy about in his first term, and I still have hopes that at least a little of that will continue in his second.
My only point was that he said it was among the things that people like him ("stars") COULD get away with, not that he had done it. (I was not making any claim as to whether he nonetheless might have done it himself. Just saying that the statement in the post went beyond the established facts.)
My point in reply is that I don't think that's a believable interpretation of his statement. It strikes me as implausible to read that paragraph, in context, as anything other than admission to the behavior in question, so I treat it as an admission. YMMV, of course!
Don't forget that he admitted to walking into beauty pageant dressing rooms (Miss USA, which he owned) while the contestants were in varying states of undress:
“I'll go backstage before a show and everyone's getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men are anywhere. And I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant. And therefore I'm inspecting it. ... Is everyone OK? You know they're standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”
(2005, Howard Stern)
Not only that, but while he might not have admitted it himself, multiple participants in the Miss Teen USA pageant (the 1997 edition in particular) have claimed that he did the same with their pageant, along with other reports of his untoward behaviour at beauty pageants.
He also said back in 2006 (on "The View", appearing with Ivanka to promote her guest stint on "The Apprentice") that if Ivanka weren't his daughter, he'd want to date her, after being asked what he would think if she were to pose for Playboy: “It would be really disappointing — not really — but it would depend on what’s inside the magazine. I don’t think Ivanka would do that, although she does have a very nice figure. I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”
The reason I am subscribed to De Civitate is because I am interested in specifically your takes on things (and I am not Facebook friends with you) and would be very happy to see smaller 'quick take' articles here.
>Also, quite frankly, I stopped calling covid the “Chinese coronavirus” because I was told it was politically incorrect, and I am still kicking myself for backing down over that. It was a Chinese coronavirus, and, as it later turned out, it was likely born within, and leaked from, one of their government labs!
My current understanding is that if it was from a lab leak vs zoonosis is still pretty up in the air with the evidence still pointing slightly towards zoonosis (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim) but it is possible there has been new evidence since I last looked at it.
> We should call it the “China virus” just like the “Spanish flu” and the “MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) outbreak”! So I’m less inclined now to step away from a term simply because someone else uses it pejoratively.
If a (the?) primary purpose of language is to facilitate ideas between people, China virus seems much worse than COVID-19 when referring to the outbreak or SARS-CoV-2 when referring to the virus simply out of the fact that the later are much more commonly used (while also conveniently giving some biological insight and the year of origin though I guess at the expense of the geographical origin). It also follows the WHO's updated guidelines (from 2015, so post-MERS pre-COVID-19) on disease naming (https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-practices-for-naming-new-human-infectious-diseases) which seem reasonable (and at the very least if there is a standard it is probably better to follow it unless there is a compelling reason not to). Also while China deserves a lot of criticism for how they handled the start of the pandemic, the discrimination against ethnically Chinese people from Trump's repeated use of the term "Chinese flu" (or the admittedly much more funny "Kung Flu") is probably not good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobia_and_racism_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic#United_States).
> Roberts is a political animal, except that isn’t quite right, because animals are usually fairly successful at adopting means that progress them to their goals. Roberts is like a political animal with a lobotomy, constantly cutting off his own fingers and then laughing in triumph like he’s really put one over on the rest of us.
To the point on the "Spanish flu" name, at least according to Wikipedia the first documented case was in Kansas. The name "Spanish flu" came about because the initial cases occurred in early 1918, and so in countries like the United States, France and the United Kingdom reporting on it was banned by wartime censorship laws in order not to damage morale.
Spain, however, was neutral and its press reported on the epidemic freely. Not only that, but Alfonso XIII fell ill with the disease (he survived), and so in the public consciousness, since most news of the epidemic was about its effects in Spain, the epidemic was associated primarily with Spain.
> Note that this shift was _not_ caused by _Dobbs_. In 2018, Gallup found 31% of women supported abortion under any circumstances. By 2021, it was 36%. In 2022, they happened to take the survey the same week the _Dobbs_ draft leaked, and it didn’t spike; it held at 38%. It has continued steady growth to reach 42% today. This is a _seismic_ shift in abortion polling, which has been notable over the past fifty years chiefly for its rock-steady stability.
Didn't realize this change began pre-Dobbs, sobering (I initially thought this was primarily just due to abortion being more prominently in the news cycle and would settle with some time, but this makes it seem like that is maybe not the case?)
> On Signalgate
Really hard for me to get that worked up about this one (and was very surprised when this seemed to be getting a lot more press than, the what seemed to me to be much more serious insistence on violating court orders). Was it bad op-sec; yes. And does it show that Trump has appointed perhaps some less than capable people whose main qualifications are extreme sycophancy (Pete Hegseth); yes. But this was known outside of this event and there doesn't seem like there was actually any real harm caused. It would be very hard for me to get behind jail time for what seems to me to be ordinary negligence without any perceivable damages. (I have similar feelings about Clinton's emails for reference which has always seemed to me to be a huge non-story).
> My kids are not vaccinated against covid. Given the evidence, this is also an objectively good choice.
COVID vaccination of children is less obviously a no-brainer than covid vaccination of adults, but I am curious what made you think non-vaccination here is the objectively correct choice? This is not something that I have deeply looked into (as I don't have any kids (yet)), but my understanding is that most (all?) health organizations recommended vaccines for children with the understanding that while the risk of serious complications from COVID were lower for this age group that getting vaccinated
1. Helped 'lower the curve'/slow the spread of the disease (which seems like a societal duty we probably have)
2. Did reduce the risk of serious COVID side effects (even if the base rate was lower)
*There is some subtlety here as things like acute myocarditis were also higher among this population from the vaccine itself but
1. acute myocarditis is not a very serious side effect
2. while the pandemic was happening, my understanding was the chance of getting acute myocarditis from the vaccine was lower than getting covid + getting acute myocarditis from covid itself (which had a much higher base rate)
It has been a while though so it is very possible that I am missing something obvious here.
> Sejanus was Tiberius's head of the Praetorian Guard and a very highly trusted adviser. Tiberius withdrew to the isle of Capri after the death of his son Drusus. (It was later alleged that Sejanus had killed Drusus, his rival, by slow poison.)...
The kind of footnotes that keep one coming back! Amazing!
> He immediately sought the extreme limits of presidential power (as previously understood) in order to...
Surprised by the lack of inclusion here of enrich himself here. The level of blatant corruption and kleptocracy in this administration is pretty astounding (even in comparison to his previous administration).
On articles: I admit that, at some point in the last week, it occurred to me that, if I could write these 12,000-word articles and then just *break them up* into reasonable 750-word chunks, I could have an article every single day! But then I worry about spamming the inboxes of you beloved readers. Maybe I'll try it on some non-Trump subject soon, just as an experiment.
On lab leak: I took Scott's assessment very seriously, even when I don't really understand the science behind it (perhaps especially then). When it came out, that article single-handedly moved me from 75% probability of a lab leak to 40% probability of a lab leak. Not quite as far down as Scott places it, but still a big shift from my prior. What's changed for me since then are the leaked intelligence assessments from several governments, which revealed that a number of major intelligence services (with access to precisely the kind of evidence Scott and the debaters can't access) thought it was a lab leak, sometimes with high confidence. Then recently there was the news of U.S. servicemembers falling ill with something very covid-like in October 2019. This doesn't fit with the timeline for the wet market hypothesis but does fit with other reports that I seem to find more credible than the Rootclaim debaters. (I did not watch the debates, so maybe I'm wrong.) All in all, I'm back to 60% lab leak, and it really is just Scott Alexander and that debate keeping me from shooting to 90%.
On vaccinating children: Oof, honestly, years since I thought about this, so let's see if I can even reconstruct my old thought process. Of course, other kids, especially other kids with other conditions or covid history, might reasonably face a very different calculus when it comes to the child vaccine.
What the relevant committee really said was that it's a good idea for high-risk kids, a bad idea for kids with immunity (from having had covid), and an extremely close call for everyone else. My kids had both had covid by this time, so the vaccine's tiny benefits were outweighed by the also-tiny risks. (I think there's also more tail risk from a novel vaccine delivery system under an EUA in a population that hasn't been well-studied.) They were very clear they didn't think their very mixed recommendation should be used to enforce school vaccine mandates and that it should be presented with nuance, but the CDC had political concerns and just ignored them. (Things seem to have gotten even worse with the booster recommendation a few months later, which ACIP tried to restrict to people ages 50+.)
Matt Shapiro (politicalmath) was the only generally-pro-vaccine person I knew covering this process in exhaustive detail, and I trusted him a lot. Certainly a lot more than I trusted the heads of the CDC under either Biden or Trump! A sampling: https://www.marginallycompelling.com/p/the-vrbpac-meeting There's a lot of diversity in Europe about whether under-16s are even *allowed* to get the vaccine, much less *advised* to get it.
On virus names: my irritation with the WHO's naming guidelines is probably too complicated to unpack here, but my general view is that telling people they can't say naughty words (and taking action to delete emerging naughty words from the global vocabulary) tends to make people *more* racist, not less, even if only to give a middle finger to such meddling busybodies. (This is not a developed argument I do not expect it to persuade anyone in this limited form.)
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts! I'm always delighted to hear when a footnote strikes the right chord!
“You cannot have constitutional government when the country does not agree on what the Constitution says.”
You also cannot have a constitutional government when people don’t care what it says, or don’t care about faithfully applying what it says, or when they twist its words into pretzels to achieve ends which they desire…
Which is to say, we’ve been cooked for nearly a century
I will possibly have more to say in the future on the actual contents of this, but for now I want to note that the link in "The Supreme Court and the Second Trump Administration” by William Baude (general speculation/analysis on how SCOTUS is thinking about these cases)" isn't working.
James, i wish you would have broken this up into separate articles! A lot of ground to cover!
2 thoughts:
1. On the Garcia case, much is less clear than reported in most media. But one thing is abundantly clear: the Trump administration both admits it made a mistake, and at the sam time, refuses to fit a finger to correct it! We know (from how Trump bullied Colombia into accepting deportees) that if Trump wanted Garcia returned from El Salvador, or even deported to a third country (which might have been legal), he could have pressured El Salvador to do it.
Garcia, as a illegally present immigrant and possibly an (unproven) gang member is not a sympathetic case. But consider this: the next "administrative mistake" could be a legal immigrant or even an American citizen. And the Trump administration would not admit the "mistake" but proclaim they got rid of Another Gang Member. If I were Hispanic, or looked Hispanic, I would definitely buy a gun!
(Footnote: Any US citizen can apply for a "US Passport card," a document the size of a credit card or driver's license, that definitely proves citizenship and is easily carried at all times).
2. Trump will never get a third term. We haved talked before about the the 22nd Amendment term limits that everyone knows about, versus the obscurity of the Insurrection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Another reason is that (as in Minnesota) election officials in each state (usually the Secretary of State) are empowered to bar ineligible candidates from the ballot. And many Secretaries of State will do just that if Trump runs in 2028.
My survey of the Wikipedia list (https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_current_secretaries_of_state_in_the_United_States) the Wikipedia list of state secretaries of State reveals that of the 7 swing states in the 2024 election, 5 of them have Secretaries of state that are Democrats. If that holds (and assuming that all Blue states bar him from the ballot as well, Trump won't make enough state ballots to get anywhere near 270 electoral votes. If Trump sues to get ballot access, he will surely get shot down. There are no terms like "insurrection" to define. "You can't be elected President more than twice" is crystal clear.
I suspect trump knows that;s a fight he can't win, and is simply musing about the possibility to retain his influence and avoid being a lame duck.
1. Agreed on Garcia, except that I would wait to buy a gun until seeing whether the Administration will deny the Supreme Court.
2. Suppose Trump runs as Vice-President to JD Vance, with Vance promising to resign immediately if elected. This neatly works around the 22nd Amendment, which only forbids him from being *elected* President more than twice -- not *succeeding to* to the presidency. There's some language in the 12th Amendment that seems to forbid this, but it's questionable in just the same way that the insurrection language was questionable, so at this point I assume the courts would wave it through.
The 12th Amendment ends: "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."
This does indeed the literal reading would allow Trump to succeed back to the White House, while the clear intent is to confine the VP to the same qualifications as the president, which would have to include being elected.
I had thought of this as well. The Blue Secretaries of State will oppose this as well, and it will get to the courts. But the way Trump has been pushing back against the courts, it's more likely the courts will seize the ambiguous language to rule against Trump,. The more trump openly defies th courts, the more likely this outcome would be. And that's even assuming Trump trusts JD Vance enough to step aside.
There's only one court that matters in this discussion, and it's the court that ruled 9-0 against a single state attempting to enforce the provisions of the 14th Amendment against Trump. You could be right that this time is different, and I hope you are, but I am long past the point where I have any certainty, or even great confidence, that it would be. My strongest hope remains that Trump simply stands down at the end of his term.
My read has been that if he wants to try to win a third term, he'll file to run and, when rejected, sue on the basis of this language from Anderson, readily adapted to other restrictions on being elected or serving as President:
Finally, state enforcement of Section 3 with respect to the Presidency would raise heightened concerns. "[I]n the context of a Presidential election, state-imposed restrictions implicate a uniquely important national interest." Anderson v. Celebrezze, 460 U. S. 780, 794-795 (1983) (footnote omitted). But state-by-state resolution of the question whether Section 3 bars a particular candidate for President from serving would be quite unlikely to yield a uniform answer consistent with the basic principle that "the President . . . represent[s] all the voters in the Nation." Id., at 795 (emphasis added).
Conflicting state outcomes concerning the same candidate could result not just from differing views of the merits, but from variations in state law governing the proceedings that are necessary to make Section 3 disqualification determinations. Some States might allow a Section 3 challenge to succeed based on a preponderance of the evidence, while others might require a heightened showing. Certain evidence (like the congressional Report on which the lower courts relied here) might be admissible in some States but inadmissible hearsay in others. Disqualification might be possible only through criminal prosecution, as opposed to expedited civil proceedings, in particular States. Indeed, in some States-unlike Colorado (or Maine, where the secretary of state recently issued an order excluding former President Trump from the primary ballot)-procedures for excluding an ineligible candidate from the ballot may not exist at all. The result could well be that a single candidate would be declared ineligible in some States, but not others, based on the same conduct (and perhaps even the same factual record).
The "patchwork" that would likely result from state enforcement would "sever the direct link that the Framers found so critical between the National Government and the people of the United States" as a whole. U. S. Term Limits, 514 U. S., at 822. But in a Presidential election "the impact of the votes cast in each State is affected by the votes cast"-or, in this case, the votes not allowed to be cast-"for the various candidates in other States." Anderson, 460 U. S., at 795. An evolving electoral map could dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties, and States across the country, in different ways and at different times. The disruption would be all the more acute-and could nullify the votes of millions and change the election result-if Section 3 enforcement were attempted after the Nation has voted. Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos-arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the Inauguration.
It's quite easy to adapt this rationale to the 22nd Amendment (or the 12th, or Article II, Section 1, Clause 5) and say that because some states have no procedure for excluding ineligible candidates from the ballot, no state can enforce its procedure against a candidate for President (or Vice President) since that is determined nationwide, not just in one particular state.
This strikes me as a plausible argument, given Anderson. The question then becomes (I suppose) how honest the Supreme Court was really being in Anderson.
True, but this then gets into questions of standing. In Anderson v. Griswold, it was only the fact that Anderson won in state-court proceedings that allowed the appeal to the federal Supreme Court on federal Constitutional questions. Lower courts, including state courts, would be bound by this language in Anderson because it is on a question of federal Constitutional interpretation, which means that anyone ineligible nonetheless filing to run should win there, and then who would have standing to appeal to the federal Supreme Court? Cases like Fairchild v. Hughes and Massachusetts v. Mellon would seem to indicate that because there is no harm being done to a particular person, nobody has standing. (This is setting aside any questions of whether standing doctrine should be revisited; under existing law I suspect that those clauses are effectively unenforceable against candidates for President.) The federal Supreme Court wouldn't have to weigh in on whether it was being honest in Anderson or not; they could dismiss any appeal on standing grounds.
The "patchwork" arises because the Constitution does not provide for direct election of the president, but only for the states to enact legislation to choose electors who themselves elect the President. According to the Constitution, the states are free to provide in different ways for electors. (Indeed, as late as 1860, not every state chose the electors by popular election. In South Carolina, the legislature did so directly).
IOW, while differing criteria for electoing a President is a big problem for popularly perceived legitimacy, it is not a Constitution problem, if the original meaning of the text is followed.
I'm aware of that, but in Anderson the Court directly cited that patchwork as a reason not to permit state-level enforcement of Section 3, because it would cause "chaos". (But as the attorney for petitioners in Growe v. Simon, whose name I can't recall, pointed out at oral argument, "if this is chaos, then chaos is our system".)
Even though the public at large is more aware of the 22nd Amendment and its applicability than they are (or were) of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and its applicability, that doesn't change the logic (or lack thereof) of Anderson and how it can be applied to enforcement of any other qualification for office, and especially that of President. Some states have robust provisions for challenging ballot access; we saw that process play out, to varying degrees of success (or lack thereof) in many states; other states may lack such provisions, or they are far less robust and may only permit a very select group to sue (such as other candidates, who may for political reasons find it unseemly to attempt to exclude an opponent from the ballot).
The public's awareness of the various provisions, or their use or lack thereof in recent history, does not, from a legal perspective, factor into this; Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is no more or less valid as part of the Constitution as the 22nd Amendment is, so the same legal reasoning around enforcement applies to both. (Remember that at multiple times in the last quarter-century there have been proposals before the US Congress to issue letters of marque, be that against terrorists in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, against Russian oligarchs to seize their yachts in the wake of Russia's full invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and more recently still against Mexican drug cartels, and all these would be Constitutionally valid even though the US has not done so since 1815!)
And then, once the ballot question has passed, the choice facing voters (due to Duverger's Law all but forcing a two-party system) could be between a candidate whom everyone can see is ineligible and a candidate with whom roughly half the voters disagree passionately. At that point, there will be a lot of voters in the aforementioned half who will vote for the candidate they nonetheless concede is ineligible simply because they see it as better than having a President with whom they have deeply felt policy disagreements.
I believe that Donald Trump is much more likely than not to not run again. But he will tease the idea for as long as possible.
I really believe that both you and Daniel Pareja place too much stock in SCOTUS not enforcing the Insurrection Clause, which is far more obscure and problematic than the 22nd Amendment. There was plenty of scope for the Roberts Court to avoid being seen as deciding a Presidential election by wiffing the Insurrection Clause (a provision unused in 150 years) on technicalities. An attempt at a third Trump term will not allow the Court to escape. It will have to enforce the 22nd Amendment or it will become a nullity.
Yes, SCOTUS must enforce the 22nd Amendment or it will become a nullity. But SCOTUS *already made* Section 3 of Amdt 14 a nullity, so I think the default should be to assume that they will do exactly the same thing for exactly the same reasons (not wanting to decide an election on a technicality).
To draw a comparison to an older series of cases here, Trump v. Anderson is comparable to Federal Baseball Club v. National League. You seem to be arguing that when next a legally comparable question comes before the Court, they will follow the path of Radovich v. National Football League, while I and (I presume) James are arguing that they will follow, or at least that it makes the most sense to assume they will follow, Toolson v. New York Yankees.
EDIT: Though given Anderson's reliance on the holding in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, perhaps the better analogy is that Federal Baseball Club is comparable to Thornton, Anderson is comparable to Toolson, and the argument is over whether the next case is Radovich or Flood v. Kuhn.
. . . him from the ballot as well, Trump won't make enough state ballots to get anywhere near 270 electoral votes. If Trump sues to get ballot access, he will surely get shot down. There are no terms like "insurrection" to define. "You can't be elected President more than twice" is crystal clear.
I suspect trump knows that's a fight he can't win, and is simply musing about the possibility to retain his influence and avoid being a lame duck.
Re: women having high anxiety about this administration: As one of those third-party voting, generally center-leaning abortion abolitionist ladies...this administration has set off a deep terror in me in a way no other administration in my lifetime has. Were I you, I would be treating this upswing of women-specific fear across both party lines as similar to when wildlife starts fleeing inland before a tsunami, or when the woods go quiet because a predator is stalking you. I think that this category of women has been around long enough to recognize really deep, almost imperceptible signals of danger that maybe don't ping for a lot of men or those younger than us (purely based on the kinds of dangers we face just being women and the amount of time spent having to learn to listen to our guts to avoid that danger). For whatever our flaws are as a group, I would give a relatively high trust to the collective guts of a bunch of middle-aged(ish) women as a signal something frightening really is happening. If it hasn't yet risen to the general psyche, I think that's a matter of time more than anything.
Very nice. Some of those takes (e.g. around project 2025) managed to be novel to me, and they were nearly all ones that I could agree with.
Edit: oh, I'd wanted to say that repellent has three instances of E in it. And I found it harder to respect the liberals after they said that a city banning homeless encampments violates the 8th amendment.
“It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness” … so it takes a large amount of imagination? I feel like that’s the opposite of what the court is trying to say. Incredibly petty thing but it irks me how often US courts don’t seem to care about the specific phrasing of legally binding decisions
Yeah, Wilkinson clearly got this wrong. Give him your sympathies, though: DoJ appealed to CA4 on April 5, response came in April 6 (1:48 P.M.), the amicus brief from Chemerinsky/Tribe came in April 7 (8:23 A.M.), and the opinion was published on April 7 (11:01 A.M.) -- which means the opinion was presumably finished at least an hour earlier to allow for uploading and so forth.
That means CA4 had to carefully read and review the arguments from both sides and write/revise/publish their responsive opinions, within about 22 hours, most of which are off-hours for normal people.
On that timeline, I think some typos are inevitable.
(I speak here as someone who carefully checked this entire article for typos twice before publication, which takes a good couple of hours to do, hit publish, and, lo and behold, instantly found several more typos.)
It's much more worthy of criticism when the case has been on the docket for months, and judges have had weeks to revise.
That's fair enough on Wilkinson's part, then. I still think we see this kind of thing disturbingly often and under other circumstances though.
On a similar matter, one of my bugaboos is the widespread misuse of the "Hobson's choice" concept. For example, "This pro-abortion law would make Catholic doctors choose between living by their moral convictions and losing their jobs." Thanks, I'll choose to live by my moral convictions, especially since I don't want to lose my job...
Still reading, but the JGG order literally let Trump continue the deportation, that was the effect of the order, as it vacated the only thing stopping him: the TRO. The media coverage was correct. SCOTUS dicta aren't binding orders by themselves without an injuction or something. Maybe it would only be useful in a Bivens suit if it managed to get through. And the admin isn't really acting in good faith.
I still don't think it's correct to say that "Court allows deportations to proceed" when the ruling specifically cites the government's concession that its deportations *cannot* proceed, and spends half its controlling opinion emphasizing that point, even if that holding is *technically* dicta because not *directly* related to the TRO.
It would have been unreasonable to expect any deportations to proceed after that order, no deportations *did* proceed in fact, and deportations were timely blocked by a new injunction exactly as SCOTUS had suggested. If we agree on all of those things, then shouldn't we also agree that the headlines implying that the deportations *would* proceed were, at the least, very misleading?
I think given what the White House had represented (both in statements and to the DC circuit) to that point the deportations proceeding was a reasonable prediction, which luckily didn't happen. But cynically I think the opinion itself is the court's attempt at PR damage control about which was IMHO a horrible consequence from which we were saved by a sudden glimmer of good faith within the Trump admin, and that should not be expected to happen again. (Also I think if your country is at the point where people are being sent to a foreign dictaror without any process, it is generally fair to panic and you have too much conservative brainworms on that front.)
I also think the court wanted the admin to listen to it, and it did, but it did nothing to actually bind the admin and it barely cared. (Maybe they could have stayed their own order to give time to file for habeas either class action or for the plaintiffs for example.)
> (Also I think if your country is at the point where people are being sent to a foreign dictaror without any process, it is generally fair to panic and you have too much conservative brainworms on that front.)
Here is my thought process:
1. We have a process for dealing with unlawful arrest or imprisonment: the writ of habeas corpus.
2. The courts are saying that the immigration prisoners have access to habeas corpus, and the prisoners are exercising that right, even from CECOT.
3. Therefore, due process is still occurring, and panic therefore premature.
The fact that it's a foreign prison, rather than a domestic prison, adds a wrinkle, but not, I think, a *relevant* wrinkle. I'm not aware of statutes that prevent federal prisoners from being held by allies. The fact that it's a torture prison, rather than a normal prison, means (it seems to me) that anyone illegally shipped there stands to make a lot of money when they get out, and may make it illegal to have them there at all, but that (it seems to me) is something that can and should come up in their habeas hearings.
Basically, as long as habeas is still up and running, I think we still have a rule of law, and therefore I do not need to buy a gun.
Of course, this only heightens my anxiety about the Administration's claim that everyone in CECOT is, in fact, beyond the reach of the courts, because that would mean habeas is disabled after all. But the Garcia case is ongoing, and I really strongly think they are going to lose it and be forced to cough up Garcia.
P.S. This thread makes me think of another red line I should have included: suspension of habeas corpus, especially by presidential decree (without an actual honest-to-God rebellion or invasion that justified it).
James, agree with your thoughts regarding due process still happening in theory, whereas I agree with Sathya about what is happening in practice.
Habeas corpus forces every prisoner to challenge their confinement or deportation individually, as opposed to challenging whether groups have been detained and deported unlawfully. This means each individual must retain counsel and convince a judge, usually in the most Trump-friendly districts in the country.
Given the shell game the administration has been willing to play with the locations of its prisoners, even making the habeas claims will be difficult. If the administration shuffles people around, or even simply lies about having done so, it can claim that no petition was filed in the appropriate district, ship people off to CETO, and then say it's out of their hands.
This makes the dissent's essay, as you call it, extremely relevant, since it examines what the legal ruling means in reality.
Every story I read made clear what the Supreme Court had ruled, so perhaps this is because I read past headlines, but the impression of misreporting doesn't resonate with me. We're already at the point of the Supreme Court upholding *any* kind of due process counting as a victory, and we're only a few months into the administration. Trump today doubled down on the idea of "deporting" US citizens. How much you panic at this point would correlate meaningfully with how likely the administration is to round you up if it does openly reject court control.
I confess to having had you in mind when I wrote Footnote 11.
I would be more worried about potential deportees not being able to get secure counsel if any of them were not successfully securing counsel. So far, at least, it *appears* that everyone is getting counsel (though I'm keeping tabs because it is impossible to trust the Admin at this point).
A lot hinges on whether this ridiculous "oh no Bukele has 'em I guess they're gone forever!" thing pans out or not, as you indicate. It seems overwhelmingly likely that it will not, but the fact that it's even being attempted (something that has become rapidly clearer even in the few days since I started writing this article) is a giant escalation. Andrew McCarthy of National Review has been hammering home how legally absurd it is, and he is fairly sympathetic to Trump: https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/04/what-the-abrego-garcia-dispute-is-really-about/
Footnote 11. Do I understand correctly that you're drawing an equivalence between active duty military who refuse an order losing their jobs and immigrants who attempt the legal processes for residency being rounded up without being even accused of a crime and shipped to a torture prison? If this is the argument for people having something to fear from the other side also, it seems mainly to prove the utter lack of equivalence in proportion.
It's not even equivalent with the more obvious Trumpist parallel, the summary separation of all trans people from the military. Troops could change their mind about refusing the vaccine and keep their job, whereas Trump's order does not allow troops to revert to their birth pronouns and stay in the military. (Forcing them to do this would be based in pseudoscience rather than acting on a clear health risk to the entire unit, but at least it would be more comparable.)
Meanwhile, footnote 19 similarly implies a false equivalence with the idea that our systems are holding better against Trump than they would be against Harris, as if Harris would be systematically dismantling republican institutions or receiving half the lenience from the Supreme Court that Trump is. She would most likely be continuing the trend we've seen under W. Bush, Obama, and Biden--which as you observe has been alarming for quite some time. But there's no reality where a Harris administration would lead to a scenario where, as you put it, you buy a gun. Padme Amidala could not be a Republican in today's Congress.
We're basically in agreement about our current state and where the red lines are, even if we seem to disagree about whether those red lines would be remotely as realistic under any electable Democrat. I'm not as confident as you that our institutions will hold--I think we need to stop underestimating Trump, or overestimating the extent to which maturity or other normal metrics of statesmanship matter for the kind of movement Trump is running. But it's not a foregone conclusion either. We have some decisive battles for rule of law ahead--and we have four years left of the same.
How do we know everyone is getting counsel, by the way? I'm not aware we even know the identities of everyone ICE has snatched up, much less whether they're all finding representation.
Is CECOT Cruel and Unusual punishment and if so how does that apply here?
I don't know Eighth Amendment case law practically at all, so my honest answer is "maybe." It *sounds* right, but how that plays out in cases, I don't know.
Should have branded this as a ‘Worthy Read’ since it was just that! A great collection of disparate-ish (all Trump related) topics with all sorts of great footnotes and links to follow.
Some jotted thoughts as reading:
1. I had to go look up both “poast” and “abjure”, only one of which appears to be a real word though I’ve already forgotten what it means
2. You think of that horrid “water water” song twice a WEEK?!? Fix your damn roof my man! If you need to pass a hat around to call in a plumber please do so, I can’t imagine a non waterworld-world where that song should come up twice a decade
3. I didn’t know the people were saying Trump can’t read (footnotes 10 and 20) but really enjoyed that Samantha Bee clip! Am I just not online enough to still be seeing echos of that pieces 8 years later? Or did she just not leave any sort of impact on the hive mind?
Poasting is just internet slang: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poast#:~:text=(humorous%2C%20transitive)%20To%20post,%5Bfrom%20early%2021st%20c.%5D
1. Yeah, "abjure" is the real one! I only remember it because of D&D: the "abjuration" school of magic is the school of shielding and damage prevention.
2. The problem is that it was a childhood thing, so it is hooked up to very deep places in my psyche. I am specifically triggered to think of it whenever anyone, including me, uses the phrase "get wet." Fortunately, I have learned to keep it inside my own head, or you can imagine the NSFW consequences.
I am also triggered by any two-syllable word with a first-syllable stress followed by the word "everywhere." "Turkeys everywhere" sets me off. "Climbing everywhere" does the same. However, this comes up less often than "get wet."
3. I think Sam Bee has faded into complete irrelevance, and resurrecting her jokes somehow makes them funnier than they were when she was alive.
(n.b. as far as I know, Sam Bee is actually still alive, but who can say for sure?)
James, thanks for the megapost. I agree with and appreciate most of it, though I would never buy a gun because I'm reasonably sure the first thing I'd do is shoot myself in the foot. I do, however, know which of my fellow local parishioners have them and know how to use them.
On Trump's statement about grabbing women in, um, extremely inappropriate places, I remember reading that it was more of a hypothetical: That someone with his wealth and power COULD do this without serious consequences. That would still, of course, be grossly crass, but not a confession of a past deed. It would be something like the old (also extremely crass) joke that a certain person could not lose an election unless he were found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy.
On Mexico City, I certainly agree, and I would note that Trump did something in his order that pro-life groups had urged George W. Bush in vain to do: Extend it beyond population assistance to our foreign aid's health care budget. (I think this means that, among other things, it covers PEPFAR, assuming that this very good program survives at all.)
IIRC, the genitalia-grabbing comment was phrased in such a way that while you can read it as a hypothetical, it sounds very much like a hypothetical borne out of personal experience with such matters.
To Tom's comment (with which I agree) I add the full quote:
"I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."
Now, if you or I said this, it would be disgusting, but we *might* successfully argue that we only meant that this is a power stars have, not that we were endorsing it. It would be a stretch but maybe we could sell it.
But since this is Donald Trump saying it -- Trump of the adulterous, covered-up affair with a porn star; Trump whose own ex-wife Ivana called him a rapist "in a non-criminal sense"; Trump the pal of Jeffrey Epstein; Trump who was found to have probably sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll by a jury of his peers -- I don't think that holds up.
You are right that Trump went further than Bush did on Mexico City. He also revived the Rust v. Sullivan regulations in his first term! That was pretty good stuff, too. There was indeed a very great deal for a pro-lifer to be happy about in his first term, and I still have hopes that at least a little of that will continue in his second.
My only point was that he said it was among the things that people like him ("stars") COULD get away with, not that he had done it. (I was not making any claim as to whether he nonetheless might have done it himself. Just saying that the statement in the post went beyond the established facts.)
My point in reply is that I don't think that's a believable interpretation of his statement. It strikes me as implausible to read that paragraph, in context, as anything other than admission to the behavior in question, so I treat it as an admission. YMMV, of course!
https://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/tribune/article_popover.aspx?guid=1ef52d45-710a-4716-b166-2b3650f615eb
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/a-timeline-of-donald-trumps-creepiness-while-he-owned-miss-universe-191860/
Don't forget that he admitted to walking into beauty pageant dressing rooms (Miss USA, which he owned) while the contestants were in varying states of undress:
“I'll go backstage before a show and everyone's getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men are anywhere. And I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant. And therefore I'm inspecting it. ... Is everyone OK? You know they're standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”
(2005, Howard Stern)
Not only that, but while he might not have admitted it himself, multiple participants in the Miss Teen USA pageant (the 1997 edition in particular) have claimed that he did the same with their pageant, along with other reports of his untoward behaviour at beauty pageants.
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/id-date-her-trump-20060309-gdn42m.html?js-chunk-not-found-refresh=true
He also said back in 2006 (on "The View", appearing with Ivanka to promote her guest stint on "The Apprentice") that if Ivanka weren't his daughter, he'd want to date her, after being asked what he would think if she were to pose for Playboy: “It would be really disappointing — not really — but it would depend on what’s inside the magazine. I don’t think Ivanka would do that, although she does have a very nice figure. I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”
Still reading but...
re: Intro
The reason I am subscribed to De Civitate is because I am interested in specifically your takes on things (and I am not Facebook friends with you) and would be very happy to see smaller 'quick take' articles here.
>Also, quite frankly, I stopped calling covid the “Chinese coronavirus” because I was told it was politically incorrect, and I am still kicking myself for backing down over that. It was a Chinese coronavirus, and, as it later turned out, it was likely born within, and leaked from, one of their government labs!
My current understanding is that if it was from a lab leak vs zoonosis is still pretty up in the air with the evidence still pointing slightly towards zoonosis (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim) but it is possible there has been new evidence since I last looked at it.
> We should call it the “China virus” just like the “Spanish flu” and the “MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) outbreak”! So I’m less inclined now to step away from a term simply because someone else uses it pejoratively.
If a (the?) primary purpose of language is to facilitate ideas between people, China virus seems much worse than COVID-19 when referring to the outbreak or SARS-CoV-2 when referring to the virus simply out of the fact that the later are much more commonly used (while also conveniently giving some biological insight and the year of origin though I guess at the expense of the geographical origin). It also follows the WHO's updated guidelines (from 2015, so post-MERS pre-COVID-19) on disease naming (https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-practices-for-naming-new-human-infectious-diseases) which seem reasonable (and at the very least if there is a standard it is probably better to follow it unless there is a compelling reason not to). Also while China deserves a lot of criticism for how they handled the start of the pandemic, the discrimination against ethnically Chinese people from Trump's repeated use of the term "Chinese flu" (or the admittedly much more funny "Kung Flu") is probably not good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobia_and_racism_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic#United_States).
(The term 'Spanish' Flu is also probably a misnomer as it most likely originated in the US (or maybe France or China) but not Spain https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC340389/)
> Roberts is a political animal, except that isn’t quite right, because animals are usually fairly successful at adopting means that progress them to their goals. Roberts is like a political animal with a lobotomy, constantly cutting off his own fingers and then laughing in triumph like he’s really put one over on the rest of us.
Terrific, this made me laugh for a few minutes.
To the point on the "Spanish flu" name, at least according to Wikipedia the first documented case was in Kansas. The name "Spanish flu" came about because the initial cases occurred in early 1918, and so in countries like the United States, France and the United Kingdom reporting on it was banned by wartime censorship laws in order not to damage morale.
Spain, however, was neutral and its press reported on the epidemic freely. Not only that, but Alfonso XIII fell ill with the disease (he survived), and so in the public consciousness, since most news of the epidemic was about its effects in Spain, the epidemic was associated primarily with Spain.
> Note that this shift was _not_ caused by _Dobbs_. In 2018, Gallup found 31% of women supported abortion under any circumstances. By 2021, it was 36%. In 2022, they happened to take the survey the same week the _Dobbs_ draft leaked, and it didn’t spike; it held at 38%. It has continued steady growth to reach 42% today. This is a _seismic_ shift in abortion polling, which has been notable over the past fifty years chiefly for its rock-steady stability.
Didn't realize this change began pre-Dobbs, sobering (I initially thought this was primarily just due to abortion being more prominently in the news cycle and would settle with some time, but this makes it seem like that is maybe not the case?)
> On Signalgate
Really hard for me to get that worked up about this one (and was very surprised when this seemed to be getting a lot more press than, the what seemed to me to be much more serious insistence on violating court orders). Was it bad op-sec; yes. And does it show that Trump has appointed perhaps some less than capable people whose main qualifications are extreme sycophancy (Pete Hegseth); yes. But this was known outside of this event and there doesn't seem like there was actually any real harm caused. It would be very hard for me to get behind jail time for what seems to me to be ordinary negligence without any perceivable damages. (I have similar feelings about Clinton's emails for reference which has always seemed to me to be a huge non-story).
> My kids are not vaccinated against covid. Given the evidence, this is also an objectively good choice.
COVID vaccination of children is less obviously a no-brainer than covid vaccination of adults, but I am curious what made you think non-vaccination here is the objectively correct choice? This is not something that I have deeply looked into (as I don't have any kids (yet)), but my understanding is that most (all?) health organizations recommended vaccines for children with the understanding that while the risk of serious complications from COVID were lower for this age group that getting vaccinated
1. Helped 'lower the curve'/slow the spread of the disease (which seems like a societal duty we probably have)
2. Did reduce the risk of serious COVID side effects (even if the base rate was lower)
*There is some subtlety here as things like acute myocarditis were also higher among this population from the vaccine itself but
1. acute myocarditis is not a very serious side effect
2. while the pandemic was happening, my understanding was the chance of getting acute myocarditis from the vaccine was lower than getting covid + getting acute myocarditis from covid itself (which had a much higher base rate)
It has been a while though so it is very possible that I am missing something obvious here.
> Sejanus was Tiberius's head of the Praetorian Guard and a very highly trusted adviser. Tiberius withdrew to the isle of Capri after the death of his son Drusus. (It was later alleged that Sejanus had killed Drusus, his rival, by slow poison.)...
The kind of footnotes that keep one coming back! Amazing!
> He immediately sought the extreme limits of presidential power (as previously understood) in order to...
Surprised by the lack of inclusion here of enrich himself here. The level of blatant corruption and kleptocracy in this administration is pretty astounding (even in comparison to his previous administration).
On articles: I admit that, at some point in the last week, it occurred to me that, if I could write these 12,000-word articles and then just *break them up* into reasonable 750-word chunks, I could have an article every single day! But then I worry about spamming the inboxes of you beloved readers. Maybe I'll try it on some non-Trump subject soon, just as an experiment.
On lab leak: I took Scott's assessment very seriously, even when I don't really understand the science behind it (perhaps especially then). When it came out, that article single-handedly moved me from 75% probability of a lab leak to 40% probability of a lab leak. Not quite as far down as Scott places it, but still a big shift from my prior. What's changed for me since then are the leaked intelligence assessments from several governments, which revealed that a number of major intelligence services (with access to precisely the kind of evidence Scott and the debaters can't access) thought it was a lab leak, sometimes with high confidence. Then recently there was the news of U.S. servicemembers falling ill with something very covid-like in October 2019. This doesn't fit with the timeline for the wet market hypothesis but does fit with other reports that I seem to find more credible than the Rootclaim debaters. (I did not watch the debates, so maybe I'm wrong.) All in all, I'm back to 60% lab leak, and it really is just Scott Alexander and that debate keeping me from shooting to 90%.
On vaccinating children: Oof, honestly, years since I thought about this, so let's see if I can even reconstruct my old thought process. Of course, other kids, especially other kids with other conditions or covid history, might reasonably face a very different calculus when it comes to the child vaccine.
What the relevant committee really said was that it's a good idea for high-risk kids, a bad idea for kids with immunity (from having had covid), and an extremely close call for everyone else. My kids had both had covid by this time, so the vaccine's tiny benefits were outweighed by the also-tiny risks. (I think there's also more tail risk from a novel vaccine delivery system under an EUA in a population that hasn't been well-studied.) They were very clear they didn't think their very mixed recommendation should be used to enforce school vaccine mandates and that it should be presented with nuance, but the CDC had political concerns and just ignored them. (Things seem to have gotten even worse with the booster recommendation a few months later, which ACIP tried to restrict to people ages 50+.)
Matt Shapiro (politicalmath) was the only generally-pro-vaccine person I knew covering this process in exhaustive detail, and I trusted him a lot. Certainly a lot more than I trusted the heads of the CDC under either Biden or Trump! A sampling: https://www.marginallycompelling.com/p/the-vrbpac-meeting There's a lot of diversity in Europe about whether under-16s are even *allowed* to get the vaccine, much less *advised* to get it.
On virus names: my irritation with the WHO's naming guidelines is probably too complicated to unpack here, but my general view is that telling people they can't say naughty words (and taking action to delete emerging naughty words from the global vocabulary) tends to make people *more* racist, not less, even if only to give a middle finger to such meddling busybodies. (This is not a developed argument I do not expect it to persuade anyone in this limited form.)
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts! I'm always delighted to hear when a footnote strikes the right chord!
"I could have an article every single day! But then I worry about spamming the inboxes of you beloved readers."
You say that like it's a bad thing...
“You cannot have constitutional government when the country does not agree on what the Constitution says.”
You also cannot have a constitutional government when people don’t care what it says, or don’t care about faithfully applying what it says, or when they twist its words into pretzels to achieve ends which they desire…
Which is to say, we’ve been cooked for nearly a century
I will possibly have more to say in the future on the actual contents of this, but for now I want to note that the link in "The Supreme Court and the Second Trump Administration” by William Baude (general speculation/analysis on how SCOTUS is thinking about these cases)" isn't working.
Thanks! Fixed!
James, i wish you would have broken this up into separate articles! A lot of ground to cover!
2 thoughts:
1. On the Garcia case, much is less clear than reported in most media. But one thing is abundantly clear: the Trump administration both admits it made a mistake, and at the sam time, refuses to fit a finger to correct it! We know (from how Trump bullied Colombia into accepting deportees) that if Trump wanted Garcia returned from El Salvador, or even deported to a third country (which might have been legal), he could have pressured El Salvador to do it.
Garcia, as a illegally present immigrant and possibly an (unproven) gang member is not a sympathetic case. But consider this: the next "administrative mistake" could be a legal immigrant or even an American citizen. And the Trump administration would not admit the "mistake" but proclaim they got rid of Another Gang Member. If I were Hispanic, or looked Hispanic, I would definitely buy a gun!
(Footnote: Any US citizen can apply for a "US Passport card," a document the size of a credit card or driver's license, that definitely proves citizenship and is easily carried at all times).
2. Trump will never get a third term. We haved talked before about the the 22nd Amendment term limits that everyone knows about, versus the obscurity of the Insurrection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Another reason is that (as in Minnesota) election officials in each state (usually the Secretary of State) are empowered to bar ineligible candidates from the ballot. And many Secretaries of State will do just that if Trump runs in 2028.
My survey of the Wikipedia list (https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_current_secretaries_of_state_in_the_United_States) the Wikipedia list of state secretaries of State reveals that of the 7 swing states in the 2024 election, 5 of them have Secretaries of state that are Democrats. If that holds (and assuming that all Blue states bar him from the ballot as well, Trump won't make enough state ballots to get anywhere near 270 electoral votes. If Trump sues to get ballot access, he will surely get shot down. There are no terms like "insurrection" to define. "You can't be elected President more than twice" is crystal clear.
I suspect trump knows that;s a fight he can't win, and is simply musing about the possibility to retain his influence and avoid being a lame duck.
1. Agreed on Garcia, except that I would wait to buy a gun until seeing whether the Administration will deny the Supreme Court.
2. Suppose Trump runs as Vice-President to JD Vance, with Vance promising to resign immediately if elected. This neatly works around the 22nd Amendment, which only forbids him from being *elected* President more than twice -- not *succeeding to* to the presidency. There's some language in the 12th Amendment that seems to forbid this, but it's questionable in just the same way that the insurrection language was questionable, so at this point I assume the courts would wave it through.
The 12th Amendment ends: "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."
This does indeed the literal reading would allow Trump to succeed back to the White House, while the clear intent is to confine the VP to the same qualifications as the president, which would have to include being elected.
I had thought of this as well. The Blue Secretaries of State will oppose this as well, and it will get to the courts. But the way Trump has been pushing back against the courts, it's more likely the courts will seize the ambiguous language to rule against Trump,. The more trump openly defies th courts, the more likely this outcome would be. And that's even assuming Trump trusts JD Vance enough to step aside.
There's only one court that matters in this discussion, and it's the court that ruled 9-0 against a single state attempting to enforce the provisions of the 14th Amendment against Trump. You could be right that this time is different, and I hope you are, but I am long past the point where I have any certainty, or even great confidence, that it would be. My strongest hope remains that Trump simply stands down at the end of his term.
My read has been that if he wants to try to win a third term, he'll file to run and, when rejected, sue on the basis of this language from Anderson, readily adapted to other restrictions on being elected or serving as President:
Finally, state enforcement of Section 3 with respect to the Presidency would raise heightened concerns. "[I]n the context of a Presidential election, state-imposed restrictions implicate a uniquely important national interest." Anderson v. Celebrezze, 460 U. S. 780, 794-795 (1983) (footnote omitted). But state-by-state resolution of the question whether Section 3 bars a particular candidate for President from serving would be quite unlikely to yield a uniform answer consistent with the basic principle that "the President . . . represent[s] all the voters in the Nation." Id., at 795 (emphasis added).
Conflicting state outcomes concerning the same candidate could result not just from differing views of the merits, but from variations in state law governing the proceedings that are necessary to make Section 3 disqualification determinations. Some States might allow a Section 3 challenge to succeed based on a preponderance of the evidence, while others might require a heightened showing. Certain evidence (like the congressional Report on which the lower courts relied here) might be admissible in some States but inadmissible hearsay in others. Disqualification might be possible only through criminal prosecution, as opposed to expedited civil proceedings, in particular States. Indeed, in some States-unlike Colorado (or Maine, where the secretary of state recently issued an order excluding former President Trump from the primary ballot)-procedures for excluding an ineligible candidate from the ballot may not exist at all. The result could well be that a single candidate would be declared ineligible in some States, but not others, based on the same conduct (and perhaps even the same factual record).
The "patchwork" that would likely result from state enforcement would "sever the direct link that the Framers found so critical between the National Government and the people of the United States" as a whole. U. S. Term Limits, 514 U. S., at 822. But in a Presidential election "the impact of the votes cast in each State is affected by the votes cast"-or, in this case, the votes not allowed to be cast-"for the various candidates in other States." Anderson, 460 U. S., at 795. An evolving electoral map could dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties, and States across the country, in different ways and at different times. The disruption would be all the more acute-and could nullify the votes of millions and change the election result-if Section 3 enforcement were attempted after the Nation has voted. Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos-arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the Inauguration.
It's quite easy to adapt this rationale to the 22nd Amendment (or the 12th, or Article II, Section 1, Clause 5) and say that because some states have no procedure for excluding ineligible candidates from the ballot, no state can enforce its procedure against a candidate for President (or Vice President) since that is determined nationwide, not just in one particular state.
This strikes me as a plausible argument, given Anderson. The question then becomes (I suppose) how honest the Supreme Court was really being in Anderson.
True, but this then gets into questions of standing. In Anderson v. Griswold, it was only the fact that Anderson won in state-court proceedings that allowed the appeal to the federal Supreme Court on federal Constitutional questions. Lower courts, including state courts, would be bound by this language in Anderson because it is on a question of federal Constitutional interpretation, which means that anyone ineligible nonetheless filing to run should win there, and then who would have standing to appeal to the federal Supreme Court? Cases like Fairchild v. Hughes and Massachusetts v. Mellon would seem to indicate that because there is no harm being done to a particular person, nobody has standing. (This is setting aside any questions of whether standing doctrine should be revisited; under existing law I suspect that those clauses are effectively unenforceable against candidates for President.) The federal Supreme Court wouldn't have to weigh in on whether it was being honest in Anderson or not; they could dismiss any appeal on standing grounds.
The "patchwork" arises because the Constitution does not provide for direct election of the president, but only for the states to enact legislation to choose electors who themselves elect the President. According to the Constitution, the states are free to provide in different ways for electors. (Indeed, as late as 1860, not every state chose the electors by popular election. In South Carolina, the legislature did so directly).
IOW, while differing criteria for electoing a President is a big problem for popularly perceived legitimacy, it is not a Constitution problem, if the original meaning of the text is followed.
I'm aware of that, but in Anderson the Court directly cited that patchwork as a reason not to permit state-level enforcement of Section 3, because it would cause "chaos". (But as the attorney for petitioners in Growe v. Simon, whose name I can't recall, pointed out at oral argument, "if this is chaos, then chaos is our system".)
Even though the public at large is more aware of the 22nd Amendment and its applicability than they are (or were) of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and its applicability, that doesn't change the logic (or lack thereof) of Anderson and how it can be applied to enforcement of any other qualification for office, and especially that of President. Some states have robust provisions for challenging ballot access; we saw that process play out, to varying degrees of success (or lack thereof) in many states; other states may lack such provisions, or they are far less robust and may only permit a very select group to sue (such as other candidates, who may for political reasons find it unseemly to attempt to exclude an opponent from the ballot).
The public's awareness of the various provisions, or their use or lack thereof in recent history, does not, from a legal perspective, factor into this; Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is no more or less valid as part of the Constitution as the 22nd Amendment is, so the same legal reasoning around enforcement applies to both. (Remember that at multiple times in the last quarter-century there have been proposals before the US Congress to issue letters of marque, be that against terrorists in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, against Russian oligarchs to seize their yachts in the wake of Russia's full invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and more recently still against Mexican drug cartels, and all these would be Constitutionally valid even though the US has not done so since 1815!)
And then, once the ballot question has passed, the choice facing voters (due to Duverger's Law all but forcing a two-party system) could be between a candidate whom everyone can see is ineligible and a candidate with whom roughly half the voters disagree passionately. At that point, there will be a lot of voters in the aforementioned half who will vote for the candidate they nonetheless concede is ineligible simply because they see it as better than having a President with whom they have deeply felt policy disagreements.
I believe that Donald Trump is much more likely than not to not run again. But he will tease the idea for as long as possible.
I really believe that both you and Daniel Pareja place too much stock in SCOTUS not enforcing the Insurrection Clause, which is far more obscure and problematic than the 22nd Amendment. There was plenty of scope for the Roberts Court to avoid being seen as deciding a Presidential election by wiffing the Insurrection Clause (a provision unused in 150 years) on technicalities. An attempt at a third Trump term will not allow the Court to escape. It will have to enforce the 22nd Amendment or it will become a nullity.
I think Daniel makes a good case here.
Yes, SCOTUS must enforce the 22nd Amendment or it will become a nullity. But SCOTUS *already made* Section 3 of Amdt 14 a nullity, so I think the default should be to assume that they will do exactly the same thing for exactly the same reasons (not wanting to decide an election on a technicality).
We will disagree, and see what happens.
To draw a comparison to an older series of cases here, Trump v. Anderson is comparable to Federal Baseball Club v. National League. You seem to be arguing that when next a legally comparable question comes before the Court, they will follow the path of Radovich v. National Football League, while I and (I presume) James are arguing that they will follow, or at least that it makes the most sense to assume they will follow, Toolson v. New York Yankees.
EDIT: Though given Anderson's reliance on the holding in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, perhaps the better analogy is that Federal Baseball Club is comparable to Thornton, Anderson is comparable to Toolson, and the argument is over whether the next case is Radovich or Flood v. Kuhn.
Agh, Anderson is an irrational distortion of U.S. Term Limits and it makes me mad.
Remainder of that post:
. . . him from the ballot as well, Trump won't make enough state ballots to get anywhere near 270 electoral votes. If Trump sues to get ballot access, he will surely get shot down. There are no terms like "insurrection" to define. "You can't be elected President more than twice" is crystal clear.
I suspect trump knows that's a fight he can't win, and is simply musing about the possibility to retain his influence and avoid being a lame duck.
Re: women having high anxiety about this administration: As one of those third-party voting, generally center-leaning abortion abolitionist ladies...this administration has set off a deep terror in me in a way no other administration in my lifetime has. Were I you, I would be treating this upswing of women-specific fear across both party lines as similar to when wildlife starts fleeing inland before a tsunami, or when the woods go quiet because a predator is stalking you. I think that this category of women has been around long enough to recognize really deep, almost imperceptible signals of danger that maybe don't ping for a lot of men or those younger than us (purely based on the kinds of dangers we face just being women and the amount of time spent having to learn to listen to our guts to avoid that danger). For whatever our flaws are as a group, I would give a relatively high trust to the collective guts of a bunch of middle-aged(ish) women as a signal something frightening really is happening. If it hasn't yet risen to the general psyche, I think that's a matter of time more than anything.