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Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Brad Lander Managed His Arrest Just Fine. What He Saw in the Interrogation Room Broke Him.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Brad Lander thought he was making another trip to Manhattan's immigration court on Tuesday to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detentions and deportations of undocumented people in New York. Instead, the city's Democratic comptroller and mayoral contender was shoved against a wall by masked ICE agents, handcuffed, led through the same corridors where he'd been escorting immigrants only moments earlier, and detained for roughly five hours. Federal officials claimed he had 'assaulted' and 'impeded' their officers, though Lander was released without charges. Gov. Kathy Hochul sought to intervene and branded the episode 'bullshit.' New York Attorney General Tish James called it 'a shocking abuse of power.' Rival candidates Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo both condemned the arrest. With early voting for the Democratic primary opened, and more than 130,000 ballots already in, voters are now looking at images of a would-be mayor in zip ties. Barely 24 hours after walking out of 26 Federal Plaza, I called Lander to talk through the arrest, what exactly happened, and how the experience could reshape the last stage of his campaign. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Aymann Ismail: What were you doing inside 26 Federal Plaza on Tuesday? Brad Lander: So this was the third time I've done it. I've gone each of the last three weeks as a part of a friend of the court program organized by Immigrant ARC that asks people to come down and bear witness to immigration hearings and, in some cases, escort people out of the building. About three weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security changed their policy. They dismissed people's cases, stripped them of their asylum-seeker status, and subjected them to expedited removal. I've been able to escort five individuals or families out of the building without incident, and that felt great. But in this instance, following what's happened to Sen. Alex Padilla and to Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and others, they decided to arrest me. It's a sign of Trump's creeping authoritarianism and of the threats to our democracy. Did the ICE agents give you any warning? Was there anything different about the case of yesterday? ICE agents mill around the elevator bank. When I came up in the elevator yesterday before I even got to the floor, as soon as the doors open, a group of ICE agents were holding someone that they were detaining. We knew this was a possibility in every case, and at least in my limited experience so far, the seven people that I've accompanied, you don't know whether they're going to come grab the person or not until you turn the corner into the elevator lobby. Walk me through what was happening in that exact moment when ICE agents grabbed you. At first, I had spent a minute talking to Edgardo [the man he was escorting] as another volunteer explained what was going on. I could see how scared he was, and I was just hoping I'd be able to walk him out of the building. Then when the ICE agent started surrounding us and grabbing him, I did what I had been trained to do. I asked to see the judicial warrant. It all moved pretty quickly from there. Reportedly an agent said before your arrest, 'You want me to arrest the comptroller?' I did not hear that. I know that's been reported. I had not heard that at the time. I was asking for the warrant, and one agent said, 'I have the warrant.' That led me to say, 'Well, can I see it?' Otherwise, as you can see on the video, there was kind of a melee. And volunteers are doing more of the talking, asking for badge numbers, asking for the warrant, asking on what authority they were arresting him. This is part of the problem. In an arrest done by uniformed officers in an appropriate way, they name the person and explain on what authority they are making an arrest. And none of that happened yesterday. What was happening in your mind in that exact moment? I was trying to stay focused on Edgardo. There's an important tradition of bearing witness, of nonviolent civic action, of saying, 'I am going to object when people's rights are being stripped away from them.' I was focused on that: Asking the questions about where the authority comes from, objecting to the due-process violations, insisting that the rule of law be followed. That was what was in my head. Homeland Security accused you of assaulting and impeding federal officers. What do you make of that accusation? The video making its way around the internet quite clearly shows that that was not the case. I only learned of that once I got out. I was surprised by it, yes, because it's so patently not what the video shows happened. What happened once you were detained? What kind of facility did they take you into? Were you detained with anybody else? What was that experience like? They brought me to just a room, like an interview room—imagine a Law & Order interview room—most of the time with one ICE police officer just sitting. I didn't have my phone. I was just sitting there for four hours. It's true that we're such creatures of our phones that four hours without one is notable. I was going over in my head what had happened. There were posters on the wall of the room, like, 'Wash your hands before you leave the bathroom,' except that the posters on the wall of this room said, 'Are you a parent who is detained and separated from your children?,' in both English and Spanish. It is horrifying that we have normalized family separation to the point that there's a standard bilingual poster for it on the walls of the interview room and detention rooms in federal immigration courthouses. And the information is not helpful. It's like, 'Here's a hotline number, good luck to you.' The fact that it's a standard enough situation that we are separating parents from their kids that we've designed a bilingual poster to put on the walls as though somehow that excuses behavior that is really torture—yeah, it is enraging. Gov. Kathy Hochul called the arrest 'bullshit.' Were you surprised by that? I was grateful that the governor came down and helped get me out, and even more grateful that she announced $50 million for legal services for people like Edgardo who are facing deportation without lawyers. I was honored to be there for him, but what would've been way better for him was having a lawyer who could actually assert his rights and file his appeal. This is not a small issue. Forty percent of New Yorkers are immigrants. Fifty percent live in mixed-status households, including a million children, and making sure that they can't have their rights ripped out from under them is something that the city and the state have to be doing. Eric Adams continues to bring shame to himself and our city by showing that he's on the side of Trump and the ICE agents. The New York Times reported ICE didn't legally need the warrant you said it did. Was there confusion there? I'm not an immigration attorney. I was asking questions that I had been trained to ask. It is good for individuals when ICE comes to ask to see a judicial warrant, but I also will say I'm not an immigration attorney, and whatever the situation turns out to be, it can't be acceptable that people did everything right, presented themselves at the border, had a hearing, came to their hearing, filed their asylum application, and then just because DHS says, 'Ah, we're going to dismiss the case,' all of a sudden have no rights at all and can be disappeared into detention and deported with no rights whatsoever. That's why I was just asking for some due process. You mentioned Sen. Alex Padilla was detained in Los Angeles under similar circumstances, and Mayor Ras Baraka in New Jersey, too. Do you see this as targeted toward Democratic politicians defending immigration rights? Attorney General Pam Bondi has said on the record that their intention is to quote-unquote 'liberate' Democratic cities from their elected officials. That is Orwellian speak for authoritarian domination to say the federal government is going to come arrest elected officials who are either asking questions as Sen. Padilla was, or trying to enforce their local laws as Ras Baraka was, or observing in a court and asking for a judicial warrant as I was. I think that Donald Trump is coming after our cities and our democracy, and I think it's an important moment for leaders to step up, which is why I was glad that Congress members Nadler and Goldman went down to observe in court today. I hope other elected officials will do it, too. I hope other people will sign up with Immigrant ARC to bear witness and be escorts themselves. They can make examples of Sen. Padilla and Mayor Baraka and me. But if Americans by the thousands, by the millions, show up as we did over the weekend at the No Kings march in peaceful, nonviolent witness, we can respond to this moment of crisis with a love of our democracy and what it means to be governed by the rule of law. That's what we got to do. If you become mayor, where will you draw the line between New York City's sanctuary policies and cooperating with federal law enforcement? Our sanctuary laws are clear and appropriate. If an individual has been convicted of a serious or violent defense, then the New York City sanctuary city laws instruct cooperation with ICE. In investigating a criminal activity, both local and federal government have a role to play, depending on the case and the scope and the charges. But where people have not been convicted of a serious or violent defense, our laws do not permit collaboration between New York City personnel or contractors and federal immigration agents. And I will not allow it. I won't allow ICE in our schools or our public hospitals or our shelters as necessary. I'll put my body on the line as I did yesterday. I want to provide more legal resources so that folks have attorneys to know what to do in their cases. If parent coordinators in schools can offer to families connections to community-based legal organizations, that'll help people come to court more ready so that somebody like Edgardo or Zed or Maria and Manuel or the other families that I've met and the thousands in court every day. New York City can help make sure they have lawyers if they're facing deportation proceedings, and get the information they need to make good choices. That's what we should be doing. The only way New York City can stand up for the values reflected by that statue in the harbor is if we're doing better to live up to them. We need to deliver affordable housing and safe neighborhoods and good streets and transportation to all New Yorkers, whether they are here since birth or here since breakfast. That's what I'm going to do as mayor.
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
I Watched the Democrats Lose Muslim Support Last Election. This Gave Me Hope for 2026.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In late May, I joined roughly two dozen Muslim entrepreneurs, community leaders, nonprofit organizers, and student activists around a very large table for a closed‑door strategy meeting with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. There was no other press, no recording. Emgage Action, a leading Muslim American advocacy organization, welcomed me to observe on the condition that before I quoted anyone, I would first get their consent. We were there to discuss the role of Muslims in the Democratic Party. Many in the room had grown convinced that national Democratic leaders prefer the Muslims in their party to stay quiet and fall in line. In 2024 national party leaders all but ignored months of protests in support of Gaza, backed on-campus police crackdowns, then blamed 'disinformation' when Muslim and Arab American voters staged protest abstentions that helped tip Michigan, Minnesota, and key New Jersey counties to Donald Trump. Many in the room saw that sequence as Democrat leadership's agenda coming down to 'Please hold your nose,' and proof the party values Muslim turnout but not Muslim input. Baraka's counter‑thesis was simple: Fight for them, and they'll fight for you. It is the opposite of what Muslim organizers say they experienced from party leaders in 2024, the cycle Democrats lost to Donald Trump. When Baraka arrived in the room where we waited, it was just after 8 a.m. He was tieless, wearing a solid‑black dashiki, and he spoke softly at first, almost cautious. If anyone expected the fiery mayor who had dominated cable news earlier in the week—handcuffed by federal agents and hauled into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement jail—they found a calmer figure instead. Five days before this gathering, Baraka had joined three members of Congress at Delaney Hall, the recently reopened ICE detention center in Newark, the city he governs. They intended a surprise inspection. Video shows agents ordering them off the property; Baraka complied, stepping back onto the public sidewalk. They arrested him anyway. By that evening, supporters from civil‑rights and faith groups, including Muslim organizers, were rallying outside the detention center where he was being held. He was released that night; the trespass charge evaporated in court 10 days later. But even as the Department of Homeland Security dropped the charges against him, it brought new ones against Rep. LaMonica McIver, one of the lawmakers he had been with.* The whole thing had been a jarring experience, and Baraka has been blunt: 'It's just authoritarianism. … These people are committed to this foolishness. They're going to go as far as they can to not look completely ridiculous because what they did was wrong. They had no jurisdiction over there in the first place.' In that closed-door meeting, the questions posed to Baraka circled three themes: affordability, taxes, and Palestine. Two of those topics are par for the course, though the Newark mayor certainly has thoughts on them. On Palestine, Baraka had a real chance to differentiate himself from the rest of the Democratic party. When multiple attendees referenced student sanctions and job losses across industries in response to their stances on Gaza, Baraka replied that Muslims should be able to criticize U.S. or Israeli policy without being labeled unpatriotic or antisemitic. Throughout, he linked those answers to a wider critique of his own party. 'The leadership of the party has been pretty docile and comfortable and have completely isolated their base across the country.' His prescription was the opposite of caution. 'We can't move in a timid fashion. We have to move with force, with courage, with strength, and we have to move together.' The room nodded, but the primary electorate had a different answer when it came to the race for the Democratic candidate for New Jersey governor. Two weeks later Baraka lost decisively to Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a Navy pilot turned moderate whose campaign leaned on the county machines, saturated the suburbs with ads about property taxes, and avoided Gaza discourse almost entirely. Sherrill's pitch was electability: She promised to 'keep New Jersey blue' without scaring swing voters in Bergen and Monmouth. Baraka, who came in second, couldn't match her donor network and party support that still decides most downballot races. New Jersey is home to an estimated 320,000 Muslims, about 3.5 percent of residents. In 2021 Phil Murphy won reelection by roughly 85,000 votes. Despite those numbers, many of the Muslim community leaders I spoke to voiced their disapproval of how state and national strategists have long treated them as an afterthought—phoning in Eid greetings, skipping hard policy conversations, and assuming they'll continue to view the Democratic Party as their home regardless of outreach or collaboration. Baraka's strategy was different—he focused on reaching out to them. This, however, seemed to double as a flex to show the problem with complacency: If a bloc this large can be energized in an off-cycle primary, what could it do in a presidential year? Baraka spent one of his last days before the primary courting the population, and I tagged along. When I asked his main objective for the tour, he said he wanted to 'galvanize the Muslim community in New Jersey. If we do that, that will be good.' His theory was straightforward: turn a reliable but under-organized bloc into a decisive one and show national Democrats what they risk when they take that bloc for granted. Baraka's Muslim itinerary tracks almost perfectly with census clusters and past underperformance, like Paterson and North Brunswick. I followed Baraka north to Paterson, home to one of the nation's largest Palestinian communities. The visit was brief. He introduced himself as a candidate for governor in cafés on Main Street and took quick photos with voters. One man called out 'Barakah!'—pronouncing it like the Arabic word for 'blessing'—before snapping a selfie. Another passerby whispered, 'That's the guy Trump arrested.' Where party strategists in 2024 feared alienating moderates, Baraka has spent his state-wide campaign courting voters the party lost. Where operatives believed that Gaza activism endangered swing districts, Baraka has argued that silence costs more. Muslim organizers note that only a few statewide Democrats have held unrestricted Q&A's with them since last cycle. Baraka's willingness to do so anchors his appeal. Baraka's grassroots strategy lost—but it still netted 163,563 votes, enough to lift him surprisingly to second place and to carry New Jersey's most populous county, Essex. Those numbers didn't carry him past Sherrill, yet they did remind operatives that a bloc the size of New Jersey's Muslim population matters to the statewide margin. Now that the governor's race is over, Muslim leaders sound cautiously optimistic. They want movement—on surveillance reform, on ceasefire resolutions, on small-business aid—before they'll call this a realignment. But they also say the door is now open. If statewide Democrats walk through it before 2026, Baraka's unsuccessful bid could mark the start of a voter bloc returning to a party that once counted on it. If they don't, the silence of 2024 might echo again when the presidential race comes calling.
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
It Really Looks Like the U.S. Is Headed for War With Iran
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. By the time you read this, the United States might be at war with Iran. If not, check back in a few hours or a couple of days, as President Donald Trump is giving every indication that he'll join the fighting soon. True, Trump has gone back and forth on the issue of escalation vs. diplomacy in this war and in others, but his words and actions in the last 24 hours suggest that he's opted for escalation. As recently as Monday, he was still holding out the possibility of a diplomatic solution to the conflict. On Tuesday, he gave Iran a very different demand—'unconditional surrender.' That was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's goal against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II: It meant the enemy's total defeat, abject disarmament, and what we now call 'regime change.' Trump also posted on social media: 'We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.' We? He'd said on Monday that he might get involved in the war but hadn't done so yet. It seems that now he is involved, at least in his mind—and possibly in his orders—if not quite yet on or over the battlefield. What has changed in 24 hours is that Israel seems to be on the upswing, pounding target after target, while Iran's efforts at striking back are less than stunning and its prospects for regime survival, much less victory, are dimming. Trump likes winners and wants to join their team. Or, as Charlie Stevenson, who teaches American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies put it in his Policy Matters Substack on Tuesday, 'I think he has FOMO [fear of missing out] and wants to be able to brag that he ended the Iran nuclear threat.' Will he end the threat? Iran has two main uranium enrichment sites, Natanz and Fordo. Both are buried underground. Natanz is a bit more accessible; an Israeli barrage of bombs, on the first day of the war, reportedly did damage to the plant. However, Fordo is buried inside a mountain, almost 300 feet beneath the surface. The only 'bunker-busting' bomb that could destroy the site is the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which only the U.S. has; and the only plane heavy enough to carry the MOP across any distance is the B-2 bomber, which only the U.S. has. (Yes, the mountain could also be demolished by a nuclear weapon, which the U.S. and Israel possess; but I doubt even Trump or Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would go that far.) What about regime change? Early on in the war, Netanyahu reportedly told Trump he wanted to kill Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but Trump vetoed the idea. Could he now be reconsidering? In World War II, 'unconditional surrender' meant, among other things, killing or at least removing Hitler and Hirohito. Trump said on Tuesday that he knows where 'the so-called Supreme Leader' is hiding, adding that he didn't want him killed—'for now.' Regime change does seem to be on the agenda, given the types of targets Israel is hitting—not just nuclear infrastructure, but Iranian media, economic infrastructure, and top commanders. (Some call this expansion of targets 'mission creep,' but actually it seems this has been Netanyahu's mission since the campaign got underway.) But then what? Who succeeds the ayatollah? If some Western-leaning, secular opposition figures are waiting in the wings, they haven't been identified. It's another question whether some Western intelligence agency is funding such figures, but it's hard to imagine them rising to the fore and commanding the loyalty or even the interest of Iran's masses without having carved out a public image well ahead of time. It's also worth distinguishing regime change mounted by a native Iranian movement from regime change launched by a foreign power, especially powers like Israel and the United States, which a fair number of Iranians still regard as the devil. The current regime is deeply unpopular among many Iranians, especially young people in the cities, many of whom are pro-Western or at least desire to join the Western world. But even among those people, there is distrust of foreign meddlers, intensified by the 'Mossadegh complex'—memories of Mohammad Mossadegh, a popular Iranian prime minister, overthrown in 1953 by the CIA and British oil companies, which then installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (aka 'the Shah of Iran'), who ruled as a tyrant until the Islamist revolution in 1979. Does Israel or the United States have a plan for a post-ayatollah Iran? Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps lost its commander, but the corps itself survives, and it controls much of the country's economy and social structure. Would they sign the 'unconditional surrender' papers? If so, to whom would they surrender? Iran is almost four times the size of Iraq, with a population of 92 million. Does Trump or Netanyahu imagine that the Iranian people will greet the foreign victors—especially American and Israeli victors—as their liberators? Some might, but it's worth recalling that Iraqis didn't roll over, despite the widespread hatred of Saddam Hussein. Iranians aren't likely to do so either. More likely, the aftermath of a coup, assassination, military decimation, or whatever method brings down the Iranian regime is likely to resemble post-Saddam Iraq—chaos, instability, and civil war, possibly infecting the entire region. 'Israel is good at winning battles but not at winning wars,' Stevenson, the Johns Hopkins foreign policy professor, observed in his Substack piece. The same has often been true of the United States. Winning battles is a function of military might. Winning wars—even absolute wars ended through unconditional surrender—requires political, strategic, and diplomatic acumen. The Allies didn't leave Germany and Japan to stew in their squalor; they had a plan not just for defeating the old regimes but helping to build new ones. Does Trump, Netanyahu, or anybody else have a plan for Iran? What, to them, does winning the war mean?
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How Judges Can Use a Roberts-Invented Judicial Tool to Curb Trump
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. On top of his legally dubious commandeering of the California National Guard and the Pentagon's deployment of Marines to (it claims) protect federal assets, President Donald Trump appears to be perilously close to invoking a law from the early 19th century, the Insurrection Act, as a basis for deploying regular troops to police American cities. While shocking, it is unfortunately not surprising: Trump regrets not having invoked the act to respond to protests in 2020, having been talked down by the 'adults' in his administration. With the adults long since dismissed and Congress missing in action, resistance to this Trump power grab could come from an unlikely source: federal judges. Packing the judiciary was the crowning achievement of the president's first term, which resulted in a stable of young, Trump-appointed conservative judges trained by their Federalist Society boosters. Some of these same appointees might be standing in the way of Trump's most dangerous overreaches, which to survive judicial review would require judges to exhibit broad deference to the executive branch. Trump appears frustrated by this irony on many fronts. At the end of May, a long-simmering rupture finally spilled into the open when the president took to Truth Social to lambast 'sleazebag' Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, perhaps the most influential political organization so far this century. The trigger? A pair of court decisions, one signed by a Trump appointee, declaring the White House's tariff regime unlawful. (One of the district courts temporarily stayed its own order, and an appeals court later stayed the other decision from taking effect while the administration appeals.) At first blush, the outburst might seem confounding. After all, during the Trump administration's first term, the White House and Leo worked hand in glove to stock the federal courts, above all the Supreme Court, with appointees drawn from the ranks of the Federalist Society and its allies. The results were the most consequential achievement of Trump's first presidency, leading most notably to the overturning of Roe. However, today's MAGA movement, perhaps more than in its first iteration, has a set of ideological commitments of its own—namely, a muscular, personalist, and near-monarchical vision of executive authority (especially within certain issue areas like trade and immigration). And these priors sit uneasily alongside the Federalist Society's decadeslong bid to rein in the regulatory state that it believes bedevils corporate interests. In fact, these competing priorities have been set on a collision course for some time: The MAGA 2.0 movement's policy ambitions require precisely the type of bold, transformative executive power that the anti-administrative conservative legal apparatus has spent the past several decades attempting to frustrate. This tension also demonstrates precisely why the administration's opponents should continue to invoke Roberts court precedents, including those they might philosophically disagree with, to oppose the administration's harmful policy agenda: Such arguments could be successful, even in conservative courts. And if progressive litigants lose with these claims, it is not all bad news. As we have argued elsewhere, litigants using anti-administrative doctrines against Trump policies could lead Trump-aligned judges to curb those doctrines, which might make future progressive governance easier. Nowhere is the overall MAGA–vs.–Federalist Society dynamic clearer than in the chaos over Trump's tariff policy. In April, industry and states launched a wave of litigation challenging the legality of Trump's steep and widely applied 'liberation day' tariffs. The litigants claimed that the tariffs would raise prices, disrupt their supply chains, and otherwise increase the costs of doing business. One tool that the plaintiffs in all three lawsuits wielded is the major questions doctrine, a rule that was formally established in a landmark 2022 decision issued by the conservative Supreme Court supermajority that Trump built during his first term. After bubbling under the surface since the early 2000s, the major questions doctrine emerged in West Virginia v. EPA to herald a new, less deferential regime in review of agency policymaking. Under the doctrine, if an agency action is 'major'—if it is novel, transformative, and economically and politically significant—then it can survive only if Congress quite specifically directed the action. During the Biden administration, the high court repeatedly invoked the doctrine to cut down a host of progressive regulations, including the Clean Power Plan, the COVID-19 eviction moratorium, and student-debt cancellation. Lower courts got in on the action too, using the major questions doctrine to stymie several Biden efforts. And the doctrine has metastasized beyond the regulatory context, with courts applying it to individual enforcement actions, agency guidance documents, and presidential actions. Much to the chagrin of progressive lawyers, who hoped to forestall such a development, the doctrine may have all but become, in the words of Judge Jed Rakoff, 'at bottom, a principle of statutory construction,' apparently applicable wherever statutes are interpreted. Yet, now that he has returned to the White House, Trump has to contend with anti-administrative thinking, like the major questions doctrine, fashioned by the very Supreme Court supermajority he constructed, including in the context of tariffs. In their complaints, states and businesses argued that the political significance of the 'highly novel tariffs' are 'staggering by any measure,' are 'likely much larger' than those of prior 'executive actions previously found by the Supreme Court to be 'major questions,' ' and represent an 'unheralded' and 'transformative expansion' of presidential authority. The litigants then explained that nowhere in the text of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, under which Trump issued his tariffs, does the statute offer the 'clear congressional authorization' required by the major questions doctrine. So far, at least two courts agree. A unanimous three-judge panel, including a Trump appointee, discussed plaintiffs' major questions doctrine claims in detail and ultimately held that, 'regardless of whether the court views the President's actions through the nondelegation doctrine, through the major questions doctrine, or simply with separation of powers in mind, any interpretation of IEEPA that delegates unlimited tariff authority is unconstitutional.' Similarly, Judge Rudolph Contreras of the D.C. District Court cited a recent SCOTUS major questions doctrine case to explain that 'if Congress had intended to delegate to the President the power of taxing ordinary commerce from any country at any rate for virtually any reason, it would have had to say so.' Tariffs are not the only MAGA priority that might suffer at the hands of doctrines that conservative jurists have pioneered in recent years. For example, an ACLU lawyer and Judge James Boasberg agreed in a hearing that the president's reliance on a 1789 wartime law to summarily deport suspected gang members was far removed from the legislation's historical use, suggesting that principles of the major questions doctrine might apply. These examples help illustrate one reason why progressive litigants, who might philosophically oppose frameworks like the major questions doctrine, should nonetheless invoke them to challenge harmful Trump 2.0 agenda items: They might win. That is not to say that, perhaps especially at SCOTUS, we should always expect doctrinal rigor to supersede the kinds of political considerations that often undergird high-profile decisions. But the federal judiciary does not operate in a fluid, top-down fashion. Once issued, Supreme Court precedents take on a life of their own in the district and circuit courts, which enjoy ample latitude to find the play in their joints. Moreover, and as we have suggested elsewhere, a proliferation of major questions doctrine claims against a Republican president—even if they are ultimately unsuccessful—could have a beneficial side effect. One of the key challenges that the doctrine poses to regulatory governance is its malleability, thanks to the high court's poor articulation of the philosophy's scope and application. Bringing major questions doctrine cases against Trump policies in front of Trump-aligned judges could cause those judges to discipline the unwieldy and sprawling doctrine, a medium-to-good outcome that could prove useful for future attempts at progressive governance. Beyond the effect on any particular lawsuits, invoking these doctrines against Donald Trump's signature policies can also help expand the fault line that has emerged between the anti-administrative conservative legal apparatus and the MAGA 2.0 movement, the policy ambitions of which require precisely the type of bold, transformative executive power that the former was constructed to impede. Driving a further wedge between these onetime allies can only redound to the collective benefit of the administration's opponents.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How Sun Belt Cities Are Becoming More Like Boston and San Francisco
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. For the past 50 years, Forsyth County, Georgia, has been one of the fastest-growing places in the United States. Today, the population of this Atlanta exurb, 45 miles northwest of the city, is 280,000—more than 10 times as many people as lived there just 40 years ago. It's emblematic of the Sun Belt boom that has shifted the nation's population geography south, into a string of fast-growing cities from Orlando to Phoenix. Forsyth County may be emblematic of the Sun Belt in another way: It has soured on growth. In the last election, one commissioner ran as 'big corporate developers' worst nightmare'; another trumpeted 'zero apartments approved.' This spring, county commissioners voted to establish a 180-day moratorium to freeze rezoning for residential development. 'Our roads are gridlocked, and our schools are full,' said a third commissioner, Mendy Moore. Similar growing pains are playing out in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, as residents grow irate over the loss of farmland, overworked sewer systems, crowded schools, and traffic. They are responding with impact fees, traffic studies, minimum lot sizes, and moratoriums, among other urban-planning tactics to slow down subdivision builders. 'Anti-Growth Fervor Grips US South,' Bloomberg wrote last year. The belt isn't buckling anymore. In a new working paper, economists Edward Glaeser and Joe Gyourko put some data behind the anecdata. They show that the rate of new home construction is collapsing in big metro areas like Atlanta, Phoenix, Dallas, Las Vegas, Orlando, and Raleigh that have long been synonymous with sprawl and cheap housing—especially on the urban frontier. They are building housing at a pace much closer to those of Rust Belt cities like Detroit and coastal cities like Los Angeles these days. 'What we show is there is a sharp decline in the intensity of building in high-price, low-density housing tracts. What's that? That's the best suburbs,' Gyourko, a professor at Penn's Wharton School, told me. As sprawl dries up, prices are soaring: The paper notes that home prices in Miami, Tampa, and Phoenix have grown faster than those in metro New York City since 2000. Increasingly, housing affordability is a national problem, inspiring policy action in once cheap cities like Dallas and states like Montana. But problem solvers in those places may be up against a vicious cycle, in which rising prices attract well-heeled buyers who support policies that stop development—and cause prices to rise further. 'Sun Belt residents are starting to behave and stop development the way Bostonians did in the '80s and '90s,' Gyourko hypothesized. 'It's similar behavior but just starting much later. They're not [exactly like] coastal cities yet, but if this keeps going for another 20 years they will be, and housing will be very expensive.' From the 1970s to the 2000s, Sun Belt cities built on a massive scale—hundreds of thousands of new homes each decade. The sweet spot for those new homes, Glaeser and Gyourko show, was in 'high price, low density' tracts—places that were in high demand, relative to the metropolitan average, and very suburban in character. In the 1970s, for example, Atlanta built 88 percent of its new homes in such areas—areas like Forsyth County. Miami built 65 percent of homes in those parts of the region in the 1980s. Dallas and Phoenix peaked in the 1990s. Since then, the share of new homes getting built in those areas has fallen in all of those cities and others—evidence, the authors suggest, of a rising tide of not-in-my-backyard sentiment. And that's a smaller share of a much smaller pie: Overall, the housing stock in these cities is growing by less than 1 percent a year, a fraction of the pace of decades past. Of course there are other possibilities. Nationally, construction has not recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. The accompanying mortgage finance crackdown boxed lower-income buyers out of the market. There may be geographical and temporal limits to desire in sprawl, points so far from the metropolitan center of gravity that nobody wants to live there. And then there is the shift toward demand for more housing in closer-in, denser neighborhoods, which command high per-square-foot prices and have long been starved for development. But the data suggest that the sprawl decline began before the financial crisis. And while a comb of tall apartment buildings on Miami's Biscayne Bay waterfront in Brickell might reflect increased demand for urban living, there may be a push factor there—development is going where development can go. In some quarters, this will be taken as good news. In addition to its environmental costs, sprawl's reputation for affordability is undermined by the enormous transportation expenses that come along with living miles from schools, shops, and jobs. If you include the obligation that every adult in the household own, fuel, maintain, and insure a car, supposedly affordable cities like Houston can wind up being more expensive than cities like New York, by some measures. Still, what construction has shifted to higher-density areas hasn't been enough to offset sprawl's decline, and rising home prices reflect that. In April, Conor Dougherty wrote a story for the New York Times Magazine questioning the conventional wisdom of anti-sprawl, arguing that exurban development has been a vital escape valve for the nation's failure to build enough infill housing. His focus was on Princeton, Texas, 43 miles from Dallas, where the population has more than doubled since the pandemic, to 37,000 last year. In May, the Census Bureau dubbed Princeton the fastest-growing city in the country. But it is also a poster child for the limits of sprawl. Last year, Princeton passed a moratorium on new residential development. The city staff said: 'The city's water, wastewater and roadway infrastructure is operating at, near, or beyond capacity.' Princeton, Texas, is full. Keep moving.
