The Weekly Sift

America is the greatest democracy in the world.

– Rümeysa Öztürk,
arriving back in Massachusetts after her court-ordered release

This week’s featured post is “As we approach our crisis of democracy, we’re in better shape than I expected“.

This week everybody was talking about the new Pope

Thursday, the College of Cardinals elected the next pope: Leo XIV.

In my previous weekly summary (April 21) I said:

Undoubtedly there will now be a battle for the soul of Catholicism. Will the church continue on the path Francis started down, or will it return to its traditional role as an ally of authoritarians and the privileged classes?

Leo XIV may surprise me, but at first glance it looks like the Francis faction won. The new pope seems more interested in the Sermon on the Mount than in fighting the culture wars.

I think the name he chose is significant: in 1891, Leo XIII wrote the ground-breaking encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), which has been the foundation of Catholic social justice thinking ever since. The main idea of Rerum Novarum is for the church to take seriously the plight of working people under capitalism. It represented a realization that without a clearly worker-sympathetic position, the church might lose out to some form of Marxism.

By choosing to be another Leo, this pope gestures towards both a sympathy with the lower classes and a willingness to modernize Catholic doctrine.

Much is being made of Leo’s American roots He grew up in Chicago, and his time the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago overlapped my years at the University of Chicago a few blocks away. We probably walked past each other on the sidewalk. Chicago is extremely proud to claim Leo, as the following cartoon illustrates.

To me, the greatest significance of an American pope is that he’ll be much harder for conservative American Catholics to ignore. (I’m looking at you, J. D. Vance and Sam Alito.)

and Trump’s legal losses

Yesterday, a federal judge in Vermont ordered Rümeysa Öztürk released on bail without travel restrictions. She’s the Tufts student who was kidnapped off the street in Somerville, Massachusetts by masked DHS agents and taken to a detention center in Louisiana. The administration obeyed the order, and Özturk is back in Massachusetts walking around free.

Chris Geidner of the Law Dork blog:

[Judge William Sessions concluded] that she has raised “a very substantial First Amendment claim” in her underlying habeas challenge, in addition to a “substantial claim” that the Trump administration violated her due process rights regarding her detention as well.

Prior to being arrested, Öztürk had been a Tufts Ph.D. student legally in the country on a student visa. What appears to have drawn the administration’s ire was an op-ed Öztürk wrote (with co-authors) in Tufts Daily urging the Tufts administration to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”. The judge wrote:

“There is absolutely no evidence that she has engaged in violence or advocated violence.” Additionally, he noted, “I do not find that any of the contacts that she has in the community create any danger or risk of flight.”

If you read the First Amendment, you will notice that it says nothing about citizenship. Freedom of speech is a human right, not a privilege of citizenship.

In a similar case, a federal appeals court denied the administration’s motion to stay the release of Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi. Mahdawi was a green-card holder who was arrested in Vermont when he appeared for an interview related to his application for citizenship. He similarly has no record of violence or criminality, and has only advocated for Gaza.

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Several federal judges have ruled against the administration on its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act; this is the basis for Trump to send people to prison in El Salvador. (See the same Law Dork link.) The Act allows the president to deport foreign nationals during time of war, predatory incursion, or invasion. Judges in a variety of jurisdictions have been finding that the current situation does not fit into any of those categories. Trump can call mass migration of individuals an “invasion”, but that does not match the way such a term was used in 1798 when the AEA was passed.

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Yet another judge issued a restraining order against Trump’s mass firings of federal workers. (Same Law Dork link.)

“It is the prerogative of presidents to pursue new policy priorities and to imprint their stamp on the federal government. But to make large-scale overhauls of federal agencies, any president must enlist the help of his co-equal branch and partner, the Congress,” U.S. District Judge Susan Illston wrote in the decision. “Federal courts should not micromanage the vast federal workforce, but courts must sometimes act to preserve the proper checks and balances between the three branches of government.“

… “Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that the President’s Executive Order 14210 is ultra vires” — or beyond the president’s legal authority, in other words illegal — “as the President has neither constitutional nor, at this time, statutory authority to reorganize the executive branch,” [Judge Susan] Illston wrote.

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One Trump victory: the purge of transfolk from the armed services can continue.

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In general, I think the media is doing a bad job of explaining why the Trump administration is snatching people off the street, deporting American children, and so on: Trump was elected because he sold voters a dark fantasy about Biden’s America: The nation had been overrun by millions of immigrant criminals whose gangs had taken over our cities. The local police knew who they were, but couldn’t do anything because Biden protected the criminals. But Trump would be able to deport them all quickly. Millions of them.

So now he’s elected and has a real world to deal with: There aren’t millions of immigrant criminals and there is no migrant crime wave. If he just deports people for legitimate reasons, he can’t achieve the numbers his supporters expect.

That’s why he has to deport not just the relatively small number of immigrant criminals, but also men with tattoos, students who expressed anti-Israel opinions, and so on. And he’s still not making the numbers his followers expect.

and the FY 2026 budget

Nothing sums up the problems Republicans face in putting together a budget than this: Senator Josh Hawley isn’t down with cutting Medicaid.

As for Missouri, it is one of 40 Medicaid expansion states — because our voters wanted it that way. In 2020, the same year Mr. Trump carried the Missouri popular vote by a decisive margin, voters mandated that the state expand Medicaid coverage to working-class individuals unable to afford health care elsewhere. Voters went so far as to inscribe that expansion in our state constitution. Now some 21 percent of Missourians benefit from Medicaid or CHIP, the companion insurance program for lower-income children. And many of our rural hospitals and health providers depend on the funding from these programs to keep their doors open.

All of which means this: If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care. And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will replicate in states across the country.

Meanwhile, the House leadership’s budget calls for more than $800 billion in Medicaid cuts.

A preliminary estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the proposals would reduce the number of people with health care by 8.6 million over the decade.

They’re clever about it: They aren’t cutting “benefits”, they’re just slashing the federal reimbursement to states. Then most red states will scrap the Medicaid expansion associated with Obama’s Affordable Care Act, providing Congress with deniability: We didn’t do it, the states did it.

The end result, though, is exactly what Hawley says: People (particularly people working for barely more than minimum wage) will lose their health insurance, and rural hospitals will close.

Cuts like this (and to food stamps, which also affects the working poor) are necessary so that billionaires can pay lower taxes. And even then, a huge deficit will remain. I don’t know how Republicans will be able to sell this to their base. And if they can’t, their slim majorities in Congress won’t hold together well enough to push it through.

This is another example of the MAGA fantasy world running into reality. In the fantasy world, government is full of waste and fraud that a smart guy like Elon can point out and eliminate. That way, spending can be slashed without affecting ordinary Americans.

but I want to talk about optimism

That’s the subject of this week’s featured post. My view wouldn’t be optimistic in any other context: I still think we’re facing a crisis of democracy. But we’re facing it in better shape than I thought we’d be in.

and you also might be interested in …

Brought to you by the party that supports family values:

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Vox’ Zack Beauchamp warns:

Israel’s war in Gaza, which has long been a moral atrocity, is on the brink of becoming unimaginably worse.

He quotes Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich;

“Within a few months, we will be able to declare that we have won. Gaza will be totally destroyed,” Smotrich said. “In another six months, Hamas won’t exist as a functioning entity.”

He told the listening audience that the population of Gaza, some 2.3 million Palestinians, would be “concentrated” in a narrow strip of land between the Egyptian border and the so-called Morag Corridor, which runs the width of Gaza between Khan Younis and the border city of Rafah.

“They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

Beauchamp notes that this is “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

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Mass shootings are down. No idea why.

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Trump has stopped just about all refugee resettlement in the US. But he has finally found a group of refugees he likes: White South Africans.

The Trump administration is bringing a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees next week in what it says is the start of a larger relocation effort for a minority group who are being persecuted by their Black-led government because of their race.

But are they persecuted? Not in any way that makes them stand out, and maybe not at all. But they’re White, so they go to the front of the line.

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This week in corruption:

In what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government, the Trump administration is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar — a gift that is to be available for use by President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, sources familiar with the proposed arrangement told ABC News.

Nothing to see here, just a foreign government giving an extremely valuable gift not to the United States, but for the benefit of one person, who happens to make many decisions the government of Qatar might want to influence.

The Guardian reviews the rules on presidential gifts, which are legally regarded as gifts to the American people. Previous presidents have transferred gifts — none of them nearly this large — to their presidential libraries for public display. But in Trump’s case this appears to be a dodge, as the plane will remain available for Trump’s personal use after ownership transfers. Judd Legum:

Can we please stop staying that, after Trump leaves office, the $400 million plane from Qatar will be given to the “Trump Presidential Library” Libraries do not fly on planes. The plane will be given to Trump.

The jet is not the only Qatari bribe. There’s also his partnership with Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in developing a new Trump International Golf Club in Qatar.

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The measles outbreak continues to spread, and even though it started before RFK Jr. took over as HHS Secretary, he’s coming to own it. The costs of his anti-vaccine crusade are becoming obvious.

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A Republican attempt to steal a state supreme court seat in North Carolina was finally thwarted this week, a mere six months after an election that the Democratic candidate won.

[Incumbent Justice Allison] Riggs won the election in November by just 734 votes, but [Republican challenger Jefferson] Griffin mounted a massive legal challenge to overturn the election results and disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters. At the heart of Griffin’s lawsuit was a challenge to 65,000 lawfully cast ballots that he believed should be tossed out, because of errors made by the North Carolina elections board. The board counted some 60,000 ballots cast by voters with allegedly incomplete registration. … In fact, the litigation raised no significant evidence whatsoever that any illegitimate votes were cast.

A federal judge ruled in Riggs favor last Monday.

“This case concerns whether the federal constitution permits a state to alter the rules of an election after the fact and apply those changes retroactively to only a select group of voters, and in so doing treat those voters differently than other similarly situated individuals. This case is also about whether a state may redefine its class of eligible voters but offer no process to those who may have been misclassified as ineligible,” Myers wrote in his opinion. “To this court, the answer to each of those questions is ‘no.’”

Griffin decided not to appeal, so the case is finally over.

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The US and China have agreed to reduce the massive tariffs each have imposed on the other, from 145% and 125% to 30% and 10%. The reduction is temporary: 90 days. We’ll see if that’s enough to cause trade to start flowing again. 30% is still a pretty hefty price increase.

and let’s close with something distracting

If you’re on BlueSky and looking for something to brighten up your otherwise depressing news feed, I recommend following Daily Bunnies. You’ll get a reliable stream of cute rabbit pictures. I guarantee that this sleepy bunny is not worrying about whatever is bothering you.