Now that I have a system for doing it I’m going to post these ratings periodically.

As you can see the outliers are Gorsuch and Jackson. The justices with the strongest partisan/ideological bias are Thomas and Alito, followed by Kagan and Sotomayor. The most consensus-oriented justices are Barrett and Roberts.

Last night I listened to President Trump’s address to the nation on the Iran War. Delivered in his typical stream of consciousness shotgun style with his vestigial Atlantic seaboard prep school honk at nineteen minutes it was mercifully short.

In the address he spoke about the reasons for the war, returning multiple times to the urgency of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and its status, speaking in exaggerated terms of the excellence with which our military has carried out its missions. Much the same speech could have been delivered at the very outset of the war and at that time it might have bolstered American support for it. At this point I suspect that most Americans have already made up their minds both about President Trump and the war against Iran.

What I noticed most about the speech was not its content but its delivery. Not just its uncharacteristic brevity but its terseness. It lacked the ad libs that frequently punctuate the president’s speeches and it largely stuck to the subject of the war with Iran without notable digressions.

I was struck by how labored his delivery sounded—something I don’t recall noticing before. Whether that reflects the moment or something more persistent, it stood out. He seemed out of breath throughout.

For a broader sampling of reactions at James Joyner has a useful round-up of media commentary at Outside the Beltway.

President Trump’s recent executive order directing the creation of a national voter list and conditioning the delivery of mail-in ballots on that list presents three distinct problems: feasibility, operational impact, and legality.

By way of background, I have more than twenty years’ experience as a judge of election in Chicago and have participated in the design of an electronic voting system. I am also familiar with U.S. Postal Service sorting operations through direct exposure to the design of their systems.

First, feasibility. Voter rolls are not static; they change continuously. Registrations are added, removed, and updated on a daily basis across thousands of jurisdictions. Any “national list” would be obsolete almost immediately upon compilation. Moreover, no federal system currently exists to aggregate, reconcile, and maintain these lists. Building such a system would be a substantial undertaking—almost certainly exceeding the 90 days contemplated by the order—and no funding has been identified.

Second, operational impact. The Postal Service’s sorting systems are designed for rapid routing and delivery, not for eligibility screening. While it may be theoretically possible to modify them, doing so within the required timeframe is highly unlikely. The alternative—manual sorting—would impose a labor burden for which the Postal Service has neither the staffing nor the capacity. At scale, this would risk disrupting normal mail operations.

Finally, legality. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution assigns the regulation of federal elections to the states, subject to alteration by Congress—not by executive action alone. Whether this order exceeds executive authority is a question that will almost certainly be addressed in court.

For these reasons, even before considering its legal status, the order appears impractical to implement within the constraints imposed.

I’m going to do something I very rarely do. In this post I will quote William J. Luti’s Wall Street Journal op-ed in full:

Poets may not strike our Operation Epic Fury Navy pilots as aviation visionaries. But in the 1830s, Alfred Tennyson penned an astonishingly accurate portent of events: “For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see / Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be . . . / Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew / From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.”

As I wrote in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings 34 years ago, “the English poet laureate could not, of course, have predicted the extent to which the nation’s airy navies would dominate the nature of war in the 20th century. Nor could he have appreciated the paralytic effect the modern extension of his ‘ghastly dew’ would have on a Middle East nation and its million-man military machine.” That was the Desert Storm air campaign.

Epic Fury is the technological and tactical offspring of Desert Storm, whose air campaign was history’s first attempt to achieve the political and military aims of war from the air. Until now, Desert Storm was the closest the U.S. had come to achieving the visions of the early air-power prophets. These men—Gens. Giulio Douhet, Billy Mitchell, Hugh Trenchard and Alexander de Seversky—theorized, if a bit prematurely, that seizing command of the air was essential and even sufficient for victory.

And as air-power legend and retired U.S. Air Force Col. John A. Warden III aptly described in his 1991 essay “Applying Air Power in the 21st Century,” Desert Storm was history’s first example of what he called hyperwar—war that capitalized on high technology, unprecedented precision, strategic surprise through stealth, tactical surprise through defense suppression, and the “ability to bring all of an enemy’s key operational and strategic nodes under near-simultaneous attack.”

It was also, as Mr. Warden theorized, history’s first “inside to outside” war. Past conflicts—due largely to a considerable lag between U.S. doctrine and technology—began with the outermost defensive ring and painfully worked toward the innermost ring of the capital, he wrote. Even World War II’s famed U.S. Norden Mark XV bombsight wasn’t accurate enough to target precisely an enemy’s industrial capacity to wage war. Hence the mass fire-bombing raids over Japan and Germany, which killed hundreds of thousands.

Epic Fury is Desert Storm on steroids. Today we’re flying fewer sorties than Desert Storm but attacking more aim points with each sortie. Only about 10% of Desert Storm munitions were precision-guided. Today some 90% are. The tactical skill with which our aviators and missile defenders are using advanced U.S. tech is astounding. Particularly impressive is our dismantling of Russian and Chinese-supplied advanced air-defense systems. The implications for deterrence are immense.

The revolution in American technology introduced in the Desert Storm air campaign partially solved this challenge. Due largely to the 1970s’ development of the “offset strategy”—using American technological superiority to offset the Soviet Union’s numerical advantage—we were able to penetrate Iraqi air defenses with stealth and defense suppression to put short-range precision-guided weapons on targets that mattered.

Desert Storm shocked the Chinese communists. No longer could the Politburo rely on centuries-old doctrine of strategic withdrawal from the periphery to the interior, seeking better ground from which to repel an invader. It also complicated their plans for Taiwan and the South China Sea. By demonstrating our ability to break through air defenses and “go downtown” on day one, we forced the Chinese to adapt their strategy.

What we lacked in Desert Storm was standoff capability, meaning weapons that allowed America to attack targets from a safe distance. The Chinese knew it. Recognizing that geography still matters, they extended their defensive periphery seaward, initially to the first island chain, from Japan to the South China Sea, and then to the second chain and beyond. They began a decades-long pursuit of a new doctrine supported by new weapons to prevent the U.S. Navy and Air Force from operating within their extended periphery.

This created near-panic in the U.S. defense establishment. Visions of Chinese forces sinking American carriers as we approached China’s extended periphery filled U.S. analytical salons. But American military and tactical ingenuity was already on the case. By 2000 we had fielded the first generation of precision standoff weapons and further honed our missile defenses, electronic attack, and penetrating stealth capability. Our next generation of ground- and air-launched extended-range standoff weapons will help cement our competitive advantage inside China’s—or any adversary’s—defensive periphery.

Like geography, numbers still matter. China’s unprecedented military buildup demonstrates the military maxim that quantity has a quality all its own. President Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget begins the urgent task of building more ships, aircraft, weapons and unmanned systems to deter this threat.

Operation Epic Fury will show if we are edging closer to the early air-power prophets’ vision or if air power in support of maneuvering ground forces remains the key to victory. We don’t yet know the answer. What isn’t in question is that Epic Fury has restored American deterrence. Should deterrence fail, the Chinese communists should be afraid, very afraid.

I want to emphasize that I continue to oppose this war on legal, moral, and prudential grounds. That said, there is no substitute for actual combat application for proving military doctrine and on a day-by-day basis our military is verifying the soundness of our military doctrine in Operation Epic Fury.

On a similar basis Russia’s doctrine has been found wanting in Ukraine. It is learning but very slowly. China’s military doctrine is almost completely unproven. That’s what the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership should fear.

China has the ability to expand the size of its fleet and to build missiles and drones. Those capabilities far exceed ours. That has been demonstrated. Whether the People’s Army has the ability to use them is a great unknown.

In another op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Rahm Emanuel exhorts Democrats to pursue a “positive agenda” when they gain control of the House next year:

Nearly every data point suggests that Democrats will ride to victory this November, making it very likely that we’ll take control of the House and possibly the Senate. While we shouldn’t take anything for granted, we need to think through how to maximize our opportunity, both politically and in enacting a substantive agenda.

Here are some of the measures he has in mind:

What is that agenda? It should begin with raising the minimum wage, which hasn’t been changed since 2009. We should pass a ratepayers’ bill of rights. We should fight to lower healthcare costs. We should end the scourge of social media on children. And we should pass an ethics-reform package that cleans up Washington and bans insiders from betting on prediction markets. That should be our focus in 2027: forcing Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress to veto and vote against bills that unite us, divide them and lay the foundation for our electoral and substantive victories in 2028 and beyond. As with the tax hike in 1990 and work on children’s healthcare in 2007, we need to highlight issues that exploit the GOP’s fissures to our strategic advantage.

I think that Mr. Emanuel’s advice is both tactically and strategically sound, much what I would expect from him. The question I have for Mr. Emanuel is what makes him think the new Congress will heed his advice?

Illinois is often described as a “blue state” but that obscures more than it reveals. It is not a progressive state in the mold of California or New York; it is a machine state. “Democrat” here has traditionally meant a particular sort of organization-driven, patronage-oriented politics rather than ideological progressivism. Think Dick Durbin not Bernie Sanders.

That is precisely what makes the recent primaries noteworthy. Even within that environment, nearly every successful candidate ran on themes like “Fight Trump,” “Defund ICE,” and “Medicare for All.” In most of these districts the primary is dispositive. The general election is a formality so those are the incentives that actually matter.

There is a simple, nearly iron law of political behavior: politicians tend to keep doing what worked. Expecting a Congress elected on those incentives to pivot toward a disciplined, incremental “positive agenda” for strategic reasons strikes me as unrealistic.

Which raises the question for Mr. Emanuel: if, as he himself warns, the political energy of the moment inclines toward “retribution and vindictiveness,” what makes him think it will be channeled into the sort of program he proposes?

Much as I might agree with him, I think he’s dreaming of a Clintonesque Democratic Party that was rather than the one that exists today.

The editors of the Washington Post speculate on how the Supreme Court will deal with President Trump’s edict against birthright citizenship:

President Donald Trump’s executive order claiming to deny citizenship to children of immigrants in the United States temporarily or unlawfully has been uniformly blocked by lower courts, and on Wednesday the Supreme Court will hear arguments on both sides. The administration’s chances of a win in Trump v. Barbara are extremely low, but one question is whether the justices opt for a sweeping constitutional ruling or a narrower one that gives Congress room to legislate on the subject.

They explain:

One option for the justices is to leave the constitutional debate for another day. That’s because — as an amicus brief from 217 members of Congress points out — the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 probably codified birthright citizenship independently of the 14th Amendment. It uses the same “subject to the jurisdiction” language as the 14th Amendment, and legislative debates in the 20th century strongly imply that members of Congress took birthright citizenship for granted.

Even if the history around the 14th Amendment is too ambiguous for a firm constitutional holding, in other words, the justices could decide that Congress has written birthright citizenship into the country’s immigration laws more recently. The president can’t override immigration law with an executive order.

I am no augur of Supreme Court behavior. I suspect the justices will find that the 14th Amendment means what it says about birthright citizenship which will certainly not please either President Trump or his supporters. That is consistent with longstanding precedent as well as a minimalist approach to interpretation. That wouldn’t be my preferred outcome but I think it’s the likely outcome.

For what it’s worth my preferred outcome would be for the justices to find that states and jurisdictions with “sanctuary” policies hold those in the country illegally outside of federal jurisdiction so the 14th Amendment and the citizenship provisions in the Immigration and Naturalization Act don’t apply to them. If a jurisdiction affirmatively refuses to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, it raises a serious question whether individuals shielded by such policies are meaningfully “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States in the sense contemplated by the 14th Amendment and the Court could resolve that ambiguity by concluding that they are not. That would uphold existing law while flashing a warning sign at state and local governments but it would also maximize chaos which I why I don’t think the SCOTUS will rule that way. Historically, courts tend to avoid rulings that create administratively unworkable distinctions across jurisdictions.

The provisions of the 14th Amendment and the INA are overdue for an overhaul. They don’t deal with what’s called “birth tourism” or the sort of citizen via surrogacy farm that was in the news not long ago, both of which exploit a legal framework that ties citizenship to geography alone rather than to any durable civic connection. And neither envisioned mass immigration of the sort we have had for the last several decades. Our present situation is unprecedented in its combination of scale, legal complexity, and administrative fragmentation.

We can’t expect a single case to solve all of the problems with our immigration law. While the Court will almost certainly avoid creating chaos the only institution capable of resolving the underlying contradictions is Congress and it has shown little willingness to do so.

Could someone please explain to me how the United States actually wins our war with Iran? Not how we have air superiority and can strike every military target. Not how the U. S. and Israeli militaries can strike at the Iranian leadership virtually at will. Not that Iran has provided ample provocations over the last 50 years. Not how we could just walk away from the war at will.

Walking away is not the same as winning and declaring victory does not make it so.

How can we win?

We have means, but no theory of victory. Absent that, “victory” becomes rhetorical rather than real.

I’m acquainted with Rahm Emanuel at least to the extent of having once ridden up the elevator in the Thompson Center and chatted with him. That brief encounter, combined with watching his career as a political consultant, chief of staff to Bill Clinton, congressman, mayor of Chicago, and ambassador to Japan, leaves me with a consistent impression: he is intensely focused, relentlessly transactional, and unusually effective. In other words, a formidable political actor and, in my view, someone who would likely make a capable president.

At Politico, Adam Wren argues that Democrats have a “Rahm Emanuel problem,” describing both his style and the challenge he would pose to a party that has drifted leftward, particularly on social issues. The implication is that Emanuel could force a reckoning, that his candidacy would be a kind of “rolling Sister Souljah moment for the party”.

I think that’s right as far as it goes. But I also think it misses the more important point: Rahm Emanuel is very unlikely ever to be the Democratic nominee for president.

Not because he lacks ability. Quite the opposite. He is arguably too well-suited to an earlier version of the Democratic Party.

The problem is coalition mismatch.

Start with generation. Four of the last five presidents have been Baby Boomers; Joe Biden is Silent Generation. Rahm Emanuel is a Boomer. It is tempting to treat Biden’s election as evidence that Democratic voters are comfortable with candidates of that age. I don’t think that’s right.

Democrats had already rejected Biden twice in presidential primaries. In 2020 he was not the natural expression of voter preference so much as the beneficiary of a very specific and unlikely confluence of events: the pandemic, a fragmented field, a consolidation of party elites, and a widespread sense of urgency about defeating Donald Trump. It was, in that sense, a panic nomination. And it worked. But that does not mean it revealed a durable preference for older candidates. If anything, it looks more like an exception that proves the rule.

Since then, the pressure for generational turnover inside the Democratic coalition has only intensified, not diminished.

But generation is only part of the story.

More important is the growing gap between Emanuel’s profile and the priorities of the Democratic primary electorate. He is combative, pragmatic, and institutionally oriented. He believes in bargaining, in trade-offs, in incremental gains extracted through leverage. That is a political style that fits comfortably within the party as it existed from the 1990s through roughly the Obama years.

It is a less comfortable fit today.

Consider one concrete example: Israel. Emanuel’s connection is not merely rhetorical; he has deep personal and political ties, including time spent as a civilian volunteer with the Israeli Defense Forces. A decade ago that would have been unremarkable within Democratic politics. Today it is not.

The Democratic coalition has changed. Younger voters, activists, and key parts of the party’s intellectual infrastructure have moved in a markedly different direction on Israel. You don’t have to take a position on that shift to observe that it exists and that it has consequences in a primary election where activists and highly engaged voters play an outsized role. Emanuel’s stance is not just a difference of emphasis; it is, for many of those voters, disqualifying.

That same pattern shows up more broadly. Emanuel is male, white, and 60-something. None of those characteristics is disqualifying in isolation. But taken together, they place him out of phase with a coalition that is increasingly diverse, increasingly younger, and increasingly attentive to representation as well as policy.

Put differently: the issue is not that Democratic voters consciously reject candidates who look like Rahm Emanuel. It’s that, when given a choice, they are now consistently drawn to candidates who do not.

There is, of course, a counterargument. Emanuel’s supporters would say that his very willingness to challenge the party’s left flank—his “pugilism,” as Wren puts it—is precisely what makes him attractive. In a general election environment shaped by polarization and conflict, a candidate who can fight, bargain, and govern might be exactly what Democrats need.

That argument shouldn’t be dismissed. It may even be right in a general election context.

But it runs into a more immediate constraint: getting through the primary.

And the Democratic primary electorate, as it is presently constituted, is unlikely to reward a candidate whose profile, priorities, and instincts are so visibly out of alignment with its center of gravity.

So I find myself in an odd position. I think Rahm Emanuel would probably be a good president. I might well vote for him.

I just don’t think Democratic primary voters ever will.

Of all of the Democrats who are running for their party’s nomination for president or appear to be running the one I favor most at present is New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. This post at The Hill by Alexander Bolton provides a good explanation for what that is:

Asked by NBC anchor Kristen Welker whether Democrats are making a mistake of shrinking their coalition with purity tests, Booker responded that his party “has failed this moment.”

“I’m proud of so many things that my Democratic colleagues are doing. But as a whole, our party has failed this moment. It’s why I’ve called for new leadership in America,” he said, going on to argue that party leaders have gotten too mired in partisan fighting.

“I’ve called for generational renewal because this left/right divide is killing our country. And our adversaries know it. They come onto our social media and try to whip up hate in America. That is one of our biggest crises,” he said.

That’s similar to the reason I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. This echoes the rationale that led me to support Barack Obama in 2008. In that case, however, the bipartisan tone of the campaign did not survive contact with governing—whether due to political constraints, party incentives, or presidential choice.

Booker’s case differs in at least one important respect. He brings a broader governing background, having served both as a mayor, an executive role requiring practical coalition-building, and as a U.S. senator. More importantly, he has sustained this message for over a decade rather than adopting it solely in a presidential campaign.

The relevant question, therefore, is not whether Booker can articulate a bipartisan vision but whether he can maintain it under the structural pressures that have pushed recent presidents toward partisanship. His record suggests a greater likelihood than we have seen in recent cycles, though those pressures remain formidable.

Whether a President Booker could sustain such an approach remains uncertain but it is, in my view, a more plausible prospect than it has been in roughly twenty years.