Yesterday a shocking episode unfolded. California Senator Alex Padilla came into the new conference being conducted by Director of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, shouting questions and was forcibly removed by the security detail. I have watched videos of the events from multiple angles. I have been struck by two questions: what should have happened and how could that have been effected?

IMO everything hinges on whether the security personnel recognized Senator Padilla as a sitting senator? Answering “of course they did” is too pat. I couldn’t pick all of the U. S. senators out of a crowd consisting of mixed elected officials are other individuals. Are FBI and Homeland Security agents routinely trained to recognize all of the members of the Senate, House, governors of states, etc.? Did they recognize him and should they have? If they recognized him and treated him as they did they should be severely disciplined. If they did not recognize him they did nothing wrong.

As far as Sen. Padilla’s comportment goes, rather clearly his actions were a breach of decorum if nothing else.

Update

At Axios Andrew Solender quotes Maine Democrat Rep. Jared Golden on the incident:

• “I think that it’s never good when a senator or member of Congress gets roughed up by law enforcement,” he said in an interview with Axios at the Capitol.
• But, he added, “I don’t think politics as theater is what our job is here.”

which I think are rather prudent observations.

At Mediaite Joe DePaolo quotes CNN Security Analyst Josh Campbell:

“From a law enforcement perspective, we’re really looking at three separate incidents that happened within a short period of time,” Campbell explained. “First, you have the DHS secretary who was addressing the press. This was not a Q&A period, and she was interrupted. She was interrupted by someone who was speaking very loudly. And so her security detail confronts what we obviously now know to be the senator. And at that point, he is now going to be escorted out. You can’t interrupt something like that that’s already in progress without having those consequences.

“The second incident, in my view, happens the moment — as officers are trying to lead him out — he then turns and walks back towards kind of into those agents. At that point, from a security detail perspective, we’re taking this person out against their will. We’ve asked the person — and again, this is all happening very quickly — but the moment he then turns into them, they realize this is not someone who is going to comply.”

Campbell, though, did express some concern about the agents forcing Senator Padilla to the floor and handcuffing him after he had already been ejected from the press conference.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the disorder in Los Angeles and Gov. Newsom’s reaction to it:

So much for moving to the political middle in the culture wars. That’s where California Gov. Gavin Newsom appeared to be heading earlier this year after the Democratic defeat in November. But President Trump’s escalation in migrant deportations has put him in a tight spot with progressive Democrats, and on Tuesday the Governor nominated himself as leader of the anti-Trump resistance.

That’s the clear message from his campaign-like remarks ostensibly aimed at Californians but that sounded like a national rallying cry for Democrats.

Here’s the meat of their observations:

The problem for Mr. Newsom, and all Democrats, is that the Biden Administration so botched the border issue that the public for now is giving Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt to fix the problem. All the more so when the streets of Los Angeles erupt in protests that turn violent and wave Mexican flags, and Democrats are slow to denounce and quell them.

concluding:

Mr. Trump wants to polarize politics around immigration, and it looks like Mr. Newsom is willing to accept the challenge, or take the bait as the Trump White House would put it. The politics of immigration is about to get worse, if that’s possible. But then Mr. Newsom may not care if his resistance catapults him to the Democratic nomination in 2028.

It probably doesn’t help that the mayor of Los Angeles appears to be intent on fighting the last war. The Supreme Court decided during the Obama Administration that enforcing immigration laws was the responsibility of the federal government. Cities, even sanctuary cities, don’t get to have their own immigration laws. How would her rationale have worked out in Little Rock 60 years ago?

Ruy Teixeira laments the missteps he sees Democrats making:

As the riots in Los Angeles developed, one question kept going through my brain: Have Democrats learned anything?

The chaos in Southern California could have been designed in a lab to exploit Democratic weak spots, combining the issues of illegal immigration, crime, and public disorder. Yet their most visible response to the anti-deportation riots in Los Angeles has been to denounce President Trump for sending National Guard troops to quell the riots. The situation, they insist, is under control—or at least it was, until Trump intervened.

This view is not shared by some in charge of actually doing the quelling.

He quotes the LAPD chief’s saying that the police are overwhelmed by the demonstrators and rioters.

He continues:

There might very well be a universe where it makes sense for Democrats—already saddled with a dreadful image on crime and immigration—to train their fire on Trump and the National Guard instead of anti-deportation rioters. However, it is not the universe we currently inhabit.

and

Democrats do not have to cheer on every ICE raid, but they have to be seen to prioritize law and order and not deny the reality on the ground of violent protests.

Missing from their calculus is how popular many of the president’s policies remain. And that’s especially true on the two issues in question on the streets of L.A.: law and order, and illegal immigration.

His conclusion is:

But what’s unfolding in California should make it glaringly obvious that Democrats aren’t yet ready for a real reckoning with the party’s toxic brand on immigration, crime, and public order and the fight with the party’s left that would inevitably produce. Voters are noticing and will penalize the Democrats accordingly.

In his column in the Washington Post David Ignatius has his own lament:

Democrats have gotten the border issue so wrong, for so long, that it amounts to political malpractice. The latest chapter — in which violent protesters could be helping President Donald Trump create a military confrontation he’s almost begging for as a distraction from his other problems — may prove the most dangerous yet.

When I see activists carrying Mexican flags as they challenge ICE raids in Los Angeles this week, I think of two possibilities: These “protesters” are deliberately working to create visuals that will help Trump, or they are well-meaning but unwise dissenters who are inadvertently accomplishing the same goal.

Democrats’ mistake, over more than a decade, has been to behave as though border enforcement doesn’t matter. Pressured by immigrant rights activists, party leaders too often acted as if maintaining a well-controlled border was somehow morally wrong. Again and again, the short-term political interests of Democratic leaders in responding to a strong faction within the party won out over having a policy that could appeal to the country as a whole.

What worries me is the possibility that someone, somewhere makes a stupid mistake that provokes a national response. It could be here in Chicago. It may not be the Trump Administration. The response could be that anyone who even looks Hispanic is deported. It’s happened before here in the United States.

Update

At The Free Press former Washington Post columnist Charles Lane declaims:

The main argument in favor of a new “grand bargain” is reality. Reality is the same factor that has obliged President Trump, grudgingly, to negotiate with trade partners when his tariffs spooked major U.S. companies and global financial markets. There actually are several realities: First, undocumented workers constitute five percent of the entire workforce. They can’t be replaced just like that. Forty percent of the agricultural labor force is undocumented, along with 15 percent of workers in building and grounds cleaning and maintenance.

Second, it is simply not feasible to deport all of the illegal immigrants, as 84 percent of Republicans want to do, but only 41 percent of independents want to do. ICE arrested 2,300 people nationwide on Thursday—the most arrests it has ever made in one day. At that rate, it would take 465 days to add up to the president’s goal of a million deportations by the end of this year. Even that would be a tiny fraction of the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the U.S.

I think we should recall that the last “grand bargain” on immigration failed because Democrats insisted on normalizing the immigration status of the parents of “DREAMers” as well as the DREAMers themselves. In other words Republicans found anything that could be represented as amnesty politically toxic. I’m confident their position is that much more extreme now.

So, what would a grand bargain on immigration look like? Regardless of reality I don’t think such a thing is possible now.

Let me repeat my own view. I think we should have more legal immigration including low-skill workers and a lot less illegal immigration. Regardless of the letter following the name of whoever is president we should enforce our laws as written energetically, regardless of personal preference. I think that eVerify should be fully implemented to facilitate workplace-level enforcement. There should be serious consequences for employers who knowingly hire people in the country illegally.

I wanted to make a few remarks about comments in a recent Chicago Tribune editorial (synopsis here) about our new Cook County States Attorney, Eileen O’Neill Burke. I supported her in the primary and general election but I honestly think it’s too early too draw any conclusions about what her term of office will be like. All I can say about that is she is a cut above her predecessor. Two, maybe three cuts above. A great improvement which is damning with faint praise.

My first remark is about this:

But she told us something else during our conversation that was bracing indeed. As she was running for the office last year, O’Neill Burke said, “I thought guns were the biggest problem. But it turns out domestic violence is.”

In Cook County, 23 women have died allegedly at the hands of abusers just since O’Neill Burke took office in December.

Twenty-three. Let that number sink in.

Even as Laterria Smith, Jayden’s mother, saw Brand face justice a little over a year after that horrific day, women aren’t being adequately protected from the men in their lives who abuse them.

Under O’Neill Burke, prosecutors already are making some progress on this front. The rate at which Cook County judges now are detaining those accused of domestic violence while they while they await trial has increased to 81% from around 50% before she took office, she told us.

This is clearly a cultural issue. The prevalence of domestic violence among black Americans and Hispanics is a multiple of what it is among the white population. Nearly all of the women murdered by their domestic partners mentioned above were either black or Hispanic.

While I laud States Attorney Burke for her efforts in this area, it’s not enough. Unless we plan to chalk such murders up to the price of a multi-cultural society, it needs to be called out. Black and Hispanic religious, social, and political leaders need to be enlisted in the effort. People in those communities need to be encouraged to understand that such behavior is not acceptable. Law enforcement should be the last recourse not the first and only recourse.

My other remarks are about this:

We were surprised to learn that the state’s attorney’s office has no automated case management system to speak of. For felonies, there’s a system created in-house more than a decade ago on a platform that no longer is tech-supported. Assistant state’s attorneys must input into spreadsheets procedural developments in each of their many cases — something prosecutors themselves don’t have the time to do and paralegals ought to be handling. Oh, except the office has no paralegals.

and this:

The state’s attorney’s office, which has a current-year budget of $187 million, badly needs a bona fide case-management system, and that will cost millions. Money well spent, we say, because the public would have access to this important information, and the office itself could
make better decisions about resource allocation and — critically — move criminal cases through the process much faster than the current woefully slow pace of prosecutions.

I think there a whiff of Maslow’s Hammer about this (“when the only tool that you have, etc.”). I’m sad to report that they’re probably underestimating the cost of obtaining and using such a system. Think tens of millions not millions.

One of the factors that many organizations don’t seem to recognize when it comes to picking software is that an off-the-shelf software solution represents an organizational commitment to change the organization’s processes to suit what the software solution does OR customizing the software solution for the organization’s processes which renders it unsupportable by the original vendor OR not using an off-the-shelf software solution. This is particularly true of organizations with lots of professionals.

The problem of acceptance is why so many organizations buy software solutions only to discard them a few years later or, alternatively, find that the off-the-shelf software solution is being augmented with a maze of varying spreadsheets so they’re back where they started.

I would also point out that in all likelihood they already have an off-the-shelf software solution. Microsoft SharePoint. With a few relatively inexpensive commercial add-ins SharePoint can probably be configured to accomplish their needs at a fraction of the cost of a vertical market application.

As if to prove that Illinois is the most corrupt state in the Union, the president of the Illinois State Senate has been informed by state election officials that he is liable for nearly $10 million for improperly accepting campaign donations. Ray Long reports at the Chicago Tribune:

State election officials have informed Senate President Don Harmon that he will face more than $9.8 million in penalties pending an appeal of a case alleging he broke an Illinois election law designed to rein in big money inpolitical political campaigns.

The calculation of the potential penalty emerged only days after the Oak Park Democrat attempted legislationattempted to pass legislation designed to wipe away the election board case and the potential penalties, a maneuver stymied amid bipartisan backlash only hours before the spring session adjourned early June 1.

The developments take on an added political dimension because of the looming federal sentencing on Friday of former Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan in the bribery-related ComEd scandal

Mr. Madigan was the longest-serving speaker of a state House in U. S. history. He was also chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party for most of that period.

Obviously, what is most concerning about the riots in Los Angeles still ongoing as of this writing is the destruction, injuries, and general lawlessness of them. There has been one confirmed death related to the riots; as of this writing there are no official statistics on injuries or damage. But after those sad facts what concerns me most is the deadly combination of uncertainty, a concept enunciated by von Clausewitz in connection with warfare and characterized today as “the fog of war”, with the illusion of certainty. John Halpin takes note of that at The Liberal Patriot:

Asked, “Do you believe the protesters in Los Angeles against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions are mostly peaceful or mostly violent?” U.S. adults split (38 percent ‘peaceful’ to 36 percent ‘violent’), with more than one quarter not sure. Partisans on both sides align with expected positions—for example, nearly two-thirds of Democrats think the protesters are mostly peaceful, while an equal proportion of Republicans think they are mostly violent. Again, independents and Hispanics are more divided on the matter, with a small plurality of independents saying the protesters are mostly peaceful (35 percent ‘peaceful’ to 33 percent ‘violent’) and a slight plurality of Hispanics leaning the other way (37 percent ‘peaceful’ to 38 percent ‘violent’).

That’s completely understandable when you recognize that people are getting their news from nakedly partisan sources—Democrats from ABC, CBS, and NBC; Republicans from Fox News; many people getting their information from social media. I have no idea how anyone could have confidence in such unreliable sources. Even people who live in Los Angeles have little idea of what is actually happening.

Let me ask a series of questions. The common directive in all of these question is “does it matter?”.

• If the demonstrations and riots were incidental to a DEA raid on an organization trafficking in illegal drugs?
• If the apprehensions of illegal immigrants were incidental to that raid?
• If the federal agents had a warrant?
• If the demonstrations and riots were incidental to an ICE raid which apprehended multiple illegal immigrants?
• If the unrest had escalated for several days before President Trump deployed the National Guard?
• If the Los Angeles chief of police had already declared the situation “out of control” and the LAPD “overwhelmed” before the deployment of the National Guard?
• If the governor of California had declined to mobilize the National Guard before Trump’s deployment?
• If the actual rioting were only going on within a small area?
• If freeways were being blocked by the unrest?
• If a federal judge had already rejected the governor of California’s complaint that the deployment was illegal?

Note that I am not claiming that any of those were the case although I have heard all of them asserted by one source or another. I don’t honestly know and I don’t know how anybody does. I have heard major media outlets continuing to complain about the legality of the deployment without mentioning that the California governor’s complaint had already been rejected which would seem to me to be important context.

As I think I’ve mentioned before my dad was born at 14th and Clark in St. Louis, where he and his parents lived above the saloon that my great-grandfather owned and my grandparents operated. Sometimes called “the restaurant”.

In sorting through odds and ends I learned some new facts of which I had been unaware based on addresses in letters, bills, and legal documents. My dad and his mom continue to live above the saloon until at least 1933, five years after my great-grandfather died (six years after my grandfather died). Presumably, my grandmother continued to operate the saloon during that period.

By 1935 they had moved to the two-flat on Clayton Ave. where my grandmother continued to live until her death in 1953. I did notice the coincidence between his attending Washington University (1933-1937 undergraduate, 1937-1938 law school) and the move. Clayton Ave. is more convenient to Wash U. than 14th and Clark.

After two days of violent and escalating riots in Los Angeles during which an unspecified number of federal agents and LAPD officers were injured and which the LAPD chief characterized the LAPD as being “overwhelmed”, President Trump called in the National Guard to protect federal officers and property. He is being widely criticized as certainly breaking precedent and possibly the law in doing so.

I was deeply saddened by the riots. The demonstrations from which they materialized were clearly very carefully planned, organized, and financed, no doubt by people who were at no risk of being arrested themselves for reasons of their own. The ensuing riots were violent and out-of-control and federal LAPD officers were injured. I have been unable to determine exactly how many.

Throwing Molotov cocktails and waving Mexican and Palestinian flags are probably not the most effective way of demonstrating your bona fides as new residents of the United States. Especially not in a city that is struggling to recover from weeks of wildfires. The innocent will be swept along with the guilty.

What is clear to me from the public statements from officials is that somebody is tone deaf, misreading the room. Is it Trump or Newsom and Bass? Both?

Trump is fomenting riots

Robert Reich, The Guardian
Stephen Collinson, CNN

Newsom and Bass are fomenting riots

Nicole Russell, USA Today
Miranda Devine, New York Post

If I had to make a prediction, it would be that the courts will find that Trump acted illegally in sending in the National Guard but the legal recourse will end there. Public opinion, at least among registered voters, is likely to support Trump—that appears to be what the overnight polls are showing.

One last point. If you don’t like that the president is invoking old and rarely-used laws to justify his actions, have fewer laws granting the president swepping and vaguely-defined authority.

For the last several days I’ve been devoting some time and even more of my limited energy to sorting through some of the papers that descended on me when my mom died. As I think I’ve mentioned before, one of my family’s vices is that we keep everything. I’ve been going through century-old bank statements, handwritten notes, IOUs, tax statements, and many other documents. I don’t believe they’ll hold any value for my nephews, nieces, and their children. Some of that is generational change. Some of them have no meaning to any living person.

For example:

What the heck is that? I have hundreds of them, many with the same date. Some are for what appear to be the same parcel of land but the payees are different.

I’m hesitant to throw anything away if I don’t know what it is.

Update

I’m not throwing everything away. For example, among the scraps are my parents’ and my paternal grandparents’ wedding certificates. I’m keeping those. I’m also resisting the temptation to track down the descendants of some of the people whose hundred-year-old IOUs I have. Some of the more than century-old IOUs are definitely not for bar bills—they’re for what much have been considerable sums in the 1920s. I can only speculate that my grandfather and great-grandfather were operating as a sort of informal bank.

I found John West’s recent remarks about David Daokui Li’s China’s World View: Demystifying China to Prevent Global Conflict at ASPI’s The Strategist very thought-provoking. Here’s a snippet:

So what is China’s world view?

According to Li, there would be four main aspects to the mainstream perspective of China’s world view.

First, China believes in mutual respect between countries for political and ideological diversity, meaning the West should not interfere in Chinese politics. There is no mention of Chinese interference in other countries using grey zone and other activities.

Second, economic collaboration should be the cornerstone of international cooperation, since politics can be divisive.

Third is historical conservatism, meaning that China does not seek to overturn history, such as Russia’s seizure of Chinese lands during the 19th century. But accepting history does not limit Chinese claims to Taiwan, the Senkaku Islands and the South China Sea.

Fourth, China does not seek to expand its territory (!).

Read the whole thing.

I will refrain from responding or reacting to that characterization. I’ll leave that to the experts. Take them for what they’re worth.

It would be fun to produce a corresponding list describing Russia’s worldview. Maybe in another post.

I want to focus on thinking about America’s worldview. The first part of these remarks will be my list of U. S. interests. Following that I’ll reflect on those a bit.

I think there are five main aspects to the American worldview.

First, the United States believes it is its duty to maintain freedom of navigation. That refers primarily to navigation of the seas but also extends to the air and space.

Second, the United States believes in promoting its social, political, and economic views in other countries.

Third, the Unites States believes in maintaining its military supremacy.

Fourth, the United States believes in free trade.

Fifth, the United States does not seek to expand its territory.

In beginning my reflection I hasten to point out that these are not my views. In fact, I think you’d be hard put to find many Americans who believe in all of those things. Some don’t believe in any of them. They are the views that I have observed the United States pursuing.

I suspect that the goals or objectives listed above emerge from the competing interests that Walter Russell Mead delineated in an article of his in The National Interest almost thirty years ago: Jacksonians (pessimistic realists), Hamiltonians (optimistic realists), Wilsonians (optimistic idealists), and Jeffersonians (pessimistic idealists). But I think it is pretty clear that the U. S. has been pursuing those goals for the last 80 years if not longer.

I also want to point out that many of President Trump’s executive orders, statements, and actions during the first four months of his second term of office are directly contradictory of those objectives. The most dramatic and controversial have been his remarks about Greenland and Canada. Have we had a president who was more openly expansionary since Teddy Roosevelt?

I don’t know what the eventual outcome of those EOs, statements, and actions will be. Maybe they will effect permanent changes in our national objectives. Maybe they will eventually be thought of as an eccentric divergence from our actual goals and objectives.

I look forward to responses in comments to change or withdraw some of those goals in the U. S. worldview or add others. You may notice, for example, that I did not list anything about international law in the list of goals and objectives that comprise the U. S. worldview. That’s because the U. S. has so frequently violated international law over the last 60 years it’s pretty hard to mention it without including an asterisk or parenthetical expression.