At Time Miranda Jeyaretnam reports on the multiple bipartisan efforts in Congress to limit the president’s warmaking authority. Here’s a snippet:

Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) announced plans to introduce a resolution on Tuesday that asserts the requirement of Congress’ approval if Trump wants to commit armed forces to military action in the region.

“This is not our war. But if it were, Congress must decide such matters according to our Constitution,” Massie posted on X.

The resolution has already gained the support of progressive Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who replied “Signing on” to Massie’s post.

It’s also not the first proposal by a lawmaker seeking to limit U.S. military engagement in the conflict.

I sincerely hope that the Congress acts on this matter with some sense of urgency rather than its ordinary, leisurely pace. Such a move is long overdue and it looks like it took their corporate uncertainty about Trump to rouse them from their accustomed lethargy. There are many more similar actions that need congressional attention.

The man suspect of murdering a Minnesota state representative and her husband and two other individuals has been arrested by Minnesota law enforcement. Nathan Layne and Tom Polansek report at Reuters:

MINNEAPOLIS, June 15, (Reuters) – A massive two-day manhunt ended on Sunday with the arrest of Vance Boelter, 57, for allegedly killing a Minnesota Democratic state lawmaker and her husband while posing as a police officer, Governor Tim Walz said.

Boelter allegedly shot dead Melissa Hortman, the top Democrat in the Minnesota House, and her husband, Mark, in their home on Saturday – a crime Governor Tim Walz characterized as a “politically motivated assassination.”

This whole matter has been horrid and reprehensible. One of the things that has struck me is the pains to which both Democrats and Republicans have gone to cast political blame for the crime on the other side. Can’t we just acknowledge that these murders are horrible and unjustified and leave it at that? We’ll know more about it soon enough.

Iran has had a very bad week and it looks as though that will continue. That began, propitiously enough, with the International Atomic Energy Agency informing Iran that it was out of compliance with its Safety Agreement with the agency. Reuters reports:

VIENNA, June 11 (Reuters) – Below are key passages from a four-page resolution on Iran that diplomats said the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 35-nation Board of Governors passed on Thursday. The text is still confidential and was seen by Reuters.

Here are some key passages:

(e) Regretting that despite the above resolutions by the Board and numerous opportunities provided by the Director General since 2019, Iran has failed to provide the co-operation required under its Safeguards Agreement, impeding Agency verification activities, sanitizing locations, and repeatedly failing to provide the Agency with technically credible explanations for the presence of uranium particles of anthropogenic origin at several undeclared locations in Iran or information on the current location(s) of nuclear material and/or of contaminated equipment, instead stating, inconsistent with the Agency’s findings, that it has declared all nuclear material and activities required under its Safeguards Agreement,

(f) Noting the Director General’s conclusion … that Iran did not declare nuclear material and nuclear-related activities at three undeclared locations in Iran, specifically, Lavisan-Shian, Varamin, and Turquzabad, and that, because of the lack of technically credible answers by Iran, the Agency is not in a position to determine whether the nuclear material at these undeclared locations in Iran has been consumed, mixed with other declared material, or is still outside of Safeguards,

and

(h) Noting with concern the Agency’s conclusion that Iran retained unknown nuclear material and/or heavily contaminated equipment, and other assets, arising from the former undeclared structured nuclear programme, at Turquzabad in the period 2009 until 2018, after which items were removed from the location, the whereabouts of which remain unknown,

The emphasis is mine. What the IAEA has acknowledged is what I’ve been saying all along. We have never known the extent of Iran’s nuclear development program. That includes during the period in which the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was in force.

I don’t believe that apologists for the Obama Administration recognize what the IAEA has done to them. The JCPOA could not accomplish its objective because the Iranians have never been forthcoming. They merely revealed what we already knew. Their compliance with it was limited to that.

That is not to say that I think the Trump Administration acted rightly in abrogating the JCPOA. I think it acted foolishly. Limited as Iranian compliance was we had already materially borne the costs of the JCPOA and abrogating it just threw that investment away. What I think the Trump Administration should have done was work to limit expectations of what the JCPOA could accomplish.

Then only a day later the other shoe dropped. The Israelis attacked Iran’s known nuclear development facilities and made a special point of “decapitating” Iran’s nuclear development and military. The exchange of hostilities between Israel and Iran continues. Alexander Cornwell, Parisa Hafezi and Jeff Mason report at Reuters:

TEL AVIV/DUBAI/WASHINGTON, June 16 (Reuters)
Iranian missiles struck major Israeli cities on Monday while Israel’s prime minister said his country was on its way to eliminating “threats” from nuclear and missile facilities in Iran and civilian casualties mounted on both sides.

After four days of conflict between the regional foes, Iran said its parliament was preparing a bill to leave the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) adding that Iran remained opposed to developing weapons of mass destruction.

By most accounts Israel has done substantial damage to Iran’s nuclear and missile development programs and has substantial control of the skies over Iran so expect Israel’s attacks on Iranian infrastructure to continue.

All of this is completely consistent with what I have maintained for the last twenty years: far from being a deterrent any nuclear development program on Iran’s part would be a target.

We don’t know what will materialize from the conflict. Perhaps Israel knows where all of Iran’s nuclear development facilities are located but I doubt it. Iran is unlikely to be deterred by its losses and possibly not even slowed down. I suspect that the likelihood of the U. S.’s being drawn into the conflict are high, something President Trump increases by hinting at American cooperation with Israel in Israel’s attacks on Iran.

I don’t believe that an Iranian attack on the U. S. will be a conventional one. I suspect that Iran will stick to its strengths which are in supporting terrorism. Such an attack could be in the Middle East, in Europe, or here in the United States.

Former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan has been sentence to 7.5 years in federal prison and a $2.5 million fine after his conviction on charges of corruption. ABC 7 Chicago reports:

CHICAGO (WLS) — Former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan was sentenced Friday to seven and a half years in federal prison and a $2.5 million fine in his corruption case.

The hearing lasted hours, starting around 1 p.m. at the Dirksen Federal Building. The sentence came down about 4:30 p.m.

Though it’s unclear where he’ll serve time, Madigan was ordered to report to prison October 13, almost a year to the day jury selection in his trial began.

Judge John Robert Blakey spent hours Friday discussing his reasoning for the sentence and enhancements on bribery, conspiracy and wire fraud charges.

“Judge Blakey is sending a very powerful message, not only to Speaker Madigan, but to the entire political establishment here in Illinois. Don’t engage in corruption,” said Chris Hotaling, former federal prosecutor.

The judge also touched on the ComEd Four conspiracy case and whether Madigan perjured himself, when he took the stand. Blakey said he believed he did.

Madigan was convicted in February of bribery conspiracy and other corruption counts, including the scheme with ComEd that enriched his allies in exchange for favorable legislation.

“We saw the public get a corruption tax for years and years, and we’re still paying that tax, frankly, when you look at the legislation that was passed,” said David Greising, President of the Better Government Association.

Apologists masquerading as analysts continue to prate about the good that Speaker Madigan did for the people of Illinois. As the late Mayor Daley used to say, let’s look at the record. Over a period of 40 years as Illinois House Speaker and chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party he enriched himself and his cronies. Illinois went from having a high credit rating to one of the lowest in the country. It went from being a low tax state to a high tax state. Businesses and people left in droves for more favorable, less corrupt states.

There have been hundreds of federal convictions of office holders for corruption. Nothing seems to deter it. Barring an amendment to the state’s constitution Illinoisans will continue to be yoked to high public employee pension payments.

Chicago went from “the city that works” to its lowest population in a century. Until the Republican Party become completely supine there was incessant inter-party conflict. Now there’s incessant intra-party conflict. In short most of what Speaker Madigan championed was wrong.

Mr. Madigan was only convicted of his latest misdeeds so the sentence is relatively light. Considering his age it is likely to be a life sentence.

I’m waiting for the next shoe to drop. I doubt we have heard the last of Mr. Madigan.

I want to ask a question. What will the protests against ICE raids accomplish?

IMO if the protests were to remain entirely peaceful there is an outside chance that they could turn public opinion against Trump on immigration enforcement. The enforcement hasn’t been 100% just or equitable. It should be easy to build opposition to something that isn’t 100% just or equitable.

On the other hand protests that escalate into riots and looting will increase public support for Trump’s immigration enforcement. It doesn’t make any difference whether the violence is confined to five square blocks or 500.

Yesterday was definitely the day for shocking incidents. Israel has attacked Iranian nuclear development sites. Iran has responded with a barrage of drones. I doubt this is the end of the exchange of hostilities.

Israel’s attack on Iran was not just. For a war (which is what it is) to be just there are three components: just means, just ends, just authority. Israel is a signatory to the United Nations charter. As such the war is not being conducted under a just authority. Israel should have taken its grievances to the UN Security Council.

I sympathize with Israel’s situation. It wouldn’t take much more than a single nuclear weapon to completely destroy Israel. The country is about the size of New Jersey and much of its population is concentrated in a small number of cities. It is very vulnerable. That doesn’t excuse Israel.

All of this should suggest why I have long questioned the efficacy of the United Nations for any purpose other than spending money. The U. S. invasion of Iraq was a violation of our obligations under the UN Charter. Russia’s attack on Ukraine was a violation of its obligations under the UN Charter. It should have taken its grievances to the Security Council.

That no permanent member of the UN Security Council thinks twice before violating its obligations and even flyspecks like Israel violate those obligations ad libitum without meaningful consequences are indications of the futility of the United Nations.

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.