There’s a profile of the new Cook County States Attorney, Eileen O’Neill Burke, by Ted C. Fishman at Chicago:

A ew days before Eileen O’Neill Burke would be elected the new Cook County state’s attorney, the top prosecutor in a jurisdiction of 5.1 million people, she tells me a story about her great-grandparents. We’re sitting in her campaign office on North Dearborn Street, where O’Neill Burke has laid out 15 old family photos on an otherwise bare table. Among them are antique studio portraits of her forebears, a snapshot of her as a young girl with her older brother outside their home in Edgebrook, and a recent picture of her with her lawyer husband, John, and their four children, in their teens and early 20s, all beaming. Two of O’Neill Burke’s top staffers crane over the table to see the photos for the first time.

Modern political strategies put family histories and personal struggles at the center of campaigns?—?the more bittersweet, the better. Yet O’Neill Burke did not run on her personal story. For over a year in candidate mode, she rarely mentioned the people or chapters that forged her morals or mettle. Instead, her pitch was her record as a lauded judge and her outrage over a justice system that she argued was enabling too much theft and violent crime. The photos, though, reveal another wellspring for her yearnings to help the region: her own family’s century-and-a-half history in Chicago. For O’Neill Burke, 59, that history hardly feels distant. It lives on inside her. She relates it with the emotional intensity of someone recapping her own story of love and heartache.

I wish her well. Her experience as an appellate court judge should serve her well in dealing with the judiciary. As I’ve said before one of the major improvements we need is for the police, the public prosecutors, and the judges all to be pulling in the same direction. The last states attorney clearly would have preferred the title “Public Defender at Large”. Rescinding Kim Foxx’s directive not to prosecute retail thefts under $1,000 as felonies is a step in the right direction.

I wish the article had expanded on what SA O’Neill Burke sees as “root causes”. I don’t think that the root causes of crime in Cook County are guns, poverty, race, or racism. The real root cause is gangs and that is downstream from dysfunction in black urban society. Sixty years ago that was probably an outcome of racism but, well, that was sixty years ago and the dysfunction remains. I don’t think addressing that is within the states attorney’s scope.

But enforcing the law is as is ensuring that the police department understands that the law should be enforced and convincing judges that the law should be enforced.

At Illinois Policy Ravi Mishra and Lauren Zuar propose three non-starters for balancing Chicago’s budget:

Chicago’s annual budget process is typically a desperate scramble that leaves taxpayers wounded when it could be a measured, responsible process if city leaders would just do three things: cut non-essential staff, cut non-essential projects and push government pension reform.

Although Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was forced to abandon his plans for a $300 million property tax hike, his 2025 budget adds $181.6 million in other tax and fee increases. It does little to fix enduring structural issues contributing to the city’s big budget deficit.

Cutting non-essential staff and non-essential projects is a completely reasonable idea which no Illinois politician will support. Pension reform has been fully litigated and a constitutional amendment that would allow it has already been proposed and rejected by Illinoisans. That even as the pension liability per Illinoisans continues to mount.

While we’re spinning fantasy strategies, why not think big? We could save billions by shuttering the Chicago Public Schools entirely and contracting the education of Chicago’s children out to the Chicago Archdiocese. They spend half as much per student as does the CPS.

The CPS’s budget has soared over the last 30 years even as the number of children enrolled has languished. The increased spending has not resulted in sufficiently improved performance, either.

This another report that saddened me, this one by Jeff Cox at CNBC:

In an early sign of an intensified focus on trade, President Donald Trump said Monday that tariffs could be levied against Mexico and Canada as soon as early February.

“We’re thinking in terms of 25% (levies) on Mexico and Canada, because they’re allowing a vast number of people” over the border, Trump said. The president called Canada “a very bad abuser” and said a target date for the tariffs would be “I think Feb. 1”

The remarks were made to members of the press as the newly minted chief executive offered a slew of executive orders aimed at everything from regulations to free speech to immigration.

While it’s been no secret that Trump plans on implementing across-the-board duties on U.S. trading partners, the timing and extent has been in question. There had been some speculation that the tariffs could be delayed and might be targeted at certain essential items rather than being more broad-based.

In his remarks, Trump provided no further details on how and when the tariffs could come.

While I understand the idea of raising the ante, I don’t think that imposing tariffs on imports from Canada or Mexico is the way to do it. The main effect of that will be to raise consumer prices in the United States, a perverse outcome. A lot of those imports are oil.

China is a special case. A Pigouvian tax in the form of a tariff is an appropriate remedy. Canada and Mexico not so much.

This report by Jonathan Landay at Reuters saddened me:

WASHINGTON, Jan 20 (Reuters) – Nearly 1,660 Afghans cleared by the U.S. government to resettle in the U.S., including family members of active-duty U.S. military personnel, are having their flights canceled under President Donald Trump’s order suspending U.S. refugee programs, a U.S. official and a leading refugee resettlement advocate said on Monday.
The group includes unaccompanied minors awaiting reunification with their families in the U.S. as well as Afghans at risk of Taliban retribution because they fought for the former U.S.-backed Afghan government, said Shawn VanDiver, head of the #AfghanEvac coalition of U.S. veterans and advocacy groups and the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

I have been predicting this for some time. Phony refugee claims poison the well for legitimate ones and screen Afghan claims certainly sound legitimate to me.

I haven’t looked at all of President Trump’s executive orders yet but I did want to comment on a few that look controversial. The first of these is his granting pardons to individuals convicted of offenses committed on January 6, 2021 in or near the Capitol. Although some of those pardons may be warranted, I have already expressed my opinion of blanket pardons—I’m against them and that doesn’t matter which president is granting them. I suspect that some people are being granted pardons who don’t merit them.

Perhaps the most controversial is President Trump’s executive order purporting to end the birthright citizenship provisions of the 14th Amendment:

The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Consistent with this understanding, the Congress has further specified through legislation that “a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a national and citizen of the United States at birth, 8 U.S.C. 1401, generally mirroring the Fourteenth Amendment’s text.

Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

I think that eliminating so-called “birth tourism” (the second item above) is correct and within the meaning of the amendment. It is my understanding that the other declaration has already been brought to the court’s attention. It’s an interesting theory but I suspect the courts will not uphold it.

Also controversial is withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. One of the claims in the EO is that the U. S. is paying far too much of the organization’s budget:

In addition, the WHO continues to demand unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has 300 percent of the population of the United States, yet contributes nearly 90 percent less to the WHO.

I’m not so sure about the math, either the WHO’s or the White House’s. Here’s what Statista says were the relative assessments in 2022:
You will find more infographics at Statista

I don’t know what our 2024 assessment was or whether we paid it. I think it’s reasonable to ask whether we’re getting value for our money but IMO withdrawal from the organization is an extreme step.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency launches today. While I’m asking questions what do you expect to be the consequences of the DOGE once the dust has settled?

I’ve got two predictions:

1. Its proposals will result in some cuts.
2. The total amount of the cuts will be less than 10% of what they have predicted.

To jog your memories they have promised $2 trillion in budget cutbacks.

President Biden issued a number of preemptive pardons on his way out the door. Catherine Lucey and Ken Thomas report at the Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON—President Biden issued pre-emptive pardons for officials who have clashed with President-elect Donald Trump along with members of his family, including his three siblings, using his final hours in the White House to help people he fears could face retribution by the incoming administration.

The White House said the president had issued pardons for retired Gen. Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci and members and staff of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, as well as police officers who testified before the committee.

In the waning minutes of his presidency—in a statement released as Biden was attending Trump’s inauguration—the White House said the outgoing president had pardoned his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, and her husband John T. Owens, and his two brothers, James B. Biden and Francis W. Biden, along with James Biden’s spouse, Sara Jones Biden.

“My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics. Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end,” Biden said.

Last year, Biden issued a surprise pardon for his son, Hunter Biden, wiping away criminal convictions on tax and gun charges, and drawing bipartisan criticism.

The decision to grant the pardons represents an extraordinary move by an outgoing president to shield family members and allies from an incoming administration, which critics warned could set a new precedent for the use of presidential power. While past presidents have issued controversial pardons to protect allies and donors, Biden’s moves were unprecedented in sweep.

There’s a downside for them in the preemptive pardons: they won’t be able to plead the Fifth Amendment if subpoenaed to testify.

What do you think of these preemptive pardons?

I don’t plan to watch the inauguration. Am I making a mistake?

At Reason.com Peter Suderman gives his assessment of the Biden presidency:

Over the last four years, President Biden supported the investment of billions of dollars of taxpayer money in infrastructure—and, in particular, high-tech green energy infrastructure such as high-speed rail, rural broadband, and electric vehicle charging stations.

And what happened was: He didn’t build that.

The money was authorized, but the projects didn’t come to completion. As Politico reported last month in an overview of Biden’s signature green energy infrastructure projects, “a $42 billion expansion of broadband internet service has yet to connect a single household. Bureaucratic haggling, equipment shortages and logistical challenges mean a $7.5 billion effort to install electric vehicle chargers from coast to coast has so far yielded just 47 stations in 15 states.” According to Politico, Congress authorized more than $1 trillion in spending for Biden’s major climate, clean energy, and infrastructure programs, but more than half of it “has yet to be obligated or is not yet available for agencies to spend.” Many of the big projects that received either subsidies or tax breaks under Biden are still essentially imaginary, and some may not happen at all, depending on what President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress choose to pursue.

Even projects that Biden himself is personally invested in haven’t paid off: Biden has long subscribed to a romantic fantasy of passenger rail, and his administration sent more than $3 billion to further fund California’s long-delayed high-speed rail system. The rail project was supposed to connect Los Angeles with San Francisco, but it’s currently years behind schedule and $100 billion over budget—and is now struggling to complete a much shorter, much less useful line between Merced and Bakersville, which are not exactly global economic hubs. There is currently no completion date, or really any actionable plan at all, to actually connect L.A. and San Francisco. Biden threw billions at a worthless project, and America got nothing for it.

Mr. Suderman contrasts that performance with that of the private sector:

The contrast with the private sector is revealing. The most notable train project in the United States during Biden’s tenure wasn’t California’s doomed high-speed rail, or some Amtrak upgrade that justified the billions this administration sent their way, but the Brightline in Florida. For sheer wow factor, the biggest engineering project of the Biden tenure was almost certainly SpaceX’s reusable rocket catch. Yes, SpaceX has significant business with the government, but it’s fundamentally a private enterprise, operating with private goals and direction. America can still build big things. But Biden’s top-down, bureaucratic approach has failed to do so.

I’ve already provided my explanation of why the United States is realizing so little in the way of outputs from the inputs the federal government is providing: it’s the spending that’s important to those arguing for these expenditures and those administering them not the results.

The spending alone may be sufficient for the bureaucrats and advocates of these programs but the country actually needs material results. Once upon a time the United States was able to complete major projects like these on a timely basis. Have we lost that ability or is it just the desire that we have lost?