Today marks the 75th anniversary of V-J Day, when Japan surrendered, marking the end of World War II, the greatest war the world had or has known. Most of those who fought that war are dead; only a handful remain.

Little mention is being made of the war now. We have other things to worry about: an impending presidential election, COVID-19, a major recession precipitated by state and local government strategies to control the spread of the virus, and whether or how public schools will re-open.

Little mention is being made of the war in the pages of the major news outlets. The only mention of it on the digital front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, or the Chicago Sun-Times was an NYT story about Japan’s commemoration of the event. It was far, far down on the page, the equivalent of a back page story.

On the 75h anniversary of the American Civil War, people were already starting to re-enact its battles. There were notable commemorations of its start, some of its battles, and its end.

The BBC and the online editions of various British news outlets have substantial coverage of the event.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. Ignorance is strength.

There’s an interesting story from NPR on the New Zealand government’s determination to learn how new cases of COVID-19 managed to emerge there:

After more than three months without any known community spread of the coronavirus in New Zealand, a new outbreak in Auckland has upset the fragile normalcy that had returned in the nation.

It was just Tuesday that the government said it had its first cases from an unknown source in 102 days, all within one family. By Friday, the outbreak had grown to 30 cases, including in other cities where members of the household had traveled.

Now, a hunt is on to find the source of the outbreak — a search that shows how difficult it is to stamp out the virus, even on an island nation that has taken quick and decisive steps to eliminate it.

The theories being considered include via surface contagion of shipments coming into the country and an incoming traveler breaking quarantine. However, the theory I suspect is most likely is that the virus has actually been circulating quietly in New Zealand all along, with those contracting it showing no symptoms. Here are some interesting piece of the puzzle: all of the new cases are occurring within a single family and the strain of the virus they have contracted appears to be different from strains previously detected in New Zealand.

If a containment strategy cannot be maintained in New Zealand, it could not have been maintained anywhere. There is nowhere in the world isolated enough, detached enough, or perfect enough to maintain the strategy long enough. Its use was as a delaying tactic rather than a mitigation strategy.

At Newsweek law prof John Eastman questions whether Kamala Harris is eligible to be Joe Biden’s running mate on Constitutional, 14th Amendment, and legal grounds. Apparently, the issue of whether the child of non-citizen, non-permanently resident aliens is automatically granted U. S. citizenship when born in the United States has never been ruled on by the courts:

Were Harris’ parents lawful permanent residents at the time of her birth? If so, then under the actual holding of Wong Kim Ark, she should be deemed a citizen at birth—that is, a natural-born citizen—and hence eligible. Or were they instead, as seems to be the case, merely temporary visitors, perhaps on student visas issued pursuant to Section 101(15)(F) of Title I of the 1952 Immigration Act? If the latter were indeed the case, then derivatively from her parents, Harris was not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States at birth, but instead owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers—Jamaica, in the case of her father, and India, in the case of her mother—and was therefore not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment as originally understood.

Before you dismiss this as so much conspiracy-mongering, we are a nation of laws and the laws matter. I don’t know the answers to Mr. Eastman’s questions but I suspect a lot of people think they do.

Update

At Reason.com Eugene Volokh presents a counter-argument, citing the common law and precedent:

The 14th Amendment does have a narrow exception for people who were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. at birth, but the Court made clear that this was a narrow exception for “children of members of the Indian tribes,” who were at the time not citizens, “children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation” and “children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign State.” Children born to noncitizens living here are certainly subject to the jurisdiction of American courts—no one thinks, for instance, that they are immune from criminal prosecutions or civil lawsuits. They are likewise “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States for citizenship purposes.

Now, this view had not been universal. For instance, the 1797 edition of the English translation of Emer Vattel’s treatise on The Law of Nations (a book that had some influence on the Framers), did say that, “The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” But that was describing the European civil law rule, not the English common law rule; and in any event, the earlier editions that the Framers would have read didn’t use here the phrase “natural-born citizens,” but instead spoke of “indigenes” (borrowed directly from the French original “Les Naturels, ou Indigènes”). The Framers, when they were writing the Constitution, likely mentally linked the “natural-born citizens” phrase to the “natural-born subject” in Blackstone’s very familiar explanation of the common law, rather than to “natives, or indigenes” in Vattel’s somewhat less familiar discussion of the civil law.

Just be prepared for this argument to continue. As I’ve warned before I expect this to be particularly tough, nasty election season, waged not only on the stump and at the ballot box but in the courts as well.

You might think that police arresting offenders for whom there is probable cause of their having committed a crime, prosecutors prosecuting these individuals, and judges trying them on the crimes for which they are charged would not be controversial. Apparently it is as noted by Charles Love in City Journal:

The mayor has consistently said that mass looting, vandalism, and violence are unacceptable, but Chicago’s police seem confused about what is expected of them.

Protests have been going on in the city for 50 days now. The Chicago Police Department is not equipped to handle this level of continued, high-stress confrontation. Officers have had their workdays extended and off days canceled on several occasions. They are tired and overworked.

Foxx openly admits to ignoring “nonviolent” offenders. But where “nonviolence” used to mean “peaceful,” the new, more expansive definition of the word includes property crime, public disturbance, and looting. Under these terms, most of the people causing the mayhem are technically “nonviolent.” But under any definition, nonviolent crimes are not victimless crimes.

The solution here is simple: the police must arrest offenders, and the prosecutor must prosecute them. Foxx should put her personal feelings about drug offenses and “nonviolent” crimes aside and do her job. If Chicagoans want to ease criminal penalties for some crimes, they can push their legislators to do so, via statute—but having a state’s attorney openly ignore current law is destructive to the community.

Elected officials also need to call out bad behavior for what it is, without qualifying their views by saying that such behavior detracts from “the movement.”

Something else that should not be controversial but apparently is: these determinations should not be made be protesters, demonstrators, rioters, or however you’d like to designate them. When that happens let’s call it for what it is. It is not “anarchy”. It is mob rule.

Here are a few of Peggy Noonan’s remarks from her Wall Street Journal column about Kamala Harris:

If commentators are now struggling to define Ms. Harris, it’s because she offers little that is truly defining. The party establishment quickly closed ranks around her 2016 Senate race, allowing her to run a standard liberal campaign that the Los Angeles Times described as “carefully orchestrated” and “overly cautious and scripted.” In her 3½ Senate years, she’s done little by way of legislation, preferring to showboat at hearings. The lack of an animating agenda helps a explain a presidential campaign in which she bounced from left to far-left position, whatever she thought most helpful at the moment. She twice called to eliminate private health insurance—and twice reversed herself the next day after backlash. As Vox noted, the “combination of policy reversals and botched rollout . . . undermined faith in her ability to govern on the issue Democrats rate as most important.”

The campaign was a mess, rocked by infighting, leaks, restarts and financial problems. After the campaign announced layoffs in early November, its veteran Iowa operations manager wrote a scathing resignation letter in which she said she’d “never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly” and expressed dismay at its ability to make “the same unforced errors over and over.” Ms. Harris didn’t even make it to the first contest, dropping out—broke and with embarrassing poll numbers—two months before the Iowa caucuses. The only other “top tier” candidate to implode as quickly or spectacularly was Beto O’Rourke. The Washington Post campaign obituary bluntly called Ms. Harris an “uneven campaigner” who was “engulfed by low polling numbers, internal turmoil and a sense that she was unable to provide a clear message.” The Post this week lauded Ms. Harris as “vibrant and energetic” and a “vessel for Democratic hopes.”

VP Biden has a challenge ahead of him. Sen. Harris is most useful to his campaign as a symbol and that does not appear to be a role she is by temperament suited to play. The more the campaign becomes about her, the more votes he will lose. There’s plenty of room for substantive criticism of her and accusations of racism and sexism in response to those will ring hollow. Keep in mind that 99% of Democratic primary voters voted for any candidate other than Kamala Harris in the primaries. Mr. Biden is fortunate that substantive criticism is not Mr. Trump’s strong suit. He’s more predisposed to feces-flinging, more likely to benefit the Biden/Harris campaign.

In his most recent New York Times column David Brooks tries to fight the light at the end of our present tunnel:

Radicals are good at opening our eyes to social problems and expanding the realm of what’s sayable.

But if you look at who actually leads change over the course of American history, it’s not the radicals. At a certain point, radicals give way to the more prudent and moderate wings of their coalitions.

In the 1770s, the rabble-rousing Samuel Adams gave way to the more moderate John Adams (not to mention George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton). In the middle of the 19th century, radicals like John Brown and purists like Horace Greeley gave way to the incrementalist Abraham Lincoln. In the Progressive era, the radicals and anarchists who started the labor movement in the 1880s gave way to Theodore Roosevelt.

Radicals are not good at producing change because while they are good at shaking up the culture, they don’t have practical strategies to pass legislation when you have to get the support of 50 percent plus one.

They also tend to divide the world into good people and bad people. They think they can bring change if they can destroy enough bad people, and so they devolve into a purist, destructive force that offends potential allies.

The people who come in their wake and actually make change are conservative radicals. They believe in many of the radicals’ goals, but know how to work within the democratic framework to achieve them.

IMO characterizing these individuals as “conservative radicals” is a futile exercise in rebranding. They are pragmatists and at this moment in history pragmatists are in bad odor. People who can actually get things done because they’re willing to accept half a loaf rather than none are viewed as class, race, or ideological traitors. Heresy is unforgiveable.

Here’s his view of events:

To some, this feels like a revolutionary moment. In Commentary, for example, Abe Greenwald argues that the radicals have seized control. They are pushing radical agendas (No police! No rent!). Worse, they undermine the liberal fundamentals of our democracy — the belief that democracy is a search for truth from a wide variety of perspectives; the belief that America is a noble experiment worth defending.

Many people smell in today’s radicalism the whiff of revolutions past: the destructive brutality of the French Revolution, the vicious thought police of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the naked power grabs of Lenin’s Soviet revolution.

I am not as alarmed. I’m convinced that the forces that brought Joe Biden the nomination are far more powerful than a few extremists in Portland and even the leftist illiberals on campus. I’m hopeful that if given power, Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer will forge a new conservative radicalism.

I suspect the Mensheviks were saying the same thing about the Bolsheviks back in 1917. 70 years later the heirs of the Bolsheviks had been looting, retarding Russia’s progress, and spreading their ideas all over the world for three generations.

I think he has forgotten Shakespeare’s advice that “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” The “forces that brought Joe Biden to power” are some combination of hatred of Trump and the raw desire for power. I don’t see Biden, Harris, Pelosi, and Schumer as prospective “radical conservatives” but as survivors. They will tack in whatever direction they perceive the winds of the Democratic Party are blowing.

In what direction will they be blowing in 2021? I find it hard to imagine they will be blowing in the direction of moderation, liberal democracy, and the thoughtful consideration that leads to good policies.

I wonder if anyone will pay attention to Faye Flam’s remarks at Bloomberg?

There are some weird things going on in the coronavirus data. It’s curious that cases dropped so fast, and have stayed pretty low, in the spring hot zones — New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. And why did cases remain so low in Idaho and Hawaii until recently?

The mainstream narrative is that it’s all about good behavior when cases go down — mask wearing and giving up our social lives for the greater good. And conversely, bad behavior must be what makes them go up. We talk about certain regions having the virus “under control,” as if falling cases are purely a matter of will-power. A sort of moral reasoning is filling in for evidence.

But why, then, have cases plummeted in Sweden, where mask wearing is a rarity?

This is the time to use scientific methods to understand what’s happening. The pandemic has gone on long enough to reveal patterns in the way it spreads. If it’s all about behavior, that’s a testable hypothesis. If, as a few speculate, dramatic drops in some places have something to do with growing immunity in the population, we can also turn that into a testable hypothesis.

I’m afraid it’s a complicated problem. Mask-wearing in County A might still reduce transmission in County B later on because people travel from County A to County B. I think that perfectly implemented and perfectly conformed with mask-wearing would probably reduce the rate of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 but I’m not so sure about mask-wearing when, where, and how it’s actually practiced.

Political polarization coupled with the instinct to suppress ideas that deviate from Established Orthodoxy impair our ability to arrive at or try strategies that deviate from that orthodoxy. I don’t see a simple way out of that fix.

I think that RNC member Richard Porter’s piece at RealClearPolitics about how bad governance is driving the “Illinois Exodus”, Illinois’s constant and large loss of population, is largely right as far as it does:

Illinois has a population problem: Our population has been shrinking faster than any other state (except one). The Chicago Tribune Editorial Board and others call this the Illinois Exodus.

Population changes are a measure of governance quality. We are free to choose where to live, and the United States offers 50 different states and thousands of different localities, each governed in different ways. People consider many factors when choosing where to live, and how a state is governed can be a significant factor in that decision. Over time, people migrate toward places that are governed well and away from areas that are governed poorly.

but it really doesn’t add a lot to the conversation.

The first quibble I’d make is that I don’t think that population changes are actually a measure of governance quality, at least not directly. I think that they’re more multi-factorial than that. All things equal everybody would live in Santa Barbara.

But all things are not equal and the cost of housing and the availability of jobs that pay enough to maintain the lifestyle that people expect to live can be greatly affected by government policy. Rather than being a measure of governance quality I think I might say that population changes are downstream of governance.

There are lots of different sorts of “bad governance”. All states have some, some states, e.g. Louisiana, have a lot, but few have as many different kinds as Illinois. Let’s consider some of them.

Corruption

Few states match Illinois for government corruption. In my lifetime alone four governors have done time after serving in office. Two of the last five Illinois governors have served time for corruption in office. That must be some sort of record. Then there’s Operation Greylord, Dan Rostenkowski and the Congressional Post Office scandal, and the ongoing probe of Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan’s shakedown of ComEd, just to name a very few. The list goes on and on.

Fiscal Mismanagement

Starting in the late 1990s and continuing through the first decade or so of the 21st century, the State of Illinois stopped paying into public pension funds. The governor and lawmakers had better uses for the money—increasing public employee pay and expanding Medicaid, for example—and rather than raising taxes which would have been too unpopular politically, they just stopped paying into the pension funds. Those needs were in the future. Well, the future is now and those things have a way of catching up with you. Now those pension funds have holes in them which nobody really knows how to fill.

Illinois has been borrowing money to pay its huge backlog of bills ferociously and it has the worst credit rating of any state.

Mismatch of Policies and Needs

This is a chronic problem in Illinois. I’ll just cite one example. The last mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, spent a lot of money on amenities for the “creative class” and not nearly enough on basic infrastructure, law enforcement, and the neighborhoods. Why? I think he had a misguided vision of Chicago as some sort of Midwestern San Francisco. He thought that he could attract prosperous upwardly mobile Millennials to Chicago that way. He was wrong. They don’t like Chicago’s weather, they don’t like its taxes, and there just aren’t enough jobs for those upwardly mobile Millennials.

I look at this tendency as a sort of inferiority complex on the part of our political leadership. They envy the “cool kids”—mayors of New York, San Francisco, Seattle, etc. Chicago will never be cool.

Outlaw Government

The Illinois Constitution requires that the state have a balanced budget. For several of the last few years Illinois has had no budget at all and the years of the last decade in which the budget has actually been balanced are few. How can the governor and the legislature get away with it? Nobody seems to have standing to sue them over it—it’s apparently an unenforceable regulation.

In addition Chicago in particular has been sued repeatedly for a variety of criminal conduct—mostly on the part of police. Nobody really believes that the mayor or the Cook County State’s Attorney were not involved but somehow they always get off scot free while the taxpayers are saddled with the bills for the judgments that are handed down.

I think that we can stipulate that when one party holds a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives, two-thirds of the seats in the Senate, and the White House, it’s a lot easier to enact legislation. But there are still obstacles. When you hold merely a majority in the Senate it’s harder. And when there is divided government, with one party in control of the House and another controls the Senate and the White House, it’s even harder.

But when you have divided government and compromise is impossible, you’ve reached an impasse. It becomes tremendously difficult to address problems and puts an enormous amount of power into the hands of the president.

It didn’t used to be this way. When both major political parties were truly “catch-all” parties with liberal, moderate, and conservative wings, compromise was normal and expected. With the drift to the right and left of the Republican and Democratic Parties, respectively, compromise not only became unusual but unthinkable. That is a fundamental impediment to republican government since, as Plato pointed out two millennia ago, compromise is essential to republican government.

In his Wall Street Journal column William Galston lament:

The impasse over Covid-19 legislation is a policy failure with constitutional implications. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Sunday that most issues between congressional Democrats and the Trump administration had been resolved, with the exception of aid to states and localities and the extension of supplementary unemployment insurance payments. No doubt differences of degree remain in other areas, but these seem to be the two main fiscal sticking points. If so, compromise should be within reach.

Democrats are demanding nearly $1 trillion of additional assistance for state and local governments, while Republicans are offering more flexibility for $150 billion previously appropriated. The solution: Meet in the middle. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey have introduced a bill that would distribute $500 billion to states and localities based on a formula that accounts for revenue loss and Covid-19 infection rates, as well as population. The bill has other bipartisan co-sponsors, and so does the companion version introduced in the House.

Led by President Trump, Republicans insist that the federal government should not be in the business of bailing out the budgets and pension funds of profligate states. The Cassidy-Menendez bill would compensate states for a portion of added costs and lower revenues from Covid-19, not for the consequences of past mismanagement. The bill explicitly bars the use of funds to shore up pension funds.

Then there’s the dispute over unemployment benefits. Republicans object to the current $600 weekly federal supplement on the grounds that, when added to state benefits, it can pay unemployed recipients more than they earned on the job and is thus a disincentive to return to work. They have countered with an offer of $200.

Here again, the two sides should be able to compromise. Mr. Trump has signaled his willingness to back a $300 federal contribution. There is some evidence that Democrats may be willing to settle for $400, tapered in stages linked to declining rates of unemployment. These differences can be resolved, assuming the parties want a bill more than a talking point.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is insisting on provisions that protect corporations and other entities against Covid-19 liability claims. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has made these changes a priority. Trial lawyers are dead set against them.

A compromise proposal from the bipartisan New Center would give Republicans the protection their business supporters want. In return, employers would be required to meet clear, strong and enforceable workplace safety standards. There would be no verbal loopholes such as “good-faith effort” and “to the extent possible.” Immunity from liability would depend on strict compliance, and workers who allege that employers failed to meet the standard would be protected from retaliation.

His account of the impasse is a bit lopsided. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on record as rejecting any compromise on the weekly federal income supplement at the least. It’s a bipartisan impasse.

I see no easy solution to the problem. It would require changes to Senate and House seniority rules, funding rules, and changes in the way districts are apportioned. A larger House would probably help, too. Eliminating the filibuster would enable strict majoritarianism. Impasse is likely on the menu for a long time.