The editors of the Wall Street Journal are not particularly happy about the Supreme Court’s decision in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of Univ. of Cal.:

We support legalization for these 700,000 or so immigrants, as a matter of fairness and as contributors to American life. But this is an issue for Congress. The Court’s ruling on administrative-law grounds reads like a desired policy outcome in search of justifying legal logic, and it is likely to do long-term harm to the Constitution’s separation of powers and maybe to immigration reform.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four liberals, as he so often has, in ruling that the Trump Administration hadn’t properly followed the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The Court remanded the rescission back to DHS to rewrite with a formal rule-making with notice and comment period.

This may seem routine, but the problem is that the Obama Administration never followed the APA when it issued Daca in 2012. Daca was never tested in court, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2015 issued an injunction against a companion order to Daca. The Supreme Court upheld that injunction, and the Trump Administration had every reason to believe Daca was thus illegal too.

“Today the majority makes the mystifying determination that this rescission of DACA was unlawful. In reaching that conclusion, the majority acts as though it is engaging in the routine application of standard principles of administrative law,” Justice Clarence Thomas writes in a dissent joined by Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. “On the contrary, this is anything but a standard administrative law case.”

but I am persuaded by Amy Howe’s analysis at SCOTUSBlog that the decision was the right one:

At the oral argument last November, the main issue before the Supreme Court wasn’t whether the Trump administration has the power to end DACA, because everyone agrees that it does. Instead, the question was whether the administration went about it in the right way. Lawyers for the challengers told the justices that the administration had not provided a good reason for its decision to end DACA because it didn’t want to take responsibility for its actions. Instead, they suggested, the administration wanted to blame its decision on the courts. In effect, the administration was claiming that it didn’t necessarily want to end DACA, but that it had to because the courts had said the program was illegal. U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco pushed back, telling the justices that the administration “owns” its decision to terminate DACA.

Today Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by the court’s four more liberal justices, agreed with the challengers that the decision to terminate DACA violated the APA. Before they could reach that key issue in the case, however, they had to dispose of a threshold question: whether courts have the power to review the decision to end DACA in the first place. The majority made quick work of this question, rejecting the Trump administration’s argument that the decision was unreviewable. As a general rule, Roberts explained, courts will be able to review an agency’s action, unless (among other things) the action falls within the agency’s discretion. But courts have read that exception “quite narrowly,” Roberts noted. And the government’s efforts to compare one example of an agency action that is not subject to judicial review – a decision not to institute enforcement proceedings – to the termination of DACA fell short in the majority’s eyes because DACA is not a “passive non-enforcement policy” but instead a “program for conferring affirmative immigration relief.” “The creation of that program—and its rescission—is an ‘action [that] provides a focus for” courts to review, Roberts concluded.

and

Roberts and three of the more liberal justices – Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan – rejected the DACA recipients’ claim that the Trump administration’s decision to end DACA violated the Constitution because it was motivated by an intent to discriminate. None of the factors that the challengers cited can establish such a claim, either alone or taken together, Roberts wrote.

Contrary to the editors, I think this is an instance of arriving at the wrong policy for the right reasons and, fortunately, there is a clear path to rectifying the situation: the Trump Administration should follow the correct procedures. That speaks to my repeated criticism. The president does not appreciate the workings of government sufficiently. This decision could have been avoided.

That your predecessor was a scofflaw and ruled by edict so you should, too, is a lousy argument. It does not go to a good place while affirming the rule of law does. The editors of the WSJ are right: this is a matter that should be determined by law not by presidential edict.

I don’t read articles in the National Review very frequently but I’ve got to admit this one from Rich Lowry, presenting a very different story about COVID-19 testing than you’ve probably heard, completely flabbergasted me. I don’t know what to make of it other than to conclude that publicity works.

I think that Daniel Henninger is simultaneously right and wrong in his predictions for the implications of the one-two-three punch of COVID-19, the response to COVID-19, and urban rioting on cities, made in his latest Wall Street Journal column:

In two recent, overlooked articles, demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution reports that the well-noted migration into large metropolitan areas that occurred from 2010 to 2015—predicting “the decade of the city”—has in fact reversed sharply in the past five years.

Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco and Washington are all leaking people. Meanwhile the presumably disdained suburbs and exurbs, distant from these city centers, are gaining residents.

Then came the pandemic and the protests of 2020.

Hardly anyone disputes that the coronarivus pandemic was going to affect individuals’ trust in the human density of urban living. Many were already daunted by the possibility of again enduring a shutdown of every aspect of city life while quarantined in small living quarters.

Late May witnessed the killing of George Floyd, followed by nonstop street marches and significant looting in multiple city centers—the ones already losing population: New York (as always), Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., on and on.

Urban dwellers are resilient, but these simultaneous events have forced people to face a hard reality. In just three months it has become clear that modern urban progressivism is politically incompetent and intellectually incoherent.

Said another way, trends that preceded those three precipitating events will receive additional impetus from them. More will move to the suburbs and to smaller towns, particularly in Texas and the Southeast.

Where he’s wrong is in his implication that those who move will become more conservative. The problem is that modern conservativsm is intellectually, politically, and morally bankrupt. “Urban progressivism” has little actual competition. Trump is no conservative and there is no Trumpism—the president’s approach is completely transactional in nature.

People presently living in lily white apartment buildings or condominiums will move to equally lily white suburbs or towns, presumably for “better schools”, continuing to proclaim their support for diversity. When they flee the cities of the Northeast and the Midwest, they will bring their political views with them. Urban areas will lose seats in Congress. And solidly red states and areas will become purple.

I sincerely believe that the conclusion that Jason L. Riley reaches in his latest Wall Street Journal column is correct:

The question is whether Joe Biden and the Democrats will rescue Mr. Trump by allowing violent protesters to become the face of their party and by indulging the increasingly absurd demands of radical progressives. Mr. Trump may be unpopular, but so are looting, toppling statues, defunding the police, and allowing armed radicals to take over sections of major cities.

Nor should the political left assume that the black voters they need to turn out in large numbers five months from now will thrill to this agenda. In a 1970 memo to President Nixon, adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that there “is a silent black majority as well as a white one” and that “it shares most of the concerns of its white counterpart.”

That was true 50 years ago and remains true today. Most black people know that George Floyd is no more representative of blacks than Derek Chauvin is of police officers. They know that the frequency of black encounters with law enforcement has far more to do with black crime rates than with racially biased policing. They know that young black men have far more to fear from their peers than from the cops. And they know that the rioters are opportunists, not revolutionaries.

There’s nothing wrong with having a national conversation about better policing, but this one has turned into a conversation about blaming law enforcement for social inequality, which is not only illogical but dangerous. Unsafe neighborhoods retard upward mobility, and poorly policed neighborhoods are less safe. A conversation that doesn’t acknowledge that reality is hardly worth having.

and I would urge the reform-minded to take note of this:

You don’t need to read an academic paper to understand that peaceful civil-rights demonstrations have had more success than violent protests, but a Princeton scholar just published one that is well worth your time. Writing last month in the American Political Science Review, Omar Wasow, a professor of politics, described the results of a 15-year research project on the political consequences of protests.

Mr. Wasow, who is black, focused on black-led demonstrations between 1960 and 1972, and he found that the “types of protest tactics employed” can make all the difference in advancing a social cause. “Nonviolent black-led protests played a critical role in tilting the national political agenda toward civil rights,” he concluded, while “black-led resistance that included protester-initiated violence contributed to outcomes directly in opposition to the policy preferences of the protesters.”

I guess we’ll need to wait to learn what the “policy preferences of the protesters” are. As of this writing the only clear goal that has emerged is “defund the police” and that is far from clear with some believing it means overall greater public spending with a stronger emphasis on social workers and psychologists, some believing it means cutting the number of police on the streets and using the money that would otherwise have been spent paying police officers for other purposes, and still others believing it means eliminating police forces entirely.

Otherwise I would only remind people that the areas of Los Angeles ravaged by the riots following the Rodney King incident 30 years ago have still not recovered or been rebuilt.

I do want to correct one thing in Mr. Riley’s column:

The methods championed most famously by Martin Luther King Jr. culminated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two of the most consequential laws in U.S. history. By contrast, the Black Power movement that followed eventually imploded, and its most prominent leaders wound up exiled, imprisoned or victims of murderous rivalries.

I know of one exception to that. Just this week I was treated to a press conference by our mayor and one of those “prominent leaders”, Bobby Rush. He’s still anti-police but what, otherwise, has he accomplished with his nearly 30 years as a member of Congress? When he can be troubled actually to vote, he has generally voted the straight party line. And he is widely believed to have not paid his bills, paid family members illegally, and shaken companies down for contributions to his pet charities.

I agree with the author of this post at Global Macro Monitor. The Federal Reserve’s recent announcement that it would buy corporate bonds cries out for amending the Federal Reserve Act to prevent such actions.

They will pick and choose which companies’ bonds to buy by necessity. Is there a way to buy all companies’ bonds? I don’t think so. If not corrupt on its face, it is fertile grounds for corruption. And the moral hazard!

Nonetheless I don’t believe in abolishing the Fed. Fix it don’t kill it.

The biggest news story being consigned to the back pages while we focus our attentions on ourselves may well be the border tension between China and India. At Bloomberg James Stavridis remarks:

Just as it appeared that China and India had reached a détente after weeks of military escalation at their Himalayan border, Chinese troops have reportedly killed at least 20 Indian soldiers, and may have suffered their own casualties. The first deadly border clash since the mid-1970s shows just how fraught relations between the world’s two most populous countries are becoming. And while the geopolitical dangers are obvious and severe, the crisis also presents the U.S. with an opportunity to forge the strong relationship with India it has desired for more than two decades.

The current conflict began several weeks ago when the Chinese moved thousands of troops into the Galwan valley in Ladakh, along what is known as the Line of Actual Control. (I’ve always been struck by that oddly worded term — what is the alternative, the Line of Fake Control?)

The proximate cause was India’s decision to build a road leading to a forward air base. China responded by building up forces, bringing in heavy equipment (excavators, troop carriers and possibly artillery), and building a new tented barracks to support them. In doing so, the Chinese soldiers entered a part of the region that had long been regarded as Indian by both sides.

India responded to the incursion by reinforcing its troops along the 2,000-mile border. Complicating the situation, neighboring Nepal and Pakistan have been strengthening their relationships with China, and the Nepalese are disputing Indian claims along their shared border.

Other sources have reported that the Chinese suffered 35 casualties although this has not been confirmed by Chinese authorities who have attributed their reticence to a desire not to aggravate the situation.

When two nuclear powers come to blows, it is always troubling. It’s even more troubling should both parties decide that they can’t afford, for domestic political purposes, to back down. U. S.-Chinese relations have long been compared to Athens and Sparta—a “Thucydides trap”. I have long wondered if that’s not a more apt comparison for Chinese-Indian relations.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal economists David R. Henderson and Jonathan Lipow review four different studies of the lockdowns. Their conclusions will probably not be surprising to you:

Rather than validating draconian lockdown orders, the latest economic research on Covid-19 suggests that social-distancing efforts in general, and shelter-in-place measures in particular, have done more harm than good. That doesn’t mean that all such measures should be abandoned. “To socially distance or not to socially distance” is not the question. The question should be, what policies actually make sense?

I found two of the studies particularly interesting, this one because of its empirical approach:

In what might turn out to be the best paper on the economics of Covid-19, a team of economists from the University of California, Berkeley carefully evaluated empirical data on social distancing, shelter-in-place orders, and lives saved. To measure the impact of social distancing, they gathered data from cellphones on travel patterns, foot traffic in nonessential businesses, and personal interactions.

Their findings? Social-distancing measures reduced person-to-person contact by about 50%, while harsher shelter-in-place rules reduced contact by only an additional 5%. Then, using data on Covid-19 infection and mortality, they estimated that these measures saved 74,000 lives. Finally, after using demographic data to adjust the VSL—which is lower for older people, who have fewer years to live—the study found that the gross benefit of social distancing has been a mere $250 billion.

That’s “mere” by comparison with the $8 trillion that early estimates assess would be the costs of the deaths that would result from the early projections.

The other paper which I would like to commend to your attention is this one:

To address that, a team of economists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently published the results of a study that compared various alternative strategies for limiting the spread of Covid-19. They concluded that twice as many lives could be saved if governments focused limited resources on protecting the most vulnerable people rather than squandering them on those who seem to face almost no risk, such as children.

One of the great advantages of the more limited approach the study identifies is that the incentives are properly aligned. The people at the greatest risk also bear the greatest restrictions while those at relatively low risk also face relatively minor restrictions. I would think that compliance would be better using such an approach than in the one size fits New York all strategies that were actually implemented.

I found that a tremendous number of the observations in this post by Coleman Hughes in City Journal resonated with me. By all means read the whole thing but consider this remark:

Combine all three of these observations [ed. the three factors in the title above] and one arrives at a grim conclusion: as long as we have a non-zero rate of deadly shootings (a virtual certainty), and as long as some shootings are filmed and go viral (also a virtual certainty), then we may live in perpetual fear of urban unrest for the foreseeable future.

Sadly, I think he’s missing one factor: incentives. The incentives actually push in the direction of perpetual fear of urban unrest.

CNN reports that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has updated the statistics on who is actually contracting COVID-19:

The report found that the incidence rate is 403.6 cases per 100,000, with men and women getting sick at almost the same rate. But the percentages of males who were hospitalized (16%), admitted to the ICU (3%) and who died (6%) were higher than were those for females (12%, 2% and 5%, respectively).

The rate was highest among people 80 and older and lowest among children 9 and younger. But the relationship between age and incidence rate was not a straight line: It was higher among peoples age 40-49 years and 50-59 years than among those age 60-69 years and 70-79 years.

Among cases with known race and ethnicity, 33% were Hispanic, 22% were black, and 1.3% were American Indian or Alaska Native. The report notes that “these findings suggest that persons in these groups, who account for 18%, 13%, and 0.7% of the U.S. population, respectively, are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Translated that means that blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians are about twice as likely to contract COVID-19 as their numbers in the population would suggest. The explanations which would seem to me to suggest themselves for that would be disproportionate representation in “essential occupations”, poorer overall general health, behavior, or genetic predisposition. I suspect all of the above are factors.

I also found this interesting:

The rate was highest among people 80 and older and lowest among children 9 and younger. But the relationship between age and incidence rate was not a straight line: It was higher among peoples age 40-49 years and 50-59 years than among those age 60-69 years and 70-79 years.

I’m not sure how to interpret that. Greater representation in “essential occupations”?