"Heritage Americans"

Many posts have discussed patriotism and the role of religion in American life. 

The late John McCain said: "We are citizens of the world's greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil."

Karl Rove at WSJ:

Creating America wasn’t easy, and the fulfillment of our founding documents still demands much. But we make a grave mistake if we think this nation is only for what some call “heritage Americans,” whose forebears—specifically Anglo and Scots-Irish Protestants—fought in the Revolution or Civil War.

This notion that there is a select subset of “real” Americans is being pushed by, among others, Vice President JD Vance. He says that “America is not just an idea” but “a particular place, with a particular people.” Our country is more than an idea, but it began as one. Our people are particular, yet it makes no difference whether your forebear wintered at Valley Forge or fought at Gettysburg. What matters is living up to the Declaration’s promises.

It is ironic that Mr. Vance, a Catholic convert, would advocate “heritage Americans.” In the past, such movements routinely declared Catholics unacceptable members of our national family. One of the largest such groups was the American Protective Association, an anti-immigrant organization in the Gilded Age. It claimed 2.5 million adherents at its height. Its members swore an oath denouncing the pope and “the diabolical work of the Roman Catholic Church.” The APA was particularly strong in Mr. Vance’s home state of Ohio.

This notion of “heritage Americans” is at odds with the Declaration. America’s birth didn’t include a new aristocracy based on inherited valor.

Consider some Americans without Revolution or Civil War forebears: Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charlize Theron, Hakeem Olajuwon, former Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Salma Hayek, Henry Kissinger, Oracle’s Safra Catz, Bob Hope, Irving Berlin, Interactive Brokers’ founder Thomas Peterffy, Yo-Yo Ma, Alex Trebek and at least 40 winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Noncitizens on the Voter Rolls?

Many posts have discussed immigration. Illegal voting by noncitizens is rare.

 Last night, Trump claimed there were 278,000 noncitizens who had registered to vote.  At PolitiFact, Louis Jacobson provides reasons for skepticism.

Experts cited several reasons to be cautious about the headline number and how Trump and Mullin framed it.

For starters, Homeland Security’s letters to state officials used more cautious language — glossed over in public remarks by Trump and Mullin — that called it a "preliminary review" and said that there "may be as many as" the number of noncitizens they found on the voter rolls.

At his press conference, Mullin did not identify the individuals as potential noncitizens; he simply called them "noncitizens."

Another reason for caution is history.

In the past, when government officials have announced initial numbers of noncitizens on voter rolls, those figures have dropped dramatically after months of vetting by state and local officials and the media.

In 2012, then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott ordered state officials to clear the rolls of noncitizen voters ahead of the election.

Florida initially assembled a list of about 180,000 potential noncitizens. With more scrutiny, however, officials whittled the count to about 2,600 names, then 198, then 85. The initial list was rife with errors, even flagging a Brooklyn-born World War II veteran.

In Global Public Opinion, the US is Losing to China

Many.posts have dealt with international views of the United States.  They have taken a negative turn.

Jonathan Schulman, Laura Silver, Laura Clancy, and William Miner at Pew:

Global views of the United States worsened last year as President Donald Trump’s second term began, though most people still had a more positive opinion of the U.S. than China. This year, that is no longer the case.

Views of China have improved in recent years while opinions of the U.S. have worsened, to the point where China is now seen more positively than the U.S. in most of 36 countries surveyed.

Confidence in these countries’ respective leaders to do the right thing regarding world affairs has followed a similar pattern. In the latter half of Joe Biden’s presidency, confidence in him was higher than confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping across most countries surveyed, though Biden’s rating declined in many places from 2023 to 2024.

During the first two years of Trump’s second term, ratings of the U.S. president worsened significantly. While many people still lack confidence in Xi, positive views of him have become more widespread, and more overall now say they have confidence in Xi than in Trump.

One area where the U.S. still gets higher ratings than China has to do with personal freedoms: More say the U.S. government respects the personal freedoms of its people than say the same of the Chinese government. Still, the gap has been narrowing – driven by large drops in the shares saying the U.S.  government respects personal freedoms.

Confidence in Institutions 2026

Many posts have discussed confidence in institutions and partisan polarization.

Lydia Saad at Gallup:

Americans’ confidence in U.S. institutions remains historically low, as reflected in their average view of 14 institutions measured each year since 1993. Currently, 27% of Americans express “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in these core institutions, one percentage point above the record-low average in 2023.

When limited to the nine institutions measured about annually since 1979, average confidence is also 27%, reflecting the broader similarity of the two trends. Both lists include a mix of government and private sector institutions, making either version appropriate for use as a barometer of national confidence.

Americans’ average confidence in institutions has been trending downward since 1979 — not gradually, but rather driven by several steep drops. Confidence fell sharply in the early 1980s and again in the early 1990s, each time quickly followed by partial recoveries. An even sharper decline in the mid-2000s associated with the onset of the Great Recession proved more resistant, with confidence remaining at the 2007 low point and sinking even further over the next nine years. Confidence finally showed significant improvement in 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, due to heightened public trust in several institutions most affected by that crisis — particularly the medical system and public schools. However, average confidence quickly reverted and sunk further to 27% in 2022.

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Partisan differences in confidence were modest through much of the 1980s and early 1990s, with Republicans and Democrats expressing similar levels of confidence regardless of which party controlled the White House. The gap first widened during Bill Clinton's presidency in Democrats' favor before reversing under George W. Bush. It narrowed somewhat during Barack Obama's administration before swinging back toward Republicans during Donald Trump's first term and then toward Democrats during Joe Biden's presidency.

The gap has widened during Trump’s second term, with Republicans now 13 points more confident in U.S. institutions than Democrats are, similar to last year’s 11-point gap. This is due to Democrats, for the first time, showing less confidence in an incoming Republican president at the same time Republicans’ confidence has surged. The finding echoes Democrats’ historically negative outlook on national conditions during Trump’s second term that Gallup reported earlier this year.

 

Plea Bargaining

Many posts have discussed the American legal system.

Jacob Sullum at Reason:

Criminal defendants make similar calculations every day, which explains why about 95 percent of felony convictions in the United States are based on guilty pleas. In federal courts, the percentage is even higher: about 98 percent in fiscal year 2025, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

It is not hard to understand why criminal defendants almost never opt for trials. "At the federal level," the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers reports, "trial sentences are roughly three times higher than plea sentences for the same crime on average and sometimes as much as eight or ten times higher." The threat of a "trial penalty," which may include additional charges as well as longer sentences, has transformed a constitutional right into a legal fiction. While TV shows and movies still depict trials as the standard way criminal cases are handled, such showdowns have become vanishingly rare in the real world.

As the Supreme Court acknowledged in 2012, "criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials." You might think the Court would have something to say about that situation. But for more than half a century, it was unfazed by the replacement of trials with plea bargains, which it described as "highly desirable" and "an essential component of the administration of justice." That attitude gave prosecutors free rein to coerce guilty pleas by threatening defendants with severe consequences if they insisted on making the government prove its case.

Grievances

 Many posts have discussed the Founding.

Ryan Goodman, Jack Palmer-Coole, Siven Watt and Simone Lipkind at Just Security:

Americans commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence this year. As many in the United States and around the world reflect on the words in the solemn document, it will be readily apparent how the actions of the monarch that prompted the “grievances” of the settlers are echoed by the actions taken by the current presidential administration in its first year and a half. 

We believe there is an important history lesson in simply reading, and rereading, the Declaration and reflecting on the current times in the United States. In the passages below, the text of the Declaration is annotated with the words of federal judges in 52 court cases involving the current administration. We have identified 17 of the 27 grievances with a contemporary analog.

Over the past months, different studies published at Just Security have closely documented how the federal courts have adjudicated Americans’ attempts to vindicate their rights against administration policies. The gravity of the judges’ conclusions are sobering. Indeed, reading the Declaration and their words side-by-side shows how much the very fabric of the American social contract is being tested. Today’s federal judiciary, no less than the signatories of the Declaration 250 years ago, is speaking to the current generation about the foundational needs of a functional and representative American democracy, with meaningful checks and balances, and above all, a commitment to the rule of law.

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Grievance 16: For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
Grievance 17: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

Historical grievance: The Boston Port Act (1774) shut down Boston Harbor, the Restraining Acts (1775) barred New England from trading outside the British Empire, and the Prohibitory Act (1775) prohibited American trade altogether (Grievance 16). The Sugar Act (1764), Stamp Act (1765), and Townshend Acts (1767) imposed direct taxation on the colonies without their consent or representation in Parliament (Grievance 17).
Contemporary translation: Executive restriction of international trade (Grievance 16); and executive imposition of tariffs (considered a tax by the Supreme Court) without congressional authorization (Grievance 17).
Strength of contemporary analog: Strong.

“Based on two words separated by 16 others in Section 1702(a)(1)(B) of IEEPA — ‘regulate’ and ‘importation’ — the President asserts the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time. Those words cannot bear such weight.

Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution sets forth the powers of the Legislative Branch. The first Clause of that provision specifies that ‘The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.’ It is no accident that this power appears first. The power to tax was, Alexander Hamilton explained, ‘the most important of the authorities proposed to be conferred upon the Union.’ It is both a ‘power to destroy’ and a power ‘necessary to the existence and prosperity of a nation’ — ‘the one great power upon which the whole national fabric is based.‘

The power to impose tariffs is ‘very clear[ly] … a branch of the taxing power.’ ‘A tariff,’ after all, ‘is a tax levied on imported goods and services.’ And tariffs ‘raise[] revenue’ — the defining feature of a tax
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Recognizing the taxing power’s unique importance, and having just fought a revolution motivated in large part by ‘taxation without representation,’ the Framers gave Congress ‘alone … access to the pockets of the people.’ see also Declaration of Independence ¶19[sic]. … They did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch.”

“We are therefore skeptical that in IEEPA — and IEEPA alone — Congress hid a delegation of its birth-right power to tax within the quotidian power to ‘regulate.'”

— Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. (W. Bush appointee) — IEEPA as a basis for presidential tariff power (link to Supreme Court opinion)

Nonbelievers on Capitol Hill

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.

Mark Z. Barabak at LAT:

[California Democratic House Member Jared] Huffman is the rare American — one of only about 10% or so — who flatly state they do not believe in God, or any higher power for that matter. What makes him rarer still is his place in Congress. Huffman, who represents a sprawling slice of Northern California, reaching from the Bay Area to the Oregon border, is one of just four members (out of more than 500) who are openly agnostic or religiously unaffiliated.

He is, by far, the most outspoken.

Huffman, who publicly revealed his nonreligious status in 2017, helped form the Congressional Freethought Caucus, which consists of about three dozen members of various religious stripe, each dedicated to the proposition that church and state should be distinct. He’s written a book, due out next month, raising an alarm and summoning Americans to fight the rising tide of Christian nationalism roiling our divided land.

An overwhelming favorite to win an eighth congressional term in November, Huffman, a Democrat, calls himself a humanist and described it this way:

“To me, it means good without God. It means you don’t need the inducement or fear of an afterlife to have a moral framework and to know your place in the universe. You’re sort of at peace with the reality that, as far as we know, this is it. You get one time around.

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Ignoring the counsel of family, friends and political advisors who, to a person, warned against it, Huffman revealed his religious disbelief in a series of statements and interviews in November 2017. At the time, the only member of Congress to ever publicly come out as an atheist was Rep. Pete Stark, who announced his sentiments in 2007; though the Fremont Democrat was reelected twice, he was eventually defeated by a Democratic rival who turned his lack of faith against him.

That rival was Eric Swalwell; make of it what you will.

Huffman braced for political blowback. There was none, though he’s gotten death threats and plenty of admonishments he’s bound for Hell.

(Meantime, the congressional ranks of the religiously unaffiliated have grown to include Democratic Reps. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Emily Randall of Washington and Republican Rep. Abraham Hamadeh of Arizona.)

Gallup January 26, 2024:

Take these numbers with some skepticism.  In the poll, 70% said they would not vote for a convicted felon, but on Election Day, nearly half of voters did so.