Stateless

 Many posts have discussed citizenship and immigration.

Maggie Quinlan at The Austin Chronicle:

Ten years ago, Jermaine Thomas was at the center of a case brought before the U.S. Supreme Court: Should a baby born to a U.S. citizen father deployed to a U.S. Army base in Germany have U.S. citizenship?

Last week, Thomas was escorted onto a plane with his wrists and ankles shackled, he says. He arrived in Jamaica, a country he’d never been to, a stateless man.

“I’m looking out the window on the plane,” Thomas told the Chronicle, “and I’m hoping the plane crashes and I die.”

Thomas has no citizenship, according to court documents. He is not a citizen of Germany (where he was born in 1986) or of the United States (where his father served in the military for nearly two decades) or of his father’s birth country of Jamaica (a place he’d never been).

Thomas doesn’t remember Germany. He says he thinks his first memory is in Washington state, but he moved around so much in his military family that it was hard to keep track.

Mandy Taheri at Newsweek:

Margaret Stock, a lawyer who specializes in immigration and military law, told Newsweek in a phone interview Saturday that citizenship status for babies born on overseas military bases can be "really complicated" and depend on a range of factors including marriage status, parental citizenship status and length of residency, paperwork, and more.

Children born on U.S. military bases overseas do not get automatic citizenship, but they typically acquire citizenship through their parents if eligibility requirements are met and proper paperwork is filed. Stock said typically they have to go to the State Department and file certain applications to obtain a "Consular Report of Birth Abroad."

"Thomas was admitted to the United States as a lawful permanent resident in July 1989. His visa form listed his nationality as Jamaican," the 2015 court filing noted. Thomas moved around the U.S. a bit from bases and ended up settling in Texas when he was older.

What ICE Can and Cannot Do

 Many posts have discussed immigration.

Russell Contreras at Axios:

ICE is tasked with enforcing the nation's immigration laws anywhere within the nation's interior (the Border Patrol's jurisdiction is 100 miles into the interior, from any land or maritime border).

• ICE agents can arrest anyone they suspect of being in the U.S. illegally. They can arrest U.S. citizens only if they see them "breaking laws."
• To conduct raids or operations targeting suspects, ICE agents only need an "administrative warrant" — a warrant signed by a supervisor, not a judge, Rebekah Wolf, director of the American Immigration Council's Immigration Justice Campaign, tells Axios.

ICE agents can conceal their identities and refuse any request to disclose their personal information.

• This has led to conflicts between people ICE agents have encountered, as well as allegations by Trump's administration that protesters have tried to dox agents involved in raids.
• Wolf said officers in other agencies are required to identify themselves and provide badge numbers to prevent impersonators. ICE has no such requirement, and there have been reports of ICE impersonators harassing people, creating more chaos and uncertainty in some communities.

ICE doesn't have to collect evidence for cases and has few parameters around its use of force.

• Because it's such a young agency, it hasn't faced many lawsuits and court challenges to its use-of-force policies, unlike other federal agencies such as the FBI, the Forest Service or the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
• That's resulted in few directives aimed at limiting ICE agents' tactics.
• ICE units can conduct pre-dawn raids, unannounced entries (with judicial or administrative warrants), and surveillance without many of the public accountability rules that serve as checks on local authorities.

ICE agents can't enter a private home unless they have a judicial warrant.

• They still must adhere to the Constitution regarding the search and seizure limits protecting U.S. citizens.
• Although ICE isn't supposed to place U.S. citizens in immigration detention, Cárdenas says its agents have been detaining U.S.-born Latinos and dismissing their proof of citizenship as fake before eventually letting them go.
• This has led to allegations of racial profiling.
• ICE did not immediately respond for comment on these episodes.

ICE also can't force a local law enforcement agency to join an operation, but police are obligated to keep order if protesters surround and ICE operation.

 

"There's a Flip Side to That Coin."

 A number of posts have discussed "Miles' Law," that is, where you stand depends on where you sit.  Attitudes toward procedures and institutions depend on whether you control them.  At Axios, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write:

Through silence or vocal support, House and Senate Republicans are backing an extraordinary set of new precedents for presidential power they may come to regret if and when Democrats seize those same powers.

Here are 10 new precedents, all set with minimal GOP dissent: 

1. Presidents can limit the classified information they share with lawmakers after bombing a foreign country without the approval of Congress.
2.  Presidents can usurp Congress's power to levy tariffs, provided they declare a national emergency.
3. Presidents can unilaterally freeze spending approved by Congress, and dismantle or fire the heads of independent agencies established by law.
4. Presidents can take control of a state's National Guard, even if the governor opposes it, and occupy the state for as long as said president wants.
5. Presidents can accept gifts from foreign nations, as large as a $200 million plane, even if it's unclear whether said president gets to keep the plane at the end of the term.
6. Presidents can actively profit from their time in office, including creating new currencies structured to allow foreign nationals to invest anonymously, benefiting said president.
7. Presidents can try to browbeat the Federal Reserve into cutting interest rates, including by floating replacements for the Fed chair before their term is up.
8. Presidents can direct the Justice Department to prosecute their political opponents and punish critics. These punishments can include stripping Secret Service protections, suing them and threatening imprisonment.
9. Presidents can punish media companies, law firms and universities that don't share their viewpoints or values.
10. Presidents can aggressively pardon supporters, including those who made large political donations as part of their bid for freedom. The strength of the case in said pardons is irrelevant.

Between the lines: Friday's Supreme Court ruling limiting nationwide injunctions — a decision widely celebrated by Republicans — underscores the risks of partisan precedent-setting.Conservatives sped to the courts to block many of President Biden's signature policies — and succeeded.

And since losing control of the Senate, Democrats have gone quiet on abolishing the filibuster. 

For decades, Democrats said that the term "states' rights" was coded racism -- until they used the term in defense of same-sex marriage.

Election Coalitions

From Pew Research: 

Lobbyists and the Senate Parliamentarian

Many posts have discussed lobbying.

Taylor Giorno at NOTUS:

The time during which a reconciliation bill is with the Senate parliamentarian would be a prime opportunity for lobbyists to get provisions tweaked or washed out.

Except the industry built on access has little influence with her: Elizabeth MacDonough is one of the rare players on Capitol Hill that refuses to meet with lobbyists.

“Cursing them. Yes. Lobbying them. No,” one Republican lobbyist texted NOTUS of the parliamentarian.

MacDonough is “effectively one of the most powerful women in the free world,” a Democratic lobbyist told NOTUS. Senate committees have been working for weeks with the parliamentarian on several facets of the Republican mega-bill, and they’ve already had to rework parts of the bill that the parliamentarian rejected.

While lobbyists can’t directly lobby the parliamentarian, several said they are trying to backchannel their demands through the process. Their targets include Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a tax on profits from third-party litigation funding and a 10-year moratorium on new state artificial intelligence regulations.

“A large part of the role we play is helping educate the staff and give them the ammunition to make the best arguments to their boss, for the parliamentarian,” Rich Gold, a Holland & Knight partner and leader of the firm’s public policy and regulation group, told NOTUS.

If a client is concerned about a provision in the bill, lobbyists could draft a Byrd memo to bring to senate staffers or provide them with “whatever supplementary information I think would be helpful in making the argument to knock a provision out of the bill,” the Democratic lobbyist said.

“A lobbyist like myself, we insert ourselves into the process by supplying evidence and arguments and detail to the minority, if they wish to use it, for including in their memo and their arguments to the parl,” they added.

...

“If you’re asking me, ‘Can you bamboozle Elizabeth?’ The answer is no,” said Jim Manley, who spent more than two decades working in the Senate, including a stint with the late Democratic leader, Harry Reid.

“There’s no lobbyists sitting there manipulating the process,” Manley added, although he noted lobbyists “serve increasingly as a research arm for staffers on Capitol Hill.”

 

Paywalls

Many posts have dealt with media problems.

Emily Tomasik and Michael Lipka at Pew:

Newspaper revenue has been in decline for decades, and most Americans now prefer to get news from digital devices. In this environment, many news organizations – and not just newspapers – put paywalls on their websites or apps, blocking access to articles or other content unless news consumers pay or subscribe.

The vast majority of Americans (83%) say they have not paid for news in the past year, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March. Another 17% say they have directly paid or given money to a news source by subscribing, donating or becoming a member during that time.

At the same time, 74% run into paywalls at least sometimes when they are looking for news online. This includes 38% who say they come across paywalled articles extremely often or often. 

Iran and War Powers

Many posts have discussed war powers and the US military.

Gary Schmitt at AEI:

As a constitutional matter, was President Trump required to have congressional authorization before he militarily struck Iran’s nuclear facilities? The answer is, “no.”

The Congress’s authority “to declare war”—found in Article I, sec. 8 of the Constitution—is not the same as “to make war.” As deliberations in the Constitutional Convention make clear, the change in the draft constitution’s text from “make” to “declare” was intended to give the president the authority to deal with obvious pending threats and situations in which the United States was already under attack. In short, the power to declare war was the authority to move the country formally from a state of peace to that of war, with all the domestic and international legal ramifications that follow from that declaration.

The key point is that Iran’s government and Iranian-directed proxies have been waging unconventional war on the United States for decades. ...

In 2020, after President Trump ordered the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general in charge of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, the White House and the Justice Department issued constitutional justifications for the action. As lawyers are wont to do, both had a bit of the kitchen-sink character, with differing legal justifications tossed in. The least credible was suggesting the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq was grounds for eliminating Soleimani. The most credible was that he had led the Iranian force and its proxies in planning and executing attacks on American military personnel and showed no signs of stopping. As a matter of self-defense, the president’s order to kill him was constitutionally justified.

But rather than stick with this straightforward justification, both the White House and the Justice Department slip in grounds for the president unilaterally employing the military offensively that are of a more recent (and problematic) vintage. The White House memorandum states the president not only has the authority to protect Americans from imminent attack but also “to protect important national interests.” In turn, the Department of Justice document argues that the president was not required to seek congressional approval because the action taken would not “bring the Nation into the kind of protected conflict that would rise to the level of war”—and hence, fell outside of the Congress’s prerogative of declaring war. Both arguments are found in the April 2011 opinion issued by the Office of Legal Counsel laying out the constitutional grounds for President Obama decision to order the American air campaign over Libya.