In the abandoned City Hall subway station, Zorhan Mamdani, his hand on two Qurans held by his wife, Rama Duwaji, was administered the oath of office by New York State Attorney General Letitia James. He then signed the leatherbound book kept by the Clerk of the City of New York of the signatures of mayors. Love him or hate him, he is now the Mayor of the City of New York.

What will happen next will be an experiment. It’s hard not to find him charming and charismatic. He is a damn likeable fellow, which can’t be said for a great many people who hold office. But he has promoted a litany of changes that are unlikely to work as they depend on a fantasy understanding of economics and human nature. Continue reading →

It’s been a long decade since New Year’s Eve 2025, but we’ve made it this far. Don’t give up now.

Thank you all for reading and thank all of you who have contributed to the upkeep of SJ and donated to FRAXA. I sincerely appreciate it. And a very special thank you to my editor, Beth, without whom I would be lost. Happy New Year to everyone.

According to Dahlia Lithwick and Marc Joseph Stern, people have started calling immigration stops of random Hispanics by the derogatory term “Kavanaugh stops,” referring to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Noem v. Perdomo.

Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English. Cf. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S., at 884–885 (listing “[a]ny number of factors” that contribute to reasonable suspicion of illegal presence). To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a “relevant factor” when considered along with other salient factors.

The uproar over what can kindly be characterized as Kavanaugh’s slopping writing, that while ethnicity alone might not prove sufficient for reasonable suspicion, ethnicity plus some other benign factor, such as presence at Home Deport or working as a landscaper or in construction would suffice. Kav then doubled down by crafting a fantasy scenario of how such stops happened. Continue reading →

It was only a day after the board vote, headed by Richard Grenell, a dedicated Trump sycophant, that workers were busy adding the letters for “Donald J. Trump” above those on the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. Trump claimed he was surprised by the gesture, which conflicted with the law naming the center after JFK and beyond the power of the board to change. Trump didn’t care. And the magical appearance of the letters the next day strongly suggests it was neither a surprise nor a product of the board’s vote. Letters don’t appear by magic, yet there they were.

Then came the reactions. First, Chuck Redd canceled his jazz Christmas concert. Continue reading →

The argument against imposing cash bail for pre-trial release of people accused of crimes was straightforward: The crime and personal characteristics of the accused didn’t matter. If you had the cash, you went home. If you didn’t, you sat in jail. It was, to a great degree, unfair and ineffective. Even worse, it was extremely expensive, holding individuals charged with petty offenses in jail at great public expense for pretty much no reason.

After all, what was the grave fear that someone would drink in public again if cut loose? The key justification for bail was to compel defendants to return to court as required. The one thing the experiment proved was that for the most part, they did. Indeed, the biggest factor was the reminder text of the next court appearance. Few people wanted to be saddled with a bench warrant and most were willing to confront their accusation and take the punch, whether deserved or not. Continue reading →

The State of Illinois had a big win, and Trump a big loss, on the shadow docket in Trump v. Illinois, where a 6-3 Supreme Court refused to allow the federalized National Guard to be deployed. Woo hoo? Much as the outcome may have brought smiles and tears to their respective teams, the rationale behind the ruling hasn’t gotten much scrutiny outside of the legal academy. And it is, well, surprising, peculiar and, quite frankly, not the most useful reasoning. Ilya Somin explains.

The official rationale for Trump’s use of the National Guard here is the supposed need to counter anti-ICE protests in the Chicago area, some of which had allegedly included elements of violence. In order to deploy the Guard, Trump invoked 10 U.S.C. Section 12406, which can only be used to federalize state National Guard forces and employ them for law enforcement in one of the following situations:

1) the United States, or any of the Commonwealths or possessions, is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation; Continue reading →

Traditions are what binds us together. Merry Christmas to all.

To the dismay of many, I’ve long been a fan of Chesterton’s Fence, the concept that one ought to know why a fence was put up before tearing it down. Among the reasons why others disagree is that it means things people want done now have to wait until the analysis is completed. Whether that thing is the deportation of all immigrants, legal or not, or the eradication of language that might offend, it’s a stumbling block for people on both ends of the political spectrum.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

==H.L. Mencken

People know what they want and they want it now. Some would call this immediate gratification. Some would call this the death of deliberative thought. Some would even call this the tyranny of process. Continue reading →

In the New York Times, Ezra Klein writes that the Trump “vibe shift” is dead.

The Trump vibe shift was American culture and institutions moving toward President Trump and Trumpism with a force unexplained by his narrow electoral victory. It was Mark Zuckerberg donning a chain and saying that the corporate world was too hostile to “masculine energy.” It was corporate executives using Trump as an excuse to wrest control of their companies back from their workers. It was the belief that Trump’s 2024 coalition — which stretched from Stephen Miller and Laura Loomer to Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joe Rogan and Tulsi Gabbard — was the arrival of something new rather than, as many thought in 2016, the final heave of something old.

As 2025 closes, Trump’s polling sits in the low 40s, with some surveys showing him tumbling into the 30s. Democrats routed Republicans across the year’s elections, winning governorships in New Jersey and Virginia easily and overperforming in virtually every race they contested.

Continue reading →

Connect the dots. David Ellison’s Skydance bought Paramount, which owned the Columbia Broadcasting System, which produced, inter alia, the news magazine “60 Minutes,”* and now wants to add Warner Bros. Discovery to his stable, which had agreed to be acquired by Netflix, in a hostile bid. To accomplish this, Ellison sought to use his relationship with Trump to box out Netflix and gain the inside track to approval of a takeover.

Not long ago, Trump touted his friendship with Ellison and his expectation that CBS, in general, and 60 Minutes, in particular, would treat him with greater acquiescence than it had in the past. All that changed, however, when 60 Minutes aired a segment on Marjorie Taylor (or Traitor, as Trump prefers) Greene, who did not have nice things to say about her former idol. Trump was not pleased. Continue reading →