STATE OF THE UNION

The state of our divided union is . . .

Uncertain.

It was uncertain on Monday and will be uncertain tomorrow.

The Constitution requires that the President "from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union".  

For most of our history, this came in the form of a written report.  Though George Washington and John Adams delivered their state of the unions in speeches, Thomas Jefferson discontinued that practice. He thought a personal address was too "monarchical".

Back then, the prevailing view favored a strong separation of powers.  

In following the Constitution, although the president had to "from time to time give . . . Congress Information" on the state of the union and could even (as the ensuing clause permits) "recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient", the ambiguous nature of the requirement (by no means annual or even routine) and the obvious status of his ideas (recommendations, not orders) made it clear that only Congress could actually make law.

Put simply, everyone had to stay in their lane. 

All that changed in 1913, however, when Woodrow Wilson became president.

Wilson's vision of the presidency differed from that his predecessors. 

With few exceptions, policymaking prior to the Wilson administration started in Congress. Wilson, however, wanted to set the agenda or at the very least be an active proponent in the process of doing so.  According to his biographer John Cooper, Wilson "as a legislative presence . . . ranks up there with FDR and LBJ".  His reduced tariffs, Federal Reserve Act, and Clayton Antitrust Act were historic wins, and his first-in-a-century in person State of the Union was an intentional sign of what was to come. 

As Cooper puts it, the 28th president "wanted to break the precedent" started by the third and practiced by the next twenty-four.  Nonetheless, when it was reported that Wilson had decided to  jettison that precedent, the "disbelief . . . expressed in congressional circles" was strong. So strong, in fact, that The Post had to "assure[] its readers . . . such spectacles were 'not to become a habit.'"

Oh, well.

How has that worked out?

Donald Trump will deliver his sixth state of the union address tonight.

It will be all spectacle.

On the facts, the actual state of the union this year is not much different from what it was the year before and the year before that. 

The economy is both in relatively good shape and enormously challenging.  The top line inflation and employment numbers are about where they were at the end of the Biden presidency.  Inflation hovers in the neighborhood of 3%, unemployment in the neighborhood of slightly more than 4. 

The challenge these otherwise not so terrible numbers present is inequality. As the rich and super rich have taken larger and larger shares of the nation's productivity gains, the ability of everyone else to navigate rising costs at whatever level (i.e., affordability) and obtain and retain jobs that pay living wages has eroded. 

Lots of otherwise productive citizens are an illness or job loss short of bankruptcy. 

No one is saving.

In this environment, the nation's 47th president has nothing to report that has either reduced this burden or will ameliorate it going forward.  

His Big Beautiful Bill cut taxes at the (ever growing) top and services to the (continually struggling) bottom and  middle.  His "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) Secretary of Health and Human Services watched measles explode while disassembling the nation's public health infrastructure, defunding ground breaking research and leaving the World Health Organization (WHO). 

His Department of Justice prosecutes his enemies, albeit unsuccessfully and often comically. When DC's US Attorney Jeanine Pirro sought indictments of the six Democrats who publicly told servicemen and women they did not have to follow illegal orders, she literally obtained zero votes from the grand jurors.

Zero.

(Memo to Jeanine: If I had done this when I was an Assistant US Attorney, I would have been fired.  PS Love to your pardoned ex Al, glad he's staying out of trouble.) 

His Department of Homeland Security is lawless, trigger happy and the tragic source of a growing body count. 

His tariffs have just been declared unconstitutional.

On foreign policy, Ukraine and Russia are still at war.  There is no peace deal in sight because, with Trump in his pocket, Putin knows he does not need one. 

Gaza is off the front page but by no means peaceful. Hamas has not disarmed. 

Despite repeated claims that Iran's nuclear facilities were obliterated in the June 2025 Israeli and American bombings, a flotilla of American aircraft carriers and destroyers now stand by in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf, apparently ready to strike if Iran does not agree to limit the nuclear program Trump says we already destroyed.

Go figure.

This is not a presidency that takes on and solves big problems.

Generally speaking, it ignores big problems (e.g., inequality, China), takes a swing at small ones (e.g., Maduro, the border), and creates problems that heretofore did not exist (e.g., Canada, Greenland, the gold-winning American men's hockey team). 

It routinely violates the law. (A DOJ lawyer has just been held in contempt in Minnesota and DOJ admitted in federal court in New Jersey that it violated court orders fifty-two times.)

And it is corrupt.

I do not know what Donald Trump will say tonight.

I do know it will be a performance.

A very long and extravagant one with . . . 

Created facts, paraded supplicants, faux praise and bestowed honors.

From someone whose ultimate answer is always . . .

Himself.

It will be given to an amen chorus of enablers . . .

Punctuated by the stoic faces of a minority who resist.

In other words, it will be . . .

Spectacle.

The 28th president bequeathed but avoided that.

The 47th can never get enough of it.

No thank you, Mr. Wilson.

MINNESOTA

A friend from law school lives in Minneapolis.

Five days after the shooting of Renee Good, I wrote asking for her take on what was going on there.  Three days later she responded.  

Here is what she said:

"A friend wrote this and I thought it was an excellent explanation of how things are here. I modified it a bit:

'If you are not in Minnesota and it sounds exaggerated how bad it is here[,] [i]t's not exaggerated. The stories of US citizens, including native Americans, being detained: real.  Citizens who are children being detained because they don't have "papers": real. 

'Physical violence: real. Indiscriminate chemical spraying of peaceful protester: real. Smashing car windows, dragging P[eople] O[f] C[olor] out by their hair and pummeling, punching, kicking them without asking a question, including those screaming that they're a US citizen: real. 

'Large groups roaming with guns in stores, parking lots, at schools, public libraries and malls: real. Going door to door with weapons drawn in some neighborhoods: real. US citizens and undocumented immigrants afraid to leave their homes, go to work, or get groceries: real.  Schools closed: real.

'It is as bad as you are hearing, and worse. 

'Meanwhile, thousands of Minnesotans are protesting, providing rides, delivering groceries, donating what they can. 

'It isn't right. 

'This is not how genuine, purposeful law enforcement is done. 

'And it has nothing to do with fraud. 

'Our city is under siege.'"

On Saturday, as part of that continuing siege, Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse with the Veterans Administration. 

Pretti was standing with his two arms held aloft and a cell phone in his left hand.  He then went to help a woman in front of him who an agent had pepper sprayed.  With his back to the agents, he tried to lift her up. A scrum of agents tackled and pinned him face down. One removed and walked away with a gun he legally possessed and had not brandished.  

One or more of the agents then shot him.

Ten times.

In the aftermath, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti had "committed an act of domestic terrorism." Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said "the officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted" and "an agent fired defensive shots."  Apparently because Pretti was carrying a gun and bullets, albeit legally, she also said "This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement". 

Shortly after McLaughlin's statement, Trump's senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller, made the claim explicit. "A would be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement," he said, "and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists." A little more than a half hour after Miller spoke, Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino echoed McLaughlin and Miller. Pretti, he said, had intended to "massacre law enforcement".

None of these statements were true.

At the point Pretti was shot, he was unarmed, face down and restrained.

On the Sunday talk shows, Republicans blamed Minnesota's Governor and Minneapolis's Mayor for the shooting, claiming local officials were unwilling to cooperate with the federal government because Minneapolis calls itself a sanctuary city.  

No so-called sanctuary city, however, actually hides undocumented immigrants or interferes with federal law enforcement.  Nor does Minneapolis.  All of them arrest and prosecute undocumenteds for the crimes they commit, especially any that are violent. Crime is down appreciably throughout the nation as a whole and in Minneapolis in particular.  And regardless of any jurisdiction's self-appointed "sanctuary" status, no well-trained and law-abiding police department would have done to Pretti what the Border Patrol agents did to him on Saturday.

For a number of reasons, it is time to abolish ICE and start over.

First, in order to more than double its force, ICE recruited 12,000 new agents this year. Five thousand of them are now deployed and the rest will be over the next six months.  All of them, however, are poorly trained.  What was once a six-month training course has been reduced to 42 days. Four weeks of in-person on the ground training has been replaced with a 40-hour on-line course. In those 42 training days, only four hours are devoted to de-escalation, and these are spread over the entire period.

Many of the trainees have not been well-received by veterans. As one senior ICE official put it, "These are people who have no business setting foot into our office" and "would have been weeded out during a normal hiring process." And beyond poor training, the recruitment effort itself has trafficked in white supremacist rhetoric. 

Just after the Good killing, ICE put out a recruitment post with the all caps tag-line "WE'LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN. JOIN.ICE.GOV". The line is from a song with the same name. According to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, "it is a song only known in white nationalist circles" and includes lyrics supporting white replacement theory. As the Global Project concluded, its use by ICE "can't . . . be a mistake."

Second, Trump has changed ICE's mission. In the past, ICE engaged in targeted enforcement of the immigration laws and in both the Obama and Biden administrations was able to deport millions. Arrests were planned in advance and agents took suspects into custody safely and with the least amount of drama. No one was shot in the street. 

Today, however, masked agents roam the streets outfitted as if they are in war zones ready for armed conflict. In Minneapolis they outnumber the local cops by orders of magnitude. Unlike the locals, they do not wear body cameras; in fact, that is the reason protesters have been told to video the agents and is probably what Pretti was doing when he held his phone aloft on Saturday.

Third, there need to be investigations of the killing of both Good and Pretti.  In Good's case, the local coroner has already ruled her death a homicide and there is a good chance this will be the case with Pretti as well. The notion, however, that this administration can objectively conduct those investigation refutes itself. 

In Good's case, the administration has already announced the agent who killed her did no wrong, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, and in both Good's and Pretti's case, it has told the local investigative authority with expertise in police use-of-force cases -- the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension --  to stay away.  In Good's case, the federal authorities did not preserve the scene and thus have also effectively destroyed evidence. In Pretti's case, a federal court has ordered them not to destroy evidence but it is unclear what, if anything, was done to preserve the scene and gather evidence on Saturday.

Finally, the administration's rhetoric needs to be jettisoned. 

The notion that protesters like Good or Pretti are "domestic terrorists" is false and disgusting. Good was a poet; Pretti a nurse. The claim that Pretti intended to "massacre" agents is baseless. Leaving aside the hypocrisy of GOP gun lovers now finding fault with Pretti's (legal) possession of a firearm, he never brandished his weapon; in fact, a federal agent had removed it by the time he was shot. He also wasn't committing a crime while otherwise legally possessing the weapon.

On ABC's This Week yesterday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) suggested the agents' tactics were required given epithets being thrown at them by the crowd or Minnesota's politicians. That too is nonsense. Well-trained police do not react to name-calling. They are supposed to be above it. 

Trump, of course, is not. 

Nor are Miller, Noem or Bovino.  

Which is the real problem here.  

If you send masked enforcers into the streets to invade homes without judicial warrants, cheer as they frog-march citizens out of those homes in their underwear, lie that you are only detaining the "worst of the worst" when the vast majority have no criminal records or charges whatsoever, and then call a poet and a nurse begging to differ "domestic terrorists" after your masked enforcers have killed them,  the likelihood of professional policing vanishes . . .

And the analogy to Germany in the 1930s starts to make sense. 

That is where we are today.

Real.

Not exaggerated.

TATIANA, RENEE, ZOHRAN . . . AND DYLAN

On December 30, 35-year-old Tatiana Schlossberg passed away.  

The daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Ed Schlossberg, and the granddaughter of Jackie Onassis and President Kennedy, Schlossberg was a young but accomplished journalist who succumbed to a rare form of leukemia.

A month before her passing, on the anniversary of her grandfather's assassination, Schlossberg disclosed her illness and impending death in a piece in The New Yorker entitled "A Battle With My Blood".

Anyone who read it was in tears by the end.

Her leukemia was discovered over a year ago immediately after she gave birth to her second child.

Literally.

Three hours after giving birth, she was told she had leukemia and moved to another floor in the hospital as her parents, husband and son all said goodbye.  

What followed was a year and a half of chemotherapy; two stem cell transplants that did not work; a clinical trial of Car-T-cell therapy; months-long hospitalizations at Columbia-Presbyterian and then Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK); constant outpatient treatments at MSK; and too much time to think.

But think she did.

About the daughter and son who will not (or will hardly) remember her.

About the"handsome genius [she] managed to find", her  "perfect" husband "who did everything for [her] he possibly could" and with whom she won't "get to keep living this wonderful life".

About her mom, the Kennedy for whom tragedy never skips a generation, the mother she always tried to "protect" but who now must cope with a "new tragedy" she could do "nothing  . . . to stop".

And, finally, about her cousin . . .

The one who "during the Car-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, . . . was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services".

The one, she wrote, who was "an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family"  and who, "in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed . . . despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government".

The one who "cut nearly half a billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institute of Health, the world's largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings."

"Hundreds of N.I.H. grants and clinical trials," she wrote, "were cancelled, affecting thousands of patients. I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission."

"Early in my illness," she continued, "when I had [a] postpartum hemorrhage, I was given a dose of misoprostol to help stop the bleeding. The drug is part of medication abortion, which at Bobby's urging, is currently 'under review' by the Food and Drug Administration."

"I freeze," she concluded, " when I think about what would have happened if it had not been immediately available to me and to millions of other women who need it to save their lives or to get the care they deserve."

In the end, it was a tale of two cousins.

The older forgot Bob Dylan's best advice.

The younger -- in her life and certainly in her last act -- actually lived it.

    May God bless and keep you always

    May your wishes all come true

    May you always do for others

    And let others do for you

    May you build a ladder to the stars

    And climb on every rung

    May you stay forever young

On Wednesday morning in Minneapolis, a federal ICE agent killed  37-year-old Renee Good.

She was a single mom of three, one of whom -- her six year old son -- is now an orphan.

She was driving her car away from the agent when he shot her through the windshield of her car.

She was not trying to run the agent over with her car, which was moving away from him.

After the shooting, her car careened to the left side of the street and was stopped as it struck the back of a parked vehicle.

A bystander asked another federal agent if he could go help her.

That officer said no.

The bystander told the agent he was a physician.

The officer said "I don't care."

A couple of hours after the shooting, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said the victim was "wealponiz[ing] her vehicle" and "attempting to run a law enforcement officer over."

This assertion was refuted by the video evidence of the entire encounter.

That afternoon, President Trump said the victim "behaved horribly. And then she ran [the federal agent] over.  She didn't try to run him over. She ran him over." 

This assertion was also refuted by the video evidence.

Trump's so-called "border czar”, Tom Homan, declined to weigh in.  Instead, he said "Let the investigation play out and hold people accountable based on the investigation.

On Thursday, however, Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) Superintendent Drew Evans said BCA was "reluctantly" withdrawing from that investigation because the federal government  "had reversed course" and would not give BCA "access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews."  Instead, the investigation will now be done by the FBI, which is headed by Trump-loyalist Kash Patel.

Also on Thursday, Vice President Vance called Good's shooting "a tragedy of her own making."

That too was refuted by the video evidence.

Good was apparently part of a group of neighbors watching masked ICE agents and whistling their presence as a warning to those the masked agents might seize. If she violated any law, and this is unclear, she did so either in diagonally stopping her car so that those behind her had to go left to get around her or in refusing to exit her car when a federal agent ordered her to "Get out of the fucking car".  

Though unmarked ICE agents were behind her, it is not clear she was trying to impede them. At  least one report had her car so configured on account of the snow and ice in the road. Others reported she was actually asking those behind to go around her. Though she did not exit her car, she did attempt to drive away from the agents and was not running anyone over when she was shot.

Trump's enablers -- Noem and Vance -- immediately trotted out the false story that she was attacking the agents and was a "domestic terrorist" radicalized by "the left". 

In a presidency that regularly substitutes false sound bites for fact-based analysis, this is almost certainly false. 

According to Associated Press, Good described herself as a "poet and writer and wife and mom" and  her ex-husband said "she was no activist and . . . had never known her to participate in a protest of any kind. He described her as a devoted Christian who took part in youth mission trips to Northern Ireland when she was younger."

Whether she was monitoring and/or warning of ICE's presence (which appears to be the case); obstructing the agents (much less likely given her effort in asking those behind to go around her); or refusing to follow ICE's profanity-laced demand that she "Get out of the fucking car" (both of which -- her refusal and ICE's cursing -- are true), the shooting was plainly illegal.  

No federal agents were in danger nor was anyone else. 

And under the law, cops don't get to shoot in that situation.

At Old Dominion University, where she completed  her degree while raising children, this poet, writer, wife and mom won the American Academy of American Poets prize.

Her felt-need to oppose ICE-masked tyranny was sincere.

The Dylan in her was real. 

    May you grow up to be righteous

    May you grow up to be true

    May you always know the truth 

    And the lights surrounding you

    May you always be courageous

    Stand upright and be strong

    May you stay forever young

Yesterday, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and NY Governor Kathy Hochul met to discuss Mamdani's plans to bring universal child care to NYC.  

Doing so would almost certainly require some kind of tax increase, and because New York City does not have the independent power to tax, any such increase would have to be approved by the state. 

In the past, Hochul has called Mamdani's proposed tax increases dead on arrival, and inasmuch as this (for her) is an election year, the betting was that Zohran's "socialism" would thus die in Albany.

Yesterday, however, the Governor appeared to be saying "Not so fast."

With Mamdani at her side, she announced plans to ask the state legislature to spend $4.5 billion on child care in the upcoming fiscal year.  Some of the money would come from existing funds, some from tax increases; the relative shares were not reported and apparently are not set. 

According to The New York Times, the proposal would allow the state "to vastly expand free and low cost child care throughout the state over the next several years, and put New York City on track to become the first city in the United States to provide free universal child care." 

Rising economic inequality has made affordability a front and center issue for the middle class in today's America, and for his part, Mamdani has rejected the notion that "big government" has no role in curing it.  

In his Inaugural Address on New Years Day, he was adamant: "To those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me when I say this -- no longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers' lives."

The question, of course, is how to do this.

As a matter of American history, it has been done in the past in only two ways.  

The first was in the form of the American west.  

So long as farming was America's principal venture, and the frontier remained open, (most) anyone with two feet could improve their lot by walking west, seizing available open land and getting to work.  

Millions accepted that invitation.

In 1862,  Abe Lincoln even formalized it.

Signing the Homestead Act, his administration granted 160 acres of federal land to anyone willing to farm it.

The second came in the form of FDR's New Deal

Once industrialism arrived and the frontier closed, Lincoln's remedy no longer worked.  

America's first Gilded Age produced enormous wealth gaps, regular recessions and, ultimately, two Depressions, the first from 1873 to 1896 and the second in 1929. 

Roosevelt, who was elected in 1932, and his successor Truman, who became president in 1945, created and then continued the New Deal to combat inequality and end depressions.

They did so with the big government.

First, they radically reduced inequality with a series of laws that effectively redistributed national income from the top to the middle and the bottom. Social Security provided old age insurance; the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) empowered unions to negotiate wage and benefit increases for their members; an alphabet soup of agencies (like the NRA and the CCC) provided emergency employment; and the later  GI Bill paid veterans to get college degrees (and thus higher paying jobs) in the post-World War II world.

Second, they regulated the financial markets to end the schemes that had either caused or facilitated depressions. The Securities Exchange Act made illegal the financial frauds that had actually led to the 1929 Depression. The Banking Act created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that insured customer deposits and stopped bank runs. The Glass-Steagall Act separated commercial and investment banking. This made it illegal for securities firms and investment banks to take deposits. It also made it illegal for Federal Reserve member banks to deal in non-government securities, invest in non-investment grade securities for themselves, underwrite or distribute non-government securities or affiliate with those doing so. Collectively, these new laws protected depositors, curtailed the reach of speculators and ended outright fraud.

In his Inaugural Address, Mayor Mamdani remembered that past.

"Here," he said, "where the the language of the New Deal was born, we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers who call it home." In his version of a (limited) 21st century New Deal for NYC, the cost of child care does not stop "young adults from starting a family", a rent freeze ends "the dread of the latest rent hike", and the buses (at a savings of  $6 per round trip) will be "fast and free". 

"For too long," he argued, "we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public." 

For him, those days need to be over.

And . . .

Unless the free marketeers and ostensible centrists who decry him as a socialist can come up with some better ideas -- for the last thirty years they haven't -- maybe those days need to be over for the rest of us too.

In discussing her apparent embrace of the new Mayor, Governor Hochul said "I enjoy him immensely." 

As The Times put it in capturing the moment, she was "singling out the mayor's positivity. She noted that her own children are close to the mayor's age, and that she enjoys working with younger people, because, she said, 'it's just more fun.'"

Score it as one for Mamdani . . .

And one more for Dylan.

    May your hands always be busy

    May your feet always be swift

    May you have a strong foundation

    When the winds of changes shift

    May your heart always be joyful

    May your song always be sung

    May you stay forever young