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Dara Khosrowshahi on Robotaxi ‘Mission Control’ & Uber’s Next Billion-Dollar Business
57:43
Semafor Podcasts • 1 week ago

Dara Khosrowshahi on Robotaxi ‘Mission Control’ & Uber’s Next Billion-Dollar Business

Pete Hegseth’s Crazed, Angry Tirades on Iran Give Dems a Big Opening
New Republic • 1 week ago

Pete Hegseth’s Crazed, Angry Tirades on Iran Give Dems a Big Opening

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth knows that playing a decisive tough guy on television is the way to keep Donald Trump happy, so he did just that while addressing reporters Monday about the U.S. bombing of Iran. He hailed Trump’s supposed decisiveness. He strutted and preened about the bombing death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. He angrily ridiculed his questioners. He barked out hard-sounding phrases like “War is hell.”But what came out of Hegseth’s mouth was substantively about as clear as Trump’s Truth Social word vomit. He wouldn’t say whether American troops will face combat. He offered confusing depictions of our objectives, seemingly suggesting they’re about depriving Iran of “offensive capabilities” that remain hazily defined. He declared that “this is not a so-called regime-change war” while hailing Trump’s success thus far at ... regime change. Which echoes Trump himself: In one weekend interview, Trump offered at least two competing versions of the changed Iranian regime he hopes to see.All this gives Democrats an opening to take on this debate more forcefully. While some Democrats have gotten this right, more of them need to say forthrightly that this war is patently illegal and that Trump’s chief stated rationale for it—that Iran posed “imminent threats” to the United States—is utter nonsense.“Democrats need to strongly make the point that there was no imminent threat and that this war is a violation of the Constitution—and illegal,” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told me. “Absent congressional approval, this is an illegal war.”As Smith noted, there’s an important distinction between saying Iran poses a serious problem to the region and the world and claiming it was so on the verge of attacking the United States that it required urgent defensive action. “It is made up to say that they were going to attack us—that they posed an imminent threat,” Smith said.Some Democrats are stopping short of speaking this forcefully. Senate leader Chuck Schumer, for instance, has leaned hard on the suggestion that Trump officials merely have to be more forthcoming. They must “be straight with the American people about these strikes and what comes next,” Schumer said, demanding that officials divulge “critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat.” Other Democrats have used similar language.But this posture implies that there’s potentially a legitimate case to be made that Iran actually does pose a threat urgent enough to justify our attack—and that the administration merely hasn’t been sufficiently transparent about that justification. There is no reason whatsoever to grant even that much.The evidence is strong that Trump’s central claims about Iran are false, not merely that they haven’t been sufficiently explained to lawmakers. As The New York Times reports painstakingly, American officials with access to relevant intelligence say he’s “exaggerated the immediacy” of the threat Iran poses. Trump has claimed that Iran is on track to develop missiles that can hit the United States, but as the Times reports, that’s contradicted by the administration’s own assessments. Top Trump advisers have said Iran is “a week” away from having the materials for a nuke, but the Times notes that American officials say that’s not so.“Democrats don’t need the Trump administration to explain their reasoning,” Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, told me. “This isn’t a mystery to be solved. We already know all their reasons for war are bullshit. We already know everything we need to know to conclude: Iran does not pose an imminent threat to the United States.”Similarly, the evidence is also strong that Trump simply doesn’t care about accomplishing precise objectives—if he’s even articulated them at all. That’s the problem. It isn’t that officials haven’t been clear or forthcoming enough about those objectives.All this is overwhelmingly clear. Trump named at least two competing objectives in that aforementioned weekend interview. He also insisted protracted conflict “won’t be difficult,” but that notion has been privately undermined by his own top general, again illustrating his lack of serious deliberation. Trump has piously said he hopes the Iranian people take control of the country after the regime is (or isn’t?) deposed. Yet as Anne Applebaum shows, there is no sign anywhere of any plan to make this happen.Hegseth’s barking at reporters leaves little doubt about the lack of meaningfully clear objectives here. His suggestion that Iran’s “offensive capabilities” are unacceptable is absurdly vague. It seems designed to function as a bar that Trump can arbitrarily say Iran has failed to clear, thus justifying more aggression, dictated only by Trump’s passing whims.“By Hegseth’s standard, any country having any advanced defensive weaponry of any kind can be labeled an imminent threat,” Duss says. “Trump seems to be workshopping different objectives with reporters on the phone. Democrats don’t need a briefing to understand what’s going on.”Yes, virtually all Democrats will likely vote for a war powers resolution—set for consideration in both chambers this week—that would constrain Trump’s ability to wage war without congressional authorization. Trump will veto this if it passes, but it’s an important exercise. Though previous presidents like Barack Obama abused warmaking authorities—which some liberals criticized, including yours truly—Trump is taking this further. He’s refusing to seek authorization for the killings of supposed drug-running civilians in the Caribbean, as well as for the biggest military operation in the Mideast in decades. Democrats should relentlessly point this out.But that can’t be the end of the story. This can’t simply be about Trump’s procedural failures. It also has to be linked to a larger argument that he’s functioning as a maliciously unhinged, out-of-control despot, and thus is wrecking our system of self-rule at a foundational level. As David French argues, one can view Iran as a serious long-term problem while insisting that Trump operate within his constitutional powers, and that fundamental principles are at stake:Perhaps the most important aspect of this constitutional structure is that it creates a presumption of peace. Our nation cannot go to war until its leaders persuade a majority of Congress that war is in our national interest.It’s precisely because Trump has no meaningfully articulated objectives for this war—and because American officials privately admit his Iran claims are false—that he’s launching it illegally without congressional authorization. The same Republicans who insist Trump needn’t seek congressional approval are doing so precisely because this liberates them from having to vote on the underlying proposition that this war is in our country’s interests.Hegseth’s absurdities illustrate how big an opening Democrats really have here. It’s not enough to demand that officials be forthcoming and transparent. Democrats should argue that Trump has launched what is essentially a vanity war and nothing more—and that, as Smith put it to me, he’s “ruling like a king instead of the elected president of a constitutional republic.”

AI Is Going to Revolutionize Advertising in the Worst Imaginable Way
New Republic • 1 week ago

AI Is Going to Revolutionize Advertising in the Worst Imaginable Way

The inevitable has arrived. Ads have begun popping up on ChatGPT—even, reportedly, in initial responses to user queries, rather than after extended conversations—and some fans aren’t pleased. “RIP ChatGPT,” wrote one Reddit commenter. “It was fun while it lasted! 💔” The ads, which are being rolled out to free users and those who pay for the lowest-tier subscription ($8 per month), are rather familiar and banal in their presentation: a “sponsored” box pitching a product that ChatGPT’s algorithm thinks is relevant to the conversation, much as you’re used to seeing on social media platforms like Facebook and X.An enduring feature of advertising is that it is “geographically imperialistic”: The best place to put an ad is where one doesn’t exist already. But the best type of ad to place is one that is unrecognizable as an ad. These truths should be kept in mind amid the rollout of ads on ChatGPT. Rest assured, this is just the beginning of how OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, will monetize its users. The company will undoubtedly graduate to more sophisticated ads, at which point the only question will be whether users even realize when they’re being monetized. Artificial intelligence is an unfathomably expensive product to give away for free, yet that’s been OpenAI’s main strategy to achieve adoption. So it’s little wonder that the company is in dire financial straits, facing tens of billions of dollars in projected annual losses. How else to close that deficit save for digital billboards? The geographic expanse for commercial colonization—a reported 800 million weekly active users—was simply too vast for OpenAI to forgo. So ChatGPT’s users are right to bummed. Commercials clutter both the aesthetic and impetus of the online space. And the annoyance isn’t merely a pop-up to be blocked or a pre-roll to be skipped: Ads can’t help but corrupt the purpose of the content that they surround. But even OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, has admitted that ad monetization is a real downer. “I think that ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me,” Altman said in 2024. “When I think of GPT writing me a response, if I had to go figure out, Exactly how much was who paying here to influence what I’m being shown? I don’t think I would like that.” But he also, notably, did not rule out ads on ChatGPT in the future.As the old adage goes: If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product. For two centuries, the mass and social media industries depended on this bargain. Nascent newspapers of the “penny press” era could be sold below cost because advertisers subsidized the access to audiences. Likewise, today, no one pays for Google search or Instagram or TikTok. AI represents a qualitatively different revelation. It renders all the knowledge of the internet conversationally interactive. It outsources our critical thinking skills and regresses our decision-making to the mean. It’s been designed to seem human to secure our trust. It seduces our affections and indulges our delusions, often sycophantically so. It subs in for our therapists and friends alike and helps us raise our children.The consumer insights from that level of intellectual, emotional, and social intimacy exceed an advertiser’s wildest dreams. Fortuitously so: AI arrives at a confusing, anxious time on Madison Avenue. Google’s AI summaries are disintegrating the web as we know it, hastening a “zero-click” future, in which users have no need to avail themselves of the links below on the page. Hence, a shift from search engine optimization to “answer” or “generative” engine optimization: strategizing how brands and products appear, organically, in large language model inputs and outputs.ChatGPT makes that roundabout sell a much straighter line—for a price. And it is reportedly a steep one—with ad rates nearing those of NFL games. Large language models might be a black box—in terms of why they do what they do—but that ad pricing suggests OpenAI knows exactly what a gold mine of personal data it is excavating daily.That’s why we ought to treat OpenAI’s claims about its advertising with the same skepticism applied to the advertising itself. Sure, the company says it will insulate the ads as ostensibly independent from content. “Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what’s most helpful to you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled,” the company insists. “We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.” But that leaves a lot of marketing money on the table—and from the outside, it sure looks like OpenAI needs that money to stay afloat. Hence, the Super Bowl ad diss from OpenAI competitor Anthropic, the maker of Claude, whose commercial mocked the sponsored content that will inevitably intrude and inundate ChatGPT feeds. But mount that high horse at your peril, Anthropic. Unless there’s a clever way to pay for all those server farms and microchips, all other AI platforms will probably have to follow suit. (And if the Pentagon cuts ties with Anthropic, as it’s threatening to do, that day may come even sooner.) The history of social media foretells it: Platforms and their creators, once unspoiled by corporate backers, now pitch us relentlessly—and in increasingly devious ways. “Native” ads on Instagram and TikTok often look indistinguishable within the content, forming the basis of the $30 billion influencer industry. But the notion of placing an energy drink in the background of an influencer’s video will soon seem laughably conspicuous. By that point, the problem for ChatGPT users will no longer be that they notice and get annoyed with ads. The problem—and the real money to be made by OpenAI—will be when they don’t.

The Editor Who Helped Build a Golden Age of American Letters
New Republic • 1 week ago

The Editor Who Helped Build a Golden Age of American Letters

According to American publishing mythology, there was a time when giants bestrode Midtown Manhattan. They came from Chicago, from Oregon, from Pennsylvania, from nearby New Jersey, or from the outer reaches of the city itself: Coney Island, the Bronx. Bellow, Kesey, Updike, Roth, Heller, Doctorow. Gardner and Barth, Pynchon and Coover, Mailer and Malamud. They did battle with editors Gottlieb, Giroux, Straus, Epstein, Lish, Cowley. From the rubble of their contests rose great and enduring monuments that won plaudits from Manhattan to Stockholm. But nothing lasts forever. The bean counters and synergists came to the towers; and the age of heroes passed, and the age of widgets began. Or so the story goes. And in many ways, it’s true: The U.S. publishing industry flourished in the 40 or so years following World War II, both economically and creatively. Serious writers were also blockbuster sellers, and even their agents became celebrities. But beginning in the mid-1960s, the major trade houses that published these writers were acquired by larger, diversified companies—at first, industrial conglomerates like Gulf+Western, and later, media corporations like Disney, News Corp, and Paramount. Books, literary ones especially, are only a minor and unimportant portion of these companies’ “content,” to use a term this era has dumped on us, and they don’t even make much money.This isn’t really the story that Gerald Howard tells in his The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, a biography of the memoirist, critic, editor, teacher, and general “middleman of letters” who orbited the nucleus of American writing for almost 60 years. But at the same time, it is. Despite the fact that less than a third of The Insider concerns that golden age, the “triumph of American literature” that Howard exalts in his book’s subtitle is just that: the period when the publishing industry’s fortunes and the prestige and international reputation of American writing thrived in tandem. The story of Cowley’s career is a story not just of the convergence of generational literary talent but of a country refining the image it would present to the rest of the world.The story of Cowley’s career is a story not just of the convergence of generational literary talent but of a country refining the image it would present to the rest of the world.Cowley usually isn’t counted among the colossi of the Great American Novel and its broad-shouldered editors. But Howard has made a canny choice in proposing Cowley as the key figure in legitimizing American writing, one that complicates this golden-age legend. For more than almost anyone except the novelists themselves, Cowley was the bridge between the Lost Generation writers of the 1920s and their successors in the 1950s and 1960s. And without those Lost Generation modernists’ ability to sweep away European prejudices about the puerility of American writing, our golden-age giants never would have trodden the earth. Born in 1898, the aspiring poet Cowley grew up primarily in Pittsburgh and went to Harvard as a scholarship boy, where he had his first encounters with past and future literary celebrities: John Dos Passos, Amy Lowell, and Robert Hillyer, who would later figure in the cultural wars over Ezra Pound and modernism. In 1917, he joined the American Field Service as a camion and ambulance driver on the Western Front of World War I and, after what he called a “long furlough,” returned to France in 1921, this time armed with an AFS scholarship to pursue graduate study at the University of Montpellier. He didn’t stick around the South of France for long. By the following year (1922, the annus mirabilis of modernism), he was already enough of a Lost Generation scenester that Ernest Hemingway referred to him as “the American poet with … a stupid look on his potato face” and Robert McAlmon called him “the young intellectual fairly slow on the uptake.” But by the time he returned to the U.S. in 1923, he had met and won over almost everyone in Paris who mattered. Out of this experience came one of the essential memoirs of the period, 1934’s Exile’s Return. Despite its focus on Harry Crosby and Cowley’s close friend Hart Crane, rather than on better-known writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Hemingway, Exile’s Return made Cowley into one of the most influential portraitists of a period that was already passing into gauzy memory. For in the intervening years, Cowley had become one of the most visible critics in American literary life, writing with confidence and authority about these figures and contemporary authors (primarily in this magazine, where he served as literary editor throughout the 1930s). And, in keeping with a general leftward lurch in the American literary scene, Cowley began raising the Red flag. He had, Howard says in an apt image, transformed himself into “a literary action figure, a man in ceaseless motion riding a wave of cultural and political revolution.” Although Cowley’s communism came from a genuine commitment to social activism, he did himself no favors by reflexively toeing the party line. Through almost every one of the crises and exposures that peeled more leftists away from the party—from the show trials to the Ukrainian famine to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact—Cowley sided with Stalin, even if he always remained merely a fellow-traveler. Cowley’s belated noster culpa—issued in 1940 in, and on behalf of, The New Republic—came too late. He was demoted at TNR and lost his job in the wartime Office of Facts and Figures. For decades, reviewers of his books would use their column inches to slash at his inexcusable political judgment. Howard duly rehashes these spats between the Partisan Review left and the dwindling rump of Soviet apologists perhaps too thoroughly, given that the real story here is the building of American literary reputations. Shut out of the plum positions because of his political sins, Cowley became a triple-threat hired gun: reporting, reviewing, editing. And it’s here, Howard argues, that Cowley’s skill set brought about “the triumph of American literature.” Booming after the war, in part because the public-private Armed Forces Editions had turned millions of soldiers into avid readers, the publishing industry rolled out innovations like the trade paperback and, at Viking, the “Portable Library” series, one-volume pocket anthologies of a major writer’s major works. Cowley assembled the Portable Hemingway in 1944, contributing an introduction that, for the first time, laid out the “subterranean, symbolic, and even mythic” dimension of Hemingway’s work. These weren’t just fishing stories!Five years later, working closely with the author, Cowley edited The Portable Faulkner, a brilliant selection demonstrating how William Faulkner, whose books were almost all out of print at that time, had created a cunning little universe in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, in which the sins of the South and of the nation as a whole were laid bare. And while he didn’t edit the Portable Fitzgerald (that job went to Dorothy Parker), in 1951 Cowley put together Scribner’s Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which brought into relief all the depth beneath the champagne frivolity.Cowley combined his cultural credibility, his editorial skills, and the particular affordances of the postwar publishing industry to help turn three writers—none of whom were considered particularly important, and only one of whom was widely read—into Serious Authors, at the very time when the U.S. was engaging in a broad cultural-diplomatic campaign to convince skeptical European intellectuals that “American culture” wasn’t an oxymoron. These three monuments, or “interventions in the great game of literary reputation and advancement,” as Howard calls them, packaged a prehistory that made the golden age possible.In his next act, Cowley chaperoned two counterculturists into the club. In a delicate yearslong dance, in 1957 Cowley persuaded Viking to take a chance on the seemingly formless and definitely obscene travelogue On the Road, by a vagabond named Jack Kerouac, which Howard counts as Cowley’s most significant achievement. Five years later, he plucked one of his students in the new MFA program at Stanford out of obscurity, and made Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest an “immediate hit” and Kesey “a genuine literary star.” Kerouac and Kesey “were as influential in defining the culture of the sixties as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were in the twenties,” Howard concludes. And, I would add, Cowley’s work as a “literary bureaucrat” had an immeasurable effect on the reputations of all four, with Faulkner thrown in as a chaser. The generation that followed Cowley would preside over an extraordinary flowering of American literature, often invigorated by talented and entrepreneurial figures from the margins, which a number of recent studies have joined Howard in documenting. Shut out of publishing until the early twentieth century, Jewish bookmen like Alfred A. Knopf, Ben Huebsch, and Horace Liveright had to start their own firms and take chances on untested new writers. The bets, both financial and literary, paid off, and in The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature, Josh Lambert details how next-generation Jewish editors like Jason Epstein and Robert Gottlieb became such heavyweights in postwar book culture that critic Richard Kostelanetz, in 1974, credited them with having “unprecedented power to determine what writing might be taken seriously and what would be neglected or wiped out.”Earlier accounts of this era have tended to overlook the work of women writers and editors. Fortunately, this is changing. In The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, Amy Reading details White’s editing of John Cheever, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, and other giants of the golden age. But its greater interest is in the women she encouraged, such as Janet Flanner and Kay Boyle, whom she helped reach the kind of broad audience that trade publishing denied them. White even rescued Elizabeth Bishop from the slush pile: Her predecessor as poetry editor, Charles Pearce, had rejected 13 consecutive poems, and upon taking up her new position in 1945, a horrified White had to “engag[e] in relationship repair” to persuade Bishop to send in more work. Knopf’s Judith Jones is best known for bringing Julia Child and Anne Frank to the world, but in The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, Sara Franklin shows that Jones had a sharp ear for poetry as well, cultivating Sharon Olds and snapping up Sylvia Plath’s first collection, The Colossus—although she inexplicably turned down The Bell Jar, one of the most reliable sellers of postwar American literature. No editor can get everything right.Even though Toni Morrison is best known as a Nobel-winning novelist, she was also one of the “hidden figures” of publishing, as the Howard University scholar Dana A. Williams makes clear in her Toni at Random. Morrison’s work from 1971 to 1983 as a fiction editor at Random House gave Black writers such as Lucille Clifton, Toni Cade Bambara, and Leon Forrest access to the most prestigious imprints. Deeply influenced by the Black Arts Movement’s insistence that Black art should stem from Black cultural roots and not aim for validation by white cultural institutions, Morrison took on as her first editorial project an anthology, Contemporary African Literature, whose contributors “were talking to other Black people, not to white colonialists to whom the authors had nothing to prove.”Ultimately, these heroic writers and editors were not primarily responsible for this golden age of American literature and literary culture, which was in truth the product of much broader trends: near-universal literacy, the dramatic expansion of higher education, widespread economic prosperity, a growing middle class with lots of leisure time and money to spend on it, and a nation desperate to prove to the world it now led that it had a culture worthy of respect. These monuments, these novels, both documented and were the expressions of this new America.The U.S. today has shakier infrastructure to support writers than many other countries—less affordable housing, a dwindling supply of day jobs in adjacent creative fields. Today’s corporate publishing landscape isn’t just different in degree from that time. It’s an entirely new world, one in which, as Dan Sinykin has documented in his study Big Fiction, a truly independent literary culture, and truly independent editors, cannot thrive. The relentless logic of capitalism is certainly in part to blame, but the novel is just no longer the axis around which the cultural conversation rotates. Indeed, there is no longer a cultural conversation but myriad cultural conversations, monologues, debates, cacophonies happening in forms much shorter and more kinetic and spectacular, forms abjectly unsuited for the kind of genuine contemplation and empathy that is the novel’s forte. And those recent novelists whose works have driven cultural conversation—Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sally Rooney, Sayaka Murata—are often not American.Perhaps the conglomerate era is to blame for the decline of America’s centrality to world literary culture, as Sinykin implies. Just as important, perhaps, is that the U.S. today has shakier infrastructure to support writers than many other countries—less affordable housing, a dwindling supply of day jobs in adjacent creative fields. And at the same time, its literary culture became ever more inward-looking and complacent about its own preeminence. Seventy years ago, Cowley helped establish American literature’s legitimacy, which gave cultural and intellectual heft to America’s audacious Cold War–era assertion of primacy on the world stage. This project, one might dryly observe, is no longer a national priority. And over the last year, we have learned what follows a golden age: an age of DGAF.

The Catholic Bishops Who Wrote a Scorching Brief Against Trump
New Republic • 1 week ago

The Catholic Bishops Who Wrote a Scorching Brief Against Trump

Let us speak plainly about Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court’s upcoming case on birthright citizenship. Many of the high court’s cases are about arcane legal doctrines or complex federal statutes. Real-world effects can sometimes be difficult to discern through the time-consuming labyrinth of appellate review. Rarely does the court decide anything that immediately changes everything.The birthright citizenship case is different. It is both more real and less abstract than any other case on the court’s docket, save perhaps for those involving capital punishment. It is about whether the president of the United States can denaturalize millions of U.S. citizens at a whim, deprive them of the Constitution’s full protections, and then subject them to deportation from the country where they were born—indeed, from the only country they have ever known.The Constitution says, quite emphatically, no. The Fourteenth Amendment says this in no uncertain terms: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” There is no hidden meaning to uncover here. When you are within America’s borders, you are subject to its jurisdiction. You have to pay U.S. taxes. You must abide by U.S. rules and regulations. You can be charged by U.S. officials for committing crimes. You can be sued in U.S. courts under the common law.Earlier this month, the last wave of briefs were filed in the case ahead of oral arguments on, perhaps appropiately, April 1. Some of them are more notable than others; I’ll get to them later. But perhaps the most powerful one comes from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the organization representing the Catholic hierarchy in the United States.The USCCB is a frequent flier at the Supreme Court. Like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Civil Liberties Union, it often submits friend-of-the-court briefs for the justices to consider in major cases. The bishops’ interests are wide-ranging: Recent cases that have drawn the USCCB’s attention are ones involving public religious schools, death-row inmates’ access to clergy, Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy, and, on the immigration front, restrictions on spousal visas.None of those briefs is as blunt and unsparing as the one submitted in Barbara. While the bishops make some legal arguments, they are ultimately secondary to the moral and spiritual ones contained in the text. “At its core, this case is not solely a question about citizenship status or the Fourteenth Amendment,” they argued. “It is a question of whether the law will affirm or deny the equal worth of those born within our common community—whether the law will protect the human dignity of all God’s children.”This is not an unexpected argument from the church. Catholic leaders have often expressed support for immigrants, migrants, and asylum-seekers around the world, citing Scripture and Catholic teachings on human dignity and the family. This has brought some friction with the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, recently invited Pope Leo XIV, the first American pontiff, to the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations in July. Leo opted to spend it with migrants instead.Those priorities, both theological and practical, are reflected in the bishops’ brief. “Birthright citizenship accords with the Church’s teachings concerning the State’s obligation to uphold and protect human dignity because it treats birth within a community as a sufficient and objective basis for political belonging,” the conference wrote. “The Church teaches that equal human dignity is inherent in the mere fact of personhood and does not depend on citizenship, immigration status, or parentage.”This case began with an executive order by President Donald Trump. Last spring, he instructed the executive branch to refuse to consider proof of citizenship materials for children born on U.S. soil after a certain date to parents of temporary visa holders or undocumented immigrants. Lower courts quickly blocked the order from taking effect. Those that have considered its constitutionality have uniformly ruled against it.A core theme is the harm that the Trump administration will do to untold numbers of children. By its own terms, Trump’s executive order only applies to children born on or after a certain date in 2025. A Supreme Court ruling in Trump’s favor that narrows the citizenship clause would allow him to go much further, of course. But for now, the bishops warn, the priority is on those who would be harmed if the administration prevails.“Children do nothing wrong by being born in the United States,” they warned. “Yet, this Executive Order renders them stateless. Depriving an innocent child of his citizenship based upon his parents’ immigration status would be an especially outrageous punishment—one that this Court has rejected as punishment even for people who have been proven guilty.” Children born to undocumented immigrants, the bishops warned, would face an “impossible choice” if the court redefines citizenship: They could either live a diminished life in America, “forever being an underclass citizen, with limited access to the necessities of life, such as healthcare, education, housing, and the right to vote,” or, alternatively, they could be “forced to migrate to a country that they have never known and in which they may not be welcome.”The Catholic Church’s brief is an important antidote to the Trump administration’s efforts to portray itself as the leader of “Western civilization,” which it often defines in racialized and ahistorical terms. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a European security conference last month.Other references are much cruder. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy aide and the architect of his mass deportation campaign, has called on the conservative movement to “take all necessary and rational steps to save Western civilization.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has told supporters that “Western Christianity” is under siege by “dangerous and godless foreign ideologies that sow doubt, confusion and death.”One cannot blame the Catholic Church, one of the principal forces in shaping Western civilization for the past two thousand years, for taking issue with these usurpations. It echoed the settled interpretation of birthright citizenship that flows from the citizenship clause’s plain text. “This history demonstrates that birthright citizenship is neither an innovation nor an aberration, but a deeply rooted principle of the Western legal tradition—one that the United States consciously embraced and constitutionalized in the wake of grave moral and legal failure,” the bishops explained, referring to slavery and the Dred Scott ruling.To the extent that there is a legal dispute here, it is a wholly contrived one. Some lawyers and legal scholars have tried to bootstrap a justification for Trump’s executive order, almost exclusively after the fact. Among them are Ilan Wurman, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has made the audacious claim that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” excludes “illegally present aliens” and “temporary sojourners.” The Justice Department’s own brief largely borrows from his writings on the matter.One problem for Wurman is that the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment did not include these categories in the clause’s text when Congress and the states ratified it in 1871. There is no direct evidence that they shared Wurman’s convenient assumptions. As the court’s 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark recognized, the citizenship clause only excludes children born to foreign diplomats on U.S. soil, which is an exceedingly rare occurrence, and members of Native American tribes living outside U.S. control, which has since been superseded by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.Not to worry, Wurman wrote in his brief, because the drafters were actually operating based on a long legal tradition that includes the Magna Carta, safe-conduct letters for German merchants in the Holy Roman Empire, various court rulings that predate the citizenship clause’s adoption, and other cherry-picked sources that indicate citizenship is actually based on “allegiance” and a sovereign monarch’s offer of protection. “Protection was essential to jurisdiction, and permission was necessary for protection,” Wurman claimed.The Reconstruction-era Congress, for its part, did not see itself as a protection racket. Other legal scholars, including some originalists, have noted that none of this has any bearing on the citizenship clause’s meaning. Professors Evan Bernick and Jed Shugerman urged the court not to follow Wurman’s lead, which they said relied on medieval documents “too old for constitutional relevance,” or the Justice Department’s reliance on segregationists to understand the citizenship clause’s meaning. “Rather than look for what the Citizenship Clause meant to white supremacists in the 1880s, the Court should start with the common meaning of the words at ratification,” the two scholars wrote in their own brief.I have little doubt that the Supreme Court is unafraid of committing constitutional heresies. Few could be greater than United States v. Trump, where they turned the presidency into a turnkey dictatorship without any basis in American law and tradition. Hopefully, the briefs submitted by the bishops, originalist legal scholars, and a small army of other law professors and organizations will save them from moral and human disaster, as well. Any other outcome would be an even greater crime than the case that required the Fourteenth Amendment in the first place. At least Roger Taney didn’t have Dred Scott to learn from.

Trump Hit by Damning Leaks on Iran Decision as Polls Turn Brutal Fast
New Republic • 1 week ago

Trump Hit by Damning Leaks on Iran Decision as Polls Turn Brutal Fast

With Donald Trump’s war on Iran getting worse, a new report in The New York Times reveals damning details about the run-up to the decision. We learn that Trump’s case rests on lies about the “imminent threat” Iran poses and that he publicly misrepresented his own top general’s misgivings about the invasion. Secretary of State Marco Rubio arguably misled congressional leaders, and JD Vance privately called for going big, undercutting his “noninterventionist” cred. This comes as a new CNN poll finds a whopping 59 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s war and a Reuters poll finds support at an abysmal 27 percent. We talked to Mark Jacob, who has a good piece for his Stop the Presses Substack on Trump’s lawbreaking. We discuss why public impressions of his violent lawlessness are turning voters against the war, what will happen in the midterms if things get worse, and how Trump is assuming the powers of a mad dictator. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

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