“President Donald Trump, in an emergency request Thursday, asked the Supreme Court to allow restrictions to birthright citizenship to take effect for some people as challenges to his executive order are litigated. Multiple judges in separate cases across the U.S. blocked the order from going into effect and appeals courts have declined to lift the holds. The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to limit the scope of the pauses to specific challengers and to allow the administration to develop guidance on how it would implement Trump’s directive if it is upheld. One federal judge, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour in Seattle, [has noticed that] Trump’s order [si] ‘blatantly unconstitutional.'” (03/13/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Libertarian supporters of an ‘Ellis Island’ type of immigration-control system are receiving a lesson in the fallacies of their system. They imagine an immigration-control system in which the federal government is vetting every foreigner and rejecting only the few ‘bad’ ones. What they fail to understand is that once federal officials are given the power to determine who comes into the United States, that power is inevitably going to be abused by encompassing ever-growing groups of innocent people. That’s, in fact, what happened with the Ellis Island system … Starting out with rejecting people who had tuberculosis, the Ellis Island immigration-control system was gradually expanded to encompass ever-growing groups of people, including anarchists (which ought to concern so-called anarchist libertarians, including those who favor government immigration controls and a border police state), prostitutes, mentally impaired people, people who might become public charges, and Chinese.” (03/13/25)
“The U.S. and Israel have reached out to officials of three East African governments to discuss using their territories as potential destinations for resettling Palestinians uprooted from the Gaza Strip under President Donald Trump’s proposed postwar plan, American and Israeli officials say. … Officials from Sudan said they have rejected overtures from the U.S., while officials from Somalia and Somaliland told The Associated Press that they were not aware of any contacts. Under Trump’s plan, Gaza’s more than two million people would be permanently sent elsewhere. He has proposed the U.S. would take ownership of the territory, oversee a lengthy cleanup process and develop it as a real estate project.” (03/14/25)
“The Democratic Party has been trying to paint negotiations as appeasement. During the 2024 elections, the Democratic platform condemned then-candidate Donald Trump’s ‘fecklessness’ on Iran and ‘love letters’ to North Korea. When Trump argued that the U.S. should negotiate with countries like Iran and Russia over economic sanctions, Kamala Harris'[s] campaign attacked his ‘weak’ and ‘reckless foreign policy.’ But some Democrats seem to regret taking that line. ‘Being afraid to negotiate, to my mind, is the ultimate sign of weakness because it just proves that you think that if I get in a room, you’re going to trick me and I’m going to do something stupid,’ Rep. Adam Smith (D–Wash.) said during a panel discussion Wednesday. … When asked by Quincy Institute Vice President Trita Parsi whether Democrats were seen as warmongers, Smith admitted that the party ‘walked into that problem.'” (03/13/25)
Source: EconLog
by Christopher Coyne & Andre Quinta
“Populism is one of the most important political phenomena of our time. Yet, it is still poorly understood. At its core, populism is built on the notion that the masses are engaged in a struggle against corrupt elites who have rigged the political and economic system to their advantage. Whether left-wing or right-wing, this is the essence of the populist narrative: an appeal to ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ and the claim to restore power to ordinary citizens by breaking the grip of entrenched interests. But can populism effectively challenge crony capitalism—a system where the political and economic elite are entangled? Can it truly dismantle the grip of entrenched interests? In a recent working paper, we argue that populist movements are likely to fail to deliver on their promises. The reason is that populism does not resolve the dual epistemic and incentive challenges necessary for success.” (03/13/25)
“Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa has signed a constitutional declaration covering a five-year transitional period, three months after his Islamist group led the rebel offensive that overthrew Bashar al-Assad. The document says Islam is the religion of the president, as the previous constitution did, and Islamic jurisprudence is ‘the main source of legislation,’ rather than ‘a main source,’ according to the drafting committee. It also enshrines separation of powers and judicial independence, and guarantees women’s rights, freedom of expression and media freedom.” (03/13/25)
“Among the most common economic justifications for tariffs today is that they’re needed to shrink a U.S. trade deficit that has long cost us jobs and dragged down economic growth. On both the left and the right (including the current occupant of the White House), trade balances — both overall and with specific countries like China or our new mortal enemy, Canada — are treated as a scoreboard for quickly judging the success or failure of U.S. trade policy and globalization more broadly. And seemingly every time the government releases the latest trade balance figures, at least one business journalist — and usually many more — will earnestly write that the U.S. trade deficit ‘improved’ (shrunk) or ‘worsened’ (increased), and that the deficit is a drag on economic growth. Yet little that I just wrote is actually correct.” (03/13/25)
“Armenian and Azerbaijani officials have said that they had agreed on the text of a peace agreement to end nearly four decades of conflict between the South Caucasus countries, a sudden breakthrough in a fitful and often bitter peace process. The two post-Soviet countries have fought a series of wars since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan that had a mostly ethnic Armenian population at the time, broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.” (03/13/25)
