“Over the past three months, the Trump administration has filed lawsuits against Los Angeles, Illinois, Colorado, New York state, New York City, and other places for the express purpose of forcing them to abolish their “sanctuary city” policies and start aiding the feds in rounding up undocumented immigrants and enforcing federal immigration laws.
But unless the U.S. Supreme Court rapidly overturns several of its own precedents, including a recent one from 2018, all of these cases will be constitutional losers for President Donald Trump. Why? Here is how the late conservative legal hero and long-serving Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once spelled it out.
“The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems,” Scalia wrote for the Court’s majority in Printz v. United States (1997), “nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.”
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federal agents still retain their own independent authority to enforce federal immigration law inside of sanctuary states and cities, just as federal authorities retain the independent authority to enforce other federal laws in states and cities. The key point under Printz is that it is unconstitutional for the feds to compel local officials to lend them a helping hand in carrying out the enforcement of federal law.”
U.S. murder rate is way higher than other developed countries. Our non-gun murder rate is normal, but our gun-murder rate is huge.
Much gun violence is not rational. It’s not clearly motivated by money or lack of fear of the justice system. It’s just two guys getting into an argument who fail to solve it peacefully and someone pulls a gun.
Parts of certain cities are overwhelmed with crime, so children are often left to fend for themselves. This develops a culture and an intuitive sense that if I don’t respond to provocation with violence, I will be taken advantage of. This leads people to instinctively respond to perceived provocation with deadly force.
Although gang violence is a big problem, most shootings are not gang related.
“How on earth are voters in America’s largest city choosing between a 33-year-old socialist and a sex pest for mayor?
But seriously, these are the choices Democrats here have before them when they go to the polls Tuesday in the most revealing primary election since the party’s debacle last year.
There’s Mamdani, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America by way of a noted workers’ paradise, Bowdoin, who’s calling for city-owned grocery stores and offending the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by trying to rationalize calls to “globalize the intifada.”
Then there’s former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was forced out of office less than four years ago after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment, now says he regrets resigning and has expressed little contrition about his personal conduct or his deadly mishandling of Covid-19.
Cuomo is despised by much of the city, including some of his biggest benefactors, and is the favorite to win.
Oh, and if either Mamdani or Cuomo falls short in New York’s ranked-choice Democratic primary, each already has secured a separate ballot line in the general election; if they win, they’ll get to use it in addition to the Democratic party line, and if they lose, they’ll still get the chance to run as independents. Neither ruled out remaining in the race when I asked them if they’d run on a third-party line this fall.”
“Five major U.S. cities are suing the Trump administration over funding to prevent nuclear attacks and terrorism that they argue has been illegally withheld by the Department of Homeland Security.
The lawsuit filed by Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver and Boston alleges that the administration has not reimbursed cities for relevant security expenses since February and has failed to award funding for 2025.”
“Much of the land within the proposed new city limits belongs to the company. Most of the voters are SpaceX employees. Gunnar Milburn, Space X’s security manager, was listed as the town’s first potential mayor. His name has since been replaced by Robert Peden, a vice president at SpaceX. Two other employees, the engineering manager and the senior director of environmental health and safety, would serve as city commissioners. As is the case nationally, Musk would serve as an unelected overseer.”
Demographic collapse is a huge threat to economic growth.
As countries urbanize, having kids becomes more of a burden, and as women enter the workforce, having children is detrimental to their careers and they are out of a cultural context where having children is more expected. People don’t have children at all, or women wait till their 30s where they have less time to have children and having children is biologically more difficult.
Cities should not have minimum apartment sizes. Such restrictions make city living more expensive, preventing some people from moving or staying there, and worsening homelessness. Some people can live just fine in tiny apartments and spend time in city amenities while utilizing the city’s intellectual and job benefits.
“During Trump’s first term, sanctuary cities refused to allow local law enforcement to share information with federal immigration agents or hand over immigrants in their custody. This time around, many are planning to do the same, even if doing so draws them into a fight with the second Trump administration.
Trump’s so-called border czar Tom Homan, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a named contributor to its Project 2025 manifesto, has indicated the incoming administration plans to make sanctuary jurisdictions targets for “mass deportations.” Homan said recently he hopes that local law enforcement will cooperate with requests from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hand over undocumented immigrants already in their custody, especially when they pose a public safety threat.
“What mayor or governor doesn’t want public safety threats out of their communities?” he told the Center Square. “Their No. 1 responsibility is to protect their communities. That’s exactly what we are going to do.”
Most Democratic leaders, however, have made it clear that they will not accept federal government overreach on deportations and that they are preparing to challenge Trump’s immigration policies in court.
“We’re not looking for a fight from the Trump administration, but if he attacks our progress, we’ll fight back,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta told Vox. “Immigrants are such a critical part of who we are … who we will be.””
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“In his first term, Trump’s crackdown on sanctuary jurisdictions took two forms: attempting to withhold federal funding from them and challenging their policies in court.”
“For modern urban planners, walkability is the goal. “The more drive-thrus you build, the more car-centric you become—as opposed to something that has more mobility options,” said Keba Samuel, chair of the Charlotte Planning Commission in North Carolina. “It doesn’t make sense to have this multi-billion investment in light rail and still encourage an auto-centric environment. It’s contradictory.”
In other words, light rail is in, drive-thrus are out. But the reality is more complex. While critics may argue that drive-thrus cater to greedy corporate interests, in truth they are what customers are demanding. For many restaurants, the drive-thru model is the only thing that has kept them alive both during and after the pandemic.
The Kellogg study found that fast service restaurants with drive-thru windows saw a modest 4 percent decline in sales from 2019 to 2022. Meanwhile, those without drive-thrus experienced a devastating 50 percent drop. That is comparable to 25 percent of Starbucks customers—and 50 percent of the chain’s total revenue—transitioning to drive-thru-only outlets.
Drive-thru bans also overlook the market responses already addressing traffic congestion issues. Taco Bell opened its first “Defy” outlet in 2022, which features a two-story layout with four drive-thru lanes and food delivered via tubes. (As The Verge described it: “Think a drive-thru bank but you get a Chalupa and Baja Blast instead of cash.”) Chick-fil-A is rolling out its own elevated drive-thru, designed to handle double or triple the volume of a traditional drive-thru, and utilizing conveyor belts that can deliver food orders as fast as every six seconds.
If policy makers really were concerned about traffic, they’d be embracing these high-efficiency designs. Instead of a drive-thru ban, local governments could institute two-story zoning allowances by right for any drive-thru businesses seeking to open in the area.
A final consideration lost in the drive-thru debate is the vital role many fast-food outlets play in their communities. In some lower- and middle-class areas, restaurants like McDonald’s have become a crucial “third place”—venues where locals gather for everything from Bible studies to bingo.
Drive-thrus might not fit the vision of many urban planners, but the reality is they are becoming more important, not less.”
“It takes San Francisco three years on average to fully approve new housing projects, the longest of any jurisdiction in California, according to an audit published by the state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) in October.
The very predictable result is that the Golden State’s fourth-largest city is also one of the nation’s most expensive, with median one-bedroom rents above $2,000 and a median home value of $1.4 million.
That San Francisco is expensive because it takes forever to approve new housing isn’t a new finding. Whether the city will actually get rid of the regulations gumming up home construction is now coming to a head.”