FAIR | The United States is on the verge of a constitutional crisis, one that enlivens the nationalist fervor of Trump America and that centers on a violent, racist closed-border policy.
In January, the Supreme Court, with a five-vote majority that included both Republican and Democratic appointees, ruled that federal agents can “remove the razor wire that Texas state officials have set up along some sections of the US/Mexico border” to make immigration more dangerous (CBS, 1/23/24). The state’s extreme border policy is not merely immoral as an idea, but has proven to be deadly and torturous in practice (USA Today, 8/3/23; NBC, 1/14/24; Texas Observer, 1/17/24).
In a statement (1/22/24), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton decried the decision, saying that it “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Paxton, a Republican, vowed that the “fight is not over, and I look forward to defending our state’s sovereignty.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, “is doubling down, blocking the agents from entering the area,” the PBS NewsHour (1/25/24) reported. PBS quoted Abbott declaring that the state’s constitutional authority is “the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.”
For a great many people, a Southern state invoking its “sovereignty” over the federal government in defense of violent and inhumane policing of non-white people sounds eerily familiar to the foundation of the nation’s first civil war. And 25 other states are supporting Texas in defying the Supreme Court (USA Today, 1/26/24), although none of them are states that border Mexico.
Texas media are sounding the alarm about this conflict. The Texas Tribune (1/25/24):
From the Texas House to former President Donald Trump, Republicans across the country are rallying behind Gov. Greg Abbott’s legal standoff with the federal government at the southern border, intensifying concerns about a constitutional crisis amid an ongoing dispute with the Biden administration.
Houston public media KUHF (1/24/24) said this “could be the beginning of a constitutional crisis.” University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck said in an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle (1/26/24) that Abbott’s position is a “dangerous misreading” of the Constitution.
Other legal scholars are watching with concern. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school of the University of California at Berkeley, told FAIR, “I think that this is reminiscent of Southern governors disobeying the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions.” He added, “I agree that it is a constitutional crisis in the sense that this is a challenge to a basic element of the Constitution: the supremacy of federal law over state law.”
But the New York Times has not covered the issue since the Supreme Court decision came down (1/21/24). The AP (1/27/24) framed the story around Donald Trump, saying the former president “lavished praise” on the governor “for not allowing the Biden administration entry to remove razor wire in a popular corridor for migrants illegally entering the US.” The Washington Post (1/26/24) did show right-wing politicians and pundits were using the standoff to grandstand about a new civil war. NPR (1/22/24) covered the Supreme Court case, but has fallen behind on the aftermath.
Meanwhile, Fox News (1/25/24, 1/25/24, 1/27/24) has given Texas extensive and favorable coverage of its feud with the White House, citing its own legal sources (from America First Legal and the Edwin Meese III Center—1/25/24) saying that Texas was in the right and the high court was in the wrong.
Breitbart celebrated Abbott’s defiance as a states’ rights revolution, with a series of articles labeled “border showdown” (1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/25/24, 1/28/24) and several others about Republican governors standing with Texas in solidarity (1/26/24, 1/28/24).
The white nationalist publication American Renaissance (1/25/24) stood with Abbott but lowered the temperature, saying that it is “unclear whether this could cause a constitutional crisis, but the optics are not great for the White House in an election year.” “This will not be a ‘Civil War’ or anything close to it unless someone on the ground wildly miscalculates by firing on the Texas National Guard,” the openly racist outlet asserted. Rather, the publication saw Abbott as recentering the immigration debate as a way to weaken President Joe Biden’s reelection chances. “We couldn’t hope for a better start to the election-year campaign,” it said.
The National Review (1/28/24) admitted that Abbott is probably wrong on the constitutional question. Nevertheless, it called him the “MVP of border hawks” for orchestrating a public relations coup by forcing the federal government’s hand:
Abbott has managed to get the federal government in the position of actually removing physical barriers to illegal immigration at the border and insisting that it is imperative that it be permitted to continue doing so. This alone is a PR debacle for the administration, but it comes in a controversy—with its fraught legal and constitutional implications—that will garner massive attention out of proportion to its practical importance.
This is impressive by any measure.
The support of Republican states for Abbott elevates the matter further, but this also is a relatively small thing. The backing for Abbott is entirely rhetorical at this point and perhaps not very serious on the part of some Republican governors. It nonetheless serves to elevate a conflict over security on a small part of the border into what feels like a larger confrontation between all of Red America and the federal government.
Japan wasn’t making earnest attempts at a reasonable surrender. It was hoping it could get a conditional surrender where it would be able to preserve at least some of its empire (the hyper focus on them supposedly merely wanting assurances they could keep their Emperor is really downplaying what they hoped to negotiate). It was still occupying large portions of East Asia by late 1945. That was simply unacceptable to the Allies, and very understandably so. Russia wouldn’t tolerate a conditional surrender either, and all of Japan’s hopes at such a negotiation were done via a Moscow that it turned out was just leading Japan on while assembling an invasion.
There’s just no compelling historical evidence for this claim. The paragraph following it contains the actual explanation, and in fact is hard to square with any claims that it was a demonstration for the Soviets. It’s hard to square on the one hand the idea that mass casualties had been normalized, while also implying that the nukes were viewed as a uniquely horrible thing and everyone wanted to avoid personal responsibility while also sending a warning on the other.
The nukes were developed and deployed as an extension of the conventional strategic bombing program. Strategic bombing was the ultimate military fetish of the era. The Manhattan Project wasn’t the most expensive weapons project of the war: the B-29 bomber was, costing at least a third more. The Norden bombsight cost another 2/3 of the total budget for the nuclear bomb, only it never worked well, necessitating the use of mass bombing raids. Nukes were developed and deployed as a way to effect the same level of destruction with far fewer planes and bombs.
You could interpret the eschewing of responsibility as all the players knowing the horror they were unleashing and trying to avoid accountability, but another interpretation is that no one viewed the nuclear bomb as anything other than an especially powerful explosive, so it wasn’t something where anyone agonized over the first deployments. There’s a lot of evidence that the military was very slow to appreciate the uniquely dangerous aspects of nuclear weapons even after Hiroshima, as evidenced by the cavalier attitude towards testing right through the 1950s. When the military talked about how a single atomic bomb was as powerful as X amount of TNT, that’s genuinely how they were viewing and using them: as an easier way to get X amount of high explosive on target.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which was a backup target; Kokura was the original objective) were targeted because they were significant military targets that would have been bombed sooner or later anyway as part of the preliminary phase for the invasion of Japan (and contrary to revisionism that invasion was very much in the planning. In fact Japan was counting on it and hoping to bleed it dry on the beaches in order to force the US to agree to a conditional surrender).
Personally, I view the nukes as war crimes, but as sub-components of the overarching war crime that was strategic bombing in general. Ultimately there was a rationale that went into the development of the strategic bombing concept that stretched back to the interwar years. It turned out to be massively, horrifically wrong, but there was a coherent thought process to it.