Tag: china

Tom’s Report on the State of America’s Democratic Health: Fake Research Papers, Windmills, and Wildebeests

As of May 30, 2025

Benchmarks of Democratic Backsliding and Erosion

Trump’s personal battle of evermore with Harvard continues, with the administration banning foreign students from enrolling at Harvard and then a federal court issuing a temporary injunction.  Trump further ordered a freeze on all federal government contracts with Harvard, putting on ice about $100 million in funds.  This includes several hundred grants for medical research.

But who cares about real medical research when you can just make it up.  Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy released a report on Making America Healthy Again (MAHA).  The report however, is riddled with problems, primarily that many scientific studies referenced in the report do not exist.  Yes, they were made up, fabricated.  Additionally, the FDA issued a statement opining that pregnant women and healthy children do not need COVID vaccinations.  Two issues, one, normally the Centers for Disease control makes vaccination recommendations, not the FDA, and two, pregnant women are at greater risk for bad outcomes from COVID infections, the science says.  Sadly, after Kennedy’s intentions were made clear, the CDC followed suit.  So, here we have it.  Science based policy decisions are thing of the past.  It’s Kennedy’s magical mystery tour.

The Department of Justice announced FBI investigations into several old closed cases. 1) They will reinvestigate pipe bombs left at the Democratic and Republican offices on January 6, you know the day Trump attempted a coup.  Conservative conspiracy theories are that the FBI planted them.  2) The Dobbs Supreme Court leak will also be reinvestigated.  My guess the “investigative results” it will be used to impeach one of the three remaining liberal justices. 3) During the Biden administration, a bag of cocaine was found and the FBI will reopen that investigation.   This follows previous weeks of charging a democratic house member with assaulting a federal agent, dragging former FBI Director James Comey before investigators for allegedly threatening Trump by posting a number on line: 8647, and investigate New York’s Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud. 

Regarding foreign affairs, the U.S. Trade Court ruled this week that Trump’s global tariff regime was unconstitutional and that he overstepped his authority to issue such blanket global tariffs.  An appeals court promptly stayed the Trade Court’s ruling until that court can weigh in early June.  I imagine it will end up in the Supreme Court. It is anyone’s guess how that will end given the court’s propensity to hand over more and broader executive powers to Trump, basically fatally undermining the fundamental structure of separate and equal branches of government.

Meanwhile, Trump in a Friday missive lashed out at China for violating a ‘trade truce’ pending resolution of negotiations, which according to America’s negotiator, has stalled.  I imagine he will have TACOs for lunch later this week. This lashing of China comes on the heels of the administrations announcement that it was reviewing visas issued to China.  Trump is reimagining the America’s 19th Century “Chinese Exclusion Act.”  

Not to be outdone, Rubio’s State Department, announced a new policy targeting foreign government official that allegedly censor social media.  The intent of the policy is to target Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Morae, who has made rulings against the social media company X and Elon Musk.  This will no doubt alienate one of our largest partners in South America.  I guess Putin and Orban and other foreign government officials that censor social media will be target.  Just joking.  

Meanwhile, after condemning social media censors, the Department of State announced a freeze on foreign student visas pending the imposition of “expanded” social media reviews to detect anti-American or antisemitic posts.   I guess our censorship is a different type of censorship, no?  

In sum, Trump is picking a fight-to-the- death confrontation with Harvard, basically summoning all the coercive control levers of federal executive power.  As I see it, Trump thinks that if he slays Harvard, the rest of academia will quickly surrender.  He may be right.  I expect him to ratchet up the pressure in the coming weeks.  

China is another case of Trump tilting at windmills.  I understand our strategic need to address China as an economic competitor – one that is kicking our butts, especially in technology – and a potential peer military opponent, but I just don’t see a comprehensive, well thought out strategy.  For instance, on one hand he said he is imposing tariffs on China (and around the world) to bring manufacturing back to America.  Yet, in the ‘big, beautiful bill,’ all the billions in investments in American clean energy domestic manufacturing is being killed.  It makes no strategic sense.  

Trump’s policies and management of foreign and domestic affairs are helter-skelter, undisciplined, score settling, and a way to line his and his family’s pockets with millions.  An like a herd of wildebeests charging headlong in to a crocodile infested river, the Republican party follows. 

Finally, so long Elon.

Birthright Citizenship:  Will the Supreme Court Overturn Wong Kim Ark after 127 years?

The Return of Wong Kim Ark

Wong Kim Ark was born in 1873 in the city of San Francisco to parents of Chinese descent. His parents could never achieve citizenship because of the Chinese Exclusion Act and America’s naturalization laws that privileged whiteness since 1790.  Forever migrants in the land of the free.  However, their son and daughters born in America were American, or so they believed. 

In August 1895 after visiting China, Wong Kim Ark sailed back to the United States eventually arriving at San Francisco Bay.  According to the Supreme Court opinion penned by Justice Horace Gary, Wong Kim Ark was denied entry on the “sole ground that he was not a citizen of the United States.”  That’s a polite way of saying he was denied entry because a capricious and racist customs collector, John Wise, decided he didn’t like the Chinese man standing before him. 

Can you imagine what went through Wong Kim Ark’s mind when Wise denied him entry to his homeland, ordering him detained on the ship that brought him home, the SS Coptic. The helplessness, legal purgatory, you aren’t a ‘real’ American.  We’ve all been vulnerable at some point in our lives to a capricious individual who couldn’t give a crap less whether your life collapsed into a heap of lost dreams, a life placed on hold. That kick in the gut that makes you want to puke. 

Between August 1895 and March 1898 Wong Kim Ark ceased to be a citizen of the United States in the eyes of many Americans, both in and out of the legal system..  Imagine being stateless for years in a country that treated you as an unwanted outsider, useful only for your labor. I can’t imagine the ordeal, living in fear of deportation to a land not native to you.  Ones fate in the hands of an American legal system that was designed to oppress people like you. Life held together by a legal thread tethered to the 14th Amendment.  

The Case 

The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, born out of San Francisco’s Chinese immigrant community’s long experiences with systemic discrimination, filed a Writ of Habeas Corpus to free Wong Kim Ark from detention on the SS Coptic.   That filing began two journeys.  One for Wong Kim Ark to reclaim his citizenship and the other for America to establish the legal principle of birthright citizenship.

Justice Gray framed the argument in late 19th century legalese: “The question presented by the record is whether a child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who at the time of his  birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicil and residence in the United States, and are carrying on business, and not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the emperor of China, becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States by virtue of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution…”

Thirty-one pages later the Court answered that question:  Yes.  Justice Gray writing, “…The question must be answered in the affirmative.”  This opinion was issued March 28, 1898, and in a week’s time, give or take a day or two, will mark its 127th anniversary.  

The Executive Order

One of his first acts as President, Trump issued Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.”  An Orwellian title meant to disguise racial hatred and the infliction of pain and suffering on vulnerable people.

The executive order set a two-pronged test for determining non-citizenship.  A negative test.  It reads uncomfortably like antebellum slavery statutes that based a child’s fate at birth as free or enslaved based on a parent’s status.  When birth should be a celebration of life this executive order turns into a nightmare, of families potentially destroyed, disassembled by a policy meant to be cruel, meant to dehumanize.

As for the executive order’s constitutionality, three federal district judges declared the executive order unconstitutional and placed pauses on its implementation.  Last week, however, the Supreme Court agreed to review whether the lower court orders should stand.  The Court gave the parties until early April to provide their arguments for keeping or overturning the lower courts opinions.  Why?  The Court did not have to hear the appeal since all three courts issued the same basic opinion.  There were no conflicting opinions to resolve. That is a worrying sign.  The Court should have said, ‘no.’  But they didn’t. 

An Uncertain future?

Will the Court eventually overturn Wong Kim Ark?  Yes, I do.  I suspect that at least four of the Justices would overturn the opinion today if they could.  I am unsure of Roberts and Barrett.  If the Justices later agree to hear oral argument regarding birthright citizenship, I believe they will overturn Wong Kim Ark by a 5-4 vote. Basically, ripping the soul out of this country.  Frankly, I don’t think Trump would have issued the executive order without some prior thumbs up by several Supreme Court justices.

Can you imagine the bureaucratic labyrinth of proof and denial awaiting millions of families should the court overturn 127 years of jurisprudence because a bigoted President doesn’t like black and brown migrants, the denizens of  “shit hole countries;” Trump standing in for the bigoted customs collector before Wong Kim Ark.  Endless rounds of notarized forms, systemic accusations of fraud, denials, reprieves, forever court hearings, fear of separation, dreams of reunion.  A hellhole designed to shatter souls.

Millions of stateless babies, millions of moms and dads sickened from anxious nights and days, families split and devastated by a party that claims to protect and nurture families. The executive order is predicated on racial animus and is counter to America’s values; deliberate misreads the 14th Amendment; trumped-up fables about American jurisprudence.  It does nothing to “protect the meaning and value of American citizenship,” on the contrary it taints America’s soul, divides the country, and throws citizenship into a bureaucratic shithole.