Round-up: War on the cartels. Gerrymandering goes national.

Plus, Ask Me Anything

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Ask Me Anything

I’m going to experiment with a new feature for the newsletter - Ask Me Anything. But to do an Ask Me Anything, I need questions! So please comment with any question you have about U.S. politics, foreign policy or history and I will do an edition of the newsletter with the answers.

And it really can be about anything - remember that in my day job, I’m a historian, so everything from geeky questions about some obscure aspect of U.S. history through to whatever is in the news today would be great.

The first AMA is going to be open to all subscribers, free or paid, and I’ve also left this edition of the weekly round-up ungated to everyone can check it out.

War on the cartels

The New York Times today brings this news:

President Trump has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed terrorist organizations, according to people familiar with the matter.

The decision to bring the American military into the fight is the most aggressive step so far in the administration’s escalating campaign against the cartels. It signals Mr. Trump’s continued willingness to use military forces to carry out what has primarily been considered a law enforcement responsibility to curb the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs.

The order provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels.

U.S. military officials have started drawing up options for how the military could go after the groups, the people familiar with the conversations said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations.

As the article goes on to explore, there are a lot of legal problems with doing this. Even if drug traffickers have been labelled as “terrorists”, they’re still civilians, and so killing them is technically murder. Congress passed a law authorizing the use of force against those responsible for 9/11, but it doesn’t just allow the U.S. military to randomly kill anyone deemed to be a terrorist.

I say this not because I think that this would stop the Trump regime from doing it, but just because efforts to get around the law will shape what happens next. The last time the U.S. went to war against a decentralized network of non-state actors, it ended up establishing secret torture prisons and condemning thousands of people to legal limbo in a bid to avoid its agents being held accountable under U.S. law.

Barack Obama changed that by moving from a a capture-and-torture paradigm to a bomb-them-with-drones paradigm. Just murdering people (including American citizens) from the air meant that you didn’t have a lot of prisoners of dubious legal status hanging around. This has remained the basic paradigm of the War on Terror ever since.

As a lot of people commented during the transition between the two paradigms, the politics of this was kind of weird. Of course everyone should be against the torturing, but it was a bit strange that murder-them-from-the-air came to be the preferred policy of liberals. Not taking prisoners meant no black sites and no more people being sent to Guantanamo Bay, but it also meant that there was not even a pretence of due process for anyone. But because it happened far away and wasn’t visible in the way that Guantanamo was, most people found it easy to put it out of their minds.

I think this is instructive for thinking about two ways that the war on the cartels might evolve. Will it be about bombing them from the air or about capturing them? My guess would be the former, because that generates fewer legal problems - you don’t have captives suing for habeas corpus or pointing out that some of the evidence being used against them was extracted through torture by the Salvadoran police.

But what you are likely to have is a lot of dead civilians and a fierce backlash throughout the hemisphere. And all in the service of what will probably turn out to not be a great deal of damage to the cartels.

For more on this topic, check out this post I wrote a while ago:

Gerrymandering goes national

Yesterday I wrote about how Texas’s attempt to engage in an extraordinary round of gerrymandering presents a dangerous threat to democracy. In the 24 hours since, things have gotten quite a bit worse.

Other Republican states are now also talking about carrying out a new round of gerrymandering. Florida Republicans are setting the process in motion and the White House is pressuring Republicans in Indiana to do the same.

This is a blatant attempt to steal the upcoming midterm elections by redrawing Congressional district maps to ensure Republicans keep a majority despite their cratering popularity. It’s disturbing not just on its own terms, but also because it suggests that as we get closer to the midterms, the party might start looking for other ways to cheat too.

Trump has also added fuel to the fire by ordering an extraordinary mid-decade census, which matters because it is the census that is used to produce the population counts on which House districts are based. Trump wants to redo the census but this time exclude undocumented immigrants from the count, despite the fact that the constitution clearly states that all people physically present in the country should be counted.

Trump’s reason for wanting to do this is obvious - he often peddles (and I think genuinely believes) the lie that undocumented immigrants frequently vote in U.S. elections, and he assumes they don’t vote for Republicans. So he thinks that by doing this he will produce a much more Republican-friendly map, even though most non-partisan analysts think that removing undocumented people from the census would actually leave the House map pretty much as balanced between the parties as it is now.

And then there’s another thing. Yesterday I wrote that Texas was asking the FBI to arrest and forcibly return Democratic state lawmakers to the state in order to enable the legislature to reach a quorum and pass its gerrymandering plan. According to a Republican senator from Texas, the FBI has now agreed to do that.

If this actually happens, it would be head-spinningly bad. These Texas lawmakers have broken absolutely no federal law and there is no reason for the FBI to have anything to do with them. This would be the blatant weaponization of federal law enforcement for anti-democratic ends.

Thankfully, J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois - where many of the Texan lawmakers are hiding out - has said that Illinois law enforcement will not let this happen. And that would be very reasonable - they would be essentially stopping illegal kidnappings from taking place. But where then is this going to end? A shoot out between the FBI and the Illinois State Police?

Things are going south quickly. It’s all a reminder of why I am still calling it the Trump regime.

Ask Me Anything

I’m going to experiment with a new feature for the newsletter - Ask Me Anything. But to do an Ask Me Anything, I need questions! So please comment with any question you have about U.S. politics, foreign policy or history and I will do an edition of the newsletter with the answers.

And it really can be about anything - remember that in my day job, I’m a historian, so everything from geeky questions about some obscure aspect of U.S. history through to whatever is in the news today would be great.

The first AMA is going to be open to all subscribers, free or paid, and I’ve also left this edition of the weekly round-up ungated to everyone can check it out.