Daily Archives: 2 December 2020

Persons and the Census

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The Supreme Court this week is taking up a case that centers on that. At issue is the question of whether President Donald Trump’s Executive Order excluding undocumented immigrants from state population counts—from the census—is a Constitutional one.

Progressive-Democrats and their Leftist supporters insist that “persons” in this context include illegal aliens.

“…inhabitants” at the nation’s origin meant people with a “usual” or “customary” residence in a state, which would include undocumented immigrants.

This is fallacious, as the WSJ‘s editors allude. Illegal aliens have no customary presence in any State—or territory. The illegality of their presence makes that condition not customary and entirely unusual, no matter for how long they’ve been able to evade the law.

Indeed, illegal aliens are, by their very illegality, every bit as transient in their States as any tourist. There is a critical difference, however: the tourist is here legally, and he’ll leave voluntarily at the end of his stay. The illegal alien is here…illegally…and he will be removed on detection, voluntarily or otherwise.

Progressive-Democrats and their Leftist supporters also insist that the Court must rule their way because otherwise Progressive-Democrat-run States stand to lose representation in the House of Representatives. This, too, is fallacious. Any relative loss or gain of representation is an outcome of the census and associated redistricting, not of any court action, which action can only be to uphold existing (here, census or immigration) law.

Their argument also is a cynical one. States plainly shouldn’t have the representation they have now to the extent their representation is based on the number of illegal aliens present. Nor is it the case that only Progressive-Democrat-run States could lose representation. Republican States can find themselves in the same strait—see, for instance, Texas, which is carefully ignored in their argument.

The only persons who should be counted in this, or any, census are those who are here permanently: American citizens and legal immigrants.

Illegal aliens, though, are not census persons, for all that they are human beings.

Missile Defense and Nuclear Stability

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An unsigned Bloomberg News article, carried by Newsmax, is pushing the panic button over an American successful ship-launched intercept of an ICBM in mid-course (i.e., above the atmosphere, but before warheads had been deployed).

The ICBM flying over the Pacific was an American dummy designed to test a new kind of interceptor technology. As it flew, satellites spotted it and alerted an Air Force base in Colorado, which in turn communicated with a Navy destroyer positioned northeast of Hawaii. This ship, the USS John Finn, fired its own missile which, in the jargon, hit and killed the incoming one.

A successful defense is somehow more dangerous than lying prostrate and helplessly undefended, though, according to BN. After all—and the news outlet makes this argument in all seriousness—

the new interception technology cuts the link between offense and defense that underlies all calculations about nuclear scenarios. Since the Cold War, stability—and thus peace—has been preserved through the macabre reality of mutual assured destruction, or MAD. No nation will launch a first strike if it expects immediate retaliation in kind. A different way of describing MAD is mutual vulnerability.

Wow.

And this:

[T]his month’s test was the first in which a ship did the intercepting. This twist means that before long the US or another nation could protect itself from all sides.

How terrible is that—that a nation should defend itself effectively enough as to make an attack against it unlikely.

Defense and offense are complementing duals of each other for the possessing nation, and an effective defense reduces the reliability and effectiveness of an enemy’s offense—which makes our defense the negating dual of an enemy’s offense. Unless, of course, outlets like Bloomberg News actually believe that the US, possessing a means of defending itself from an enemy’s attack, would itself initiate an attack on that enemy. But that would be BN projecting.

Bloomberg News‘ cynical panic-mongering notwithstanding, successful and effective defensive systems enhance nuclear stability rather than degrade it. A successful defensive system—which only needs to be partially successful, which can be imperfect—so complicates an attacking enemy’s success criteria as to make his attack less likely: he won’t achieve a first strike destruction of our nation, he’ll have to absorb our responding strike, and so he’s unlikely to strike at all.

It’s not that complicated.