Washington Wednesday: Politics and the Constitution

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 3rd of September.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Time now for Washington Wednesday.

AUDIO: No National Guard, no National Guard, get Trump out now, get Trump out now.

That was the scene in Los Angeles this summer after federal immigration raids. President Trump sent nearly five thousand Marines and National Guard troops into the city. But this week a federal judge said the deployment was illegal—calling it a violation of a federal law called the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from acting as a domestic police force.

BROWN: The ruling doesn’t affect Washington, D.C., where presidents have broader authority. But it could matter if President Trump tries to make good on his ideas about sending troops into cities like Chicago.

MAST: Joining us now to talk about this and other stories is Hunter Baker, he’s a political philosopher and WORLD Opinions contributor.

Hunter, good morning.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

MAST: Hunter, I'd like to tap your legal training to tell us more about this 19th century law, whether this is as black and white as the judge portrays it, and then what's the basis for an appeal?

BAKER: I'll be honest, I really thought about it more in constitutional terms. I mean, our Constitution, we don't pay a lot of attention to this, but our Constitution is a constitution that sets out a federal system where you have clear differentiation between the powers of the national government and then of the states, and the states really have most of the power, or at least in the original constitutional design they did. And so anybody who goes to law school, you're going to hear that the states possess the police power over health, morals, education and safety and those sorts of things. And so the states are the dominant actors when it comes to crime and punishment. And so Trump has kind of announced this intention to operate the National Guard, sort of like a national police force and then for himself to act as a kind of a chief.

Now, as I analyze this, basically, I would say there's the legal answer and then there's the political answer. The legal answer, I think, is pretty clear cut. You differentiated between Washington, D.C. and the rest of the country. He absolutely has broader powers in D.C. D.C. is not a state. D.C. does not have the deference owed to it from the federal government that the states do. We don't want D.C. to be a state. It would be like The Hunger Games or something like that. So better for D.C. just to remain the special district than the seat of government that it is.

But when you asked me about the political sort of view of this thing, what I would say is, is that a politician is never going to do badly, especially an American politician focusing on law and order. Order is sort of the the most fundamental of our political needs. And so when people perceive that there is chaos, they are going to want a strong figure to bring order. And I do not think that Donald Trump is going to hurt himself in the polls by saying, you know, there are these chaotic situations where people are being killed and their property is being stolen, and I'm going to do something about it. People are going to like that. They're going to rally to him when he says that. So I think that he will continue to pursue that kind of a strategy, and he will probably continue to be blocked by the courts.

MAST: I'm curious about how broadly this ruling might apply. We raised the question of Chicago. Let's listen to something Vice President Vance said about the possibility.

VANCE: What the president has said is that, very simply, we want governors and mayors to ask for the help…Why is it that you have mayors and governors who are angrier about Donald Trump offering to help them than they are about the fact that their own residents are being carjacked and murdered in the streets? It doesn't make an ounce of sense.

So does this ruling yesterday complicate things Hunter, in other words, would it limit the President if he tried something similar in Chicago? Or is this a California specific thing?

BAKER: No, this is, this is a general, sort of a limitation on the power of the president. It is not normal, in any sense, for the President to run around enforcing sort of the normal criminal laws of a state. So yeah, he'll encounter similar barriers if he tries to act that way in Chicago. But again, I think that some of the politicians may be tone deaf here, like Governor Pritzker, he says Donald Trump, you're not going to come in here and intimidate Chicagoans. Well, Chicagoans are probably thinking, I'm not worried about being intimidated by the President. I'm worried about being intimidated by a carjacking or something like that. And if somebody wants to help me with that, great. And they're looking at things like Washington, D.C., where just last week I heard the. Mayor of Washington D.C., say that carjackings had gone down 87% since the federal government had involved itself. So a lot of people are going to be saying, hey, I want, I want that kind of help.

BROWN: Well, switching to the international scene now, some big names are gathering in China today, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are set to join Chinese President Xi Jinping for a parade in Beijing. Hunter, what do you make of the open alignment between these three leaders?

BAKER: It's almost like the scene of a movie, you know, let's let's get together the bad guys, the obvious bad guys, and have them unite in a big, intimidating military parade. But this is this is much more than caricature or theater. They are trying to show some independence in a world that for the past few decades has been dominated by American foreign policy and by the West more generally. And so they are asserting independence. They're saying that, you know, we're no longer going to accept the idea that America sets the tone or tells us what to do. North Korea never did. And there they are trying to say, No, there's going to be a greater level of independence here, and we're going to set our own agenda.

MAST: Well, turning to New York City; Democratic Socialist Zoran Mamdani is still the front runner in the race for mayor there, we've talked about him several times. I don't think we've touched, though, on his plans to freeze rent rates. Here he is on a podcast back in June.

MAMDANI: About two and a half million New Yorkers live in rent-stabilized housing right now, and the profits of their landlords increased in this last year by 12%. There is clearly room for relief for those very tenants who are on the precipice of being pushed out of their own city

12% revenue increase may be a bit of a mixed bag. Revenue is up for rent stabilized apartments in core Manhattan, but going down in outer boroughs, so landlords may not be sitting on as much wealth as Mamdani implies.

Hunter, Mamdani says New York is still here after rent freezes during the last mayor’s term during the COVID lockdowns. But does that mean they’d actually work?

BAKER: No, it's not a good thing. You know, I talked about modern social science, and of the social sciences, the one that I would say is the most scientific is economics. And economists are pretty darn unified on this question of rent freezes. The idea that rent freezes actually reduce the amount of housing and the quality of housing. There used to be an economics textbook that would show pictures of badly declining sort of urban areas, and they would ask the question, the result of a bomb strike or the result of rent freezes? You know, it's just very, very often has been demonstrated, for instance, in the Bronx in the 1970s that rent freezes tend to bring about great urban decline. So this is one of those public policies that I call wishing makes it so, where we just say, well, this is the outcome we want, and it doesn't really matter what the social or economic dynamics are. I think it's guaranteed to go badly

BROWN: Well before we let you go, Congress is back in session, and House Democrats are joining a handful of Republicans pushing for the release of more files related to the Epstein case. Hunter, is this just about who might be connected to the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, or does this say something about a wider interest in government transparency?

BAKER: I think that Americans are much more interested in transparency right now, in part because we have a much greater technical ability to look into these kinds of things for ourselves, right? If I have access to hundreds, 1000s of pages of text, there are now tools, including AI, that can help me to try to digest that information and find out what's really there. And so I think that as our technical capability increases, people are naturally going to think, well, just let us see it all. That's the best way to have accountability. You sometimes heard the phrase sunlight is the best disinfectant. And I think a lot of people are starting to think that way about these things.

BROWN: Power of technology. Hunter Baker is Provost of North Greenville University and a WORLD Opinions contributor. Thanks so much, Hunter!

BAKER: Thank you.

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