2025-01-22 07:59:29
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Good evening, and welcome to the first edition of The Logoff — the newsletter that gives you the Trump news you need so that you can log off and get back to the rest of your life.
There’s so much going on today, but I want to focus on the legal fight over birthright citizenship, as its outcome will affect millions of people.
What did the law say before Trump? Under the Constitution (the 14th Amendment, to be precise), almost everyone born on US soil automatically becomes a US citizen, no matter their parents’ immigration status. Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday that would change that: It would deny automatic citizenship to babies born to parents who are both immigrants in cases where neither parent is a naturalized citizen or legal permanent resident. (My colleague Ian Millhiser has more details here.)
So what happened today? Eighteen states filed a federal lawsuit to block the order from taking effect, and the case seems destined to go all the way to the Supreme Court. There, most legal observers expect the justices to side with the states (and with 125 years of legal precedent) that birthright citizenship is constitutional. There are no guarantees (particularly not with this Court) but it’s likely that this executive order is destined for failure.
So where does this leave us? Barring something unexpected, birthright citizenship will likely survive. You should pay attention for two reasons: First, there’s always a chance of a shock result in court. And second, the order itself is an indication of how thoroughly Trump has dragged once outlandish ideas into the GOP mainstream.
What’s the larger lesson here? Trump opened his presidency with a barrage of policy changes, and nowhere were the changes bigger than on immigration. Almost all of it will be challenged. Some orders will survive; others will be the subject of lengthy legal battles. Where those battles end up will determine whether Trump succeeds in a radical overhaul of the immigration system — or just a series of changes to it. And it’ll be a long time before we have final answers.
This is a crimson-rumped toucanet. And birds like these are a big reason why Colombia has a thriving ecotourism industry. My colleague Benji Jones wrote all about it here.
2025-01-22 01:40:00
Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. This unconventional column is based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Here is a Vox reader’s question, condensed and edited for clarity.
I live in an isolated part of a developed country, relatively far from anything else, and am struggling with my relationship to flying in the face of climate change. Most advice on minimizing flying seems tailored to more connected areas in the US or Europe — we have no trains or buses, and it’s a 12+ hour drive to the nearest city. I’ve considered moving to a more connected area where these would be options, but then I’d experience the same angst any time I wanted to visit my family where I currently live.
I’ve tried to take the approach of flying less frequently and staying for longer periods of time, but I feel resentful toward the carefree way I see friends around me approaching this issue, like flying out every month to watch a game. I feel like I’m torturing myself with guilt over something that no one cares about, and that the good I do by avoiding the one roundtrip I would take on a vacation per year is erased by the behaviour of my peers.
On the other hand, the contribution my annual flight would make, in terms of global emissions and demand in the airline industry, is minuscule. I feel generally opposed to making climate change about individual actions, but flying is also something that is such a privileged action that it feels like a special case. I also feel conflicted because I don’t think I deserve to travel if I can’t do it ethically, but the strategies often proposed as alternatives are not available to me.
Dear Resentfully Landbound,
Your question has me thinking about Greta Thunberg. In 2019, the Swedish activist wanted to attend a climate conference in the US, but she refused to fly because of the high carbon emissions associated with air travel. So instead, she traveled across the Atlantic by boat. On rough seas. For two weeks.
Should we all be doing what Thunberg did?
I think Thunberg is a heroic young activist, and there’s value in activists who take a purist approach, like refusing to ever fly. But the value lies less in their individual action and more in their ability to serve as a powerful jolt to our collective moral imagination — to shift the Overton window, the range of behaviors that seem possible. Thunberg’s well-publicized sailing voyage, for example, helped convince others to fly less. But to say her approach has been a potent rhetorical tool is different from saying it’s a model that every individual should follow to a tee.
For one thing, not everyone can sail the seas for two weeks — whether because of the time required, a physical health condition, or some other factor. And it’s not clear that all people should forgo all flying.
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That’s because we each have multiple values. Yes, protecting our planet is a crucial value. So is, say, nurturing relationships with beloved family members and friends who live abroad. Or developing a career. Or learning about other cultures. Or making art. So, even though minimizing how much we fly is a virtuous thing to do, some thinkers would caution you against treating that as the only relevant value.
Take contemporary philosopher Susan Wolf, who wrote an influential essay called “Moral Saints.” She argues that you shouldn’t actually strive to be “a person whose every action is as morally good as possible … who is as morally worthy as can be.” If you try to optimize your morality through extreme altruistic self-sacrifice, she says, you end up living a life bereft of the personal projects, relationships, and experiences that make up a life well lived. You can also end up being a crappy friend or family member.
We often think of “virtues” as being connected to morality, but Wolf’s point is that there are non-moral virtues, too — like artistic, musical, or athletic talent — and we want to cultivate those, too.
“If the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry or healing the sick or raising money for Oxfam, then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe, or improving his backhand,” she writes. “A life in which none of these possible aspects of character are developed may seem to be a life strangely barren.”
In other words, it’s okay — even desirable — to devote yourself to a variety of personal priorities, rather than sacrificing everything in pursuit of moral perfection. The tricky bit is figuring out how to balance between all the priorities, which sometimes conflict with each other.
In fact, I think part of the appeal of the purist approach is that it actually makes life easier on this score. Even though it demands extreme self-sacrifice, the extreme altruist never has to ask herself how much of the luxury (in this case, flying) to allow herself. The right answer is clear: none.
By contrast, if you’re trying to balance between different values, it’s nigh on impossible to arrive at an objectively “right” answer. That’s very uncomfortable — we like clear formulas! But I tend to agree with philosophers like Bernard Williams, who argue that it’s a fantasy to think we can import scientific objectivity into the realm of ethics. Our ethical life is just too messy and multifaceted to be captured by any single set of universally binding moral principles — any systematic moral theory.
And if that’s so, we have to look at how compelling we find the case for each competing value. It’s often obvious to us that we shouldn’t give equal weight to all of them. For example, I’m obsessed with snorkeling, and I’d love to be able to travel to all the top snorkeling destinations this year, from Hawaii to the Maldives to Indonesia. But I know I can’t justify taking infinite flights for infinite snorkeling trips during a climate emergency!
At the same time, that doesn’t mean I won’t ever go on any trip whatsoever. I do sometimes let myself travel by air, especially if it’s for a purpose that is not only pleasurable but also essential to a life well lived, like nurturing relationships with friends and family members who live far away. And when I fly, I try to make those miles really count by staying for a longer time.
This is basically what you’re already doing: “I’ve tried to take the approach of flying less frequently and staying for longer periods of time,” you write, describing “the one roundtrip I would take on a vacation per year.” I think that’s a reasonable approach, especially given the lack of trains and buses in your area.
So, even though you framed your dilemma as a question about whether or how much to fly, I don’t actually think the flying bit is your real problem. The real problem is this bit: “I feel resentful with the carefree way I see friends approaching this issue, like flying out every month to watch a game. I feel like I’m torturing myself with guilt over something that no one cares about.”
To be clear, it’s totally understandable to feel resentful; what your friends are doing does sound excessive. But the issue is that your resentment is making you miserable. And a virtuous but miserable life is not likely to be sustainable.
Some do-gooders can go to altruistic extremes without feeling resentful or judgmental. They may be able to forgo flying entirely and use that choice to create new forms of meaning and connection and to enrich other aspects of their lives, so that they don’t become joyless, judgy, or one-dimensional moral optimizers of the sort Wolf described. But most of us are not in that category. And unless you are, I wouldn’t counsel you to go down the purist path, because resentment and judgmentalness can cause their own harm. They harm you, they harm the relationship between you and the targets of your judgment, and they can ultimately harm the cause itself because they’re off-putting to others and they make being climate-friendly seem impossibly hard.
If you’re like most of us, a path of moderation will probably work better. You can decide on a balance that you think is reasonable — for example, one roundtrip flight per year — and stick with that. Once you’ve done that, ditch the guilt that’s torturing you. That’ll help diffuse the resentment, some of which I suspect is actually resentment toward yourself, because of how you’ve been torturing yourself.
But that on its own might not be enough to get rid of all the resentment, because flying once annually still might feel like a big sacrifice relative to what your peers are doing. So one key intervention here is to expand your aperture, to look at what a broader group of people are doing, so that you don’t feel you’re sacrificing for the sake of “something that no one cares about.” More people care than you might think!
A study published in Nature Communications found that 80 percent to 90 percent of Americans are living in a “false social reality”: They dramatically underestimate how much public support there is for climate policies. They think only 37 percent to 43 percent support these policies, when the real proportion of supporters is roughly double that. (And support is high across the world.) The study authors note that this misperception “poses a challenge to collective action on problems like climate change,” because it’s hard to stay motivated when you think you’re alone in caring.
Concretely connecting with others who are choosing to fly less will help bring this home for you, and make you feel that you’re part of a community that shares your values. Networks you can reach out to include Stay Grounded, We Stay on the Ground, and Flying Less. The sense of belonging and camaraderie you get from being part of such a group can help you form positive emotional associations with your reduced-flying lifestyle — you’ll feel like you’re gaining something, not just losing.
I think that’s especially important given that resentment can actually feel good in the short term (even if it damages our well-being in the long term). Righteous indignation is a rush; it gives us an energy boost. So we can’t expect the brain to give it up just like that — we need to replace it with something else that feels good. The best candidate may be the pleasant emotion that philosophers and psychologists have identified as resentment’s exact opposite: gratitude.
Next time you feel resentment bubbling up, go out in nature and do something you enjoy — birding, hiking, swimming — and really savor it. Pay close attention to each sound, each smell. Remind yourself that your reduced-flying lifestyle is helping to preserve this source of pleasure. In other words, it’s enabling you to get more of what you love. As you do that, I hope you’ll feel not only proud that you’re living in line with your values, but also very grateful to yourself.
2025-01-22 01:35:00
Donald J. Trump and JD Vance were officially sworn in as the 47th president and vice president of the United States on Monday, January 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. Their inauguration looks different from previous years, in part because it is being held inside the Capitol Rotunda, instead of outside the US Capitol, as a polar vortex threatens much of the nation with below freezing temperatures.
Trump is expected to issue hundreds of executive orders as soon as he is inaugurated for his second presidency, including vows to impose tariffs on imported goods and to carry out a mass deportation effort. (How Trump plans to carry out these plans remains unclear.) He also pledged to provide “major pardons” for the roughly hundreds of nonviolent defendants convicted of storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Follow here for the latest news, analysis, and explainers about Inauguration Day.
2025-01-22 01:35:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Within hours of being sworn into office on Monday, President Donald Trump announced a spate of executive orders and policies to boost oil and gas production, roll back environmental protections, withdraw from the Paris climate accord, and undo environmental justice initiatives enacted by former President Joe Biden.
Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and appointed fossil fuel industry executives and climate skeptics to his Cabinet. His first-day actions represent a complete remaking of the country’s climate agenda, and set the tone for his administration’s approach to energy and the environment over the next four years.
Among the most significant actions Trump took Monday was declaring “an energy emergency,” which he framed as part of his effort to rein in inflation and reduce the cost of living. He pledged to “use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure,” an unprecedented move that could grant the White House greater authority to expand fossil fuel production. He also signed an executive order “to encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters,” and another expediting permitting and leasing in Alaska, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
“We will have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it,” Trump said during his inaugural address. “We are going to drill, baby, drill.”
The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve can store 714 million barrels of crude oil, but currently holds about 395 million. Under his administration, he said, the cache will be filled “up again right to the top.” He also said the country will export energy “all over the world.”
“We will be a rich nation again,” he said, standing inside the Capitol Rotunda, “and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help.”
Richard Klein, a senior research fellow for the international nonprofit Stockholm Environment Institute, noted that fossil fuel companies extracted record-high amounts of oil and gas during the Biden administration. Even if it is technologically possible to boost production further, it’s unclear whether that will reduce prices.
Dan Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California Berkeley, said it is a “direct falsehood” that increasing fossil fuel extraction would drive down inflation. He agreed that the US should declare a national energy emergency — but for reasons exactly the opposite of what Trump had in mind. “We need to quickly move to clean energy, to invest in new companies across the US,” Kammen told Grist.
Trump delivered on his promise to once again withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the United Nations pact agreed upon by 195 countries to limit global warming, which the new president referred to on Monday as a “rip-off.” In addition to signing an executive order saying the US would leave the agreement — titled “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements” — Trump also signed a letter to the United Nations to set the departure in motion. Due to the rules governing the accord, it will take one year to formally withdraw, meaning US negotiators will participate in the next round of talks in Brazil at the end of the year. By this time next year, however, the US could join Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only nations that aren’t part of the accord.
“It simply makes no sense for the United States to voluntarily give up political influence and pass up opportunities to shape the exploding green energy market,” Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the nonprofit World Resources Institute, said in a statement. Only two in 10 Americans support quitting the Paris agreement, according to a poll by the Associated Press.
Trump’s announcement came just 10 days after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2024 Earth’s hottest year on record, one marked by life-threatening heat waves, wildfires, and flooding around the world. Experts say things will only get worse unless the US and other countries do more to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
“Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled,” climate scientists wrote last October. They noted then, even before Trump’s election, that global policies were expected to cause temperatures to climb 2.7 degrees Celsius (6.9 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. One analysis by Carbon Brief estimated that a second Trump administration would result in an extra 4 billion metric tons of climate pollution, negating all of the emissions savings from the global deployment of clean energy technologies over the past five years — twice over.
Trump also took action to revoke “the electric vehicle mandate,” in keeping with his campaign promise to support autoworkers.
“In other words, you’ll be able to buy the vehicle of your choice,” he said during his inaugural address — even though there is no national mandate requiring the sale of electric vehicles and consumers are free to purchase any vehicle of their liking. The Biden administration did promote the technology by finalizing rules that limit the amount of tailpipe pollution over time so that electric vehicles make up the majority of automobiles sold by 2032. Under Joe Biden, the US also launched a $7,500 tax credit for consumer purchases of EVs manufactured domestically and planned to funnel roughly $7.5 billion toward building charging infrastructure across the country.
“Rolling back incentives to build electric vehicles in the United States is going to cost jobs as well as raise the price of travel,” said Costa Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who served as a senior policy leader in the Biden White House. “Fueling up an electric vehicle costs between one-third and one-half as much as driving on gasoline, not to mention the benefits for reducing air pollution. Ultimately, to lower the price of energy for US consumers, we need to diversify the sources of energy that we’re using and ensure that these are clean, affordable, and reliable.”
Trump signed a single executive order undoing nearly 80 Biden administration initiatives, including rescinding a directive to federal agencies to incorporate environmental justice into their missions. The Biden-era policy protected communities overburdened by pollution and directed agencies to work more closely with them.
That move was part of a broader push that Trump described in his inaugural address as an attempt to create a “color-blind society” by stopping the government from “trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” Klein said the objective was “embarrassing.” Kammen said it was a “huge mistake” to move away from environmental justice priorities.
Trump officially barred new offshore wind leases and will review federal permitting of wind projects, making good on a promise to “end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.” The move is likely to be met with resistance from members of his own party. The top four states for wind generation — Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are solidly red, and unlikely to acquiesce. Even Trump’s pick for Interior secretary, Doug Burgum, refused to disavow wind power during a hearing last week, saying he would pursue an “all of the above” energy strategy.
Many state and local policymakers, including the members of America Is All In, a climate coalition made up of government leaders and businesses from all 50 states, pledged to take up the mantle of climate action in the absence of federal leadership.
“Regardless of the federal government’s actions, climate mayors are not backing down on our commitment to the Paris Agreement,” said Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, in a statement. “Our constituents are looking to us to meet the moment and deliver meaningful solutions.”
2025-01-22 01:11:18
Wildfires are raging across Los Angeles, turning the skies red, destroying homes and businesses, and blanketing the region with smoke and debris. The largest fire is in Pacific Palisades, which has grown to over 23,000 acres and forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate.
Two other major fires have engulfed Los Angeles County: The roughly 14,000-acre Eaton Fire in Altadena and the 799-acre Hurst Fire north of San Fernando, the latter of which has been largely contained. Several more small fires have also broken out throughout Southern California as powerful winds continue to sweep the region. At least 25 people have been killed and 12,000 structures have been destroyed.
Devastating wildfires like these are becoming increasingly common, even in places that have not historically been at risk, with climate change exacerbating the conditions that fuel them.
This is a developing story. Follow here for the latest news, explainers, and analysis.
2025-01-22 01:11:03
On Monday, his first day back in office, President Donald Trump issued a wave of executive orders.
Some are ridiculous, such as an order purporting to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Others are ominous, such as an order seeking to drastically increase the number of federal civil servants who can be fired at will. Many of the orders seek to implement the kind of harsh immigration policies that have always been at the heart of Trump’s political message.
The most alarming of these immigration orders seeks to strip millions of future Americans of their citizenship.
There isn’t even a plausible argument that this order is constitutional. The Constitution is absolutely clear that all people born in the United States and subject to its laws are citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The Supreme Court recognized this principle more than 125 years ago.
Nevertheless, Trump’s order, labeled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” purports to deny citizenship to two classes of Americans. The first is children born to undocumented mothers, whose fathers were not themselves citizens or lawful permanent residents at the time of birth. The second is children whose fathers have similar immigration status, and whose mothers were lawfully but temporarily present in the United States at the time of birth.
Almost immediately after this executive order was released, pro-immigration advocates started naming prominent Americans who might not be citizens if this order were in effect when they were born — including former Vice President Kamala Harris. That said, the order does not apply to current US citizens, and is not retroactive: It only attempts to deprive “persons who are born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order” of citizenship.
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It is likely that immigration advocates will obtain a court order blocking Trump’s executive order soon — a group of civil rights groups, including the ACLU, already filed a lawsuit seeking such an order. And, because the Supreme Court has already ruled that birthright citizenship is the law of the land, any lower court judge hearing that lawsuit should be bound by the Court’s 125-year-old decision.
But the current Supreme Court also has a 6-3 Republican supermajority, which recently, and surprisingly, ruled that the president is allowed to use the powers of his office to commit crimes. So there is always some risk that this Court will ignore settled law and rule in Trump’s favor.
There are difficult questions in US constitutional law. The question of whether the federal government can deny citizenship to nearly anyone born in the United States is not one of them.
The 14th Amendment provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
“All persons” means all persons, including people with two noncitizen parents, or even people with two parents who are undocumented immigrants.
Of course, this amendment does contain one exception to its broad rule. Only babies who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States when they are born are entitled to birthright citizenship.
The word “jurisdiction” refers to an entity’s power to exercise legal authority over that person. A court, for example, has “jurisdiction” over a particular litigant if it has the power to issue binding rulings against that person. Or, as Judge James Ho, an exceedingly conservative Trump appointee to a federal appeals court, wrote in a 2011 op-ed, “a foreign national living in the United States is ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ because he is legally required to obey U.S. law.”
Basically, if someone is present in the US at birth, they are — with just a handful of exceptions that I’ll explain below — subject to the country’s laws. They are therefore under US jurisdiction and, according to the text of the 14th Amendment, have a right to birthright citizenship.
Trump’s executive order posits that many children of immigrants aren’t under US jurisdiction. However, that creates a problem for the government. If Trump’s claim is correct, that would not simply mean that these children are not entitled to birthright citizenship. It would also mean that they would be free to ignore US law, and that it would be unlawful for the government to arrest, detain, or deport them.
In any event, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s position in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which held that a man born in San Francisco to parents of Chinese descent was a citizen. Wong Kim Ark listed three categories of individuals who would not automatically become citizens even if they were born in the United States: “children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state,” children “born of alien enemies in hostile occupation,” and some “children of members of the Indian tribes.”
The third of these three exceptions is no longer relevant: The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 bestowed citizenship on “all noncitizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States.” But the two remaining categories — the children of diplomats and members of foreign occupying armies — both involve people who are not subject to US jurisdiction. Foreign diplomats typically have diplomatic immunity from the laws of the country where they serve, and hostile occupiers are not subject to US law because the entire point of such an occupation is to displace the US government.
Other noncitizens, by contrast, are still required to obey US law while they are present in the United States. So the 14th Amendment provides that their children are US citizens.
It’s notable that Trump’s birthright citizenship order never makes a legal argument justifying the president’s decision to defy an almost universally accepted interpretation of the Constitution that was embraced by the Supreme Court nearly a century ago. Instead, it simply declares that “the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States” (which is true, because the children of diplomats do exist), then lists the categories of US citizens Trump wishes to target.
That said, some of Trump’s allies have previewed the kinds of legal arguments his administration might make to justify this order.
In a 2020 op-ed questioning Harris’s eligibility for the vice presidency, for example, Trump lawyer John Eastman (who is currently facing disbarment proceedings in California) made an argument similar to Chief Justice Melville Fuller’s dissent in Wong Kim Ark.
According to Eastman, the 14th Amendment’s reference to people “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States really means “subject to the complete jurisdiction, not merely a partial jurisdiction such as that which applies to anyone temporarily sojourning in the United States.” Eastman’s op-ed is brief, so he doesn’t fully explain his argument; it’s unclear why he thinks, for example, that temporary visitors to the United States are only partially subject to US law.
But the most obvious problem with Eastman’s argument is that the Constitution does not say “subject to the complete jurisdiction” it simply says “subject to the jurisdiction.”
Similarly, in a 2018 op-ed, former Trump administration official Michael Anton claimed that the 14th Amendment does not apply to people who owe “allegiance” to another country. Though much of Anton’s argument is difficult to parse, he appears to believe that people who have sufficient ties to another country cannot have children who are US citizens at birth.
This argument, however, is precluded by Wong Kim Ark. The US citizen at the heart of that case was born to “persons of Chinese descent, and subjects of the emperor of China.” That is, his parents were found to have allegiance to China. Yet the Supreme Court held that this man was entitled to birthright citizenship nonetheless.