Alluding to the title of Thomas Frank’s book on Kansas, Michael Barone devotes his weekly column to the question on the minds of many thinking people: “What’s the matter with Minnesota?” He arrives at a conclusion that we don’t see much of in the mainstream press, here or elewhere. I’m not sure what he’s referring to in his final paragraph with respect to legal theories occasionally advanced by the Trump administration. However, the “open defiance of the Constitution’s supremacy clause” that he cites applies in spades to our state and local authorities. He writes:
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Minnesota liberals like to argue that Somalis have contributed much to Minnesota, but aside from their contribution to racial diversity statistics, they find it hard to come up with specifics. Actual data are not encouraging, showing that even after 10 years in Minnesota, three-quarters of Somali households receive Medicaid, half receive food stamps, and one-quarter receive government cash. Only about half are proficient in English.
These numbers compare unfavorably with those of Hmong refugees who started arriving in Minnesota after the Vietnam War. After five decades, Hmong Minnesotans match state average incomes and home ownership rates, nearly match average high school graduation rates, and have no known involvement in massive welfare fraud.
Somalis, after three decades in Minnesota, have made little progress on those dimensions. A low-trust, low-conscientiousness culture has proved to be stubbornly persistent, and, unlike the Minnesota liberals who helped the Hmong fit in, the last generation of Minnesota liberals has done little to move Somalis away from a dysfunctional culture that they brought from their embattled and unproductive homeland and from an adversarial attitude to the larger American society.
The social connectedness of Minnesota liberals themselves has not disappeared. On the contrary, the network of volunteers monitoring and attempting to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation efforts, described vividly in The Wall Street Journal, is a prime example — and, as the death of Renee Good on Jan. 7 showed, a tragic one.
It can be seen as an example of organized civil disobedience, only its participants seem to lack any sense that, by trying to obstruct federal law enforcement, they are doing anything morally questionable or potentially felonious. As Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have made it clear, they refuse to enforce federal immigration law and want to prevent the federal government from doing so.
The state and city lawsuits seeking to block federal enforcement, in open defiance of the Constitution’s supremacy clause, stand out among the many absurd legal theories advanced by both the Trump administration’s opponents and, at times, the administration itself. This posture is not merely wrongheaded but reckless. It places Walz and Frey in the moral tradition of segregationist governors such as George Wallace (D-Ala.) and Ross Barnett (D-Miss.), urging resistance to lawful federal authority, a kind of incitement that, as recent events have shown, can turn deadly for participants and bystanders alike.
See the whole thing here.
