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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25898 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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This is about making democrats fight each other.

This seems like a really sad claim. At least "to counter illegal discrimination" would be a somewhat acceptable excuse for cutting emergency aid for tornado/fire/hurricane/earthquake victims, many of whom of course would be centrist/conservative/griller types because even the most partisan of states still tend to be like 60/40-65/35, it'd at least be for a nominal cause of reducing harm elsewhere even if I disagree that BDS is so harmful that it's worth cutting emergency aid.

But to cut aid to own the libs? That's the reason? Just seems cruel then.

Edit: Oh and just obvious thing, the Dem states could also just be like "nah we don't care about helping out the conservative areas either then" if they felt like being cruel in response and focusing their state level recovery resources on the blue areas. Hopefully they wouldn't do that, but it's very easy for them to just shrug and go "welp it's not enough of an emergency for the feds so that rural area can just deal with it themselves"

Oh and just obvious thing, the Dem states could also just be like "nah we don't care about helping out the conservative areas either then" if they felt like being cruel in response and focusing their state level recovery resources on the blue areas

These areas are usually not blatantly violating federal law.

If the goal is just discrimination, why single out Israel specifically? It’s an odd flex considering that there are other trade partners that would qualify under anti discrimination rules (India, Japan, Korea, Latin America, etc.) but they don’t get the same protections. If I passed a law in North Dakota that said “no money goes to Asian countries,” it’s perfectly fine. If I do the same with South Asia, again, fine. It’s only when North Dakota says “we aren’t buying from Israel,” that anything happens.

If I passed a law in North Dakota that said “no money goes to Asian countries,” it’s perfectly fine.

Is it? The Constitution puts almost all powers of international relations at the federal level. States aren't allowed to engage in treaties or establish their own taxes on goods entering or leaving the country.

Arguably some states do this in practice: a few have somewhat banned certain Chinese companies (TikTok, Huawei), but most of those laws/rules at least claim to be following federal guidance.

States aren't allowed to engage in treaties or establish their own taxes on goods entering or leaving the country.

Yes, but they are allowed to choose how to spend their own money. State governments have the same right not to trade with Israel if they don't want to that you or I do.

Per the Constitution as interpreted by SCOTUS, the right not to do business you don't want to do can be revoked by explicit legislation, but there is no such legislation in this case. In a comedic prequel to the Obamacare litigation, there used to be a law (adopted in response to the Arab boycott of Israel) mandating large multinational companies do business with Israel. Naturally, the mandate was phrased as a tax.

That seems possible as applied to state government expenditures (likely subject to federal rules like the one in question, subject to future court rulings).

We never did get a ruling on California's attempt to boycott several red states, which at least seems related. But in a world in which the court accepts Wickard, I suspect the feds would win both the domestic and foreign state expenditures questions if it makes it to court.

"The Feds" aren't a unitary actor here. The point of Wickard etc. is that Congress can regulate anything as long as it does so as part of a coherent scheme which mostly regulates interstate commerce. If Trump tries to punish states and municipalities which boycott Israel, it will be a statutory interpretation case about whether Congress did or not.

Note that they've removed this already. It appears they've been adding the same anti-BDS language to various grant proposals; I would guess it's a result of pressure from the State Department, since Rubio is known to be strongly anti-BDS.

Do they need the protections?

I can see the benefit of writing every law broadly and neutrally based on unchanging principles, but at the same time there's no practical difference between "any country affected by X (it's just Israel)" and "Israel (because it's the only country affected by X)".

As an example, Google negotiated an exemption from Canada's Online News Act (otherwise it would have to pay some unknown hundreds of millions of dollars to journalists, negotiated individually), and the bill calls out the #1 search engine in Canada instead of naming them explicitly.

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