RUTHFULLY YOURS

Here’s an issue on which liberals and conservatives agree: policing the mentally ill. The two sides may have arrived at that position through different underlying beliefs, but they got there. Here’s a problem: In Texas, a conservative legislature passed, and a conservative governor just signed, the Sandra Bland Act, a law that sets a high, national bar for policies and procedures in mental health and criminal justice, and progressives haven’t yet noticed just how much this bill advances their cause. In fact, they’re complaining.

That’s not a surprise. Progressives (especially in the Northeast and California) often look down on Texas. It’s not that Texas doesn’t sometimes deserve it. A few recent bills in the state legislature rode one stop too far on the crazy train, using conservative language to describe laws that would have vastly expanded government in the service of dodgy goals.

But on the whole, the laws that Texas passes laws on police reform, limited government, and open records are remarkable and serve as models for “progressive states” like California, whose open-records and police-transparency laws are vastly inferior.

Conservative Texans support law and order, and their expectations are high. This support is deep, so when a cop goes bad, Texans are not forgiving. Brian T. Encinia, the Texas state trooper who was so unnecessarily rude to Sandra Bland, over so little, and who later lied about the encounter in which he arrested her, was told exactly why his performance was unacceptable, charged with perjury, and then unceremoniously sacked. That wasn’t because the media were watching.

It was because that’s how Texas troopers roll.

Bland’s death in a Waller County jail cell, three days after her arrest, was ruled to have been a suicide. Yet nationally, in nearly every debate about policing, activists raise Sandra Bland’s case to demonstrate just how untenable the system is.

Regardless of why or how she was arrested, Bland was incarcerated for three days in conditions wholly inappropriate for her detention. I believe she would be alive today had someone brought her for a psychiatric evaluation after Bland told them, as she was admitted to the jail, that she had recently attempted suicide.

That’s part of what the Sandra Bland Act, signed by Governor Abbott this month, does. It requires managers in jails to determine whether inmates suffer from mental illness, and it diverts those who do to a mental-health facility. The law goes further: It also calls for all Texas peace officers to undergo every two years training in de-escalation, crisis intervention, and means of evaluating whether they are dealing with someone with mental illness. This will ensure that officers have the tools to divert people to treatment before they’re arrested. Finally, the law calls for steps to ensure that jail cells are properly inspected and requires that all jail deaths be investigated independently.

That sounds like a lot of regulation and government — why should conservatives be happy?

Because if it is done right, the law will result in less police involvement in situations with the mentally ill, and fewer mentally ill people will get caught up in the criminal-justice system. This will save taxpayers money. The National Alliance on Mental Illness reckons that jailing a mentally ill person can be three times more expensive than hospitalization. But — and it’s not often we get to say this — that’s not even the best part.

By 1968, voters had tired of the failed Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. Four year later, the 1972 Nixon reelection re-emphasized that a doubled-down McGovern liberalism was even less of a viable agenda.

In that context, in 1974, obsessing on Watergate and a demonized Nixon were wise liberal alternatives to running on a positive left-wing vision, given the growing conservative backlash of the 1970s.

After Watergate and the Ford pardon, Jimmy Carter squeaked to a close victory and a one-term presidency — before the country tired of his strident liberalism poorly cloaked in conservative clothing. Bill Clinton’s third-way centrism eventually was a winning Democratic alternative to regain the presidency — albeit with help from two Ross Perot third-party candidacies. Given these historical reminders, the current efforts at Trump character assassination may be the best — or only — progressive pathway back to political power.

In the last few days, the Democratic party lost its fourth special House election; most of the four were billed in advance as likely negative referenda on the contentious first six months of the Trump presidency. Post facto, the uniformly unwelcomed results were written off as idiosyncratic outliers of no importance.

Shortly before the Georgia election, a hard-left-wing killer attacked the players at a congressional baseball practice, intent on the assassination of Republican legislators, whom he had targeted on his hit list. The shooter was foiled, but not before seriously wounding Steve Scalise, the current Republican majority whip in the House.

The two events in saner times might have prompted introspection about why the Democrats keep losing elections and why a hard-core progressive supporter would seek to assassinate key Republican leaders. Indeed, for a brief moment, there were calls on both sides of the aisle to scale back inflammatory rhetoric that in theory might push such politicized would-be shooters over the edge. One might have hoped that self-reflective Democrats could begin to grasp why voters distrusted them more than they feared Trump.

Such moments quickly vanished. Progressives saw any remedies to identity politics as worse than the disease of electoral defeat. Elizabeth Warren, with her trademark rancor, was once again talking about Republican “blood money” — as if her opponents in the Congress were legislative assassins rather than the recent targets of such. An increasingly addled Hillary Clinton (she had loudly joined the “Resistance”) accused the GOP of becoming the “death party,” reminding the country why progressive fanatics such as James Hodgkinson might think rifle fire is the only answer to conservatives who traffic in blood.

Meanwhile, another day, another Hollywood celebrity dreaming of, or advocating, the assassination of Donald Trump: This time a disturbed Johnny Depp (playing the role of Kathy Griffin or Snoop Dogg) mused out loud about repeating a John Wilkes Booth–style shooting. Since January, left-wing pundits and celebrities have alluded that Trump might be decapitated, stabbed by a mob, shot, punched, hit with a bat, blown up, strung up, and flipped off. Incineration and drowning are about the last modes of Trump mayhem left unsaid.

Barack Obama, amid the assassination chic and the obscenity of key Democrats such as Kamala Harris, Tom Perez, and Kirsten Gillibrand, recently remonstrated about the evils of inequality and the need for more diversity — at $10,000 a minute to largely white, Wall Street audiences, while wining about the ongoing recalibration of his failed Obamacare project. That is what passes for 21st-century progressive community organizing.

Left unsaid was that Obama had virtually destroyed the Democratic party, which during his tenure lost more than 1,000 state and local elections and both the House and the Senate. Obama left a personal legacy of a party agenda that had no popular support, an incoming Republican presidency, a conservative Supreme Court, a tenure to be systematically overturned, and a one-time progressive electoral paradigm that could work only for himself while imploding almost any other candidate foolish enough to try to replicate it.

And progressives oddly loved him for all that.

It is said that Democrats are in an existential crisis because of their obsessions with Donald Trump — suing over the election, trying to subvert the Electoral College, dreaming of impeachment and the 25th Amendment, filing briefs under the emoluments clause of the Constitution, stalling appointments, relying on deep-state insurrectionary bureaucrats, cherry-picking liberal judges for obstructive passes, and going from one conspiracy theory to the next as collusion begat obstruction that begat witness tampering. More outsider advice is for Democrats to focus instead on their agenda.

The positive part of this morning’s Supreme Court order, which narrows the stays lower courts have imposed to block President Trump’s so-called travel ban, is the part you don’t see. Implicit in the Court’s unsigned ruling is a rejection of the anti-Trump presumption adopted by the lower courts. Those tribunals (in the Fourth and Ninth Circuits) essentially based their rulings on the novel premise that Trump’s executive orders should not be considered on their face — i.e., on the terms set forth in the four corners of the travel ban. Rather, they must be seen through the prism of anti-Muslim animus said to radiate from the campaign rhetoric of candidate Trump and his surrogates.

As Justice Clarence Thomas points out in his separate opinion (joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch), when the Court reviews a stay, it is essentially assessing whether lower-court rulings will be ultimately reversed on the merits. There would be no reason for the Supreme Court to narrow the lower-court stays of the travel ban if the justices were of a mind to concur in the lower courts’ reasoning.

The short per curiam opinion does not delve into the most controversial aspect of the travel-ban litigation to date, namely: whether there ought to be what I’ve called a new “jurisprudence of Trump,” in which this president’s orders and actions are judged differently than would the same orders and actions if carried out by other presidents. Still, it seems likely after today that a majority of the justices would resolve that issue in the president’s favor. That is worth celebrating.

So why not celebrate?

Well, it seems highly unlikely that the Court’s left-wing bloc (Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) is averse to a jurisprudence of Trump — indeed, Justice Ginsburg was stunningly intemperate and inappropriate in her pre-election remarks about the GOP nominee. So the question is: Why did they go along with today’s ruling?

For the same reason that caused Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch to file a partial dissent: This ruling is unworkable and actually doesn’t much narrow the lower-court stays.

Let’s try to keep it simple here. The lower courts granted standing to challenge the travel ban to American persons and entities that had special relationships with aliens outside the United States. Ostensibly, the lower courts claimed that the rights of these Americans were harmed by the travel ban’s exclusion of aliens — specifically, aliens who a) are close relatives whose exclusion would deny family reunification to an American; or b) are scholars whose exclusion would deprive their contributions to American universities that had extended offers to them. In effect, however, the lower courts were vicariously granting American legal rights to aliens outside the United States, despite the judges’ grudging admission that the aliens technically had no such rights.