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I was certain that Michael Bloomberg had not read the Second Amendment, but apparently he has also skipped the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Mayor Bloomberg was on Meet the Press and made this insightful comment:

This is a country that was built by immigrants, this is a country that became a superpower by–because of its immigrant population. And unless we continue to have immigrants, we cannot maintain as a superpower.

And I’ll give you a good example of how you can fix some of the problems in America. Take a look at the big old industrial cities–Detroit, for example. Got a great mayor in Mayor Bing. But the population has left. You got to do something about that. And if I were the federal government, assuming you could wave a magic wand and pull everybody together, you pass a law letting immigrants come in as long as they agree to go to Detroit and live there for five or 10 years, start businesses, take jobs, whatever. You would populate Detroit overnight because half the world wants to come here. We forget, we, we whip ourselves a little bit too much. We still are the world’s greatest democracy. We still have hope for–if you want to have a better life for yourself and your kids, this is where you want to come. And you could use something like immigration policy, at no cost to the federal government, to fix a lot of the problems that we have.

Of course. Grant citizenship by forcing immigrants to live in a certain area and working in certain trades. Nothing wrong with that.

From the Times, an article titled Detroit Census Confirms a Desertion Like No Other:

Laying bare the country’s most startling example of modern urban collapse, census data on Tuesday showed that Detroit’s population had plunged by 25 percent over the last decade. It was dramatic testimony to the crumbling industrial base of the Midwest, black flight to the suburbs and the tenuous future of what was once a thriving metropolis.

It was the largest percentage drop in history for any American city with more than 100,000 residents, apart from the unique situation of New Orleans, where the population dropped by 29 percent afterHurricane Katrina in 2005, said Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College.

The number of people who vanished from Detroit — 237,500 — was bigger than the 140,000 who left New Orleans.

 

Maybe RoboCop can save Detroit?

Looks like the Motor City ain’t doing too well.

If he had wanted to, Mayor Dave Bing could have looked out his 11th-story window, at the Detroit River and the final vestiges of the boomtown he arrived in 44 years ago.

But his eyes were focused on the grim details of the city’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. Page 25: The annual budget is in the hole by $155 million. Page 28: Long-term debt has climbed to $5.7 billion. Bing tapped the 237-page document with his index finger, number after daunting number.

“When I was elected, I thought I knew what was going on, but I got here and found out [that] in the short term, things were way worse than I ever imagined,” Bing said. “Financially. Ethically. From a policy standpoint. We were on the brink of a financial calamity.”

Twenty-one months into the job, that’s where the city remains. With no salvation in sight, Bing, 67, has embarked on a mission few in his position have ever had to take on: Dramatically shrinking a major American metropolis. To do so, Bing has issued an open invitation: Anyone with a proposal, plan, theory – a notion, even – is welcome to try to save his crumbling city.

Shrinking a city? Shrug.

Where’s Rick Moranis? Maybe his shrinking machine from Honey I shrunk the kids may help!

Oh, and wait, the feds are building a $400 light rail project to transport people who have no jobs to businesses that no longer exist. Wonderful!

Bing clapped ‘amen’ to that, but he continues to pursue federal programs that could benefit Detroit. “As much as we can get – always ,” he said.

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood was in Detroit last month to meet with Bing about a $400 million light-rail project, which will be developed downtown with public and private dollars.

On that same corridor, Bing is using money from neighborhood grants and $110 million in federal stimulus money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to knock down abandoned buildings and clean up the area, among other projects.

“He knows what he doesn’t know, and he knows where he needs help,” said HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. “He’s invited us in as a true partner to help him tackle those issues.”

Ilya Shapiro and I authored an op-ed in the Detroit News.

Here is the thrust of the piece:

McDonald thus paints a bright picture for the future of constitutional liberty, and opens the door to reviving a long-ignored but powerful provision of our Constitution. Thomas’ clarion call for a liberty-focused originalism provides a step on which to build in future.

In the annals of Supreme Court history, solo opinions that introduce novel ideas often start a trickle of discussions. These arguments swirl and strengthen, and over time flow into a paradigm shift in constitutional law. Look no further than the monumental significance of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Fergusson, which argued that separate is not equal. Harlan’s lone voice was crucial in starting the Court on a jurisprudential crescendo culminating in Brown v. Board of Education.

Thomas’s opinion in McDonald v. Chicago — even more noteworthy, because he was the decisive fifth vote for the majority opinion rather than a dissenter — has planted a similar seed, paving the way for the Privileges or Immunities Clause to protect our most basic freedoms.

Ilya Shapiro and I authored an op-ed in the Detroit News.

Here is the thrust of the piece:

McDonald thus paints a bright picture for the future of constitutional liberty, and opens the door to reviving a long-ignored but powerful provision of our Constitution. Thomas’ clarion call for a liberty-focused originalism provides a step on which to build in future. In the annals of Supreme Court history, solo opinions that introduce novel ideas often start a trickle of discussions. These arguments swirl and strengthen, and over time flow into a paradigm shift in constitutional law. Look no further than the monumental significance of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Fergusson, which argued that separate is not equal. Harlan’s lone voice was crucial in starting the Court on a jurisprudential crescendo culminating in Brown v. Board of Education. Thomas’s opinion in McDonald v. Chicago — even more noteworthy, because he was the decisive fifth vote for the majority opinion rather than a dissenter — has planted a similar seed, paving the way for the Privileges or Immunities Clause to protect our most basic freedoms.