Tea at Trianon: Sanctuary States Should NOT Be Rewarded

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, October 8, 2026

Sanctuary States Should NOT Be Rewarded

From The Enterprise:

An Army sergeant from Dayton has been stationed in Germany for two years. She has not slept in Ohio during that time. On Census Day, the Census Bureau still credits her to Ohio, and in Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992), the Supreme Court said that was fine. Overseas federal employees are assigned to the state that was their usual home, not to the base where they happen to be sleeping. A German tourist standing outside the Ohio Statehouse that same morning is physically in Columbus. Nobody thinks Ohio has earned an extra sliver of a congressman on his account. Presence and belonging come apart. Every census since 1790 has had to pick which one it is counting.
Last month, the Commerce Department published a proposed rule, signed by Secretary Howard Lutnick, rewriting the residence criteria. Proposed section 60.4 would count foreign citizens who also hold US citizenship or a green card, and it marks everyone else holding only foreign citizenship as “Not counted for apportionment.” The rule’s own phrase for the line it draws is “durable permission from the sovereign to settle within the United States.” Aliens whose status is less durable, and less definite in length, than lawful permanent residence fall on the excluded side of that line, along with people here in violation of federal law. Under the proposal, usual residence is the place a person has lawfully spent the most days, as shown by tax records. Comments close October 13, on docket USBC-2026-0628. This is a proposal, not a finished policy. The administration put it through notice and comment in the open, years before the count, rather than issuing a memo in the middle of a census, as Trump attempted in 2020. A 2026 comment file will be the record a court has if the 2030 count is challenged. (Read more.)