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“The moment we all feared is likely upon us,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) warned after the American drone attack that killed Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani. “An unstable President in way over his head, panicking, with all his experienced advisers having quit, and only the sycophantic amateurs remaining.” The problem, as Murphy sees it, is a lack of “adults in the room” to curb the dangerous, bloodthirsty impulses of an inexperienced and impetuous president. Yet history suggests that the foreign policy professionals Murphy misses are at least as grave a threat to peace.

While running for president in 2000, George W. Bush derided “nation building” and said American foreign policy should be “humble” rather than “arrogant.” As president, Bush brought us the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, countries where thousands of U.S. troops remain 19 and 17 years later, respectively.

While running for president in 2007, Barack Obama rejected the idea that the president has the authority to wage war without congressional authorization whenever he thinks it is in the national interest. “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” he explained. As president, Obama did that very thing in Libya, another ill-advised and mendaciously justified intervention that begat chaotic violence.

A few years before his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump said the U.S. should withdraw immediately from Afghanistan, where “we have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure.” He also worried that “Obama will someday attack Iran in order to show how tough he is.” While running for president, Trump unequivocally condemned the Iraq war and the U.S.-supported toppling of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi. As president, he sent more troops to Afghanistan, became so committed to staying in Iraq that he is threatening the Iraqi government with sanctions for asking the U.S. to leave, and now may be courting war with Iran for reasons similar to the ones he thought would motivate Obama to launch one.

Three men with little or no foreign policy experience entered an office where they were surrounded by experts, and they quickly shed their initial skepticism of military intervention. If you think that skepticism was naive, that was a welcome development. But the consequences suggest otherwise.

The conflict between Trump’s pre-presidential inclinations and the expert advice he received after taking office was clear in the case of Afghanistan and Syria, where the “adults in the room” passionately, and for the most part successfully, resisted his efforts at disengagement. Even in the case of Iran, where it was Trump who decided that killing Soleimani was a good idea, that was one of the options his military advisers presented, apparently in an attempt to manipulate him.

“Top American military officials put the option of killing [Soleimani]—which they viewed as the most extreme response to recent Iranian-led violence in Iraq—on the menu they presented to President Trump,” The New York Times reports. “They didn’t think he would take it. In the wars waged since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable.”

The Times says those military officials were “flabbergasted” by Trump’s choice and “immediately alarmed about the prospect of Iranian retaliatory strikes on American troops in the region.” If so, the president’s “experienced advisers,” the ones Chris Murphy thinks should be restraining him, played a dangerous game that backfired on them.

Experience is not necessarily the same as wisdom. Hillary Clinton, who boasts an impressive résumé that includes eight years as a senator and four as secretary of state, thinks Obama’s intervention in Libya was “smart power at its best,” and she did not publicly acknowledge the folly of the Iraq war, which she voted to authorize, until 11 years after it was launched. The histories of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam dramatically illustrate how smart, knowledgeable people can make catastrophic blunders and lie for years to cover them up.

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton and former Defense Secretary James Mattis, both of whom seem to have resigned because they viewed Trump as insufficiently interventionist and/or excessively skeptical of existing entanglements, surely would count as “experienced advisers.” That does not mean their advice was sound.

Murphy is right that we should worry about a president with little knowledge of the world whose military decisions are driven by anger or domestic political considerations. But it’s not clear to me that such a president poses a bigger danger than the experts who have been disastrously wrong more times than we can count.

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“Ten thousand,” says the New York City cop, when I ask how many people the city’s expecting at the No Hate. No Fear. Solidarity March, an event in protest of a rise in anti-Semitic attacks, primarily against Orthodox Jews, in the New York City area. 

He can’t yet know that an estimated 25,000 will show or that the march, from Foley Square in Lower Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge, will be over capacity from the get-go. An hour before march time and the streets are packed solid, people wrapped in Israeli flags and carrying American flags, wearing Yankee caps and yarmulkes, carrying signs that read NO HATE NO FEAR and babies in bunting to keep out the kind of cold where you expect birds to drop from the sky, the kind of cold in which you don’t normally see sixty-something women chattering outdoors about the HBO series Big Little Lies and men standing on a park bench drinking coffee and calling out, “Hey, you a reporter? He gives good quotes.”

Sure. Why are they here today?

“We’re here because we have to play offense and defense against this growing hate in this country and in this world,” says Ariel Nelson. “That means not just standing by and making sure our synagogues and our institutions are secure, but going out en masse and showing the world that we are not going to tolerate it.”

“It” being the rise in hate crimes against Jews: 229 last year according to city officials, including a pair of gruesome incidents in December, the murder of four people in a Kosher supermarket in Jersey City, and a man with a machete storming a synagogue during a Hanukkah celebration in Monsey, 35 miles north of New York City. The two attacks got a lot of airtime, the others (some seen in a sickening compilation video), not so much. There are reasons to take some of those statistics with a grain of salt. Does Nelson, who works for a news organization, see the media downplaying the attacks?

“Yes,” he says.

Does he have an opinion as to why?

“Jews aren’t important,” he says. “That’s just the way of the world, and it’s unfortunate.”

“I had been under the view that antisemitism was mostly a thing of the past in the post-Holocaust era,” says David Leit. “In recent months and years, my view has changed, and I think that antisemitism now requires a much more robust response. Whereas previously I thought that maybe some groups were overreacting to it, now I tend to agree more with Ariel, that if anything, we’ve been underreacting.”

Which makes it easy, or easier, for people not immediately affected to see the attacks as just a thing happening in New York.

“Pittsburgh isn’t New York,” says Nelson. “Poway isn’t New York.”

“Paris isn’t New York!” says Leit.

“And New York is where you would think it shouldn’t happen,” adds Nelson. “I mean, New York, there’s lots of Jews here, it’s the most pluralistic place on Earth, practically. You would think there would be, if anything, greater ability to get along. And my understanding is that the current New York police statistics [show] that half of the reported hate crimes [in 2019] are against Jews, which is shocking.” 

A drum boom starts from somewhere.

“There can be skepticism about marches, like, ‘We’re all going to get here, and we’re going to chant,’ and does it actually accomplish anything?” says Nelson. “In some respects, that’s a fair criticism. But I think there also does need to be public displays of unity…whether you’re Jewish or not Jewish, whether you’re black or white, whether you’re Muslim or Christian, we should all be here together today, to say, we’re not going to tolerate it.”

The people who are not going to tolerate it include a handful of young people singing a pop song in Hebrew as they walk amidst many thousands toward the bridge. Where are they from? 

“Israel!” say two 18-year-old girls at once. They’re volunteering with the Jewish Agency for Israel, working with Jewish communities in Brooklyn. Have they noticed an escalation in violence in the five months they’ve been here? Yes, they say. 

“Honestly, I think we are better prepared in terms of, we know how it feels like to be under attack, to be alert all the time,” says one. “But I don’t think we have better tools to deal with terror attacks and anti-Semitism.” 

“Now people understand how this situation in Israel is,” says the other. “We experience it in Israel and now it’s starting to be here and people feel it and now they actually will do something about it.”

And then they go on singing, being joyful despite the knowledge that massacre might be coming for them. But then, what are the options?

“I myself this week filled out an application for a gun permit,” says David Katz, who’s running for Congress from New York District 17 in Rockland County, which includes Monsey, where the machete attack occurred and where Katz grew up.

“I was taught to be worried about stuff like this, and then as I got older, I realized, it’s not such a danger. Now it seems like it is a danger,” he says. “There’s more of a nervousness, and for myself––excuse my French––shit seems to be happening and I want to be prepared in the event there’s a much larger conflagration. Does that make sense?”

Yes. During the Monsey attack, one of the Orthodox men picked up a table and attacked the assailant with that, which, granted, was impressive, but a gun would be a little more—

“Right,” says Katz. “There was a celebration for a new Torah within a couple of days after that, and there were Jews with guns presenting weapons. I know there are plenty of people that have already been training with weapons, preparing.”

How big of a shift is it for the Orthodox community to arm themselves? 

“Is the culture changing? That’s a yes,” he says. “Especially in younger people, at least. I think there’s a change in thinking, like, ‘there is a danger and we can’t count on anyone to protect us in the moment.’ Yes, police will come at some point. But in the moment, we are targets.”

For which the targets are sometimes blamed, as in, if Jews had not formed a community in Monsey, or wherever, there would be no friction with those not of the community and thus no opportunity, no incubator per se, for hatred of Jews to grow. Which history tells us, over and over, is untrue. People can crochet hatred out of nothing. How do we fight a hatred that never seems to go away for good, that comes back every generation with a new virulence? With new people ready to embrace hate and justify what they do with it, and a world willing to watch and prevaricate? 

“Do we need to be shot dead in a synagogue for people to pay attention to the fact that our neighbors are being beat up?” asks Bari Weiss on-air with CNN, as she starts walking across the bridge. An opinion page editor at The New York Times and author of the recent book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism (and, full disclosure, a friend), Weiss has written heartbreakingly of the attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she made her bat mitzvah and where, in October 2018, a gunman entered yelling, “Death to all Jews!” and killed 11 people.

Not today, no death today, today is about believing we can make this about life, we have made it across the bridge to Cadman Plaza Park, where a young man enthusiastically approaches my friend and asks if he’s been “tied” yet today. My friend, who’s flown in from Austin, Texas, for the march, says no, and the young man wraps the leather tefillin up his arm, telling us at a rat-a-tat pace how overjoyed he is by the day, that we are all here together, he has my friend say a few words and then asks, “You’re Jewish, yes?” My friend says he’s not, he’s Episcopalian, and the young man smiles and says, “Well, it’s your bar mitzvah” and, after loosening the ties, walks toward the massive Brooklyn War Memorial, with its larger-than-life figures symbolizing victory and family, and on which in a few minutes Weiss will stand before thousands and explain why she is a Jew, and why we are here. She tells us, “We are the lamplighters, we are the ever-dying people that refuses to die. The people of Israel live now and forever, Am Yisrael Chai.”

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A major Trump administration rewrite of the fair housing regulations that govern federal development grants is inching closer to completion.

In late December, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sent Congress a proposed rule that would ask localities receiving federal housing funding to report on their housing market outcomes, and then propose concrete steps for improving housing affordability.

HUD would then use the data it collects to rank and incentivize local jurisdictions. Localities that either have affordable housing, or see housing become more affordable over a five-year time period, would be rewarded with additional grant money and other incentives. The department says it would “focus remedial resources and potential regulatory enforcement actions” against the lowest-performing jurisdictions, who potentially could lose access to HUD grants entirely.

The rule, which has yet to be made public, is a marked change from prior regulations issued by the Obama administration in 2015. Those required grantees to collect voluminous amounts of demographic data and then use that data to craft plans on combating racial segregation and concentrated poverty.

The Trump administration argues those rules were “overly burdensome” in their requirements and “too prescriptive” in their desired outcomes.

In early 2018, it delayed the implementation of the Obama-era regulations. In August of last year, HUD Secretary Ben Carson announced that fair housing rules would be rewritten entirely to encourage local jurisdictions to add housing supply by loosening regulation.

The proposed rule still leaves a lot of details to be sorted out. Its early circulation has already provoked a storm of controversy between those who see free, well-functioning markets as the best guarantor of fair housing, and others who argue for a much more proactive federal response.

HUD’s proposal “incentivizes a race to the top among localities based on housing affordability and availability and then offers a chance to put some teeth behind that,” says Michael Hendrix, the director of state and local policy at the Manhattan Institute.

The proposed rule focuses HUD on the things that really matter when it comes to fair housing, he tells Reason, while also reducing the regulatory burden on local governments.

Other housing advocates are less pleased, arguing the new rule is much too narrow and actually weakens, not strengthens, the federal government’s enforcement powers.

“The proposed rule entirely ignores the essential racial desegregation obligations of fair housing law,” Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told the Washington Post, saying that Carson “is scrapping years of extensive input and intensive work that went into the fair housing rule and essentially reverting to the agency’s previous flawed and failed system.”

The root of this regulatory dispute goes back to the 1968 Fair Housing Act (FHA), which outlawed housing discrimination for a number of protected classes—including race, religion, and disability—and required that HUD programs be administered “in a manner that affirmatively furthers fair housing.”

What exactly is meant by affirmatively furthering fair housing, however, is not defined by the FHA, leaving it up to regulators and the courts to hash out.

For most of the FHA’s history, HUD required communities receiving federal housing money to produce analysis of impediments (AI) reports, which detail obstacles to fair housing.

Those rules were widely considered to be a toothless rubber stamp that did nothing to satisfy the government’s fair housing obligations.

Under the old AI process, for instance, HUD did not give any guidance on what might count as an impediment to fair housing, or what steps localities might take to overcome those impediments. It did not even review the AI reports that localities produced, and did not specify how often they had to be updated.

So in 2015, the Obama administration issued a new rule, called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), which was much more complex in its requirements and much more ambitious in its aims.

The text of the rule says it would empower grant recipients “to foster the diversity and strength of communities by overcoming historic patterns of segregation, reducing racial or ethnic concentrations of poverty, and responding to identified disproportionate housing needs.”

The 2015 rule required local governments to complete lengthy fair housing assessments that included some 92 questions on a huge array of topics, including everything from access to transportation and education to labor market outcomes. Jurisdictions that did not complete these assessments to HUD’s satisfaction were required to do them again.

The 2015 rules “asked too much and asked too little at the same time,” Hendrix says. The number of things jurisdictions were asked to report on saw some cities produce tome-sized AFFH assessments, while other localities struggled to complete them at all.

Philadelphia’s AFFH assessment was over 800 pages long. Los Angeles’ was over 400. Meanwhile, of the 49 jurisdictions that were the first to turn in AFFH assessments between October 2016 and December 2017, 63 percent of them either failed to meet HUDs standards or managed to do so only after preparing subsequent drafts, according to the text of Trump’s proposed AFFH rule.

At the same time, the 2015 rules did too little in that they did not require localities to take any specific actions besides completing the AFFH assessments.

This was part of a deliberate effort to allow local communities to set their own priorities based on their local knowledge. But it ended up making the 2015 rule as defanged as the AI process it was replacing, says Salim Furth, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

“There were no consequences,” he tells Reason. “It was never spelled out in the Obama rule what happened if they don’t like your proposals except you have to do them again. It was like you were going to keep redoing your homework until the professor liked it.”

In January 2018, the Trump administration started to chip away at Obama’s AFFH rule, suspending most localities’ reporting requirements until 2025. Then in August of that year, Carson announced that the administration would be rewriting AFFH completely.

The new rule, he said, would only focus on encouraging jurisdictions to add more housing supply, in contrast to the Obama-era rules that considered housing supply as just one factor among many that needed to be considered when assessing access to fair housing.

“I want to encourage the development of mixed-income multifamily dwellings all over the place,” Carson told the Wall Street Journal, saying, “I would incentivize people who really would like to get a nice juicy government grant” to reform their zoning codes.

For that reason, Carson’s proposed rule asks jurisdictions to narrow their AFFH submissions to reporting on measures of housing affordability and quality, with the idea being that these metrics will provide a quantifiable proxy measurement for exclusionary housing regulations that stand in the way of fair housing.

If housing is cheap citywide, the thinking goes, low- and moderate-income people will have the ability to live in neighborhoods that offer more opportunities.

Localities would also have to list at least three concrete steps they intend to take to further fair housing.

The proposed rule “essentially says do you look like a place where people who want to rent a home can rent one and people who want to build a home can build one, or do you look like a place that is making it really hard to live there through regulation?” notes Furth.

To combat discrimination, the Trump administration’s proposal would also examine if jurisdictions had been the subject of a successful fair housing complaint in the last five years. Those that had would lose access to the incentives HUD would provide to high-performers.

Solomon Greene, a researcher at the Urban Institute and former HUD staffer who helped craft the 2015 AFFH rule, says focusing so narrowly on market outcomes and affordability misses the many ways obstacles to fair housing can present themselves, especially for the classes of people the FHA was designed to protect.

“When talking about affordable housing from a fair housing perspective, you have to look at [what’s] affordable for whom,” Greene tells Reason. “Using a lens that looks at affordability from the perspective of protected classes is absolutely important and seems missing from the proposed rule.”

For example, looking at general affordability in a city—as the new HUD rule proposes—might not tell you whether neighborhoods with good access to handicap-accessible public transportation are actually affordable to disabled people.

By collecting neighborhood-level data on demographics, school quality, transportation access, and job opportunities, says Greene, the Obama-era AFFH assessments were able to give a much fuller picture of what roadblocks there were to protected classes finding adequate affordable housing.

By focusing on affordability in general, he says, the new HUD rule is depriving the department of information it needs to accurately assess if communities are, in fact, furthering fair housing.

Greene also says that HUD was proactive in assisting jurisdictions who had difficulty completing the detailed fair housing assessments required by the Obama-era rule.

Others have made similar comments, saying that the new HUD rule effectively throws in the towel when it comes to fighting housing discrimination.

“Discrimination and segregation will continue unabated when HUD doesn’t provide meaningful fair housing oversight of local governments,” Thomas Silverstein, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told the Post.

Yentel, in comments to Mother Jones, also said that Carson is letting “localities off the hook by explicitly stating there will be no consequences if they keep their restrictive zoning laws.”

The latter criticism is one that Furth is sympathetic to. HUD’s new rule might focus on more appropriate measures of fair housing he says, but it will still largely judge localities on the plans bureaucrats produce, not the actions elected officials actually carry out—a flaw it shares with Obama AFFH rule.

“I don’t see a reason these fictional plans written up by bureaucrats seeking money would be any more real under a Carson rule than they would be under a Castro rule,” says Furth, referencing former HUD Secretary Julian Castro.

Furth says localities should have to show HUD that they’ve actually taken some steps to further fair housing, whatever those steps might be.

There are obvious perils in tying many strings to federal grants. Demanding local governments take specific actions when it comes to land-use planning is a huge intrusion of federal authority into a policy area long held to be the sole domain of cities and states.

There’s also the wider question of what libertarians should make of rules governing federal grant programs that probably shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Hendrix cautions against making the perfect the enemy of the good. So long as these grant programs do exist, they should at least be administered in a way that encourages better, freer housing policy.

“So much of what this new rule points to is a more market-oriented approach to housing, which is what we should all be pushing for,” he says.

The Trump administration’s proposed AFFH rule has yet to be published in the federal register. Once that’s done, the public will have 60 days to submit comment before the rule is finalized.

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