STORY OF THE WEEK: President Trump’s use of an executive order to try to eliminate birthright citizenship — a right enshrined in the Constitution not long after the Civil War — shows how we suddenly find ourselves in a new and different political era, one with a lot of uncertainty about the long-term fallout.

Attorney General Peter Neronha is among more than 20 attorneys general challenging the attempt to undo birthright citizenship. “Despite what he may say to the contrary, the president cannot unilaterally re-write the Constitution,” Neronha said in a statement. For now, a court has blocked Trump’s move, but it was just one among a fusillade of executive orders on topics ranging from a hardline approach on immigration, to an expedited schedule for releasing federal documents about the assassinations that rocked the 1960s.

The effect was almost immediate. Immigrants and their advocates are anxious. Democrats are alarmed. Trump supporters are delighted. There was also Trump’s pardon of roughly 1,500 people convicted of assaulting police and other crimes related to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021 — a move, as the BBC reported, that “erased the work of the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history,” even if it allows the president to amplify his own alternate history.

As Trump and his administration try to impose their stamp on the federal government with a breakneck pace, how will the U.S. be different by the end of his presidency? As Ezra Klein notes, Trump’s return comes amid uncertainty posed by other big changes — the maturing of AI, the warming of the planet, and the global decline of fertility. Elsewhere, Scott Lehigh makes the point that Trump’s victory last year required support well beyond his MAGA base, meaning that “when his presidency moves into a phase where Congress can’t sidestep accountability, the road ahead is likely to get both steeper and rockier, GOP congressional control notwithstanding.”  

2. IMMIGRATION FALLOUT: Gov. Dan McKee and Providence Mayor Brett Smiley are sharing a similar message about their approach to immigrants without legal status in Rhode Island: State Police and Providence police, respectively, will continue working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on criminal cases, but the state and the city will not otherwise seek to round up or expel immigrants without legal status. “President Trump should take a playbook out of President Reagan’s playbook and actually create an amnesty program to help some of these people …. they’re good people for our state,” McKee told me during an interview this week. “Give them a path to citizenship.” In Rhode Island’s capital city, “Mayor Smiley has affirmed that the Providence Police Department will not and should not be immigration officers,” spokesman Josh Estrella told The Public’s Radio. “The City has not and will not proactively collaborate with ICE to provide information and will not change this policy.”

3. MORE MCKEE: Gov. McKee has had a sometimes-testy relationship with reporters in Rhode Island and he’s shown less interest than his predecessors in doing long-form interviews. But when McKee, 73, returned as a guest on Political Roundtable last week for the first time since May 2023, he was affable and unbothered by my line of questions. Here are some highlights from my discussion with the governor.

• On his less-than-robust approval rating: “Rhode Island has never really had governors that have polled well.” McKee said he plans to announce his re-election in the “near future.”

• Asked about why warnings about the Washington Bridge going back to 2009 — as reported by Patrick Anderson in April — didn’t get more attention, McKee said, “I think that’s what we’re trying to find out,” although he mostly stuck to his message about moving forward after inheriting a broken bridge. “It’s difficult to tell,” he said about whether the western bridge could have been saved, at lower cost, if action had come sooner. 

• Can the state make more headway against its structural deficit by attempting to raise state revenue to the level of state expenditures? As he is wont to do, McKee pointed to his 2030 plan and when asked for specifics, cited various efforts to improve the economy — apprentice programs, boosting scholarships and investing in such new sectors as the life sciences and cyber-security.   

4. BAROMETER: U.S. Sen. Jack Reed has generally polled as Rhode Island’s best-approved elected official for years. So it’s worth noting both the tone and specific words of the man once dubbed “the E.F. Hutton senator” as Donald Trump begins his second term at the White House. Reed’s statement on Trump’s inauguration was congratulatory and mostly diplomatic, expressing hope that 47 will muster “a stronger commitment to upholding and defending our Constitution.” Reed didn’t mince words on the J6 pardons: “Trump’s pardon of these offenders is an insult to law enforcement, the rule of law, and our democracy. With these pardons, Donald Trump is sending a dog whistle to other extremists that political violence is okay as long as it is done under the banner of Trump. The president has the power to pardon, but he can’t erase this historic stain on his record or whitewash history.” Nor did Reed, a West Point grad and former Army Ranger, hold back in his opening statement during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Pete Hegseth, the nominee for defense secretary, asserting that he lacks the character and composure for the position.

5. SPEAKING OF NOMINEES: U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s vote on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s controversial nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is a subject of growing interest. On Jan. 13, I emailed Whitehouse’s office to ask if he was a definite ‘no’ on the vote — and I still haven’t heard back. Now, Ted Nesi flagged Brown alum Josh Marshall’s piece describing Democrats worrying that Whitehouse may support Kennedy, due to a friendship going back to law school.  

6. BRIDGE TO THE FUTURE: State officials announced plans this week for a limited relaunch of the state’s health benefits website, following the cyber-breach in December. Meanwhile, Alexander Castro at the Rhode Island Current reported that extensive details about the mechanics of the site were posted online for months, until he began asking questions.

7. IMMIGRANTS AND THE ECONOMY: “Immigrants — they get the job done,” goes the line in “Hamilton.” That’s true throughout America’s economy — and according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, immigrants without legal status paid almost $100 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022. Back in 1996, I reported for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette how Jamaican migrants played a crucial role in harvesting the apple crop in New England — a practice that began when the American labor pool shrank during World War II. “The work is extremely hard — harder than most Americans want to work for the pay," Jay Marshall, owner of Marshall Farm in Fitchburg, told me. “I can't explain how much you hurt at the end of the day." More recently, The Public’s Radio documented how migrant teens work in the seafood processing industry in New Bedford. In a guest piece for this column last December, Dr. Pablo Rodriguez wrote that America’s economy needs more, not fewer immigrants to prosper: “Our fertility rate has fallen below replacement level, and without an influx of young people, we will not be able to keep up with the needs of an aging population. According to FWD.us projections, the U.S. should double immigration levels to remain competitive and keep fiscal programs like Social Security strong. International migrants were the sole source of growth in the U.S. working-age population in 2021 and 2022.” 

8. HEALTH: A combination of Covid, the flu and norovirus are straining local hospitals, as my colleague Olivia Ebertz reports.

9. HOUSING: The state’s new secretary of housing, Deborah Goddard, told lawmakers this week that she expects the long-delayed palette shelter at ECHO Village to open within a few weeks. From my colleague Nina Sparling’s report: “The reality is that we are in this situation because year after year, a number of things have gone wrong,” said state Sen. Jake Bissaillon (D-Providence), chair of the Housing and Municipal Government Committee. A few years into Rhode Island’s stepped-up effort to confront its housing crisis — and even after Stefan Pryor’s tenure as housing secretary — Goddard said the state’s housing bureaucracy needs to be streamlined: “There are a number of players, and this is critical to understanding how we all mesh and sometimes don’t mesh.” … In related news, House Speaker Joe Shekarchi has introduced a bill meant to close gaps in emergency housing.

10. ON THE MAP: Andrew Middleton was using computers to make maps in Oakland when he heard the buzz about the Map Center, a longstanding Providence business, and how proprietor Andy Nosal was looking to pass it to someone else. After a handshake deal, Middletown said, “Yeah, totally. I’m going to, I’m going to move to Rhode Island. I’m going to do this thing. While secretly completely dissolving inside, I proceeded to have like a four-month-long midlife crisis about whether I wanted to move across the country to own a not profitable map store in, forgive me, I now know it’s a lovely place, but you know, on the other side of the, I’m going to move to Pawtu-  to where?” Things worked out well, though, and Middleton is leading the quirky map store into the future at its current location in Pawtucket. Give a listen to the audio version of the full story from my colleague James Baumgartner.

11. OPIOIDS: Apropos a new Purdue Pharma/Sackler settlement, Phil Eil makes the case that since the scale of the opioid epidemic is so vast and so damaging treatment should be free. For a deeper understanding of this issue and how we got here, I heartily recommend both Phil’s book and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Sackler history, Empire of Pain.

12. CELEBRATED CITY: Former Mayor Joseph R. Paolino Jr., who owns a considerable amount of downtown Providence real estate, is out with a new plan to beautify the area by significantly boosting the tree canopy, among other improvements. 

13. TAKING OFF: T.F. Green International touts itself as the fastest-growing airport hub in New England. Via news release: “December 2024 proved a landmark month, marking the airport’s best performance since 1997 with 27.3% growth compared to the year before, propelling it past the 4 million passenger milestone for the year, which is even more than before the pandemic in 2019. Based on FAA data for the other hub airports in the region, PVD is the fastest-growing hub airport in New England for 2024, and also offers the most per capita destinations to Rhode Islanders, with 34.7 routes per million population.”

14. HOT AIR: Former Gov. Don Carcieri often touted the coast off Rhode Island as the Saudi Arabia of wind, so the state’s pioneering role in the offshore wind industry gives it a considerable stake in President Trump’s vow to stop additional wind farms. (“Keep it Wild” signs posted by wind farm opponents — a mix of conservatives and shorefront property owners — can be seen around the state.) But as lawyer Drew Minciewicz of Black Point Maritime Law tells my colleague Ben Berke, the outlook is less clear locally than Trump may suggest: “Vineyard Wind and Revolution Wind and SouthCoast Wind got their construction and operations plans approved right on the twilight of the last administration on Friday, so they have permits. Now they have something concrete from the federal government. And so that’s where an executive order can’t just waive a permit, can’t just waive a regulation. For them to rescind a permit — for them to rescind the construction and operations plan — there is a detailed process and there has to be a rationale. The facts have to support the decisions that they’re making. If you’re a holder of one of these permits, you will challenge that at every step of the way, and you’re allowed to throughout the process, and it will be a drawn out fight if the Trump administration does try to remove permits.”

15. FLOWER POWER: Via Matthew Lawrence: “Neighborhoods in five Rhode Island cities will be brighter this year, as Bloom Rhode Island gives away grants of up to $500 each to local gardeners in Providence, East Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Woonsocket. These mini-grants are open to any group of three or more people looking to plant and maintain decorative plants in publicly visible spaces such as sidewalks and parklets. Applications are available at BloomRhodeIsland.org/grants. In 2024, Bloom Rhode Island gave away $135,000 in grants to 27 local nonprofits and fiscally-sponsored gardening groups. Projects included a cutting flower garden at a food pantry, decorative plantings outside a senior center and the redesign of two public library’s lawns.”

16. KICKER: Presidents come, presidents go, but Rhode Island’s usefulness as a measuring unit for icebergs has some serious staying power, even amid — or perhaps because of — global warming.