Puerto Rico Deserves Statehood
Their current status is bad (bunny).
Hey everyone. I have a fun Jackal this week that gets into the nuances of - what else - the Jones Act and Puerto Rico. But I’ll also have a couple brief notes on Pam Bondi’s crash out in front of Congress and the SAVE Act.
Are you really about to write a thing about trade policy between the continental United States and one of its territories?
Sort of. I actually want to start off with what prompted this Jackal: Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. I thought it was amazing. You can watch it yourself:
From purely a theatrical standpoint, I think it was the best halftime show…ever. The dancing and set pieces were more akin to a Broadway play than a Super Bowl. From a performance standpoint, I think it obviously falls behind Prince’s 2007 show (which I’m not sure anyone will top), and a few others. But overall, it was a lot of fun and entertaining.
And then we have to talk about the conservative safe space that was created because Bad Bunny sings in his native Spanish: The TPUSA alternative halftime show, featuring Kid Rock. I have to say, nothing captures our current moment better than a group that bills itself as a “Christian” organization promoting a guy with lyrics like this:
Now some people say my mind's blown
I'm coolin' like a snow cone
On my cell phone, I'm paid, G
Can't call me, just page me (Daddy, yeah)
Young ladies, young ladies
I like 'em underage, see
Some say that's statutory
But I say it's mandatory
Mr. Rock certainly fits in with the current Administration!
The Safe Space Show™ topped out at about 6 million viewers, which counts bot-views in its total. I would put the real viewership at around 3 million. In contrast, 128 million people watched Bad Bunny perform.1 Sad!
Maybe I am biased about the halftime show because I genuinely love Bad Bunny. My eldest daughter asks us to play “Weltita” on an almost daily basis, and the rest of his newest album is fantastic. It was one of my five favorites from last year, along with the albums from Geese, Rosalia, Nourished by Time, and Dijon.2
Bad Bunny has been around for a while, but I think his previous album, Un Verano Sin Ti, shot him skyward in terms of popularity. It is really great, and has a more straightforward reggaeton sound, whereas his latest album, Debi Tirar Mas Fotos, leans heavily into the classic sounds of Puerto Rican music. Bad Bunny loves where he’s from and you can hear it in his songs.
I also love Puerto Rico, and I hope you can hear it when you read this Jackal. I have exactly one photo of it from the last time I was there in 2007:
The photo is from the pre-iPhone years, which explains why it sucks. But I chose it because aside from maybe one or two quirks, this is a street that could easily be mistaken for a beach town in Florida. Puerto Rico is a thoroughly American place and it deserves statehood.
Belief in Puerto Rican statehood is actually a bipartisan affair. It is weird to think about it this way, but we were actually a lot closer to statehood for Puerto Rico in the 1940s than we are today. When Democrats first inserted it into their Party Platform in 1940, it seemed like an inevitability.
Republicans followed suit in 1964, and support for Puerto Rican statehood appeared in every GOP Party Platform up until 2020 (when the Platform essentially said they just wanted to reëlect Donald Trump). So, throughout the 20th Century, support for Puerto Rican statehood was not at all controversial and even Republicans used the forceful language of advocacy:
Puerto Rico has been a territory of the United States since 1898. The Republican Party vigorously supports the right of the United States citizens of Puerto Rico to be admitted into the Union as a fully sovereign State after they freely so determine. Therefore, we support the establishment of a presidential task force to prepare the necessary legislation to ensure that the people of Puerto Rico have the opportunity to exercise at the earliest possible date their right to apply for admission into the Union.
That’s from the GOP Platform of 1988, when George H.W. Bush ran for president following Ronald Reagan’s two terms. That was a GOP infinitely more welcoming to immigrants than its current iteration, so it is unsurprising that it sounds so different. But Puerto Ricans aren’t immigrants; they are Americans. And their lack of statehood has become a form of oppression.
Current U.S. policies are detrimental not only to Puerto Rico but also non-continental U.S. states like Hawaii. Specifically, the Jones Act is a 100 year-old law that artificially increases prices on all goods coming from places like Hawaii (which produces large amounts of beef that we eat here on the mainland) and Puerto Rico.
So, statehood would help Puerto Rico a lot and give them access to all the benefits that come with being admitted to the Union, but the Jones Act - a law that results in higher shipping costs - should be repealed yesterday.
The thing about Puerto Rican statehood that jumps out at me the most is that admitting it into the Union would allow us to acknowledge how Spanish America is, and how it is intertwined with our history.
There is a video from a few years back of a guy in a Nevada airport yelling at another dude for speaking Spanish. The irony of telling someone to speak English while sitting in a state with a Spanish name (“snowy”) was apparently lost on him. But that is something that could apply to a whole host of states: Colorado, California, Montana, Nevada, and Florida all get their names directly from Spanish. Another two, Texas and Arizona, are based on Spanish interpretations of Native American words. And then there’s New Mexico, whose name actually predates regular Mexico by about 200 years.
Before large parts of the southern and western U.S. became America, they were actually Spain (or Mexico), and we are a better country for it. There was an old series put together by Andrew Sullivan back in the blogging days called, “America has no idea how black it is,” where he would detail all sorts of factoids lost to history. For example, the banjo - a mainstay of “white” music - has its origins in Africa, and that’s before you even get to things like Rock and Roll.
A similar point exists about America’s Spanish origins. There are places here that speak Spanish now because they always have. Places like Laredo, Roma, and San Ygnacio in Texas are speaking Spanish now and were speaking it before the United States was even a country. In the same way that there is no America without England or France, there is no America without Spain, and Puerto Rico fits neatly into our weird, melting pot of a story.
Pam Bondi crashes out.
So, Pam Bondi’s hearing this week in front of the House went poorly. I’m not sure what her goal was, but if it was becoming a meme then she succeeded. She bemoaned the current investigation into Epstein because the Dow is over 50,000, which I guess is infinitely more important:
As of this writing, the Dow Jones is now below 50,000, which is funny but besides the point.
To answer Bondi’s question - why are the Democrats only now interested in Epstein - I think there are a few points to be made:
The #MeToo movement completely upended the way America now treats sexual assault, especially when it is done by men in power. This probably explains why Jeffrey Epstein was conversing with Steve Bannon about how to push back on the movement as a whole.
That environment is what eventually leads to Epstein’s second indictment. Lots of people missed it, but back then we had our first mini-Epstein scandal and it was highlighted by Democrats, who demanded Alex Acosta’s resignation (Acosta famously gave Epstein his first sweetheart deal and was working in the Trump Administration).
Ghislaine Maxwell is indicted after Epstein, and because her trial was ongoing, DOJ could not speak about the case and none of the records could be released. The first set of Epstein material that we got - things like flight records - came out during public testimony in Maxwell’s trial and during the Biden Administration. We started getting these more recent releases because Maxwell exhausted her appeals last summer, effectively ending her case.
This is the most important: The Democrats are very much interested in this case because the Trump Administration’s handling of it is a scandal all on its own. Bondi is the one who got into office and said, “The Epstein Files are on my desk,” only to completely shut down any subsequent investigation in July 2025. It would be pretty normal and routine for indictments of alleged co-conspirators to follow after Maxwell’s conviction, but the Trump Administration pumped the brakes.
Democrats want to find out why because it is politically advantageous for them to do so, but also because Trump himself is acting guilty. And here is the thing I’ve learned about Trump after watching him for 11 years: When he sounds guilty, he is guilty. He spent years trying to cover up the Russia scandal because he knew his Campaign did something wrong; he isn’t trying to shut down the Epstein scandal because it makes Les Wexner look bad.
Democrats should support the SAVE Act for trolling purposes.
So, the House passed the SAVE Act this week, and now it heads to the Senate. I’ll say off the bat that it’s a ridiculous piece of legislation seeking to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. Because the GOP as a whole now has to pretend that Trump’s fantasies about the 2020 Election are real, they are passing a nationwide Voter ID bill. Cool.
I have long said that Republicans in Congress - who all know Joe Biden won the 2020 Election - are subservient to the base of the GOP (which believes Trump) to their own detriment.
The SAVE Act has to pass the Senate to become law, but it will not get the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster. Trump is pushing for Republicans to eliminate the filibuster to pass the law, and I can guarantee you they will not because the SAVE Act hurts Republicans more than Democrats.
The SAVE Act requires you to present proof of citizenship when registering to vote, which means you need a driver’s license and either a passport or birth certificate that matches your driver’s license. And all of it has to be presented in person. That will disproportionately affect rural voters, who often have to drive hours in order to complete their voter registration. Guess who rural voters tend to vote for?
More importantly, the GOP is also now the Party of low-propensity voters, i.e., ones that do not pay close attention to politics. This is where Trump has lost the most support since he took office, but suffice it to say this group does not keep track of their birth certificates and they certainly do not have passports.
If the SAVE Act had been law in 2024, Democrats would have easily won:
Pennsylvania
Wisconsin
Michigan
And they likely would have won Arizona and Georgia. Republicans would probably have done a little better in Virginia, but not enough to flip the state. The 2024 electoral map with the SAVE Act looks like this:
So, you can see why Republicans in the Senate are hesitant to break the filibuster for a law that doesn’t help them. Of course, the GOP base believes that once this law is passed, the non-citizens who magically propelled Democrats to a win in 2020 (but not 2024, where they forgot to vote against the guy who was going to deport all of them), will fall off voters rolls and the GOP will dominate even in states like California.
But here’s the thing: Non-citizen voting is so rare it is nearly accurate to say it never happens at all. And I don’t even have to cite to some far-left source to make that point; I can cite to the Trump Administration.
A lot of people missed this, but after Trump won in 2024, Republicans across the country embarked on a quest to find non-citizen voters and prosecute them. They quietly released their findings last month and found that non-citizen voter fraud - if it even happens at all - is exceedingly rare:
As president, Mr. Trump has pushed his administration to address the alleged crimes, including prompting many states to upload tens of millions of voter records through a federal immigration verification tool run out of the Department of Homeland Security.
But with the review underway, the results so far indicate there is no evidence of widespread fraud, according to interviews with government officials and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
Out of 49.5 million voter registrations that have been checked, the department referred around 10,000 cases to Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation of noncitizenship, or roughly .02 percent of the names processed, according to Matthew Tragesser, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the D.H.S. agency that oversees the program. A Justice Department spokeswoman also said the administration believed around 10,000 registered noncitizen voters had been found.
And even what they’re finding in their reviews seems to be an overestimation:
The verification tool has mistakenly flagged some people who appear to actually be citizens, according to some local election officials.
In Charlotte County, Fla., for instance, the elections supervisor Leah Valenti, an appointee of Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor, said she found that just 15 out of 176,000 names she uploaded to D.H.S. came back as noncitizens. Of those, she found that three were people mistakenly added to the rolls who never intended to register to vote; they have since been removed. Two others already sent in documentation to prove their naturalized citizenship, she said.
“We didn’t get a mass onslaught of people,” said Ms. Valenti, who is a proponent of using the D.H.S. system to verify voters’ eligibility. “We have clean voter rolls.”
Mr. Tragesser said the program was “doing exactly what it is supposed to do — providing states with an easy-to-use tool to stop aliens from hijacking our elections.”
The thing is, verification of citizenship already happens when you register to vote. When states get your driver’s license number and proof of residence, that information is cross-checked with a national database (thanks to a little bill called the Help America Vote Act, passed by Dubya) that includes your Social Security number. If the database shows that you do not have a Social Security number or that your Social Security number is being used by someone living somewhere else, your registration is caput (and, in rare instances, you are prosecuted).
The law is a solution in search of a problem, and it provides a solution that will weaken Republicans going forward. It ain’t passing the Senate.
Guys, I forgot that it is President’s Day weekend. I will try to get a Jackal to you next week but we might be in vacay mode. See you soon.
He is obviously the worst, but Nick Fuentes’s rant about how bad the TPUSA show was is good schadenfreude.