Quebec's French, America's Constitution
Oh hey! I haven't sent an email in a long while. But I'm back. I'm now on a weekly schedule. Let's go!
This week was pretty chill. I went ice skating on a beautiful sunny day. Got a haircut. All around, pretty good. Hope you're doing well, too.
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➔ Right now, commercial signage in Quebec cannot have any language shown more prominently than French. The Quebec government recently issued a draft regulation that would tilt the balance so that signs must have a super-majority of content in French. CBC News made a good 5-minute explainer video of the change and the challenges it poses.
Lots of people outside Quebec might think that language laws are inherently silly, but as an adult of Bill 101 I can attest: they serve a very good purpose. However, ensuring the predominance of French in public-facing signage has been a mostly-solved problem here for decades. This rule change is clearly an effort to look "tough on English" whether or not there's an actual need or a logical way to enforce the law. Frankly, there's much better things the government can to do bolster and promote French.
➔ On that note: Radio-Canada recently dropped a 52-minute documentary that follows a class of immigrants through intensive government-sponsored French-language courses over the course of six months. (Why six months? The Quebec government now prohibits immigrants from interacting with the government in a language other than French after their first six months here.) So the documentary shows you what life is like for the students, along with their teacher (who, incidentally, has incredible taste in t-shirts). All in all, it's incredibly moving. If you don't speak French, you can watch it with automatically-translated subtitles on YouTube.
Okay, now to return to where I came from...
➔ Ezra Klein had a recent banger about the uneasy coexistence of the electoral coalitions that presently line up behind the Democratic Party, at a time when the tectonic plates of "who votes for Republicans" and "who votes for Democrats" is undergoing an epochal shift.
➔ That said, there is so much campaign coverage right now (and much more on the way) that it can become all-too-easy to lose sight of what Donald Trump's candidacy means for the American republic. History professor Manisha Sinha, an expert in Reconstruction, was on Slate's Amicus podcast recently to discuss the 14th Amendment clause that could remove Trump from the ballot. It's fairly simple, but rarely used: it prohibits someone who engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution from holding office. At a moment when even those who oppose Trump are worried about what the consequences could be if the courts enforce this clause of the Constitution, I found her moral and legal clarity to be refreshing.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Trump v. Anderson on Thursday.
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Have a great week.
