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Good question, Ajit Pai.The context of history is illuminating here.When the colonies that would later become the original States declared independence, they did not do so as a single, unified nation broken up into individual provinces or sub-units.Each of these States viewed themselves as little independent nation-states, like Germany or Denmark. People didn’t see themselves as Americans, or United States citizens. They saw themselves as New Yorkers or Rhode Islanders or Virginians. These individual States governed themselves, had their own laws, customs, traditions, interests, and positions. And, thus, they had their own state-wide court systems.The idea of a confederation, or loose coalition of individual nation-states, was a well-established political theory at the time. Enlightenment thinkers had written extensively about the topic, and there were plenty of historical examples.That’s why the first governing document that established an overarching central government to govern the coalition matters was called the Articles of Confederation. The Continental Congress, established by those Articles, was incredibly weak and essentially useless. Nothing could be done without unanimous consent of all 13 member states. Taxes could not be levied; the Continental government could request money from the states, but it was optional for the States to pay in.This quickly fell apart as the States started squabbling with each other, starting economic trade wars, levying tariffs against each other, even refusing to honor treaties negotiated by the confederated Continental government.The final straw came with something called Shays’ Rebellion.The Continental Congress was just about flat broke by 1786. The Continental government had shouldered most of the burden of the Revolutionary War, including paying Continental soldiers who had volunteered with the promise of back pay once the new country was up and running. If the government went broke, that meant these vets would stop getting paid.Daniel Shays, a veteran who had been at Valley Forge in the winter of 1776, was particularly pissed at the idea that he wouldn’t get his dues, so he gathered up several thousand disgruntled and disillusioned vets with the intent to march on the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts, take the guns there, and go give the Continental government a piece of his mind.Ultimately, the rebellion was put down, but through essentially no help of the Continental Congress, which was about powerless to so much as send military personnel to assist. It became abundantly clear that the Articles were just no longer effective enough to keep these fractious nation-states together.The Continental Congress convened a special session for the purpose of revising the Articles, and ultimately Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and a few others were able to successfully pull a bait-and-switch to draft an entirely new form of government rather than just tweak the Articles.That new form of government would be a federation. Not just a confederation. The idea of a federal system was similar to a confederated system, but with a stronger centralized government, and rather than individual nation-states in a loose mutual coalition, they were sub-units of the centralized federated government.This idea was largely untested in the world and the political theory behind it was pretty new.And initially, it was met with intense skepticism. These guys had just fought a war that ended barely ten years prior over the whole idea of self-governance and popular sovereignty. This felt a lot like going back to monarchy.So, they weakened the federal idea a bit. Madison had the brilliant idea of splitting up the power at the federal level a lot and giving the individuals States a lot of influence in that federal government. He proposed a tricameral branch system with a bicameral legislative body that gave both popular representation (the House of Representatives,) and State interest representation (the Senate, whereby every State got the same equal representation, sent by the individual state legislatures.)This new federal system would be one of carefully enumerated powers. The supporters of the new proposed system argued that by only giving the federal government a very limited set of abilities to do certain, very specific things, it would limit the federal government’s ability to infringe on the self-government of the individual States. The idea was to give the federal central government juuuuuust enough power to hold the fractious states together and solve inter-state disputes, but provide the maximum amount of individual self-governance to each State.And that’s where the Federal judiciary came in. The Federal courts are only empowered by the Constitution to hear (have subject-matter jurisdiction over) two kinds of cases:Federal questions, andInter-state questions (disputes between residents of two different states).Cases that involve interpretations of federal laws, treaties, regulations, etc. are “federal questions,” and the federal judiciary is the appropriate place to hear those.Inter-state questions, such as fights between two states, or the residents of two states, were another place where having a neutral arbiter was important. After all, if a resident of Rhode Island sued a resident of North Carolina, whose court should hear the case? If in Rhode Island, wouldn’t the court be biased to its own resident? The same would be true of North Carolina. The federal court would be an unbiased place where both residents could get a fair hearing on the matter.Today, we call this diversity jurisdiction.The rest of all of the judicial matters would be left up to the individual States.Not only that, but the Constitution substantially limited how cases could reach the federal court system, particularly the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court would only have appellate jurisdiction over most matters. You would have to start a case somewhere that was not the Supreme Court of the United States, except for a few things involving cases at admiralty (occurring in the waters of the United States,) or diplomatic matters.This is why the Supreme Court of the United States (as well as the federal judiciary that operates under it) today still refuses to hear cases that were decided on state law grounds. They will only pick up a case if it involves a conflict between the federal government and a state government that cannot be resolved at the state level (such as a state law that conflicts with the federal Constitution.)And if you think that’s interesting, consider as well that at the time, there were two entirely different court systems at both the federal and state levels! There was the Court of Law and the Court of Equity, a holdover from the English court system.The Court of Law dealt with interpretation of the laws of the jurisdiction (in England, the laws of the King). You could only receive money damages, and you had to plead a very specific, narrow set of facts that entitled you to receive those money damages.If your case didn’t fit those facts or you wanted something other than money (like say, your house back), back in England, you used to be able to take it to the King. Eventually the kingdom got pretty big, and the king got pretty busy, so he appointed a Chancellor, who would hear those cases for him. And eventually the kingdom got even bigger and the Chancellor got too busy, so he hired some folks to help him out and it became the Court of Chancery, also known as the Court of Equity, because it could only hand out equitable relief and not money damages.The colonies, all being English colonies, kept this same system, and the new federal government, also being a product of this system of thinking, also kept it. It wasn’t until the 1930’s with the promulgation of the Rules of Civil Procedure and a new judiciary act that these two court systems were merged into a single court system.This still has implications on how we handle certain kinds of proceedings and relief.The more you know.

I’m assuming that you mean: did American English borrow words from Native languages for things that were not unique to North America and Native cultures? Because we borrowed a lot of words for animals that were found only in North America (possum, raccoon, skunk, chipmunk, sockeye, chinook, moose—OK, moose turned out to be the same as European elk, while what Americans call elk is a different animal, also known by the Native name wapiti) and plants and foods found only in North America (squash, succotash, persimmon, pecan, hickory) and cultural items found only in North America (moccasin, kayak, parka, teepee, pemmican, wigwam, tomahawk, papoose) and geographical and meteorological features found only in North America (bayou, yazoo, squamish, chinook). And I’m not even mentioning Native words from Central and South America and the Caribbean, which were usually borrowed by way of Spanish: tamale, avocado, tomato, chocolate, alpaca, llama, cashew, toucan, tapir, jerky, barbecue, hurricane, tobacco, maize, caiman. . .So we’re not counting those, right? We’re looking for Native words that were adopted for things that the colonists may have already had words for?OK. Well, I’ve seen more than one theory for the etymology of the word caucus, but one is that it came from Virginia Algonquin caucauasu, “counselor”. Borrowed into English, it shifted from meaning a counselor to a meeting of political party leaders.There was also a leader of the Lenape tribe in the Delaware River valley named Tamanend, noted for his peaceful relations with the colonists in Pennsylvania. A political society in New York took his name in 1789, and it lasted until the 1960s. At its height, it was an extremely powerful “political machine” that basically ran New York. History buffs still remember Tammany Hall. The leader of Tammany Hall was the Grand Sachem. Sachem means “chief” in the Narragansett language, and you’ll sometimes see the word used outside of political history contexts to mean a leader in general, usually somewhat ironically or humorously. The cognate word in other Algonquian languages was also borrowed: sagamore also means “leader”, but it’s rarer than sachem.The Massachusett language had the word muggumquomp meaning “war chief; war leader”, and that got borrowed as well into US politics. The Mugwumps were Republicans who refused to support their party’s candidate James G. Blaine in the Presidential election of 1884, because of his ties to corruption. (The joke is that a mugwump is someone who sits on a fence, with his mug (face) on one side and his wump (rump) on the other.) Again, this is perhaps obscure outside of political history, but I’ve occasionally seen it used elsewhere.Outside of politics. . . let’s see, there are words that are borrowed from Native personal or place names, but that now are applied outside of a Native context. For example, there’s a type of prefabricated steel building that can be assembled quickly. Since it was tested during World War II on Quonset Point, Rhode Island, it was dubbed the Quonset hut. The Menominee tribe called the straits between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron Mishilimaqkinahkw, “large like a snapping turtle”; the French spelled it Michilimackinac, and the English shortened it to Mackinac or Mackinaw. That name in turn became used for a heavy wool cloth, and then for a short jacket made from such cloth, stereotypically worn by lumberjacks in a plaid pattern: the mackinaw. Sequoia trees were named in honor of the inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, Sequoyah (Endlicher and Sequoia: Determination of the Entymological Origin of the Taxon Sequoia) even though they grow thousands of miles from Cherokee territory. And in the Pacific Northwest, there was apparently at one time a Tlingit village called Hutsnuwu, “Grizzly Bear Fort”. The inhabitants allegedly learned how to distill a rather rough alcoholic liquor that was much in demand by miners in the 1898 Klondike gold rush. They mispronounced the Tlingit name (which is easy to do; Pacific NW languages are notoriously hard to pronounce if you’re not used to them) and called it hoochinoo, later shortening it to hooch. (This is not the same word as the Vietnam-era word hooch for a hut or other simple living quarters; that comes from Japanese uchi.)Chinook Jargon was a pidgin language used for trade in the Pacific Northwest, and was spoken by Natives and Europeans alike. Words borrowed from Chinook Jargon are still used in the Northwest, although not so much elsewhere: skookum for “strong; capable; reliable”; cheechako for “newcomer”; potlatch for a feast; and high muckamuck or muckety-muck, originally meaning “plenty of food” but now used to mean “leader; person in authority”. Chinook itself has come to mean a warm dry wind that drops down the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains (a type of föhn or foehn wind, for those of you who know your meteorology).But my favorite came from Quechua, in which yapay means “addition”. That word was borrowed into Spanish as la yapa, then to French as lagniappe. Lagniappe is a very Louisiana word, meaning “a little extra on the side”. If you buy a dozen donuts at a donut shop, you may get a few donut holes thrown in for free—that’s lagniappe. If you buy vegetables at a farmer’s market, the vendor may throw in a few cherry tomatoes or a bunch of herbs—that’s lagniappe. The university in the town where I grew up, now called the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, has an annual Lagniappe Day, a day when classes are canceled and the students get to play games and relax. Mark Twain wrote about the word in Life on the Mississippi. It’s a lovely word, and it needs to be more widely known.We picked up one excellent word—a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word—‘lagniappe.’ They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish—so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a 'baker's dozen.' It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. When a child or a servant buys something in a shop—or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know—he finishes the operation by saying—‘Give me something for lagniappe.’ The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor—I don't know what he gives the governor; support, likely.When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in New Orleans—and you say, ‘What, again?—no, I've had enough;’ the other party says, ‘But just this one time more—this is for lagniappe.’ When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady's countenance that the edifice would have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his ‘I beg pardon—no harm intended,’ into the briefer form of ‘Oh, that's for lagniappe.’ If the waiter in the restaurant stumbles and spills a gill of coffee down the back of your neck, he says ‘For lagniappe, sah,’ and gets you another cup without extra charge.

What do you think of President Trump’s tweet that Cuomo has been “begging” him for supplies and now he wants “independence” and that “that won’t happen”?I think it shows a dichotomy of thought.Cuomo was begging for supplies. The Feds had them and New York needed them. The Feds couldn’t quite muster up the gumption to send them up in a timely fashion.Washigton tried to block surgical masks going to Canada but then sent the Israeli military a million masks that probably should have gone to New York a month ago. This is after the President said he’s a “wartime President” and we are at war with an invisible enemy. An invisible enemy in North America mind you. So why send much needed masks not to the front line but all the way to Asia Minor?Andrew Cuomo was already the most independent governor in the country. He skirmishes with the DNC routinely, gets grudging respect from his home state Republicans, seldom bows to Washigton and frankly criticized the whole Federal System when he feels that’s warranted and none of that is new. He was doing all of that ten damn years ago. He’s the most moderate moderate in the country and that has always made him a political unicorn.Trump invoked the 9th and 10th Amendments to sidestep any economic culpability in this whole fiasco and that put the burden squarely on Andrew Cuomo’s shoulders. The problem here is that Governors actually are enormously powerful in our system and Cuomo has more, home state, political capital than any other politician in the country.Trump can’t make Cuomo do squat. At this point the entire, considerable, New York State infrastructure is behind Cuomo and that is probably going to include Wall Street and that considerable population of billionaires. Cuomo is their guy right now, Trump is not.What is Trump going to do? Send in the 82nd Airborne and have troops serve tapas food in Soho?No.That tweet sounds tough but it’s actually the deflective retort of a bruised 13 year old’s ego.Yesterday it was announced that New York, New Jersey and Conneticut would coordinate a phased reopening of their economies. By the end of the day, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Delaware had all committed to the program too. Add all of them together and that is the world’s sixth largest economy. That’s a G7 superstate.Trump wanted to be the guy who announced that the war was won and we are open for business. The very governors he has slighted over the last three weeks just stole his thunder. Worse yet, they just Federalized outside of Washington’s control and didn’t invite Trump to the party.This means that the whole country might still be watching Cuomo everyday on TV. That’s going to rankle the diva in the White House. He’s already scheduling his press conferences so they don’t interfere with Cuomo’s. He doesn’t want to come in second in the “ratings”.Yesterday Trump reversed his position on the 10th Amendment, now that it’s convenient to do so, and asserted absolute Federal Authority, something he gave up a month ago when it was going to include hard work on his part.This is all utterly absurd.That working group of 7 States, more than half of the original 13 colonies. Will determine their own protocols and timeline. They are going to do it together, smartly and hopefully seamlessly. Their decision making should hopefully be in the best interest of their citizens. Not Trump’s poll numbers.His assertion last night of absolute authority is meaningless. He actually had that but squandered it in indecisiveness and petty vindictiveness.How does he propose to force them into anything?He could withhold Federal Aid, which he has possibly already done. I point out the Israelis above for just this reason. He prioritized a foreign state over a US State. Israel has a socialized medical system.He could pull Federal Funding of Federal Facilities, hurting business and jobs going forward. That’s a huge disaster brewing. The combined tax base of these States exceeds most of the country.He could send in the Army. This is basically executing a coup e’tat on the original signatory states of the Constitution. That will go over like a lead balloon and is specifically prohibited by the Constitution.He can keep on tweeting like a twelve year old “mean girl”.He will choose option #4. That’s all he has because the rest of Washington won’t back him on the first three. If those states decide to stall federal tax payments they can do to the Federal Treasury what the Coronavirus has done to theirs.He has spent this whole drama trying to spin public perception. Trying to sidestep culpability for mistakes while simultaneously snatching credit for any minor win. He wants credit for a roaring economy because he knows he can’t win in November without that. Sadly it was his own procrastination and rejection of expertise that led us to where we are.He can’t have it both ways.Andrew Cuomo took sole responsibility the day he started phased shutdowns in New York State. He was unequivocal, “if this proves to be a mistake it’s on me, don’t blame the mayors, the legislature, the bloc health officials or the emergency managers. This was my call”.Andrew Cuomo owned it and it turns out he was right. The other governors followed suit. They knew it was the right call, to be better safe than sorry. They had to lead while Trump played cheerleader and spin doctor.We’ve had three years of Trump tweets. 99% of them are the delusional ramblings of an internet troll. He has repeatedly asserted that Article II gives him the absolute right to do whatever he wants. Now he faces a super regional bloc of Governors and the Constitution awards him no such power in that realm.Trump invoked the 10th Amendment and that moment ended his absolute authority.POTUS is not a dictatorial position. The authority of that office is derived from the acquiescence of the population. The consent of the structures beneath him. The President is the CEO of the largest corporation the world has ever known. Like all CEOs his time is limited and his ability to lead is sourced in the confidence of the various subordinates and the board of directors. The 50 state governors are in all meaningful ways the board of directors.The governors independence is baked in collectively it is incontrovertible. In their own demesne they have more assets and resources than the President and by custom his resources are integrated to theirs. The US Marshals, US Attorneys even the military is as likely to move on a sitting Governor as they are to move on a sitting President.Key to this quandary. His assertion of absolute Federalism coupled to his waffling on the 10th Amendment in the face of a National Tragedy erodes his own political capital. It undermines the deeply held beliefs of the Constitutional Conservatives.He has spent two weeks in his nightly press conferences airing grievances, issuing threats and looking for enemies. These drag on longer and longer everyday with his actual experts standing there, inactive, dutifully nodding as Americans die. Doctors Birx and Fauci could be doing almost anything else, including sleeping and We the People would be better off.We still don’t have tests. We are weeks behind on contact tracing. Nothing will really be open without tests and this won’t be over without a vaccine. That is just objective reality.Trump’s tweets and his nightly campaign rallies will continue because that’s all he knows how to do. Four years ago he promised “great healthcare” yet under his watch the US Healthcare system has come as close to collapse as it ever has. He might need to look into that because Joe Biden is going to ask him straight out, on stage, how this doesn’t happen again and he’d better have a real answer or Biden will brutalize and belittle him. Vague Trump fabulisims won’t cut it in November. Not for Americans that actually have an attention span that exceeds the common gnat.