Zorn: Here's how Trump could serve a third term

... and rename the Mississippi River after himself

1-30-2025 (issue No. 178)

This week:

• The workaround/loophole that some legal scholars say could allow Trump to serve a third term or more

• Last week’s winning quip

• What’s to stop Trump from naming lakes, rivers and mountains for himself? Not much

• News and Views — Hot takes, fully baked

• That’s so Brandon! — Updates on the misadventures of Chicago’s maladroit mayor

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• Mary Schmich — What you need to know about her new podcast

• Do Willie Wilson’s kickers make you uncomfortable? — Here is your chance to vote

• What’s on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week

• Quotables — A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

• Quips — The winning visual jokes and this week’s contest finalists

• Good Sports — The combination of the transfer portal and NIL money is ruining college football and basketball

• Tune of the Week — the very timely Woody Guthrie protest song, “Deportee”

How Trump could serve a third term

President Donald Trump has been openly musing about ways he might serve a third term despite the two-term limit that was added to the U.S. Constitution when the 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

There’s a doomed effort underway in the House to repeal this amendment, and some of Trump’s partisans have floated the laughable argument that the limit applies only to consecutive terms.

But I’m not the only one to see a gaping loophole in the language of the 22nd Amendment that is created by the words “elected to the office of the President.”

“It is notable that the amendment does not preclude a former two-term president … from serving as vice president,” wrote Brian E. Gray, now an emeritus professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, in a 2007 Los Angeles Times op-ed speculating on a return to the White House of Bill Clinton. “Nor does it preclude a former two-term president's succession to the presidency for all or part of a third term.”

The 12th Amendment says that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of vice-president,” but that language, ratified in 1804, simply refers back to Article II in the Constitution, which says that, to be president, you have to be “a natural born citizen,” 35 or older and a U.S. resident for at least 14 years.

In 2000, constitutional law expert Michael C. Dorf, now at Cornell Law School, wrote in support of the idea that Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore could choose two-term incumbent president Bill Clinton as his running mate, paving the way for a possible third term for Clinton were Gore to then resign the office:

The 12th Amendment would allow a Clinton vice-presidency. Its language only bars from the vice-presidency those persons who are "ineligible to the office" of President. Clinton is not ineligible to the office of president, however. He is only disqualified (by the 22nd Amendment) from being elected to that office.

This is no mere semantic distinction. (The 22nd Amendment) places no limits whatsoever on how many terms someone may serve as president, only how many times he can be elected. …

Thus, if Clinton were to be elected vice president and ascend to the presidency based on, for example, Gore's resignation, then nothing unconstitutional would have occurred. Clinton would have been elected to the presidency only twice though he would serve as president thrice.

Substitute Trump for Clinton and JD Vance or one of Trump’s children for Gore — as Dorf did in an updated think piece published in November — and you have a plausible scenario for a third term for Trump, who will turn 82 in 2028. Vance, Ivanka or Don Jr. could run at the top of the ticket with the open promise/understanding that he or she would resign on day one after inauguration and cede the presidency back to Trump. And even if such a placeholder didn’t formally step down, Dorf wrote, “Trump would rule through him, as (Vladimir) Putin did through (Russian President Dmitry) Medvedev from 2008 through 2012.”

Would this violate the spirit of the 22nd Amendment? Arguably. A 1999 Minnesota Law Review article that supports this idea of a workaround notes that early drafts of the amendment read:

No person shall be chosen or serve as president of the United States for any term, or be eligible to hold the office of president during any term, if such person shall have heretofore served as president during the whole or any part of each of any two separate terms.

and

Any person who has served as president of the United States during all, or portions, of any two terms, shall thereafter be ineligible to hold the office of president.

and

A person who has held the office of president, or acted as president, on 365 calendar days or more in each of two terms shall not be eligible to hold the office of President, or to act as President, for any part of another term.

But lawmakers dithered and dickered about circumstances under which one might become president, and so got rid of mentions of service, and went with “elected.”

(This) appears largely to have been a function of political give-and-take … although some House members found the measure "pregnant with questions" and indicated that they preferred the original House language (in the first two examples above), they recognized the need for "compromise" as part of the legislative process.

A 2015 scholarly paper by University of Georgia School of Law professor Dan T. Coenen analyzed the same congressional debate and reached the same conclusion:

Democrats were given the last word on whether the amendment should include the term “eligible” or the term “elected.” In addition, they were given this choice in a setting where the difference mattered precisely because the latter phrasing was tied to a narrowing of the amendment’s effect and thus to expanding the range of voter autonomy in keeping with the wishes of a large number of federal lawmakers. … To dismiss the change in phrasing as inconsequential is to blink reality. … An enriched understanding of the aim of the 22nd Amendment invites the conclusion that its spirit — particularly when viewed in light of the spirit of the Constitution as a whole —supports, rather than undermines, the case for permitting two-time presidents to seek the vice presidency. A centerpiece of the republican theory that drove the entire constitutional project was identified by Alexander Hamilton at the New York Ratifying Convention: “[T]he true principle of a republic is, that the people should choose whom they please to govern them. … This great source of free government, popular election, should be perfectly pure and the most unbounded liberty allowed.”

More recent, non-scholarly essays, such as “The 22nd Amendment doesn’t say what you think it says,” by Pennsylvania attorney Joel Ready and “How Trump could try to stay in power after his second term ends” by Hamilton College professor of government Philip Klinkner, are persuasive in arguing that the 22nd Amendment left a back door open for Trump to rule almost indefinitely.

Mark Joseph Stern, an attorney who covers the courts for Slate, has recently been exploring the same idea:

We don’t want it to happen. But if we go by a rigid textualist reading of the 22^nd Amendment, it could happen. … (The 22nd Amendment) reinforces the workaround I identified. Because if it’s true that a twice-elected president can serve a third term as long as he isn’t directly elected to it, then he is not “constitutionally ineligible to the office of President” under the 12th Amendment. That means he is eligible to be vice president, as well, and the 12th Amendment poses no bar to his election as VP.

(Some object that) the distinction between being elected to office and holding office is semantic and artificial and not worth serious consideration. I respectfully disagree. This distinction actually runs throughout the Constitution. I’ll give two examples. First, the Constitution says you must be at least 30 years old to serve as senator, yet Joe Biden was elected to the Senate at age 29. Why was that allowed? Because the Constitution differentiates between the requirements to be elected senator and to hold office as a senator — and the minimum age applies only to holding office. Biden turned 30 a few weeks after he was elected, so he became constitutionally eligible to hold the office of senator.

Political scientist Matthew Franck of the Federalist Society has dismissed the idea of a 22nd Amendment loophole as “straw-man originalism” that “treats the words of the text in isolation from one another, rather than as parts of a whole that has an integrated meaning and purpose … (and) treats the Constitution as a Tinker Toy set to be disassembled and its pieces examined separately, with no attention to the organic structure of the whole that those pieces make.”

Paul Anthony Gowder, a Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law professor, had a similar take when I reached out to him for his opinion:

The Constitution is not a detailed and precise document that’s supposed to be lawyered within an inch of its life. It’s a statement of broad ideas and general principles meant to be understandable by normal people as well as by lawyers.

In other words, it’s totally appropriate a lot of the time to say “come on dude, use your common sense” when we’re talking about reading the Constitution. And “come on dude, use your common sense” applies quite clearly to the 22^nd Amendment. Its drafters were obviously and clearly trying to limit the president to two terms. Narrow, pettifogging interpretations to try to change the clear intent of the amendment are not really in good faith, and we ought not to take them seriously. … The only rational, normal person, common-sense, response is, “Give me a break. You can torture all kinds of texts that way, but when the drafters of the amendment worked that hard to make it clear that two terms really means two terms, it’s not consistent with the Constitution to try to twist that to mean more than two terms.”

University of Chicago constitutional law professor Aziz Huq replied, “Like many questions of constitutional law, I think this one is pretty easy; the 22nd Amendment can be read as an eligibility rule, and thus applies via the 12th Amendment to a vice presidential candidate.”

Can be. Sure. But would it be by a Trump-friendly U.S. Supreme Court?

To the objection that we shouldn’t talk about this or pretend to take it seriously because it will just give Team Trump ideas, I reply that Team Trump is certainly already all over this possibility, and if Trump is still healthy in 2028, look for him to attempt to exploit this loophole.

Last week’s winning quip

I love the look on people's faces as they stand freezing at the bus stop while I drive past them. It's partly why I became a bus driver. — @NicolaJSwinney

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-jokes poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

Will the River Trump meander lazily through Trump National Forest in the shade of the Trump Mountains?

In bowing to the wishes of President Trump to rename Denali “Mount McKinley,” the Associated Press notes that “the area lies solely in the United States, and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country.”

Technically, Trump will need the approval of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, but Trump’s executive order on renaming Denali and the Gulf of Mexico specifies that “each agency head with authority to appoint members to the Board on Geographic Names … shall review their respective appointees and consider replacing those appointees.”

The policies of Board on Geographic Names now say that a person must have been dead at least five years for members of the board to consider honoring that person with a formal renaming of a geographical feature. But that policy is not law, and it’s easy to imagine a board packed with Trump-approved sycophants ignoring that guideline were Trump to suggest renaming places for himself.

News & Views

News: “Republicans are mulling deep cuts in safety net spending, partly to offset big tax cuts aimed mostly at the wealthy. But some programs they propose to cut reach not just the poorest Americans but also struggling working class voters, many of whom helped elect Mr. Trump in November.” (The New York Times)

View: This tweet from Adrian Bott is evergreen: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.”

News: Some are contending that Selena Gomez was snubbed when she didn’t get a best supporting actress Oscar nomination for her role in “Emilia Pérez.”

View: Gomez is a terrific singer, but as an actor, she’s at the high school drama club level at best — wooden and dull.

News: As payback for perceived disloyalty, the Trump Administration has yanked security protections from his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley; his former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci; his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; and his former national security adviser John Bolton.

View: Treating security protection as a perk or a signifier of status or approval is outrageous. Law enforcement professionals should evaluate actual threats and provide security accordingly without regard to politics, and for the perpetually aggrieved and petty Trump to go down this road invites retaliation when he leaves office and he and his top advisers are under threat.

That said, I will reiterate my objection to the gratuitous security details provided to state and even county officeholders. Former Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White had a whole entourage protecting him, as though he were a controversial figure whose life was often threatened.

His usually candid spokesman lamely explained to me that some people are upset about driver’s license and license plate issues and might want to take out their anger on the secretary of state. And I was the only person I know of who called bullshit on that.

News: Chaos, confusion, fear, terror and panic on the front pages this week

View: It’s going to be a very long four years. Or more.

That’s So Brandon!

Updates on the misadventures of Chicago’s mayor

I was preparing to take a break this week from chronicling the pratfalls of Brandon Johnson. The Tribune story about the contents of his texts — acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests — showed that he has been savvy enough not to vent unflatteringly in a medium that reporters are likely to see, a lesson his predecessor, the often splenetic Lori Lightfoot, did not learn. And I have been glad this past, crazy 10 days that he is in charge at City Hall rather than the more conservative Paul Vallas, who likely would not have been pushing back so hard against President Donald Trump’s edicts.

But alas. Wednesday’s headlines provided material:

• Johnson accepted valuable gifts, blocked access to room where items stored, inspector general says (Sun-Times)

• OIG report finds Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office improperly blocked access to gift room with Gucci bags, other designer items (Tribune)

Tribune:

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office improperly blocked public access to a City Hall room where they said they store Gucci bags, designer cufflinks and other gifts, according to an investigation by the city’s Office of the Inspector General. A report released Wednesday by Inspector General Deborah Witzburg found Johnson’s office violated the city’s ethics policy that requires mayors to record gifts above $50 and “accepted on behalf of the City” in a publicly available log maintained on the 5th floor of City Hall.

Sun-Times

Nearly 70% of the 380 logged gifts do not identify the gift-giver. Many of the more valuable gifts were given to Johnson. They include: Hugo Boss cufflinks; a personalized Mount Blanc pen; a 2023 U.S. National Soccer team jersey; AirPods; designer handbags by Givenchy and Kate Spade; and Carucci size-14 burgundy men’s shoes. …

The entire episode raises serious questions about attempts to curry favor with Chicago mayors.

“It’s hard to imagine how exactly size-14 shoes would be used ‘on behalf of the city.’ But they’re squirreled away in literally a windowless room at City Hall. … That presents an enormous transparency and accountability problem,” Witzburg told the Sun-Times.

My take is that Johnson is sloppy, not corrupt (see this item on his clumsy fundraising reporting), but that the appearance of attempts to purchase favor with him with gifts ought to be enough that he — and all public officials — ought to return such gifts instantly. Of course the distinction between material goods and campaign cash is slight, so it’s hard to stand on principle here.

Further, Johnson’s administration is disagreeably secretive — Witzburg’s report details the lengths her office had to go through to get access to the gift information, which is supposed to be easily available to the public.

Land of Linkin’

• Ted C. Fishman profiles new Cook County State’s Attorney Eilleen O’Neill Burke for Chicago Magazine in “The New Face of Law and Order.”

• Bookmark this link that counts down the days to the next presidential inauguration.

• Garret Epps in Washington Monthly: “Trump’s Flaming Turd of an Argument for Ending Birthright Citizenship.”

• In “The Weight” by The Band, is the lyric “Take a load off, Fanny,” or “Take a load off, Annie”? This essay analyzes and settles the question.

• My opinion that TV stations should ditch local weathercasters and use a centralized service is proving massively unpopular.

• CWBChicago reports: “Man robbed tattoo artist at gunpoint while on electronic monitoring for 2 armed robberies, prosecutors say.” Though I realize there is a certain amount of sensationalism to this anonymous crime blog, I have yet to see its accuracy challenged, and it features so many stories like this that it suggests an epidemic of naiveté in the Cook County judiciary. Along these same lines, CWB’s recurring feature “Brandon’s Bodies,” which keeps a running tally of gunshot victims who arguably would have been reached more quickly by first responders were the ShotSpotter gunshot detection system still in place (now at 32), seems like something the mainstream media ought to be doing.

• There are ways to limit executive pardon power through oversight. This page from the Restoration of Rights Project lists the different procedures followed in each state. Here’s Illinois:

• Vox: “The DeepSeek saga that’s transforming AI, explained.” “The Chinese startup DeepSeek sunk the stock prices of several major tech companies on Monday after it released a new open-source model that can reason on the cheap.”

• Tyler Fischer’s comedy video “Trump's WILD new Executive Orders!” is worth your time.

• In the italic shirttail of a Tribune op-ed by Brad Weisenstein, managing editor of the Illinois Policy Institute, the newspaper identifies the IPI as “a group working to expand liberties and prosperity in Illinois,” which is puffery masquerading as description.

• “Kash Patel for the FBI? Buyer Beware!” a seven-minute Betty Bowers video.

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ News media watchdog Margaret Sullivan: “Mainstream journalists are not effectively communicating the bigger story.” She recommends “right-thinking Americans” consult ProtectDemocacy.org’s 29 things you can do to protect democracy—including No. 1: “Invest in local news.”

■ President Trump’s offer/threat to federal employees—quit by next week and get about eight months’ salary—is fueling resistance on a Reddit message board for government workers: “Make these goons as frustrated as possible.”

■ The Washington Post: What federal workers should know about the “deferred resignation” offer.

■ Project Democracy advises federal employees “how to plan for what happens next.”

■ Columnist and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich: 10 ways to resist Trump II.

■ “Lock Pritzker up. Lock the mayor up”: Donald Trump thrall Steve Bannon calls for imprisoning Illinois’ governor and Chicago’s mayor for “getting in the way of the ICE agents.”

■ “Everyone Is Entitled to My Own Opinion” proprietor Jeff Tiedrich: “Elderly rage-baby melts down when called out for massive abuse of deportees.”

■ “Could one woman with absolutely zero institutional backing … really be the one to break such an important story? Now we know the answer is yes.” Solo newsletter proprietor Marisa Kabas did it, in reporting the president’s sweeping freeze of federal aid programs. After she broke the news on Bluesky, the big news orgs followed.

■ USA Today columnist Rex Huppke, reviewing the new Federal Trade Commission chair’s statement on DEI: “This reads like it was written by an unhinged lunatic who hasn’t left his mother’s basement in 10 years.”

■ Critic Bill Carter: Late-night hosts aren’t retreating from confrontations with Trump, but “the battle lines have changed.”

■ A Mississippi state senator’s introduced the “Contraception Begins at Erection Act” to outlaw male masturbation “without the intent to fertilize an embryo”—but he’s a Democrat who says he’s satirizing Republicans.

■ “Beware ‘the Appistocracy’”: That’s how investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein dubs six tech billionaires through whose products “the path to power increasingly runs,” and he sounds an alarm about a late-Biden administration directive “encouraging America’s spies to make the corporations partners in their quest for secrets.”

■ Columnist Dan Sinker: “Let’s talk about making physical media again: Music that can’t be taken away with a keystroke, movies that don’t involve a subscription, and news, writing, art and more that can be copied and printed and handed person-to-person.”

■ Once-bustling Northbrook Court’s lost one of its few remaining stores.

■ R.I.P., a veteran Tribune “political reporter with the instincts of a jaguar.”

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Mary Schmich: The ‘Division Street Revisited’ podcast has dropped!

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts occasional column-like entries on Facebook. Here, reprinted with permission, is a recent offering:

This week’s episode, the first of seven, is about Myra Alexander, a Chicago school janitor who met Studs Terkel on a train in 1963 and told him, "The best of my life is behind me and I spent that in bondage. I’d like to be free and I’d like to see all of the young people free."

We tracked down three generations of her descendants to see what became of her and her dream.

I got a text at 7 a.m. Monday from my nephew in New York. He sent a photo of his iPhone showing the Myra episode on the Apple podcast app and he wrote: "And so it begins. It's always a pleasure to have hard work get to translated into something you can hold."

You gotta love a young man kind enough to text that to his old aunt.

And none of this would have happened without Melissa Harris (who dreamed up the idea) and our hard-working, patient, creative team: Bill Healy, Mark Jacob, Cate Cahan, Libby Lussenhop, Chris Walz and Chijioke Williams. Plus so many others--Liz Shields! Alex Garcia! Cheryl Harris!-- who have contributed their time and talents to putting this out into the world.

The portraits above — by Ben Kirchner — are of the seven people we're featuring, one per episode over seven weeks. Myra is the second on the bottom row.

Here's a full explanation of the show, which also debuts this week on all the podcast platforms.

Melissa Harris and Mary Schmich after Wednesday night’s launch party at the Harold Washington Library Center — Picayune Sentinel photo

I post this item to see how comfortable readers are with Willie Wilson’s kickers

Tribune Editorial Page Editor Chris Jones wrote Wednesday to urge me to read Thursday’s column by contributing pundit Willie Wilson, saying it was very good and should interest me since I’d mocked Wilson in the past.

I will read the column — it hadn’t posted at this writing — with an open mind.

And it’s true that I did once refer to Wilson as "a gasbag perennially rejected by voters (who) has never shown more than a surface understanding of the issues of our time, and labors under the delusion that merely because he’s a successful business owner and generous philanthropist, he should hold high office." It’s also true that I have derided him for presuming to call himself “Dr. Wilson” because institutions to which he has given money have bestowed honorary doctorates upon him.

But I wrote back to Jones saying that I reserved most of my mockery for Wilson’s ritual last sentence in which he conjures up phantom ogres --- "those who are comfortable with promoting policies that divide citizens and steal their joy," " those comfortable with chaos and division," "those comfortable with keeping our children illiterate," "those comfortable with promoting social isolation and loneliness” and so on, and then adds that he wants to make them uncomfortable.

Jones replied that Tribune readers like Wilson’s kickers. I suspect he may be drawing that inference from a very tiny sample size — amplification by magnification is an affliction that many newspaper editors suffer from, receiving a handful of messages and interpreting them as evidence of a groundswell.

I wrote back:

You think that's good writing? That your readers like? Look, either a column lands or it doesn't; makes certain readers change their thinking or it doesn't; justifies its place in the paper or it doesn't. Explaining the purpose at the end ought to feel as redundant as the extra "in conclusion..." verbiage a junior high student tacks onto a theme in order to reach the assigned 500-word threshold.

But hey, I certainly could be wrong about what readers think. I have been before. Tuesday comes to mind. So you tell me:

Minced Words

Cate Plys, Brandon Pope and Austin Berg joined host John Williams on this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast. They discussed the confusion over the Trump administration’s federal funding freeze and the consternation over the ICE raids. Predictions on the verdict in the corruption trial of former House speaker Michael Madigan, which has now gone to the jury.

Red light, yellow light, green light:

• Austin: A green light for “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original," a biography by Robin D. G. Kelley

• Cate: A yellow light for “Black Doves,” a Netflix mini-series

• Brandon: A green light for “Paradise” a series on Hulu

• John: A green light for“Cher: Part One: The Memoir: Part One of a Two-Part Memoir from the Iconic Artist and Actor.”

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Read the background bios of some regular panelists here.

Quotables

A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

For some reason, and it may be a perfectly understandable reason, the American people have chosen to unknow what they definitely knew about Donald Trump. Well, today the great remembering begins. — Stephen Colbert

You simply cannot cover Trump’s second term accurately and responsibly if you are not willing to situate his acts as part of a terrifying descent into authoritarianism, racism, and cruelty. And the mainstream political media – for a variety of reasons — is not willing to do anything of the kind. — Dan Froomkin in “Why is Trump coverage so feeble?”

Quips

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

The new nominees for Quip of the Week:

• ICE needs to arrest my neighbor. He's a citizen, I just want him out of here. — @Bob_Janke

• If you enjoy interacting with people who have strong opinions and minimal life experiences, may I recommend parenthood? — @MedusaOusa

• Hot singles over 40 in your area are curious what you use for joint pain and inflammation. — @cowboyjeffkent

• Due to budget cuts, only some of you can wang chung tonight. — @dmc1138

• Show and tell should also happen outside of elementary school. I’d love to get together with my friends once a week and take turns bringing something we think is neat and want to talk about. — @roastmalone_

• I’ve always had expensive tastes so it’s been kinda nice to see the price of eggs skyrocket. Have never really tried them before because I’ve always thought of them as being too pedestrian. — @camerobradford

• Places I won’t be going in 2025: Above and beyond Out of my way. — @crushed_silver

• Not everything I say is right. But I believe it is, and that's the important thing. — @wildethingy

• You come from dust and you will return to dust. That's why I don't dust. It could be someone I know. — unknown

• To everyone worried about the dangers of TikTok influencers on kids, please know that every day, a new YouTuber sets up an account and convinces someone’s husband that there’s no need to hire a plumber. — @LurkAtHomeMom

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Why the new name for this feature? See “I’m rebranding ‘Tweet of the Week’ in a gesture of contempt for Elon Musk.”

Good Sports

At bedtime, when I’m trying avoid doom and gloom in the news, I listen to podcasts about University of Michigan sports — “Wolverine Confidential,” “The Wolverine Podcast” and “MGoBlue Podcasts with Jon Jansen” — but lately much of the talk on these shows has been about the role the transfer portal and NIL — name, image and likeness — money is playing in shaping the rosters for revenue generating sports at universities around the country, and this has increased my feelings of doom and gloom.

The transfer portal allows athletes to move from school to school more or less at their whim, and the size of the NIL payments they’re offered appears to be one of the major factors in where they land.

Michigan, my alma mater, has lost players to the portal in this bidding war, and has enticed others. And as much as it delights me when the Wolverines swipe a star running back from Alabama and lure the top high school quarterback in the nation with an NIL deal reportedly worth upwards of $10 million, it depresses me to think that schools with the most money to throw around will end up with the best rosters, and that the idea that the players in the major sports are loyal to their schools and part of their student bodies — long mostly a fiction — is dead.

Stars should be paid, no question. But the elimination of the rule that required a player switching schools to sit out a season was a mistake, as it both encourages and rewards disloyalty.

Restoring that rule would be a good idea. Either that or simply admitting that college revenue sports are now semi-pro and require athletes who take NIL money to sign contracts that bind them to certain terms of service.

Any other ideas?

Tune of the Week

Thanks to Michael Gorman for the timely suggestion of “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)", a Woody Guthrie song. “It may make some people think of the humanity of the victims of (“border czar” Tom) Homan and his goons,” he wrote. “I lived in the Central Valley of California for 20 years and know of the real sorrows and tragedies of such people.”

Gorman suggested this version by Judy Collins, but I prefer this version, the one I grew up listening to, for its stronger emphasis on the lyrics:

Some are illegal, and some are not wanted
Our work contract's out, and we have to move on
600 miles to that Mexico border
They chase us like rustlers, like outlaws, like thieves
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adiós mi amigo, Jesus and María
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
And all they will call you will be "deportee."

The song is based on the Jan. 28, 1948, crash of a plane near Los Gatos Canyon in California that killed 28 migrant farm workers being deported to Mexico, and was inspired by Guthrie’s outrage that most news reports named the four Americans who died in the crash but referred to the dead migrants simply as “deportees.” It was originally a poem, but 10 years after the fact, Martin Hoffman, a schoolteacher, set it to music.

I’ve been opening up Tune of the Week nominations in an effort to bring some newer sounds to the mix. I’m asking readers to use the comments area for paid subscribers or to email me to leave nominations (post-2000 releases, please!) along with YouTube links and at least a few sentences explaining why the nominated song is meaningful or delightful to you.

Info

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise. Browse and search back issues here.

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