| This week on The View, Zohran Mamdani expressed a desire to get things done more quickly as mayor of New York City. “Day one, we put bad landlords on notice; day six, we fixed a bump on the Williamsburg Bridge; day eight, we announced more than a billion dollars in funding for universal childcare,” he reminded Whoopi Goldberg.
But will the road ahead be as easy? As Nasreen Abd Elal reminds us, Kathy Hochul and New York State have a lot of power. “On January 13, Hochul proposed legislation that would ban protests within 25 feet of houses of worship,” Abd Elal explains. While the bill may seem at first like common sense, it would “enable pro-Israel agencies to recruit Americans into Israel’s settlement enterprise or sell properties on confiscated Palestinian land, without fear of disruption”—which is why, Abd Elal says, Mamdani should stand against the proposal.
And that’s at the state level. More obstacles are surely to come, especially if Republicans remain in power at the federal level. As Clarence Lusane writes, while Trump probably cannot wrest a third presidential term, there’s always JD Vance.
-Alana Pockros
Associate Editor, The Nation |
