Boston mayor Martin Walsh gives Donald Trump the Chick-Fil-A rush over his immigration opinions [Boston Herald]:
If Donald Trump ever wants to build a hotel in Boston, he’ll need to apologize for his comments about Mexican immigrants first, the Hub’s mayor said.
“I just don’t agree with him at all,” Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh told the Herald yesterday. “I think his comments are inappropriate. And if he wanted to build a hotel here, he’d have to make some apologies to people in this country.”
More on the use of permitting, licensing, and other levers of power to punish speech and the exercise of other legal rights at Overlawyered’s all-new regulatory retaliation tag. And no, I’m not exactly thrilled with Mayor Walsh for making me take Trump’s side in an argument.
P.S. Now the NYC sequel, from Mayor Bill de Blasio: no more city contracts for the guy with the wrong opinions [The Hill] And welcome readers from the Foundation for Economic Education, which generously calls this blog “indispensable.”
3 Comments
The mayor said, “if he wanted to build a hotel here, he’d have to make some apologies to people in this country.” You’ve read that as “if he wanted a permit to build a hotel here, he’d have to apologize.” That’s reasonable.
Seems to me an equally reasonable interpretation has him saying, “If he wants to build a hotel here and have it be somewhere that Boston citizens want to eat, drink, stay, or work, such that it would be a success, that he’d have to apologize.”
The benefit of this second interpretation is that you don’t have to side with Trump!
Brian’s alternative reading would be more consistent with the rule of law, and that’s appealing. My reading, however, is more consistent with Walsh’s choice of the verb “build” as opposed to, I don’t know, “make a success of” or something. And hotels, more than most businesses, need not depend heavily on the good will of local residents to fill their rooms so long as they can find enough visitors from other places prepared to do so.
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