Reader question:

Please explain “kind of moot” in this passage (Biden jokes about his age at White House Correspondents’ Dinner, NPR.org, April 30, 2023):

I want to turn it to the serious side of this – pundits have highlighted polls showing that a majority of Democrats have said they do not want Biden to run. But that’s kind of moot now ’cause he’s running. (Biden jokes about his age at White House Correspondents’ Dinner, NPR.org, April 30, 2023).

My comments:

Joe Biden, that is, President of the United States.

Back in the day, before the example article was published, a lot of political commentators (pundits) believed Biden should not run for a second term. They emphasized (highlighted) that, according to some polls, most Democrats had said that he shouldn’t.

At that time, Biden himself hadn’t made up his mind whether or not to seek a second term. So all the debate, discussion and speculation made sense.

By the time of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (April 23, 2023), however, Biden had made up his mind. He’d decided to run.

That, as the speaker (I) points out, makes all the debate, discussion and speculation kind of moot, i.e. pointless and irrelevant.

You see, before the man makes up his mind, it’s useful to try to convince him one way or another by offering up the pros and cons – reasons why he should run again and why not.

Now that he’s decided to run, no more suggestions are needed – because, well, it’s a done deal.

That’s why the speaker says Biden’s decision to run makes the debate “kind of moot”.

“Kind of” means “sort of”. In other words, you can put further debate into the “moot” category or variety.

Oh, moot.

Moot is best understood as a legal term. Here’s a good explanation (“Mootness” Explained, SubscriptLaw.com, February 4, 2021):

What does it mean when a court dismisses a case as moot?

The Constitution outlines specific roles for each branch of American government. Article III, relating to the judicial branch, says a court must only take live “cases or controversies.” Mootness stems from this mandate.

Courts exist to resolve live disputes. They don’t resolve hypothetical issues. They don’t issue “advisory” opinions. That would mean a court is letting people know what the law says but without having a real, live dispute at hand.

What is “mootness”?

When a case starts, the dispute is live. It’s real. The plaintiff needs resolution. Otherwise a court wouldn’t take it. But sometimes either the passage of time or an intervening event extinguishes the dispute. That’s mootness. A court must recognize when a case ceases to matter. And it will dismiss the case as moot.

Here is a basic example.

Suppose a plaintiff sues her employer claiming she didn’t get a promotion because the employer discriminated against her. Then the plaintiff gets the promotion. If all she asked for in the case was the promotion, then the case is now moot. She got what she wanted. There’s no point in continuing.

If a case is now moot, in short, it is irrelevant. It is no longer valid. It is, hence, meaningless.

In other words, it is neither here nor there.

Turns out, however, questions over whether Biden should run again were not moot. In fact, they persisted until last month, when he decided to quit, allowing Vice President Kamala Harris to take over the Democrat candidacy.

That means, among other things, youth has prevailed over age and experience.

For better or worse.

And here are media examples of “moot”, meaning no longer relevant and therefore pointless:

1. A federal watchdog’s report that the White House budget office broke the law in withholding aid to Ukraine is “moot” when it comes to the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, because he eventually released it, U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst said Thursday.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found the White House Office of Management and Budget violated the Impoundment Control Act when the budget office withheld nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine. The law specifies how the White House can veer from specific spending instructions from Congress, and the GAO found the White House did not follow that guidance.

Trump was pressuring Ukrainian officials at the time to investigate political rival and former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, according to congressional testimony. It led to Trump’s impeachment in the U.S. House of Representatives and an impending trial in the Senate that could lead to his removal from office if a significant number of Republican senators vote against him.

But for Ernst, an Iowa Republican up for reelection this November, the GAO report released Thursday has no bearing on the Senate trial and doesn’t bolster Democratic calls for witness testimony, either.

“One thing to remember, folks, is that the president did actually provide aid to Ukraine,” Ernst said in a telephone news conference Thursday morning, shortly before the Senate’s trial formally began. “So, the point is moot, I believe.”

- Joni Ernst says watchdog’s finding that White House broke law is ‘moot’ for impeachment, DesMoinesRegister.com, January 16, 2020.

2. Staying at my parents’ house while in my thirties, unable to bear it any longer, I once stole a plastic cupboard from their bathroom. It was a cheap freestanding thing, covered in stickers and filled with teenage gunk, which had become part of the landscape simply by hanging around too long. (Jenn Jordan, a professional home organiser I follow online, recommends taking a walk around your house with “fresh eyes”, trying to see things as a stranger might.) I chucked the cupboard and all of its buried treasures out.

My father was understandably upset about the dawn raid, as it wasn’t my home any more, and nobody had asked me to. He is very much a keeper of all the things. Yet the next day – and I was impressed by his grace in doing this – he told me he’d just walked into the bathroom and experienced a strange sense of peace.

How I wish, now, that I had held on to that winning streak and convinced him and my mother to move out of the family house altogether. It’s too late for that now, as he gets to approach his 92nd birthday in the detached house he knows and loves, and the rest of us get to hold our breath every time he goes near the stairs, and burst into tears every time we think about the garage, and the attic, and all that stuff.

We live in a strangely divided age. On the one hand, we have a housing and cost of living crisis, with younger people delaying or not having families at all because they can’t afford the childcare or the number of bedrooms required. In February this year, the Office for National Statistics revealed that by 2022, the birth rate in England and Wales had reached its lowest point since records began in 1939, at 1.49 children per woman.

On the other, we have an older generation often rattling around in large properties filled by possessions rather than people. A common argument is that all those bedrooms might be needed for grandchildren at Christmas, but if the intermediate generation is becoming unable to afford the grandkids in the first place, this point is moot.

- Why can’t my parents see the upsides of downsizing? By Sophie Heawood, FT.com, June 19 2024.

3. In 1924, with fewer than one hundred words, the U.S. Congress granted citizenship to all “non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States” through passage of the Indian Citizenship Act. During the next 100 years, Indigenous peoples and the federal government of the United States have sought to determine exactly what this citizenship means.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which was passed in 1868, granted citizenship to formerly enslaved people, according to the National Archives website. However, this did not apply to American Indians for another 56 years. The topic was also a controversial one at the time, as some Indigenous people were concerned about what citizenship would mean for their tribal memberships.

“One of the conversations that was being held among Native activists in the late 19th through the 20th centuries was [regarding] those who were reluctant towards supporting U.S. citizenship, because they were reluctant to perhaps lose their tribal identity,” says Matthew Pearce, state historian with the Oklahoma Historical Society. Then there were others who argued that they could insist on U.S. citizenship without having to relinquish their identity, he says.

“From their perspective, U.S. citizenship was making sure that American Indians could secure an equal footing in American society … that they could be recognized as a minority group within the United States with all the rights as would be extended to those groups under the 14th Amendment,” Pearce adds.

But once the Indian Citizenship Act was passed, the reality was that there were still some serious limitations – specifically that the right to vote for Native Americans was not guaranteed in every state.

According to history.org, “the privileges of citizenship, however, were largely governed by state law, and the right to vote was often denied to Native Americans in the early 20th century.”

And, according to Pearce, the Indian Citizenship Act also did not end the paternalistic policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, such as guardianship of Native-held allotment land. This corrupt practice, wherein members of Native tribes who received allotments were deemed “incompetent” and a guardian was appointed for them, was in full swing at this time.

However, despite serious limitations, the Indian Citizenship Act was an important first step that laid the groundwork for future advocacy for the rights of Indigenous peoples in the United States. With the fact of citizenship for Native Americans settled, came protections under the 14th Amendment, and a foundation for advocacy for Native peoples during the coming decades and into the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s.

“With the passing of that Act, the question of whether or not an American Indian is a U.S. citizen, that question is now moot,” says Pearce. “That debate, that question, was answered.”

- A Step in the Right Direction, OKMag.com, July 29, 2024.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：張欣   編輯：丹妮）