Once again, the war in Iran dominates the news, and yet we know so little about it. Why did we attack? What are our goals? How will the tactics we are using achieve those goals? There’s not enough there for a featured post, but it seems silly to focus on something else.
So instead of being news-focused, the featured post will cover some general sociological and psychological analyses of the administration that have come out recently. Why are they the way they are? I’ll try to get that out between 10 and 11 EDT.
So the actual news will all be in the weekly summary: the war, the ongoing persecution of trans people, the administration’s continuing legal problems, the WaPo’s sudden change into the voice of the billionaire agenda, and a few other things. Expect to see that around noon.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Trump continues to lose in court. I’ll try to do a round-up next week.
Climate change. Trump killed a report on the health of nature in the US, but the researchers released it anyway.
Ukraine. Ukraine is offering us anti-drone tech for our war with Iran. Russia is offering Iran targeting information on our forces. So Trump lowered sanctions on Russian oil. No wonder Adam Kinzinger wonders what Putin has on Trump.
Epstein.Miami Herald: “Three FBI interviews that contain graphic sexual and physical assault allegations against President Donald Trump were released Thursday by the Justice Department.” If the purpose of attacking Iran was to make Epstein go away, it’s not working.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the Iran War
When I wrote last week, the war had only just started and it was hard to know what was happening. So I focused on the Trump regime’s lack of preparation: The first lesson of our defeat in Vietnam was that a long-term war effort would fail without popular support. So any war but the briefest needs to be preceded by marshaling public opinion at home. George W. Bush did nearly everything else wrong in Iraq, but that part he understood. Conversely, Trump had done virtually nothing to explain why we needed to attack Iran.
At the time it was still plausible that there was a clear reason, but we weren’t being told what it was. This week it became apparent that there is no explanation for why we attacked Iran. Or at least there is no explanation that connects clear national goals with some likely outcome of this war. For several days Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth contradicted each other and sometimes themselves. It was about nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles or regime change or freedom for the Iranian people or punishing evil or making the world safe for Israel or remaking the Middle East or some other thing that you would hear about one day but not the next. The war would be short or maybe long or maybe something in between.
If the goal of your military action is clear, your exit strategies should be straightforward. Indeed, you shouldn’t need a ‘strategy’ at all. When your goals or met you’re done and you leave. … This war is probably just about Donald Trump being in charge. That’s not a clear or definable goal. It leaves the initiative in the hands of whoever currently controls the Iran state and military. It’s a recipe for unclarity.
Here are the most insightful takes on the war I’ve seen:
James Fallows’ “The Arrogance of Ignorance”. He’s been reporting on war and the military since the1980s, and boils the lessons we should have learned during that time, but haven’t, into five points.
“How does this end?” That’s the question to ask before you begin.
The importance of morale and moral factors. Your side needs to believe that you are right and your cause is just.
The memories a war creates will persistent for decades. Iranians still remember 1953, when the US engineered a coup to topple the elected government and install the tyrannical Shah.
What if the war comes home? Even a country that is dominant militarily can be vulnerable to terrorism.
Leadership matters. Fallows drives this point home with the following juxtaposition of photos: George Marshall and Pete Hegseth.
[T]hink of the clowns and posturers who now have the controls. They don’t know what they don’t know. They have no idea what they are unleashing. It took years for the United States to get into its quagmire in Vietnam. It took many months to prepare the groundwork for the disaster in Iraq. These people have changed the world, for the worse, in just nine days. And none of us knows how it will end.
One leader views the world as a transactional playground where everything is for sale, while the other views his own survival as a world-historic necessity, regardless of the ruin it brings to his people.
Trump really has only two methods of trying to influence people: He buys them off or he intimidates them. He does not understand people who act out of values deeper than greed or fear (which is why he gets so frustrated with “the Deep State”, i.e., government workers who believe in the mission of their agency). And he is fundamentally incapable of forming a shared understanding of the situation and arriving at a win/win solution.
Khamenei, on the other hand, did not want money and welcomed the prospect of martyrdom. So none of Trump’s levers could move him. Quite possibly, Trump won’t do any better moving Khamenei’s successor, his son.
Marcy Wheeler looks at how the NYT and other mainstream publications indulge Trump’s fantasies of omnipotence.
The most irksome reporting, however, is the response to Trump’s promise, on the fourth day of this war, that he will jerry-rig a program to ensure the “FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD … as soon as possible.”
His “program” is an order to the US Development Financing Corporation to offer risk insurance to ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz “at a very reasonable price. Wheeler points out that such a program would take time to set up and funding from Congress. Maybe it could work if somebody had thought of it months ago and had it ready to implement as soon as the first bomb dropped.
But Politico covers this as if Trump’s tweet had already created this program in a “Fiat lux!” sort of way. Clearly the world sees through this: That’s why the price of a barrel of oil has jumped from below $60 in January to over $100 today.
The Times has identified the weapon seen in the new video as a Tomahawk cruise missile, a weapon that neither the Israeli military nor the Iranian military has. Dozens of Tomahawks have been launched by U.S. Navy warships into Iran since Feb. 28, when the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran began.
James Fallows commends the NYT for reporting this straight rather than watering it down to please Trump.
Not “appears to contradict” or “is at odds with” or “may give rise to suspicions that.” Flat out: “Contradicts.” “Video shows.” About the US blowing up a school full of little girls.
If your pastor is telling you that murdering Iranians will hasten the return of Jesus, you’re not a church member. You’re a cult member.
and the primaries
The flashy news from Tuesday’s primaries in Texas, Arkansas, and North Carolina was the Texas Senate race. (Complete primary calendar here.) James Talerico defeated Jasmine Crockett on the Democratic side, while Republican incumbent John Cornyn goes to a run-off with Ken Paxton.
Turning Texas blue is a longstanding dream of the Democrats. The hope is that Texas follows the California model: Republican hostility to the growing Hispanic population eventually makes the state unwinnable for them. So far it hasn’t happened. Beto O’Rourke got within three points of Ted Cruz in 2018, but so far that has been the high-water mark. (Cruz beat Colin Allred in 2024 by 6.5%.)
This race was interesting from both sides. Cornyn and Paxton have waged a nasty and expensive campaign, and unless Trump forces one of them to drop out — he’s been making noises — the run-off is likely to be even nastier and more expensive. Paxton is the more true-blue MAGA, but is a scandal machine. The Texas House passed 20 articles of impeachment against him in 2023, mostly focusing on misuse of his office and bribery, but the Senate didn’t convict him. Last year, his wife of 38 years filed for divorce “on biblical grounds”. His legal problems go back to 2008, and he appears to have never held an office he didn’t misuse for personal gain.
Talerico is a Presbyterian seminarian who speaks the language of religion comfortably without compromising progressive positions on the major issues. I discuss what this might mean for the nation in the featured post.
Give Crockett credit for offering a timely and complete concession to Talerico. The only way Democrats pull this off is if they stay united. Crockett showed the kind of class that used to be standard, but is rare these days.
One of the winners in Texas was Rep. Tony Gonzalez who, despite being married with six children, pressured a staffer into an affair; she later committed suicide by setting herself on fire. Fortunately for Republicans, party leadership is wiser than Gonazlez’ voters: They forced Gonzalez out on Thursday, but want him to serve out his term because they have such a small margin in the House. (Moral considerations only go so far. Power is more important.)
Prior to his withdrawal, Gonzalez provided a lesson in how Republican Christianity works. Here, Gonzalez admits to the affair, but assures the voters that it’s all fine now.
I have reconciled with my wife Angel, I’ve asked God to forgive me (which He has), and my faith is as strong as ever.
What the staffer’s family thinks is not worth mentioning.
I love the “which He has.” Not “I believe He has” or “I trust He has” or “My faith tells me He has.” Just “He has.”
How convenient a powerful man must find it, to believe in a God who lets you speak for Him. And once God had spoken (through Rep. Gonzalez), what voter would dare not to forgive him too? No wonder Gonzalez’ faith has remained strong, probably just as strong as it was when he was screwing his staff.
Republican Christianity is a very convenient religion. I recommend it to powerful-but-amoral people everywhere.
and Noem
Kristi Noem finally lost her job as Homeland Security Secretary, but not for of the reasons you might expect. It wasn’t that her agents murdered two people in Minneapolis, or that she blatantly lied about it. It wasn’t because DHS under her leadership routinely ignored court orders. It wasn’t that she had DHS buy a $70 million luxury jet under the guise of “deportations”, but really for her own use.
An executive jet the Department of Homeland Security has told the White House’s Office of Management and Budget it needs for immigrant deportation flights and Cabinet officials’ travel features a bedroom with a queen bed, showers, a kitchen, four large flat-screen TVs and even a bar, according to images of the aircraft obtained by NBC News.
I can’t quite imagine who we’d want to deport in that kind of luxury. But that is just corruption; you can’t get fired for that in this administration.
It also wasn’t because of her barely-hidden affair with underling Cory Lewandowski. (They’re both married.) And it wasn’t even because she wasted $220 million of DHS money on TV ads that seem aimed more at raising her name recognition and personal profile than any legitimate DHS purpose.
During a congressional hearing this week, Ms. Noem was asked if Mr. Trump had approved a $200 million-plus government ad campaign in which she was prominently featured. Ms. Noem said Mr. Trump had tasked her with “getting the message out to the country.” Asked if Mr. Trump had signed off on the campaign before the ads aired, Ms. Noem responded, “We had that conversation, yes, before I was put in this position and sworn in and confirmed. And since then as well.”
That’s Rule #1 in the Trump regime: Nothing is the Boss’ fault.
You can now add a third covered-up murder to Noem’s tally: We now have video showing that Ruben Ray Martinez was not trying to run over an ICE agent when he was shot nearly a year ago. Like Rene Good and Alex Pretti, Martinez was a US citizen.
and you also might be interested in …
The February jobs report was terrible: Nonfarm payrolls fell by 92K workers. It’s a mistake to read too much into any single month’s report, but the trend over the last year is not looking good. And things are not likely to improve now that oil prices are soaring.
Cutting-edge discoveries and clinical investigations—on subjects ranging from mRNA vaccines to diabetes and dementia—are denied crucial resources while junk science and fringe beliefs are elevated without justifiable explanation. … Kennedy has continued to spread misinformation and push politicised agendas at the expense of the country’s most vulnerable. When called to account for his decisions by Congress, he has been evasive and combative. The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.
This is discouraging. A 25-country survey by Pew Research asks whether your fellow citizens’ morals are very good, somewhat good, somewhat bad, or very bad. US citizens showed the least trust in each other, with only 47% rating fellow citizens as very or somewhat good. No other country was under 50%, and Canada was the most trusting at 92%.
With so many substantive reasons to denounce Trump, I don’t like to focus on his symbolic outrages. But when he attended the return of the coffins of the first six American troops to die in the Iran War — known to the military as the “dignified transfer” and considered a solemn ritual — he wore a white USA golf hat that he sells on his website.
Fox News apparently realized how bad this was, because they “inadvertently” deceived their viewers to cover for him. Instead of showing the actual footage, they replayed video from a dignified transfer in December when he wasn’t wearing a hat.
The next time someone asks why you don’t like Trump, show them this 6 1/2 minute video from Dean Withers. He goes through Trump’s character, domestic policies, and foreign policies in an amazing amount of detail.
Thursday, Alabama is scheduled to execute Sonny Burton. Burton was involved in a 1991 robbery in which someone got killed. He was not the shooter. The shooter has already died in prison. He’s 75, and the victim’s daughter has asked for clemency. Will Governor Ivey intervene?
and let’s close with something anachronistic
What if “Staying Alive” had been done in the 1500s as a four-part madrigal?
Republicans have left an opening. Can Democrats like James Talarico take advantage?
Ever since Jerry Falwell launched the Moral Majority and got credit for electing Ronald Reagan in 1980, conservative Republicans have seemed to own Christianity.
Not really, of course. There was always a Christian Left, going back to Dorothy Day in the 1930s, and even further back to St. Francis or even that ultimate bleeding heart, Jesus. Both the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement had strong liberal religious components.
But from the 1980s on, in the media and the public mind, Christianity in politics somehow came to mean conservative politics. “Moral” issues were defined as the issues religious conservatives cared about: abortion, gay rights, and so on. When Supreme Court decisions purport to defend “conscience”, or people’s right to act on their “sincerely held religious beliefs”, you can bet that those beliefs are conservative. Only rarely have treating women like people, fighting oligarchy, refusing to racially discriminate, opposing cruelty towards immigrants, preserving the environment, or allowing LGBTQ people to lead full lives been framed as “moral” issues.
Texas has gone as far as to legally prohibit its [mortality review] committee from reviewing deaths that are considered abortion-related. This could include some miscarriage care, health officials told ProPublica.
In times past, the choice between Democrat and Republican wasn’t always so clear, and Christians tended to split down the middle. A shared worldview across the aisle led to more options in the voting booth. As things stand now, no such options remain. The Democratic Party has so situated itself against the God of heaven and against His Word that no Christian can justly, nor obediently cast a vote for anyone who claims the Democratic platform. … For these reasons, Christians cannot vote for any member of the Democratic party while also saying “I believe and follow the teachings of King Jesus.” From Vice President Harris all the way down to local City Councils and school boards.
The “reasons” given are abortion [1], LGBTQI+ rights, and DEI (which doesn’t even rate an explanation).
Democrats, for the most part, have dodged this challenge. Conservative Catholics like J. D. Vance can claim to know better than the Pope, but liberal Catholics like Joe Biden or John Kerry have had to strike nuanced positions (like disapproving personally of abortion while defending a public right to choose it) while trying to change the subject. Barack Obama’s liberal Christian religion was seen as a political problem, not a strength.
Enter Trump. During the Trump era, Republicans have leaned even more heavily on the conservative Christian vote while putting their Christian supporters in an ever-more-difficult position. Trump, after all, represents the virtual antithesis of Christianity.
He has been accused of sexually assaulting a minor. And even if that turns out not to be true, he’s been suppressing the Epstein files to hide something.
He lies so constantly that he has worn out the fact-checkers. Anything short of an outrage-producing howler gets ignored now.
When you get down to cases, it’s actually harder to see how a Christian can support Trump rather than a typical Democrat.
Pastors who are committed to Trump politically have twisted themselves into all kinds of contorted positions. Bible verses get re-interpreted to circumvent what they obviously say. The importance of morality and character in public leaders (something we heard a lot about when Bill Clinton was president) is discounted, because “God uses flawed people“. When Republicans have scandals, we hear about God’s mercy and forgiveness — even if the offender denies the sin and refuses to make things right with the victim. But Democratic sin is unforgivable.
This can’t go on forever. At some point, the gulf between Trump and Christ grows so large as to be unbridgeable. And that raises the question: Can Democrats make an explicitly Christian play for the Christian vote?
Talarico. That’s going to be tested in Texas, where Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico won the Democratic senate primary Tuesday. Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons comments:
Talarico’s message is not about moderating progressive commitments to win over religious conservatives. It is about courage. It is about saying plainly that support for LGBTQ+ equality, reproductive freedom, public education and church-state separation can flow directly from Christian faith. He’s openly Christian and firmly pluralistic.
That does more than close a messaging gap: Talarico and those like him can change the terrain. When leaders speak about faith with confidence instead of defensiveness, they show that democracy and devotion are not in conflict.
His Republican opponent — whether it will be the incumbent John Cornyn or challenger Ken Paxton (who presents about as many moral issues as Donald Trump) — is bound to double down on the Christians-can’t-vote-for-Democrats message. Texans can expect to hear a lot about Talarico’s support for reproductive freedom and trans rights. We’ll see whether such attack ads can drown out the voice of an authentic liberal Christian whose worldview is rooted in what Jesus actually said rather than the conservative positions that have attached to him like barnacles.
But what about church-and-state? A second question Talarico raises is whether Democrats should compete explicitly for the Christian vote. One popular liberal viewpoint is an interpretation of church-and-state separation that extends to political argument rather than just government: Our government needs to remain secular and not favor any particular religion, so our candidates should campaign in a purely secular way.
I think this view misses an important point: People come to their political positions through their values, and many people’s values are grounded in their religion. If you can’t use religious language, you end up arguing against opinions already set; you can’t get into the mill where those opinions were forged and might be re-forged.
And finally, purely secular politics runs into a widespread American belief: that religious convictions are more serious and solid than secular ones. One reason Democrats are always under more pressure to compromise than Republicans is that the public sees conservative positions as religion-based and therefore immovable. Democratic positions seem more political than principled, because we so rarely seem to “speak from the heart”.
Many, many liberal positions rise out of deeply held moral values that are as serious as any religion, and many of those values are in fact religious. In the privacy of their own minds, many Democrats think in religious terms. If those terms have to be edited out before we speak in public, we will sound inauthentic.
[1] I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating that the anti-abortion position is entirely un-Biblical. Nothing in the Bible indicates that fetuses have souls, and Genesis 2:7 shows the soul entering the body not at conception, but with the first breath (which is a common Jewish belief).
Occasionally someone argues that Jesus or the prophets would have denounced abortion had they known about it, but this is nonsense. Surgical abortion may be a recent development, but from the beginning of time women who didn’t want to be pregnant have tried to induce miscarriages. If you see some spiritual difference between mifepristone and pennyroyal, you are more perceptive than I am.
Jesus and the prophets had to know about this practice, but for some reason they didn’t find it worth commenting on.
This lack of Biblical support is not so important for Catholics who oppose abortion, because the institution of the Catholic Church reserves the right to create new doctrine. But Protestant denominations — especially conservative ones — explicitly reject this view: Churches are not supposed to add or subtract from the message of the Bible.
Anti-abortion has been grafted onto the Bible. It wasn’t there originally.
So we’re still at war and we still don’t know why. I’ll cover that in the weekly summary, but it’s hard to write at length about all the things I don’t know.
Instead, I want to look at an interesting question raised by James Talerico’s senate candidacy in Texas: After years of Trump’s blatant immorality and policies directly opposed by the Sermon on the Mount, can Democrats start competing for the explicitly Christian vote? And if so, should they? I’m not sure how long that article will take, but I hope to get it posted by 10 EDT.
That leaves the weekly summary to cover the war, last week’s primary elections, Kristi Noem’s departure, and a variety of other things. I’ll try to get that around noon.
Boil it all down and what do we have? We have a military operation with no clear ends at all. Stop asking what the US government’s intentions are, they do not exist outside of the personal interests of Donald Trump. They can and will therefore change in a heartbeat as he searches desperately for whatever end gives him the best chance to declare victory.He has made the national interest entirely personal.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Iran attack further undermines the role of Congress in our democracy. But congressional Republicans seem content to watch their institution fade into irrelevance.
Epstein. From the beginning, I’ve been in denial about the depth and persistence of this scandal. It’s not going away. So I’m moving it onto the Ongoing list.
Climate change. My limited attention didn’t spot anything this week.
Gaza. The US has opened two consular offices in West Bank settlements that past administrations of both parties have deemed illegal.
This week everybody was talking about the attack on Iran
In the featured post I focus on how little Trump seems to care about either Congress’ approval or the public’s.
and the State of the Union
In past years I’ve often devoted a featured post to analyzing the State of the Union, but this one doesn’t deserve that kind of attention. Ordinarily, a president whose party controlled Congress would list things he wants Congress to do in the coming year, and use his public platform to build popular support behind those proposals. But Trump views himself as a dictator, so he didn’t bother to ask Congress for much of anything — not even for approval of the Iran attack that was undoubtedly already in the works.
The one noteworthy thing is a speculative theme I’ve seen in several places, notably from David Frum in The Atlantic: Trump has now broken the State of the Union tradition so badly that Democrats should put an end to it if they hold the House majority next year.
Lots of people think the State of the Union address is mandated by the Constitution, but in fact it isn’t. Here’s the relevant text:
He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient
Notice: no set schedule and no requirement for an in-person speech. Washington and Adams did speak to Congress on a more-or-less annual basis, usually sometime in early December. Jefferson began sending written messages instead, a practice that continued until Woodrow Wilson revived the in-person speech in 1913.
If you look at old state-of-the-union messages, they are not political speeches. What they resemble instead are the reports corporate presidents send to their boards of directors: This is what your government has been doing this last year and what we plan to do in the coming year. They aren’t full of well-crafted phrases and soaring rhetoric. But they did have policy announcements: James Monroe announced the Monroe Doctrine in the 1823 SOTU.
The first SOTU broadcast over radio was Calvin Coolidge’s in 1923. The first televised SOTU was by Harry Truman in 1947. Broadcasting changed the nature of the speech, turning it into an address to the nation rather than a message to Congress. Now it’s an annual pageant for the president to try to whip up support.
This year’s address was shameful, as so many of Trump’s speeches are. It was full of lies, way too long, and insulting to the Democrats in Congress. It contained no proposals of substance. It’s sole point was that Americans should love Trump and hate his enemies.
Before the speech, Democrats debated among themselves about whether to attend or boycott. Why subject yourself to two hours of lies and insults? I “boycotted” in the sense that I had better things to do with two hours of my life. (I scanned the transcript.)
Here’s the piece of the SOTU ritual that Trump has forgotten and needs to be reminded of: He is not the master of this event; he is a guest of the Speaker of the House. He comes in response to an invitation. Guests should act with a certain decorum. In particular, they should not gratuitously insult their hosts.
The Democrats are widely expected to regain the House majority in the fall. So when it’s time for the 2027 SOTU, the Speaker may be a Democrat like Hakeem Jeffries. He should not invite Trump to come speak in person. Trump should not be invited back at all until he pledges to behave as a guest should.
and ICE
Every week, more horror stories.
Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a refugee from Burma who was nearly blind, died after Border Patrol agents took him into custody, determined that they couldn’t hold him, and then abandoned him outside a closed Tim Horton’s franchise on a freezing-cold night in Buffalo. His family (who put up fliers asking if anyone had seen him) wasn’t told about his release or where to find him. His body was found five days later.
A Nashville man who was in this country legally and had a work permit was stopped, had his windows broken, and was taken away. His wife says he showed the agents his papers but they didn’t care.
The Portland Press Herald has found 35 Maine residents (out of the 206 swept up by ICE in the recent Operation Catch of the Day) who have been arrested and detained, but were then released by immigration judges who found that the government had no reason to hold them. Many of them have done nothing wrong.
[South Portland resident Evaristo] Kalonji’s name was on ICE’s target list even though the agency knew he had no criminal record, according to notes the government submitted in court that were viewed by the Press Herald. He said he had left his native Angola, completed an ardous journey up through the Americas and arrived in California a few years ago. He presented himself at the border, he said, then applied for asylum, so the Department of Homeland Security knew he was here.
He spent weeks in custody, paid a $3000 bond, and was released back into the same situation he was abducted from: He’s living with his family and working while he waits for his next asylum hearing.
“People were held in detention facilities for weeks for an immigration judge to essentially find that they were not a danger or a flight risk and should be released,” said Jenny Beverly, an immigration attorney in Portland and a former immigration judge. “That tells me that the arrests were needless to begin with.”
Being in detention meant Kalonji and others missed paychecks. Some lost their jobs. Their families and friends scrambled to raise money to continue to pay their bills, to pay bond, while waiting anxiously for news.
Here’s what grinds on me: The Maine detainees were brought to a detention facility in Burlington, Massachusetts — the next town over from where I live. The site was built to be a temporary processing center, but has turned into an overcrowded jail where people spend weeks or months under “inhumane” conditions. I’ve protested outside this facility, which is a quick walk from the popular Burlington Mall, with its Nordstrom’s and Victoria’s Secret. (Mall police chase away protesters who try to use the mall’s parking.) But those of us who live nearby have no way of knowing what goes on inside.
You may feel like all this Gestapo activity is far away from you. But it probably isn’t.
So now Bill and Hillary Clinton have both testified before the House Oversight Committee that is investigating the Epstein files. Reportedly, they answered every question. Both denied wrongdoing, and Hillary said she had never met Jeffrey Epstein, although she did know Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
There is way more evidence linking Trump to Epstein than either of the Clintons. So why isn’t he testifying?
and deadly AIs
The Pentagon was negotiating a contract to use Anthropic’s AI app Claude, a competitor of ChatGPT. They hit a snag when Anthropic wanted the contract to ban Claude “being used for the mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in autonomous weapons with no humans involved”.
That demand didn’t just result in Anthropic losing the contract, but being declared a “supply chain risk“, which would blacklist the company from just about any government work. Axios says this designation is “usually reserved for companies from adversarial countries, such as Chinese tech giant Huawei”.
The future is not working out the way Isaac Asimov pictured. Sticking to his three laws of robotics will get you punished.
In 2023 the Florida Legislature passed a bill that bans curriculum at state-funded schools that supposedly teaches identity politics or diversity, equity and inclusion, or that suggests racism, sexism and other forms of oppression are embedded in American institutions.
You might wonder what kind of sociology textbook Florida professors could find that stays clear of all that. Well, Florida has made its own.
Florida’s new 267-page sociology textbook is an abbreviated version of the 669-page free and open-source “Introduction to Sociology 3e” and excludes chapters not just on race and ethnicity and gender and sexuality — the usual targets — but also on media and technology, global inequality and social stratification.
The word “racism” appeared 115 times in the original textbook, but just six times in the censored version. Sociology Professor Robyn Autry comments:
Because sociology aims to better understand “today’s most divisive issues,” it’s hard to imagine how any sociology course, especially an introductory one, can be taught without delving into topics that have been censored. And that appears to be the point for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies on the board of governors. It’s rational to conclude that they don’t want sociology taught at all, and that it’s not just particular topics but the discipline as a whole that bothers them.
Robert Cassanello, president of the United Faculty of Florida, warns:
I have it on good authority that next year they’re going to look at the psychology and American history textbooks. It’s an assault on critical thinking.
Until I went looking for that video, I never realized that “Dads unsupervised” is a popular YouTube search term. Here’s something else it will get you.
Two decades ago, George W. Bush and his cabinet spent months raising support for an invasion of Iraq. Two days ago, the Trump regime attacked Iran without giving us any coherent explanation.
Saturday, the US and Israel began an air war against Iran. The widespread attacks had a variety of goals, but decapitating the government was clearly one of them: One early death was that of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, an ayatollah who has been in power since the death of the founder of the current theocracy, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989.
The first American deaths were reported yesterday: three service members who had not yet been named. Five more have been seriously wounded.
It’s hard to know what to write about this, because we have been told so little. Comparisons to George W. Bush’s Iraq fiasco are everywhere, but this attack differs in one important respect: Bush spent months trying to raise public and congressional support for his invasion. Trump, on the other hand, has given no credible explanation. In retrospect, many Americans resented Bush’s deceptive propaganda, but at least he acted like our opinions mattered. Trump seems not to need either our approval or that of Congress. (The Constitution and the War Powers Act say he does need Congress’ approval, if things like that still matter.)
I remember where I was when Bush came on every TV network to announce we were going to war. Trump hasn’t bothered. He posted to social media an 8-minute video full of rhetoric and falsehoods, and never answered the questions “Why this? Why now?” Stylistically, he talked at us rather than to us — standing behind an official podium and hiding his eyes in the shadow of the visor of a USA cap.
No senior Trump administration officials or cabinet members appeared on the Sunday show television circuit a day after the US and Israel began a major military operation in Iran, killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. … The White House’s communications operation indicated that it would let allies on Capitol Hill do the talking, three people familiar with the discussions said.
Why would Trump want Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton to make the case rather than Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth or J. D. Vance? To me, the answer seems obvious: Republican senators aren’t official representatives of the Trump regime, so anything they say is deniable.
Trump has sent them out to lie to us, and doesn’t want to be answerable when those lies collapse.
Every hint of an explanation that we’ve been given so far is full of holes. We were told in June that the bombing raids then had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability. But only months later we have to attack again because Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon.”
As they made their public case this week for another American military campaign against Iran, President Trump and his aides asserted that Iran has restarted its nuclear program, has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days, and is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States. All three of these claims are either false or unproven.
Lay down your arms. You will be treated fairly with total immunity. Or you will face certain death.
But there’s no way an air campaign can back that up. The Iranian forces would have to surrender to somebody on the ground, somebody with the institutional power to hold tribunals for some people but not others. Who is that?
Trump also claimed to be doing this for the Iranian people:
When we are done, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations. … America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.
What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.
In Venezuela after Maduro was captured, his vice president took power and the entire regime remained intact. All they did was let Trump control their oil.
So much for the Iranian people.
In the absence of any plausible explanation from Trump, we’re left to imagine some other motive. Here’s the opinion of Phillips P. OBrien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland:
Boil it all down and what do we have? We have a military operation with no clear ends at all. Stop asking what the US government’s intentions are, they do not exist outside of the personal interests of Donald Trump. They can and will therefore change in a heartbeat as he searches desperately for whatever end gives him the best chance to declare victory. He has made the national interest entirely personal.
Trump attacked Iran to change the media narrative in the US. The testimony of the Clintons to the House Oversight Committee has raised the question of why Trump doesn’t testify. And polls show Trump’s party headed for a historic defeat in November, losing the House and possibly even the Senate.
This bombing campaign is what Iran’s regional rivals get in exchange for a series of bribes to Trump and his family: the UAE’s half-billion-dollar investment in Trump’s crypto company; a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar; Jared Kushner’s firm getting $2 billion in Saudi money to invest despite their high management fees and lack of experience; an Abu Dhabi firm using $2 billion in Trump meme coins to complete a business transaction; and perhaps countless others that are still hidden behind the veil of Trump’s real estate and crypto-currency operations. Rachel Maddow says: “And now for that low, low price, they appear to have rented the services of the United States military to start a war that they want, but that the American people do not, and that our American government hasn’t bothered to explain in terms that are even internally consistent, let alone rational and sound.”
A big, expensive distraction? A quid for the sheikhs’ quo? Trump may not like those theories. But if he doesn’t want them settling into the public mind, he needs to give us something better.
Friday night, it seemed like I had a newsy week to cover: the State of the Union address; further developments in the Epstein case, including testimony from the Clintons and questions about why Trump isn’t testifying; still more instances of ICE’s excessive violence; the midterm primary season kicking off in Texas tomorrow with consequential Senate races in both parties; the War Defense Department showdown with a major AI firm about killer robots; and the usual collection of lesser stories.
And then Trump attacked Iran, killing its leader and at least 175 schoolgirls, getting at least three American servicepeople killed in the process.
That move shoved everything else into the background. But the problem it presents to me and other commenters is that we don’t have a lot of facts to pass along. We don’t know what’s happening on the ground in Iran. We don’t have any clear explanation from the Trump regime about why they’re doing this, what the ultimate goal is, or even what the short-term plan is.
But I remember something my high school journalism teacher said: “If you can’t write about the is-ness of something, you can write about the not-ness of it.” (Thanks, Mr. Connelly.) So that’s the focus of this featured post: Why don’t we know?
Usually, when you hear references to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, it’s a cautionary tale: Don’t be like that. But in one sense, George W. Bush did much better then than Trump is doing now. Bush’s people may have pushed all sorts of lies about their prospective invasion, but at least they respected the American people and the Congress enough to spend months trying to convince us. Trump seems not to care.
So the featured post “Why?” should be out shortly. All the other stuff I thought I was going to talk about will be in the weekly summary, which I’ll try to get out by noon EST.
I am begging my fellow politicians, my fellow Illinoisans, my fellow Americans to realize that right now in this country we are not fighting over policy or political party. We are fighting over whether we are going to be a civilization rooted in empathy and kindness — or one rooted in cruelty and rage.
Climate change. The EPA has reversed the 2009 endangerment finding that named CO2 as a pollutant that can be regulated. The EPA is now essentially helpless to do anything to combat climate change.
Gaza. The “Board of Peace” that claims to be overseeing the reconstruction of Gaza includes no Gazans or other Palestinian representatives. But it’s building a base to house a multi-national peacekeeping force. Meanwhile, Israel is preparing to expand colonization of the West Bank.
Ukraine. M. Gessen looks at Ukraine after four years of war, a period longer than Russia and Ukraine experienced fighting the Nazis as part of the Soviet Union. “Now Ukraine’s patriotic war, against Russia, has crossed that threshold, with no end in sight. Russia’s offensive appeared to speed up in December. In February, Ukraine recaptured ground, in its most successful counteroffensive in more than two years. But on the whole, the front line has remained largely static for more than three years.”
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about tariffs
This is covered in the featured post. Short version: The Supreme Court has ruled that the “liberation day” tariffs are illegal. Trump immediately replaced them with 15% across-the-board tariffs, which are almost certainly illegal too.
One additional comment from Paul Krugman: Even if the new tariffs stand up in court “Tariffs as an instrument of arbitrary power have been dismantled.” Under this law, Trump can’t impose large tariffs on countries he doesn’t like and low tariffs on countries that grovel to him.
Something I didn’t mention in the featured post is how catty the conservative justices got with each other in their written opinions. For example, Roberts strongly implied that Kavanaugh was simply a Trump mouthpiece:
The Government, echoed point-for-point by the principal dissent, marshals several arguments in response.
and the Epstein files
The big recent news about the Epstein scandal is that other governments are taking it far more seriously than the Trump administration is. The former Prince Andrew, brother of King Charles of the UK, was arrested Thursday morning. The King expressed his “deepest concern” over Andrew, but showed no indication to help his brother in any practical way, saying “the law must take its course”.
US Republicans are mostly doing the exact opposite: expressing “concern” over Epstein’s victims, but not lifting a finger against the men who abused them.
Andrew was arrested for “suspicion of misconduct in public office”. I’m not sure how that correlates to anything in the US justice system. You can’t be convicted of “suspicion”, but a formal investigation will decide whether a charge will be pressed. Because “misconduct in public office” is such a catch-all term, the penalties range all the way up to life imprisonment. Ultimately, the charges may include not just sex crimes, but also leaking confidential information to Epstein. (Andrew used to be a trade envoy for the UK, so his insider knowledge could be useful to a financier.)
In spite of King Charles revoking Andrew’s title in November, for now he remains 8th in the line of succession to the throne. Removing him from succession requires an act of Parliament, which is under consideration.
I can’t discuss the Epstein case without mentioning Pam Bondi’s shameful testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. She responded to virtually every question by yelling attacks at the questioner. Among other questions she dodged in this manner, she refused to comment on why the Justice Department had not talked to any of the Epstein victims who were present in the gallery, and segued onto the high stock market and how we really ought to be talking about that.
Just for the record: The performance of the stock market should never come up during the testimony of an attorney general. Her job has nothing to do with that.
The NY Times Pitchbot skewers both Andrew and the US Supreme Court’s decision giving Trump immunity:
“Charges against Former Prince Andrew must be dropped if it’s determined that raping teenagers was an official act.” – by John Roberts (joined by Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett).
WaPo lists prominent people — mostly non-US or in the US private sector — whose connections with Epstein have produced consequences. Notably missing: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The commerce secretary previously told Congress he cut ties with Epstein in 2005 after the late financier – a neighbour of Lutnick in New York – used sexual innuendo to explain why he owned a massage table in a room of his home. In Tuesday’s testimony, he said: “Over the next 14 years, I met him two other times that I can recall.” The justice department files show Lutnick visited Epstein’s Caribbean island on 23 December, 2012. That came four years after Epstein was convicted for soliciting prostitution from a child.
Hunting for revelations about the occupant of the Oval Office in this email blizzard is a fool’s errand. Trump’s name attached to anything incriminating is redacted. Of the 5,300 files with 38,000 references to Trump, Melania, or Mar-a-Lago, none are direct communications between Trump and Epstein. Deputy AG Todd Blanche has already said that the second half of the tranche—another two-and-a-half million pages—will never see the light of day.
Nonetheless, people are finding things. Jay Kuo summarizes what he’s seen so far. Nothing he mentions constitutes beyond-reasonable-doubt proof. But it’s a far cry from Trump’s claim “I’ve been totally exonerated.“
Celeste Davis wonders about the Epstein-files question hardly anybody asks:
Everyone is asking how did these men get away with so much rape? No one is asking what would cause so many to want to rape so much in the first place?
We seem to take for granted that men whose power puts them beyond any restraints will of course abuse underage girls. Why do we do that?
A. R. Moxon makes a related point not specific to the Epstein story. He comments on the “male loneliness epidemic”, which he finds frequently discussed in the media.
This is a problem. What I am inviting you to contemplate is how frequently it is treated as a problem for men, caused by women, to be solved by everyone else. I’m inviting you to contemplate how seldom it’s being treated as a problem caused by men who have never even started the work they need to do on themselves.
Moxon traces the “problem” to the decline of patriarchy: Men who expect to dominate a woman domestically and sexually are less and less likely to find a woman who agrees to be dominated.
The loneliness of women—also quite real—is not a problem that’s usually mentioned at all, much less as one worth seeking a solution to, and certainly never as one that ought to be solved by men deciding that they no longer need to dominate others as a core of their identity.
If patriarchal men are “dying off” (as they often phrase it) due to women finding them unfit for mating, that’s evolution at work. Survival-of-the-fittest isn’t always about becoming a better predator. Sometimes it’s about recognizing that the environment has changed, and adapting to it.
Continuing in this vein, Jessica Valenti discusses the Heritage Foundation’s plans for America’s cultural future, in a piece called “They’re Coming For Our Daughters“. Purportedly high-minded rhetoric about “Saving the Family” translates to limiting girls’ potential futures, and turning back the clock to a time when women could aspire to little other than the protection of a man and the opportunity to bear and raise his children.
People who didn’t take Heritage’s Project 2025 seriously enough are probably not taking this seriously enough either.
and Jesse Jackson
Jesse Jackson, who died last Tuesday at the age of 84, was the most visible Black leader of the post-Martin-Luther-King era. The Guardian published a summary of his influence on American politics.
One thing I remember from listening to Jackson was how he tried to unite all discriminated-against groups in a “rainbow coalition”. I’m going to get this quote wrong, but it went something like: “You have to decide whether you don’t want your group sent to the back of the bus, or you don’t want anybody sent to the back of the bus.”
and Iran
Are we going to war with Iran? We have an enormous armada in the region, including two of our largest aircraft carriers.
according to Robert A. Pape, the Founding Director of the Chicago Project on Security & Threats (CPOST), the US’s current force mobilization in the Middle East accounts for 40-50% of the deployable US air power worldwide.
Trump is giving deadlines and threatening “bad things will happen” if Iran doesn’t give him what he wants. Talking in his mob-boss style, Trump told reporters: “We’re either going to get a deal or it’s going to be unfortunate for them.”
and Cuba
Did you realize that we’re already more-or-less in a regime-change war with Cuba? I didn’t until recently, and I’m pretty sure a lot of Americans still don’t. (By contrast, the Cubans all know about it.)
Nine days after taking office, Trump signed an executive order declaring Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy, requiring immediate response to protect American citizens and interests”. The order imposed tariffs on “any country that directly or indirectly provides oil to Cuba”.
Venezuela had been supplying most of Cuba’s oil, until the Trump regime attacked. While the US has not formally announced a blockade of the island, on January 11 of this year, Trump posted:
THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.
Make a deal about what? Before it’s too late for what? But no list of demands accompanies Trump’s threats. The NYT reports:
Cuban tankers have hardly left the island’s shores for months. Oil-rich allies have halted shipments or declined to come to the rescue. The U.S. military has seized ships that have supported Cuba. And in recent days, vessels roaming the Caribbean Sea in search of fuel for Cuba have come up empty or been intercepted by the U.S. authorities. …
“Among us longtime Cuba watchers, we’ve always resisted people using the word blockade,” said Fulton Armstrong, the former lead Latin America analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, who has been studying Cuba since 1984. “But it is indeed a blockade.”
“There’s no oil, there’s no money, there’s no anything,” US President Donald Trump told reporters Monday, adding that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leading efforts to negotiate with top Cuban officials. Rubio, who is Cuban American and a longtime opponent of the Cuban government, has previously said the only thing he intends to discuss with the island’s communist leadership is when they would relinquish power.
“It is an extreme form of unilateral economic coercion with extraterritorial effects, through which the United States seeks to exert coercion on the sovereign state of Cuba and compel other sovereign third States to alter their lawful commercial relations, under threat of punitive trade measures,” they said. … “There is no right under international law to impose economic penalties on third States for engaging in lawful trade with another sovereign country.”
And it’s having devastating effects on the people of Cuba: Not only is there little-to-no imported food, there isn’t fuel to bring food into the cities from the countryside. When food arrives, there may not be electric power to keep it refrigerated. Recently, the crisis has been damaging the healthcare system:
The situation however has reached a new extreme, with authorities now saying that ambulances are struggling to find fuel to respond to emergencies. Persistent power outages have also further deteriorated hospitals.
Flights bringing in vital supplies, which the island nation has been relying on since the blockade, have now stopped, as Havana is no longer capable of refuelling airplanes for their outbound flights from Cuban airports.
We’re doing that. And why, exactly?
and Gaza
Wielding a golden gavel, Trump presided over the first meeting of his Board of Peace, which, among other vague ambitions, is supposed to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza. The meeting was held in the newly renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. (Like the Kennedy Center, the Institute of Peace’s name is in the legislation that established it. Legally, Trump has no power to change it, but his name is on the facade anyway.)
Trump pledged $10 billion in contributions from the US. Other BoP members have pledged $7 billion. (By contrast, the US is about $4.5 billion behind in its commitments to the United Nations.) You might wonder where this money will come from. Congress has not yet appropriated anything. But does that matter any more?
The Board, all of whom have been chosen by Trump, includes no Palestinian representative, but does include First Son-In-Law Jared Kushner, whose vision for Gaza is of high-rise towers and beaches full of tourists — basically pre-civil-war Beirut.
As I’ve pointed out before, the BoP’s charter gives all power to its chairman, who is defined in the charter to be “Donald J. Trump”. (Not the President of the United States, but Trump personally.) Like a king, he serves in perpetuity and names his own successor. If the taxpayers are going to contribute $10 billion to the BoP, we might as well just put the money directly into Trump’s pocket.
The Trump administration is planning to build a 5,000-person military base in Gaza, sprawling more than 350 acres, according to Board of Peace contracting records reviewed by the Guardian. The site is envisioned as a military operating base for a future International Stabilization Force (ISF), planned as a multinational military force composed of pledged troops.
During the Gaza War, death toll estimates were given by local Palestinian authorities who were answerable to the Hamas government. For this reason, many observers — especially those sympathetic to Israel — tended to discount them. Surely the carnage wasn’t as bad as the Palestinian numbers made it look.
In fact, it now appears to have been worse. The Lancet has raised its estimate of the death toll of the first 16 months of the two-year Gaza war: from 49,000 to 75,000. That total includes 22,800 children under 18.
and you also might be interested in …
If you haven’t seen Illinois Governor Pritzker’s state-of-the-state speech, you should look it up. (The opening quote comes from it.) It is part political speech, but part sermon on the values that make America what it should be.
DHS is wildly unpopular, partly because it keeps telling the public ridiculous lies that are easily disproven by video. When DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin left the job, then, many hoped for a change in the department’s policy regarding the Truth. Not so fast. New spokesperson Lauren Bis might be worse.
Friday, students at a Philadelphia-area high school staged a walkout to protest against ICE. According to witnesses, a man in a brown jacket lunged towards students and put one girl in a chokehold. (There’s a picture of that.) Other students started hitting the man, as you well might when an adult attacks one of your classmates. Police arrived.
Marcy Wheeler sums up Marco Rubio’s message to European representatives to the Munich Security Conference like this: “We want to be friends, if you want to be as racist as we are.”
So Trump announced that he’s sending a hospital ship to Greenland “to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there. It’s on the way!!!”. No one seems to know what he’s talking about. Both of the Navy’s hospital ships (including the one he posted a picture of) are moored in Mobile.
In Greenland, as in Denmark, access to healthcare is free. There are five regional hospitals across the vast Arctic island, with the Nuuk hospital serving patients from all over the territory.
The Danish defense minister responded: “The Greenlandic population receives the healthcare it needs. They receive it either in Greenland, or, if they require specialised treatment, they receive it in Denmark. So it’s not as if there’s a need for a special healthcare initiative in Greenland.”
The Chinese Zodiac has 12 animals and five elements, so the pattern repeats every 60 years. This is a Fire year, and the Horse represents speed and energy, two fiery qualities. So a Fire Horse year is essentially “double fire“. Expect sparks to fly this year.
At least for now, the power to tax still belongs to Congress.
I had been starting to wonder if we still had a Supreme Court.
Again and again, starting with two cases before the election (the ballot-access case in March, 2024, where the Court more-or-less took Section 3 of the 14th Amendment out of the Constitution; and the immunity case, where they placed Trump above the law) and proceeding through a series of shadow-docket cases in 2025, the high court has seemed to be just another agency in the Trump regime, and not at all an independent branch of government. After spending four years trying to limit executive power when it was wielded by Joe Biden, the Court has been expanding the reach of the Trump presidency well past legal limits that seemed clear to judges in lower courts.
But the Court’s creeping abandonment of the rule of law at least paused on Friday, when it ruled that the emergency law Trump had been using to justify his tariffs, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), doesn’t actually give him that power. So the approximately $130 billion of IEEPA tariffs to date have been collected illegally.
I thought the law in this case was clear, so I can’t say that I was surprised by the outcome. But I was (at the very least) grateful that the six conservative justices didn’t make up some completely new legal principle to let Trump continue to do whatever he wants. (Only three of them did — not enough to form a majority.)
Several pundits are trying to read some great meaning into this decision, like that the Court is drawing a line on Trump’s power grabs. In other words, John Roberts has finally seen where all this is going and decided to take a stand. But I don’t think so. In order to understand what happened, you need to break the nine Supreme Court justices into three camps:
The partisan hacks: Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh. Whatever Republican presidents do is fine. Whatever Democratic presidents do is unconstitutional.
The liberals: Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson. They look at the statute Trump says authorizes his tariffs and can’t find an authorization there. They don’t think any novel constitutional doctrine is needed to see this.
The long-gamers. Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett. They’ve worked to establish new constitutional doctrines (Major Questions, Non-delegation) that limit regulation and unleash corporations to do whatever they want. Denying that those doctrines apply here would undermine their long-term program to hogtie the administrative state.
The votes of the hacks and the liberals were both predictable before any arguments were presented. The question was what the long-gamers would do: They are also partisan Republicans, as the immunity decision showed. (Barrett less so than Roberts and Gorsuch.) So they must have wanted to let the tariffs stand. But Trump’s justification for his tariffs flies in the face of Major Questions decisions the Court made during the Biden administration. Finding for Trump here would give the game away: Major Questions is just a rhetorical trick for constraining Democratic presidents; it doesn’t apply to Republican presidents.
Delegated powers. OK, let’s explain what these doctrines are. When Congress passes a law, sometimes small turns of phrase turn out to have big consequences. (I’ll give you a simple example from the Constitution: When the Founders gave the federal government the power to regulate interstate commerce, they never imagined that eventually nearly all commerce would have some interstate component. What they imagined to be a specialized power has turned into a sweeping power.) Both Major Questions and Non-delegation are supposed to limit this possibility.
Major Questions says that an executive action with huge consequences can’t be based on a subtle reading of an apparently minor phrase. So Biden couldn’t cancel all student debt, even though a law allowed him to change the terms of any particular student loan. Congress couldn’t have imagined that this simple provision could be the basis for a trillion-dollar action.
Non-delegation says that there are powers Congress can’t delegate, even if it wants to. It couldn’t, for example, delegate the power of the purse, essentially telling the president: “Tax and spend however you want.” Even if a law said that, the courts should disallow it.
Both of these ideas make sense in extreme cases, if the courts apply them fairly. But they both allow the Supreme Court to grab power away from the executive branch, and they’re both open to ideological bias. There’s no clear definition of the powers that can’t be delegated, or exactly when an executive action becomes “major”. So the Court has essentially given itself as much veto power as it chooses to claim.
Up until now, the Court’s conservative majority has been using that power in a partisan way, but they usually don’t even need to: Both provisions inherently favor de-regulation, because corporations tend to move much faster than Congress. For example, corporations can create new compounds faster than Congress can pass laws to regulate them. So the Clean Air Act specifically empowers the EPA to identify new pollutants and make rules about them. (The Obama administration used that power to find that climate change makes CO2 is a pollutant, allowing the EPA to regulate things like coal-burning power plants. The Trump regime has recently unmade that scientific finding, which the Court was probably going to undo anyway.) Disallowing delegations like that favors corporate malefactors over government regulators.
On the surface, both doctrines seem to be pro-democracy: If the government is going to do something significant, Congress should debate it and vote. That sounds lovely in the abstract, but it ignores the dysfunctionality of our Congress. Senate filibuster rules require a supermajority to pass new laws, and a presidential veto requires an even bigger supermajority to overcome. In practice, this means that very few new laws will get passed. So either major problems will go unaddressed, or other branches of government will have to use the powers Congress has abdicated.
This case. (The text of all the justices’ opinions is here.) The problem for the long-game faction is that the Trump tariffs are clearly a bigger intervention in the economy than Biden’s student-loan cancellation was. Biden wanted to take a one-time charge against the national balance sheet. But Trump wants to take hundreds of billions out of the private sector every year, and do it in a way that re-arranges the global trading system. So if student loan cancellation is a major question, massive tariffs must be too.
In 2021, Barrett famously declared that the Court “is not a bunch of partisan hacks”. Taking Trump’s side in this case would have exposed that as a lie.
So, here’s the issue this case presents: The Constitution gives Congress (and not the president) the power to tax. Tariffs are taxes. So a president can only impose a tariff if Congress has somehow delegated that particular taxing power to him or her. In his majority opinion, Roberts writes:
the President must “point to clear congressional authorization” to justify his extraordinary assertion of the power to impose tariffs. He cannot.
Trump takes the IEEPA as the congressional delegation he needs. But IEEPA doesn’t specifically mention tariffs, or any equivalent term. Kagan’s concurring opinion summarizes:
That text authorizes the President, upon finding a foreign threat and declaring an emergency, to “regulate” the “importation” of foreign goods.
Trump’s lawyers interpret “regulating” imported goods as including the power to tax them. But it can’t point to any other law where “regulate” carries that meaning. Roberts writes:
The Government concedes, for example, that the Securities and Exchange Commission cannot tax the trading of securities, even though it is expressly authorized to “regulate the trading of . . . securities.”
(Wouldn’t that be a bombshell, if the next Democratic president could impose a sales tax on NYSE transactions, and change the tax rate according to whatever whim possessed him that day?)
To the liberals, that’s the end of the story; it doesn’t matter whether the tariffs are major or minor, they’re just unauthorized by Congress. (To the charge of hypocrisy, in supporting Biden’s loan cancellation while opposing Trump’s tariffs, the liberals might point to this: Biden stretched a provision that is really in the law. But Trump is making up an authorization that doesn’t exist at all.)
But the long-gamers feel obligated to have an argument about why and how this falls under the Major Questions doctrine, which the liberals don’t recognize at all, and Barrett appears to regard as minor. That argument takes up about half of the 170 pages of opinions, and is well worth skipping.
The consequences. So according to the BBC, the regime has so far collected about $130 billion in illegal tariffs. Legally, that money ought to be returned. It’s a mess, made worse by the length of time the Court took to decide the case.
But who should it get returned to, and how? Directly, tariffs are paid by importers, so they presumably can sue to get their money back. (Or there’s an administrative procedure to claim tariff refunds, a process that undoubtedly will get swamped soon.) Importers like, say, WalMart or General Motors have plenty of lawyers, so they’ll eventually get their money back.
Indirectly, the tariffs have been paid by ordinary American consumers. A recent report from the New York branch of the Federal Reserve estimates that about 90% of the tariff costs were passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. But absent some unlikely legislation to pay us back out of the Treasury, we’re just out of luck. You didn’t directly write a check to the government, so you can’t get a refund.
Next steps. Trump responded to his legal defeat in two ways: First, he lashed out at individual members of the Court, accusing them of being “swayed by foreign interests” and “fools and lapdogs for the Rhinos and the radical left Democrats”. His own appointees — Gorsuch and Barrett — weren’t exempted. He called their opinions “an embarrassment to their families, to one another”.
Second, he announced new illegal tariffs: First 10% across the board, which he then raised to 15%. (Since the IEEPA lawsuit was first decided in a lower court last June, and was filed months before that, you’d think Trump would have had a clear plan of what to do if he lost. Apparently he didn’t, and just started making stuff up on the fly.)
The new tariffs are based on a different law, Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act. That law allows tariffs up to 15% that last for 150 days. However, there are conditions, which Trump has ignored:
the actual language of the Trade Act lists requirements that don’t exist today, including a “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficit. While the U.S. has run a trade deficit for decades, it’s been offset by capital inflows as foreign investors pour billions into financial markets, resulting in a net balance of zero.
Bryan Riley, director of the National Taxpayers Union’s Free Trade Initiative, wrote in a blog post last month that Section 122 only makes sense under a fixed exchange rate, which hasn’t existed in the U.S. in more than 50 years.
Expect lawsuits to be filed as soon as the new tariffs take effect. Trump will lose that case too.
However, winning may not actually be the point. The Supreme Court decision made Trump look weak, and responding with a new power grab makes him look strong again, at least for now. To the MAGA faithful, he remains a valiant warrior against the Deep State, which now includes two people he appointed to the Supreme Court himself.
One last point. Maybe at this point you are asking an obvious question: The Court didn’t say that tariffs are illegal, just tariffs unauthorized by Congress. Republicans control Congress, so why doesn’t Trump ask for authorization?
Two reasons: First, Trump’s authoritarian takeover relies on establishing that he doesn’t need Congress. A tariff he imposes on his own authority is better, in that view, from a tariff Congress gives him permission to impose. And second, Congress wouldn’t do it. The tariffs are unpopular, economists of all stripes say they’re a bad idea, and the Republican majorities in each house are small. Asking for permission and not getting it would make Trump look weak (because he is weak). From an authoritarian-takeover point of view, it’s the worst possible outcome.
I’m running a bit behind schedule today as I watch the blizzard outside my window. Expect delays.
The big thing that happened this week was the Supreme Court’s decision striking down Trump’s liberation-day tariffs. This is Trump’s biggest legal defeat to date. It’s amply justified by the underlying law, but runs counter to the usual partisanship of this court. The featured post will explain what happened and what I think it means. That should be out sometime between 10 and 11 EST.
It’s kind of amazing what stories that has pushed into the background, like Prince Andrew’s arrest on Epstein file charges, Jesse Jackson’s death, a looming attack on Iran, the ongoing blockade of Cuba, and maybe some other stuff that has slipped my mind. In the pre-Trump years, any of those might have been the biggest thing that happened. But times have changed.
Anyway, expect the weekly summary to get out by 1.
The Weekly Sift 