◼ This week’s joke is paused for 90 days.
◼ President Trump wants a “liberation day” do-over. After the stock market tanked and Treasury yields rose in response to his “reciprocal” tariff plan that was supposed to fundamentally alter international trade forever, Trump announced a 90-day pause and said there would instead be a 10 percent tariff on goods from all countries, except 25 percent on Canada and Mexico and 145 percent on China. This is still bad policy. There’s no reason Americans should be paying more to import from Canada and Mexico than from other countries, and the Chinese rate amounts to a sudden near-embargo. National security justifies some restrictions, yes, but the bulk of Chinese imports are everyday goods that don’t threaten the country. The 10 percent minimum is likely not high enough to change production patterns but is still a major tax increase on Americans when Republicans should be focused on extending the 2017 tax cuts and reducing the cost of living. None of the basic facts of economics and trade will be any different 90 days from now. As long as the “liberation day” executive order remains in place and Peter Navarro remains employed by the White House, expect us to have to rehash all of this in early July.
◼ Among the many questions that have been raised in response to Trump’s chaotic experimentation with punitive tariffs is whether he, or any president, has the legal right to impose them unilaterally in the first place. Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution makes clear that “the Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,” and yet, since his tenure began, Trump has claimed near-total discretion in this realm. To achieve that, Trump has invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977, which, he claims, accords him the power to take any steps necessary once he has determined that the United States is in an “emergency.” A lawsuit filed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance dissents from this from the ground up. Among the claims it makes is that there is no emergency to speak of, that the IEEPA statute does not apply to tariffs (and, indeed, has never previously been used to impose tariffs), and that, even if it did apply to them, Congress is not permitted to delegate its taxing power to the executive branch. Since 1928, the governing Supreme Court standard has been that all congressional delegations of the tariff power must contain an “intelligible principle.” It is difficult to see how Trump’s extremely expansive application of IEEPA conforms to that rule. Whether we have five justices willing to say so is another question.
◼ The Supreme Court unanimously held that the suspected Venezuelan gang members Trump has designated for deportation under the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 (AEA) are entitled to notice of their designation and a right to be heard in opposition. That includes the two planeloads of Venezuelans the administration furtively transferred to a notorious prison in El Salvador with no such due process. The president claimed vindication because the Court vacated Judge James Boasberg’s temporary restraining order (TRO) barring the deportation of the Venezuelans. Trump maintains, in AEA parlance, that they have “invaded” or executed a “predatory incursion” at the direction of the Maduro regime. But the Court itself has now barred deportation in the absence of due process. It vacated the TRO because five justices ruled that the correct procedural vehicle for challenging the AEA designation is habeas corpus lawsuits in Texas, where most of the aliens are (or were) being held, not an Administrative Procedure Act class action before Boasberg in Washington. After the Court’s decision, a Trump-appointed judge in Texas promptly ordered the administration not to deport any other AEA designees absent further proceedings. Fight illegal immigration, and fight crime, legally.
◼ House and Senate Republicans fought over a resolution that will serve as the vehicle to extend President Trump’s tax cuts before they expire at the end of the year. A contingent of House Republicans, concerned about mounting debt, was reluctant to go along with a Senate-passed resolution that stipulated a floor of only $4 billion in spending cuts over ten years even as Congress plans trillions of dollars in tax cuts. Only after House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune announced their aspiration to cut at least $1.5 trillion in spending did the resolution squeak through, 216 to 214. The House holdouts were right to resist. The federal debt held by the public is expected to reach 100 percent of the economy this year, the highest level since World War II, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and it is on track to surpass that all-time record four years from now. By taking reforms to Social Security and Medicare off the table, President Trump has made it highly unlikely that we will see any significant deficit reduction in his administration (DOGE hype is not changing the trajectory of the federal spending). But House Republicans should continue to insist on responsible budgeting where they can.
◼ Which does not mean cuts everywhere. President Trump is advancing a long-overdue defense buildup, promising to boost defense spending to $1 trillion this coming year. Malign actors from all corners of the world are banding together in a manner that poses a serious threat to America’s security. Despite this reality, there are forces within Trump’s administration and in the Republican Party who, for fiscal and ideological reasons, are skeptical of such a buildup. As dire as the state of the federal budget is, deterring a war with China will prove much cheaper than potentially fighting one. And an ideological tendency whose commitment to American supremacy is dubious should not be in the Pentagon driver’s seat. As Senator Roger Wicker (R., Miss.) has put it, the goal should be a buildup bigger than Ronald Reagan’s and a reform of the Pentagon as significant as that under Dwight Eisenhower. Peace through strength requires strength.
◼ “No longer will shower heads be weak and worthless,” the Trump White House thundered in a press release accompanying an executive order that rolled back regulatory limits on the amount of water that consumers can expect to flow from their showerheads. The New York Times scoffed: “How big of an issue is this, really?” But Trump is just rinsing away prior bad rules. Congress imposed a 2.5-gallon-per-minute flow rate maximum on showerheads in the early 1990s, and Barack Obama extended that limit to multi-head units in 2013. In late 2020, Trump merely applied a more common-sense framework to the issue by counting each shower head on multi-head units as a single conduit. Joe Biden restored Obama’s framework, and Trump countered by returning to his own formula. Trump is on the right side of the issue, and of public opinion. Consumer surveys have long found that low-flow shower users “want more flow and force” and report lower “overall satisfaction” with governed showerheads over high-flow showers. That’s to say nothing of the other low-flow plumbing products—toilets, dishwashers, washing machines, etc.—that also consistently underwhelm. Voters aren’t purchasing consumer appliances solely to feel better about their water use. They want their things to work as advertised. The left can scoff all it wants, but helping voters to feel marginally less miserable isn’t a terrible political strategy.
◼ Business in the House ground to a halt for a week over whether to allow proxy voting for new parents. Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R., Fla.), who gave birth to her first child in 2023, led a bipartisan push for new moms and dads to vote without being present. This is not a new issue: Under then–Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House allowed proxy voting as a Covid emergency measure into fall 2022. That was a defensible choice early in the pandemic, but was widely abused by members. One member was spotted partying on the French Riviera while casting 17 proxy votes. President Trump backed Luna: “You’re having a baby, you should be able to call in and vote. I’m in favor of that.” But several Republicans contended that it was unconstitutional. “I signed up for the job!” Chip Roy (R., Texas) argued. “We’re supposed to be here.” Trump then said he would go along with Speaker Mike Johnson—who, in the end, struck a deal with Luna to allow “vote pairing,” whereby an absent member could agree with a member on the other side to sit out the vote. That solution relies on the survival of some residual collegiality but exposes the absent members to criticism for poor attendance records, disincentivizing abuse. It’s refreshing to see members so invested in ensuring that their colleagues are present. Perhaps as their next step, they can actually debate legislation while they’re there.
◼ On Monday, Princeton University hosted former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. During his talk, someone pulled the fire alarm. Roughly 20 protesters stood up and walked out while chanting, “You can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” Campus police permitted a man to yell from the audience for about two minutes. The approximately 200 protesters outside who chanted and beat drums could be heard inside the lecture hall. Once the event concluded, some of the protesters yelled insults at the attendees leaving the venue: “Go back to Europe,” “inbred swine.” Later, two students sent a letter to the university president demanding an apology to Bennett, punishment for the disrupting students, a ban on identity-concealing face covers, termination of Princeton’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and a condemnation of antisemitism. The university president has said that he personally apologized to Bennett, and he confirmed that a campus investigation has been opened. That’s two down. Three to go, President Eisgruber.
◼ “I’m saving the baby,” Tyler Sowden said to himself as he rushed to get a ladder from the garage of his family’s house in the West Park neighborhood of Cleveland on March 28. Avila Padilla and her two children, her ten-month-old daughter and seven-year-old son, were standing on the porch roof below the second story of their house as it burned. She had shouted for help but saw no one on the street. A neighbor called 911. Meanwhile, Sowden carried the hundred-pound ladder past ten houses to Padilla’s and climbed and rescued the family. He’s 16 years old. The fire department thanked him on social media. The mayor and local councilman reached out to thank him privately. The city council issued a resolution to thank him publicly. Through his foundation, Cleveland Cavaliers shooting guard Donovan Mitchell invited Sowden’s family to a game at Rocket Arena. During a timeout, Sowden was called to stand on court for a moment of recognition. “For a child to step in and really just do the job of a fireman and to think to do that, to think to have the ladder, go up there, and do that,” said Mitchell. “Man, it’s special.”
◼ Nothing has more besmirched the Catholic Church in recent history than the scandal of priestly sexual abuse. Neither has anything in recent decades driven more faithful from the pews. It adds scandal upon scandal that Theodore McCarrick was the face of the church’s initial response. At the time, McCarrick, ordained in 1958, was mostly regarded as a trustworthy and influential figure in the leadership of the church in the United States. The archbishop of Newark, N.J., and then of Washington, D.C., he was created a cardinal in 2001. Throughout his long career, rumors had circulated about his extensive sexual transgressions involving minors, seminarians, and priests. The rumors gained a ghastly credence in 2018 following an investigation by the Archdiocese of New York, which opened the floodgates for further sordid revelations. Those involving misconduct at a New Jersey beach house that a diocese had purchased at McCarrick’s request would put even the most corrupt and dissolute Renaissance-era Vatican prelates to shame. Allegations of abuse in the priestly confessional shock the conscience. McCarrick resigned from the College of Cardinals at the request of Pope Francis; a year later, he became the highest-ranking official in the church ever to be defrocked. He spent the last years of his life in a succession of unexplained residences, further scandalizing the church and raising questions about how much, and when, high-ranking officials, including several popes, knew about his diabolical activities. The man who was once a symbol of the church’s response to its gravest modern scandal became a scandal unto himself. Whether McCarrick ever expressed genuine contrition for what he did is unclear. His soul and his judgment are in God’s hands. Dead at 94.