◼ We bring you the One Big Beautiful Newsletter.
◼ The intifada has come to the nation’s capital. Wednesday evening, a gunman, who chanted “Free, Free Palestine” when he was later taken into custody, opened fire near the Capital Jewish Museum as attendees were leaving an event sponsored by the American Jewish Committee for young diplomats. The attack killed a young couple—30-year-old Yaron Lischinsky, an Israeli Christian who served as a research assistant at the Israeli Embassy, and Sarah Milgrim, a 26-year-old Jewish Kansas native who organized missions and delegation visits for the embassy. Shortly after the shooting came the bitter news that Lischinsky had just purchased an engagement ring and had planned to propose to Milgrim next week in Jerusalem. Elias Rodriguez, the suspected shooter, is an out-of-central-casting left-wing extremist. He was once a part of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a group that advocates a socialist takeover of the United States and is consumed by loathing for both Israel and America. President Trump has made the fight against antisemitism in our cities and on college campuses a top priority, for which he should be commended. He must take a strong line here. The targeting of a specifically Jewish event to advance the Palestinian cause was an act of international terrorism on U.S. soil, and should be treated as such. As this attack reminds us, radicals who seek to destroy Israel also hate America.
◼ Former president Joe Biden announced that he has stage 4 prostate cancer two days before the release of Original Sin, the damning book about the cover-up of his decline while in office. Everyone should wish Biden well, but the timing was curious, and the Biden team hasn’t, to say the least, built up a lot of credibility about his health. Did Biden know about the cancer before, or did his team not want to know? Biden’s camp says his last PSA test was in 2014. That would accord with the common practice of not testing men over age 70. Still, it would have been odd not to flyspeck every aspect of an incumbent president’s health. If Biden and his allies find the questions unwelcome, they’ve earned every bit of the suspicion.
◼ Newly released audio of Biden’s 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur, who was investigating the president’s mishandling of classified documents, made Hur’s final report seem generous. Not only did Biden struggle with remembering basic dates and facts, but his constant pauses and stumbles made each sentence a struggle. His difficulty remembering the year his late son Beau passed is even more stark in the audio than in the transcripts released last year. No wonder his administration fought as hard as it could, even invoking executive privilege, to prevent the tape from coming out as he prepared to run for reelection.
◼ By a vote of 215 to 214, the House of Representatives passed the 2025 budget reconciliation bill—known officially as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” The bill is certainly big. But it is not beautiful. In fact, it is a mess. It contains some imperative provisions—the extension of the 2017 tax cuts, and an increase in spending on defense and border security—but misses many opportunities. It does not fully repeal the boondoggle that was the 2022 “Inflation Reduction Act,” which would save more than a trillion dollars in future spending. It massively raises the caps on the State and Local Tax deduction (SALT), which, in conjunction with the addition of all manner of new complications to the tax code, undoes one of the main achievements of the first Trump administration. It shies away from meaningful reform of Obamacare’s deleterious Medicaid expansion. And it does not cut the federal budget deficit—as President Trump promised in his speech before Congress earlier in the year—but blows it open. We are now a decade into the MAGA takeover of the GOP, and, thus far, its effect on the national fisc looks like more of the same—a lot more.
◼ Trump lashed out at Walmart, posting on Truth Social that the nation’s largest retailer and private-sector employer should “STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices.” This sounds a lot like Senator Elizabeth Warren saying that companies were using inflation during the Biden administration as a “cover” to raise prices. Companies in highly competitive industries such as retail don’t want to raise prices. They are doing so in response to poor government policies. Trump went on to sound even more like Warren by noting that Walmart made billions of dollars in profits last year and can therefore afford to “EAT THE TARIFFS.” Profits are not extra money sitting around to be appropriated by politicians. They are the lifeblood of the free-enterprise system, the signal that markets provide when customers are satisfied that helps direct resources to their most productive use. We’ll keep saying this even if both parties pretend it isn’t true.
◼ Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem testified under questioning by a Senate panel that “habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.” When corrected that habeas corpus is a procedure to challenge the legality of a detention, she backtracked by saying that the president has the authority to suspend the great writ—a power that in truth belongs to Congress. Even Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War regarded presidential suspension as constitutionally dubious enough that he asked Congress to back him up as soon as it returned from a recess. Meanwhile, Noem has reportedly been conducting lengthy interviews with polygraphs on DHS staffers in a search for leakers. They’re lucky she hasn’t taken them to a gravel pit. Noem’s department oversees some of Trump’s highest priorities, and the administration is busy urging that its operations need not be subject to judicial review. She should work harder at inspiring confidence.
◼ The U.S. Supreme Court ordered that Maine state representative Laurel Libby be temporarily restored to her voting rights in the legislature while her lawsuit proceeds. Libby was suspended from speaking or voting in the Maine House because of her public speech on Facebook criticizing men’s participation in women’s sports. The pretext was that Libby’s Facebook post identified a transgender student-athlete publicly, but this is done in high-school sports all the time; what was objectionable to Maine Democrats was Libby’s viewpoint. Under Bond v. Floyd (1966), state legislators may not be stripped of their votes over speech. Yet, somehow, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. Jackson’s dissent mentioned neither Bond nor the First Amendment, pretending that this was just an “ethics” dispute and claiming, falsely, that the Maine House was not voting on anything of note in Libby’s absence—this, after Jackson sat on Libby’s application while previous votes were held. Thankfully for democracy and free speech, Jackson was outvoted.
◼ After Oklahoma’s virtual charter school board approved a Catholic virtual charter school, the state’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, reversed the approval given by his predecessor and sued, claiming a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause. The Oklahoma Supreme Court overreached in agreeing with him, ruling that even independently operated, voluntarily enrolled, per-student-funded charter schools are governmental entities tantamount to a state church. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed in January to hear the case, but Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused, not because of any connection to the Oklahoma litigants but because of her ties to the Notre Dame Law School religious liberty clinic, which represented the school. Recusals have a cost. The Court split 4–4, leaving the Oklahoma decision standing, albeit without issuing a precedential opinion by the Court. With an unsigned order, it is unclear which of the conservative justices joined the three liberals. A proper decision will have to await another case. In the meantime, Oklahoma voters can register their verdict on Drummond, who is campaigning to be the state’s governor.
◼ Say what you will about notorious sex trafficker and financier Jeffrey Epstein, at least he killed Jeffrey Epstein. That was the conclusion of the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice’s inspector general back in 2019, but many Americans—including more than a few in the ranks of the MAGA movement—insisted that some sinister conspiracy, likely connected to powerful Democratic officials, killed Epstein before he could destroy more reputations and implicate others in his sordid deeds. Now, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have weighed in after reviewing the evidence, concluding that Epstein committed suicide. The pair made the declaration in an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, and it’s hard to begrudge the handful of MAGA social-media types who reacted with surprise and a sense of betrayal. In fact, as recently as February 7, Bongino was talking up Epstein’s connections to the Clintons on his podcast and declaring, “It’s time to start overturning that rock, and seeing what’s underneath.” Apparently, sometimes when you turn over a rock, all you find is the bottom of a rock.
◼ Conservatives have been portrayed as waging a war on IVF. Yet the first attack on a fertility clinic in America has come from the other side in the culture war. Guy Edwards Bartkus has been identified as the man behind the car-bombing of American Reproductive Centers, an IVF clinic near Palm Springs, Calif. Bartkus killed himself and injured four others in the attack. Police have found various “anti-natalist” and “pro-mortalist” essays and manifestos among Bartkus’s belongings. Bartkus objected to human life itself as non-consensual infliction of suffering. Humans do not consent to be born, and yet they are brought into this world deliberately, even though life is full of misery and suffering, environmental harm, violence, and overpopulation. Before his attack, he posted about his forthcoming suicide online, promising “some extra drama that I probably should not say haha.” He declared existence to be miserable, and made it more so.
◼ Pope Leo XIV has begun his pontificate in a show of reassurance and confidence. The American pope, while praising his predecessor Francis, has been a welcome contrast in style. Whereas Francis was emotive and cutting, Leo is both intellectual and warm. His first homilies and addresses are reassuringly free of progressive argle-bargle. In his self-assured singing of the “Regina Caeli” and his choice of vestments, Leo has abandoned the zealous liturgical modernism of Francis. He has made proclaiming Gospel truths the centerpiece of his first public remarks. While we expect to get to know him better over time, one especially reassuring gesture was that Leo ousted Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia from chancellorship of the John Paul II Academy for Life, replacing him with the stoutly orthodox Cardinal Baldo Reina. That’s a move that should be commended by pro-lifers inside and outside the Church.
◼ Flag football is the fastest growing sport in the world. This week, it got a massive boost, when the NFL’s team owners approved a resolution that permits NFL players to join the United States’ Olympic team in 2028. It is difficult to imagine any other outcome than immediate American dominance in the realm. While flag football has caught on worldwide, the U.S. remains the only country that plays football to an elite standard. If, as seems likely, figures such as Patrick Mahomes and Justin Jefferson consent to represent their nation, the result ought to resemble America’s commanding basketball performance in the 1992 Olympics. Sometimes, it’s good to be the King.
◼ A native of Chicago’s South Side, George Wendt matriculated to Notre Dame. After one indolent winter, he dropped out with a 0.0 grade point average. But while Wendt may have missed out on a formal education at that time, he probably learned something about being a slacker, which served him well when he later took on the role of Norm Peterson in Cheers. Wendt’s Norm was overweight, he couldn’t hold down a job, he struggled with his wife, and he loved drinking beer more than he should’ve. He was America’s favorite barfly. Wendt began his comedy career sweeping the floors at Chicago’s Second City improv club; his performance in SNL’s “Da Bears” sketches proved to be enduring and iconic. But it’s for Cheers that he will always be remembered. George Wendt has died at 76, and everybody knows his name. RIP.
