Two from CATO

5 Reasons the US Should Not Spend Another Penny on the War with Iran

FCC Threats and the Fog of War: The Government Cannot Be the Arbiter of Truth

Supreme Court Strikes Down Most of Trump's Tariffs

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s far-reaching global tariffs on Friday, handing him a significant loss on an issue crucial to his economic agenda.

The 6-3 decision centers on tariffs imposed under an emergency powers law, including the sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs he levied on nearly every other country.

It’s the first major piece of Trump’s broad agenda to come squarely before the nation’s highest court, which he helped shape with the appointments of three conservative jurists in his first term.

The majority found that the Constitution “very clearly” gives Congress the power to impose taxes, which include tariffs. “The Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh dissented.

Read the rest here.

See also: 

The Supreme Court Got It Right on IEEPA—But Don’t Pop the Champagne Yet

What the SCOTUS Tariff Decision Means for Fiscal Policy in Four Charts

Trump’s made tariffs central to his presidency. Chaos may come next

Hawaii’s Shocking Legal Argument Against the Second Amendment

This past Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Wolford v. Lopez, the Second Amendment case out of Hawaii in which the Aloha State is defying the Constitution and claiming it can ban concealed carry holders from all private property that is open to the public unless they have the explicit permission of the owner. Thus, you can spend a year in jail if you carry a gun that you have a license to carry onto private property that is open to the public such as a mall or a gas station where the owner is completely silent on the issue.

In other words, silence equals prison in Hawaii.

The oral arguments were full of questions, debates, and discussion of the Second Amendment and the Supreme Court’s prior holdings on this very important provision of the Bill of Rights. But what was shocking was the reliance by Hawaii’s lawyer, Neal Katyal, a distinguished Supreme Court advocate, on blatantly bigoted state laws — the infamous Black Codes — to justify Hawaii’s defiance of the Second Amendment rights of its residents.

The Black Codes were some of the first laws passed in the United States to restrict gun ownership — and they were implemented in segregationist states like Louisiana after the end of the Civil War. They had one purpose, and one purpose only: to prevent newly freed black Americans from being able to defend themselves from the threats, assaults, intimidation, and killings perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and other white, racist segregationists.

Justice Neil Gorsuch said he was “astonished” that Hawaii would “rely very heavily on an 1865 black code law in Louisiana,” with Katyal seemingly claiming that Hawaii’s law is “a dead ringer and reason alone to affirm the judgment.” Gorsuch said he really wanted “to understand how that could be,” that Hawaii is relying on a racist, historical outlier to support its argument that its law ought to be upheld.

Katyal didn’t seem to want to answer the question, referring to a California law instead, and Gorsuch chided him saying, “Why don’t you answer the question posed? I want to understand how you think black codes should inform this Court’s decision making.” Katyal admitted, “The black codes are undoubtedly a shameful part of our history,” but then made the astounding claim, “That doesn’t at all mean that this particular [Louisiana] law is irrelevant to Second Amendment analysis.”

Gorsuch’s response to Katyal’s rambling explanation of why Hawaii was embracing the racist black codes to try to uphold Hawaii’s firearms restrictions was akin to a vampire embracing garlic. In short, suggesting that such reasoning was unfathomable, inexplicable, and harmful to Hawaii’s argument.

Read the rest here.

9th Circuit: Oregon Right to Life Group Is a Religious Organization

In Oregon Right to Life v. Stolfi, (9th Cir., Oct. 31, 2025), the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, remanded the case to the district court for it to re-evaluate whether requiring Oregon Right to Life to furnish its employees with health insurance covering abortion and contraception violates its First Amendment rights. The majority said in part:

We agree with ORTL that its beliefs are religious and sincerely held.  In light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, 605 U.S. 238 (2025), which reiterated the constitutional significance of exemptions granted to some religiously motivated organizations but not others, we return this case to the district court to reevaluate whether RHEA’s application to ORTL violates the First Amendment....

ORTL’s religious motivations and beliefs are overt and long-established.  They are announced throughout ORTL’s governing documents, shared by ORTL’s board, and have been publicly declared by ORTL since before this litigation....

Read the rest here. 

Vindictive Prosecution

"The Federal Prosecutor" an address by Robert Jackson US Attorney General (later Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court) April 1, 1940 

cf: Selective and vindictive prosecution

Federal appeals court largely rejects Trump’s emergency tariffs

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that most of President Donald Trump’s global tariffs are illegal, striking a massive blow to the core of his aggressive trade policy.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in a 7-4 ruling, held that the law Trump invoked when he granted his most expansive tariffs does not actually grant him the power to impose those levies.

“The core Congressional power to impose taxes such as tariffs is vested exclusively in the legislative branch by the Constitution,” the court said. “Tariffs are a core Congressional power.”

The appellate court paused its ruling from taking effect until Oct. 14, in order to give the Trump administration time to ask the Supreme Court to reverse the decision.

Trump later Friday attacked the appeals court as “Highly Partisan” and asserted that the Supreme Court will rule in his favor.

“If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America.”

“The President’s tariffs remain in effect, and we look forward to ultimate victory on this matter,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a separate statement.

Friday’s ruling is the second straight loss for Trump in the make-or-break case, known as V.O.S. Selections v. Trump.

The case was consolidated from two separate lawsuits, one filed by a dozen states and the other by five small U.S. businesses.

It is the furthest along of more than half a dozen federal lawsuits challenging Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to impose sweeping tariffs.

Read the rest here.

White House declares $4.9B in foreign aid unilaterally canceled

President Donald Trump threw a grenade Friday into September government funding negotiations on Capitol Hill, declaring the unilateral power to cancel billions of dollars in foreign aid by using a so-called pocket rescission.

Escalating the administration’s assault on Congress’ funding prerogatives, the White House budget office announced Friday morning that Trump has canceled $4.9 billion through the gambit that Congress’ top watchdog and many lawmakers argue is an illegal end-run around their “power of the purse.”

The move to unilaterally nix money previously approved by Congress raises tensions on Capitol Hill as lawmakers face an Oct. 1 deadline to avoid a government shutdown, pitting Republicans at the White House against GOP lawmakers and increasing pressure on Democrats to force a funding lapse unless Trump stands down.

Democrats and Republicans alike have warned that a pocket rescissions request would hamper cross-party talks to avert a shutdown at the end of September, while fulfilling White House budget director Russ Vought’s wish that the process of funding the government be “less bipartisan” to accommodate a raft of conservative priorities.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer hinted Friday that Democrats could refuse to offer the votes to get a government funding bill through the chamber before funding lapses late next month if congressional Republicans don’t push back against Trump’s latest funding move.

“Republicans don’t have to be a rubber stamp for this carnage,” Schumer said, adding that “if Republicans are insistent on going it alone, Democrats won’t be party to their destruction.”

Yet three congressional Republicans, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said they expect Vought to send additional requests to revoke funding between now and the end of the current fiscal year, which would only inflame tensions.

“Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” the Senate’s top Republican appropriator, Maine Sen. Susan Collins, said in a quick and clear rebuke of the Trump administration’s gambit.

But the Trump administration is embracing the strategy boldly and without apology, while also signaling it intends to stare down any legal challenges that may come its way as a result: “Congress can choose to vote to rescind or continue the funds — it doesn’t matter,” an official from the White House budget office said in a statement. “This approach is rare but not unprecedented.”

Read the rest here.

The Most Corrupt President in US History (Yet Again)

The royal family of Qatar is planning to gift President Trump a brand new luxury Boeing 747 for use as Air Force 1, and for his private use after leaving office. The bill for the necessary upgrades in security, communications etc., will presumably be footed by the American taxpayer. Of course this is illegal under the US Constitution but Trump and his lawyers have a plan to get around that. The Qataris will officially gift the plane to the US Government, with the understanding that the Air Fore would then gift the plane to Donald Trump's presidential library at the end of term. Of course, he doesn't have a presidential library and has taken no steps towards creating one. (One of the few things I actually approved of after he left office in 2021.) Apparently the plane would then be available for his personal use. Lawyers working for Trump and the administration (more or less the same thing at this point) believe this little shell game will get them past the Emolument Clause in the constitution. 

The level of sheer corruption in this president, his family, and the broader administration defies the descriptive capabilities of the English language. 

Read the story here.

The Systematic Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law

In his first hours back as president, Donald J. Trump did an extraordinary thing: He made a direct assault on the Constitution. He declared that his government would no longer treat U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants or children of lawful, temporary immigrants as citizens, as the 14th Amendment commands.

You can draw a straight line from that executive order on birthright citizenship to his administration’s revocation of visas, the detention of foreign students and the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident, to a Salvadoran prison and the subsequent refusal to try to extricate him in spite of court orders. Mr. Trump is claiming far-reaching but dubious powers, pushing or exceeding legal limits without first bothering to determine if they were permissible, as past presidents generally did.

Times Opinion recently reached out to dozens of legal scholars and asked them to identify the most significant unconstitutional or unlawful actions by Mr. Trump and his administration in the first 100 days of his second presidency and to assess the damage. We also asked them to separate actions that might draw legal challenges but are, in fact, within the powers of the president. And we asked them to connect the dots on where they thought Mr. Trump was heading.

We heard back from 35 scholars — a group full of diverse viewpoints and experiences, including liberals like U.C. Berkeley’s Erwin Chemerinsky and Harvard’s Jody Freeman; the conservatives Adrian Vermeule at Harvard and Michael McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge who directs Stanford’s Constitutional Law Center and is a member of the Federalist Society; and the libertarians Ilya Somin at George Mason University and Evan Bernick at Northern Illinois University. Many are among the nation’s most cited scholars by their colleagues in law review articles.

From all of their responses, we constructed a road map through Mr. Trump’s first 100 days of lawlessness, including his defiance of our judiciary and constitutional system; the undermining of First Amendment freedoms and targeting of law firms, universities, the press and other parts of civil society; the impoundment of federal funds authorized by Congress; the erosion of immigrant rights; and the drive to consolidate power.

This road map largely draws on the scholars’ words, which serve as bright red warning lights about the future of America:

Read the rest here.

Various for 3/31

Trump is about to impose one of the largest tax hikes in history

Germans are getting nervous about their gold

Germany wants to sanction Hungary's authoritarian regime

Trump, again, hints at force to seize Greenland

Lessons for America in Russia's disastrous war

Trump says there are "methods" to serve a third term   (He's right. The constitution could be amended. Or he could simply ignore it.)

Amidst trade wars, rising concern over inflation, and the inability of the US Government to deal with the debt; gold shatters records.

On the rule of law

The MAGA movement is attacking the American judiciary. The evidence is everywhere.

Let’s begin with President Trump. On his Truth Social account, in post after post he has ranted against the judges who’ve ruled against his policies. He has said that judges who rule against him should be impeached. He’s called them “lunatics,” and on Sunday he posted an article by the far-right outlet Gateway Pundit that made the case that federal judges were guilty of “sedition and treason.”

It’s tempting to ignore Trump’s rants as examples of an undisciplined man merely venting, but if there is one thing we know from the opening months of his second term, it’s that his powerful supporters are taking all of Trump’s words very seriously indeed.

On Tuesday, for example, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, floated the idea of enacting legislation that would eliminate judicial districts or defund the courts in response to rulings against the Trump administration.

“We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things,” he said. “But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act.”

So this is when Congress rises from its slumber? To make sure that Trump is protected from prompt judicial review? This is a telling indication that the Republican Congress exists only to please Trump.

Elon Musk, Trump’s virtual co-president, has called the rulings against the Trump administration a “judicial coup,” has demanded the impeachment of federal judges, and has said the Trump administration should fight against “activist” members of the judiciary.

The list goes on. Stephen Miller posted on social media last week, “Under what theory of the constitution does a single marxist judge in San Francisco have the same executive power as the Commander-in-Chief elected by the whole nation to lead the executive branch?” He called the rulings against Trump “naked judicial tyranny.”

In February, JD Vance posted, “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

And lest we think this is all just words, Republican lawmakers have now filed articles of impeachment against several federal judges in response to their rulings.

Trumpists are having a temper tantrum, but it’s a mistake to treat their arguments against the federal judiciary as merely a fit. The second Trump term is substantially different from Trump’s first term in a key respect — the people around him have developed actual legal theories and policy ideas to buttress, direct and channel Trump’s impulses.

And these legal theories and policy ideas make Trump’s second term far more dangerous to the Constitution than his first.

In a nutshell, here’s the Trumpist argument: As Miller put it in a press briefing last month, “The whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president.” He is the only elected official who represents the whole of the American people, and he embodies the people’s general will. Every member of the House has his or her small, defined constituency. Every member of the Senate is confined to representing a single state. The president, by contrast, is elected by the whole of America.

As a result, Miller argued, he is the best expression of American popular will, and Article II of the Constitution, which vests “the executive power” in the president, gives the president the power to hire staff to “impose that democratic will onto the government.”

Under this theory, the president even has the power to issue definitive legal interpretations that control executive branch functions. As he said in an executive order in February, “The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch.”

Read the rest here.

Moving Fast, Breaking Things, and the Oath of Office

In a remark that might seem to sum up Congress’s current approach to its oversight role, Sen. Thom Tillis (R‑NC) acknowledged the other day that the Trump administration’s opening moves to cut spending and do away with agencies without congressional approval were in some cases not lawful, but said, “Nobody should bellyache about that.” In particular, he said, “That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense. But it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.” (I briefly summarized the ongoing lawbreaking spree in this space on Monday, and further likely illegalities have come to light since then.)

One group of thinkers who were given to bellyache when officials acted in unconstitutional ways were the framers of the Constitution, who had in recent memory the “long train of abuses and usurpations” committed in the name of the British crown. To guard against a repeat, they provided in Article II, Section 1, that the president take the following oath: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” In Article VI, along with declaring that the Constitution “shall be the supreme law of the land,” they provided that Sen. Tillis, along with all his legislative colleagues, “be bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution.” 

A lot of good that seems to have done. 

Read the rest here.

We Are in a Constitutional Crisis

In his first term, President Trump seemed to relish ripping through the norms and standards of self-restraint that his predecessors had respected. Three weeks into his second term, hand-wringing about norms seems quaint.

Other presidents have occasionally ignored or claimed a right to bypass particular statutes. But Mr. Trump has opened the throttle on defying legal limits.

“We are well past euphemism about ‘pushing the limits,’ ‘stretching the envelope’ and the like,” said Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University and the author of a casebook on separation-of-powers law. The array of legal constraints Mr. Trump has violated, Mr. Shane added, amounts to “programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.”

Mr. Trump has effectively nullified laws, such as by ordering the Justice Department to refrain from enforcing a ban on the wildly popular app TikTok and by blocking migrants from invoking a statute allowing them to request asylum. He moved to effectively shutter a federal agency Congress created and tried to freeze congressionally approved spending, including most foreign aid. He summarily fired prosecutors, inspectors general and board members of independent agencies in defiance of legal rules against arbitrary removal.

More than two dozen lawsuits have been filed so far challenging moves by the Trump administration, though many overlap: At least nine, for example, concern his bid to change the constitutional understanding that babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented parents are citizens.

Courts have temporarily blocked that edict, along with his blanket freeze on disbursing $3 trillion in domestic grants from money Congress appropriated. And a federal judge has temporarily blocked the transfer of a transgender federal inmate to a male prison, pausing a move in line with one of Mr. Trump’s executive orders.

But those obstacles so far have been rare in Mr. Trump’s blitzkrieg, which has raised the question of whether, in his return to office, he and his advisers feel constrained by the rule of law.

This week, Mr. Trump moved to effectively dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and fold its functions into the State Department, making Secretary of State Marco Rubio its acting director. He had already crippled U.S.A.I.D. by imposing a “temporary” freeze on disbursing foreign aid that Congress appropriated, which as time passes is increasingly at odds with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

Since the first Congress, it has been the legislative branch — not the president — that decides how to structure the executive branch, creating departments and agencies, giving them functions and providing them with funds to carry out those missions. And Congress has enacted laws that say U.S.A.I.D. is to exist as an “independent establishment,” not as part of any executive department.

No matter. On Monday, Mr. Trump was asked whether he needed an act of Congress to do away with the agency. He dismissed that suggestion and insulted the officials who work there.

“I don’t think so, not when it comes to fraud,” Mr. Trump said. “If there’s fraud — these people are lunatics — and if — if it comes to fraud, you wouldn’t have an act of Congress. And I’m not sure that you would anyway.”

Rumors abound that Mr. Trump is weighing executive actions to at least partly dismantle the Education Department, another component of the government that Congress has mandated exist by law.

Mr. Trump and his appointees have also been firing people in naked defiance of statutes Congress enacted to protect against the arbitrary removal of certain officials, like civil servants or board members at independent agencies.

For example, Mr. Trump shut down three agencies by ousting Democratic members before their terms had ended. That effectively hobbled the agencies, the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, because they were left with too few officials to have a quorum to act.

Congress created those agencies to be independent of the White House, and all three have been understood to have forms of protections limiting the president’s ability to remove their leaders without a good cause, like misconduct, although only the labor board statute says that. Regardless, Mr. Trump flouted the limit.

Read the rest here.

Trump’s Theory of Power

These are the times that try a constitutional conservative’s soul.

Donald Trump and his allies have proposed two legal maneuvers that could have profound consequences for the function of the federal government. He has proposed confirming presidential appointments through an abuse of his power to make recess appointments, and his allies have proposed reviving a mostly banned practice called impoundment, under which the president can refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress.

These proposals together would gut core constitutional functions of Congress and could make Trump our nation’s most imperial peacetime president.

You can’t fully comprehend how pernicious these proposals are without knowing Congress’s intended role in our republic. If you read the Constitution carefully, you see that the United States was not intended to have coequal branches of government. Instead, it is clear that the branch of government closest to the people, Congress, was given more power than any other.

While other branches can check Congress’s power — the president can veto bills and the Supreme Court can use the power of judicial review to invalidate statutes passed by Congress, to give the most obvious examples — Congress’s enumerated powers surpass those of both the president and the court.

Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution says, “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” This constitutional provision is particularly important, given that in the original Constitution the House was the only part of the federal government chosen directly by the people. The power of the purse is inseparable from democratic rule.

Congress has the sole constitutional power to declare war, even if presidents frequently usurp that authority. It can fire the president, executive officers and judges through impeachment and conviction. It can override presidential vetoes, and the Senate can reject presidential appointees.

But if Trump gets his way, he will have the power to nullify congressional enactments, even if they’re passed with veto-proof majorities. He’ll destroy the Senate’s advice and consent authority. He’ll make the executive the most powerful branch of government by far, creating a version of monarchical government that the founders despised.

Read the rest here.

Can the President "Adjourn" Congress?

“…in Case of Disagreement between [the House and Senate], with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, [the President] may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.” — Article II, Section 3 

The presidential power of adjourning Congress has never been used. There are no precedents and scant commentary about what it means or exactly what triggers it. But now, there is credible consideration of the idea being discussed as part of Trump’s demand for an adjournment to let him use recess appointments to completely bypass the Senate confirmation process. It wouldn’t be the first time the issue has come up, as Trump briefly floated it during his first term, and Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to rule out possible support for the scheme. 

It is important, then, for us to quickly get a handle on exactly what this obscure bit of constitutional text means and what it does, and doesn’t, allow the president to do. 

The possibility is uncomfortably suggestive of one of the most firmly repudiated ideas in Anglo-American law, the attempt by Charles I to rule without Parliament. That did not end well, to put it mildly, for either side of the dispute or the nation as a whole. It was an example the Framers of the Constitution were very aware of and consciously sought to avoid by explicitly constraining the chief executive’s power to interfere with the legislature. 

As Ed Whelan writes at NRO, the basic outline of the idea is as follows: the House (presumably more amenable, though that’s far from certain with a razor-thin Republican majority) would pass a concurrent resolution adjourning Congress, which is the normal procedure. The Senate would not concur. Trump could then cite this as the two chambers being in “disagreement,” and adjourn them to whenever he wants. To allow for recess appointments would require an adjournment of at least ten days. But in theory it could extend nearly an entire year, until the next constitutionally mandated annual convening of Congress on January 3, 2026, per the 20th Amendment. 

Read the rest here.

UK: New Law to Remove Last of Hereditary Lords from Parliament

The government is proposing to banish all remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords in the biggest shake-up of parliament in a quarter century.

The UK’s 92 remaining hereditary peers – who have inherited their titles from their parents – will lose their right to sit and vote in the upper chamber under proposals put forward by ministers on Thursday.

The move would complete reforms first made by Tony Blair’s government, which revoked the 700-year-old right of all hereditary peers to sit in the Lords in 1999. Just 92 of them, elected from the whole group, were allowed to remain until an agreement could be reached to phase them out altogether.

All 92 hereditary peers who now hold seats in the Lords are white men, and their average age is just under 70. They have continued to top up their numbers by holding byelections when one of them retires or dies.

Campaigners have long called for the system to be overhauled. In its manifesto, Labour said the continued existence of hereditary peers was “indefensible”.

The government’s bill will mean that there will no longer be any hereditary peers in the upper chamber. The earl marshal and the lord great chamberlain, who had been expected to keep their seats because of their ceremonial functions, will also be removed.

The bill is likely to become law sometime next year, and will fulfil a Labour manifesto commitment.

Read the rest here.

David French on the persecution (or not) of Christians

This June, I was invited on a friend’s podcast to answer a question I’ve been asked over and over again in the Trump era. Are Christians really persecuted in the United States of America? Millions of my fellow evangelicals believe we are, or they believe we’re one election away from a crackdown. This sense of dread and despair helps tie conservative Christians, people who center their lives on the church and the institutions of the church, to Donald Trump — the man they believe will fight to keep faith alive.

As I told my friend, the short answer is no, not by any meaningful historical definition of persecution. American Christians enjoy an immense amount of liberty and power.

But that’s not the only answer. American history tells the story of two competing factions that possess very different visions of the role of faith in American public life. Both of them torment each other, and both of them have made constitutional mistakes that have triggered deep cultural conflict.

One of the most valuable and humbling experiences in life is to experience an American community as part of the in-group and as part of the out-group. I spent most of my life living in the cultural and political center of American evangelical Christianity, but in the past nine years I’ve been relentlessly pushed to the periphery. The process has been painful. Even so, I’m grateful for my new perspective.

When you’re inside evangelicalism, Christian media is full of stories of Christians under threat — of universities discriminating against Christian student groups, of a Catholic foster care agency denied city contracts because of its stance on marriage or of churches that faced discriminatory treatment during Covid, when secular gatherings were often privileged over religious worship.

Combine those stories with the personal tales of Christians who faced death threats, intimidation and online harassment for their views, and it’s easy to tell a story of American backsliding — a nation that once respected or even revered Christianity now persecutes Christians. If the left is angry at conservatives for seeking the protection of a man like Trump, then it has only itself to blame.

Read the rest here.

Elon Musk Sues His Critics into Silence. So Much for ‘Free Speech.’

Despite his posturing as a defender of free expression, Musk is one of the nation’s most vexatious litigants against anybody who exercises their First Amendment rights in a way he doesn’t like. His latest target is GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, an industry association of advertisers on online platforms of which X, formerly known as Twitter, is still a member. The lawsuit also targets several of GARM’s members for the supposed crime of declining to purchase ads on Musk’s website.

X’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, posted a video on Tuesday explaining that the suit is part of the company’s noble pursuit of preserving “the global town square … the one place that you can express yourself freely and openly.” Yaccarino wore a pendant around her neck that read “FREE SPEECH.”

On Thursday, GARM, citing its inability to handle legal fees that would likely run into the seven figures, simply shut its doors, ending all operations. Musk’s censorial bullying worked — abusing the legal system to shut down his critics.

Musk’s argument against GARM fits a long-running pattern for him: attacks on free speech wrapped in the rhetoric of defending free speech.

Major corporations generally do not want to pay for ads running next to posts praising Adolf Hitler, among other noxious content that has flourished on X under Musk’s ownership. It’s hardly an unreasonable position, and GARM worked to promulgate shared standards companies can adopt for this type of brand safety. This, Musk alleges, amounted to a violation of antitrust laws.

Read the rest here.

Trump v. US: With Great Power Comes Great Immunity

I have no end of uncharitable thoughts about recent American presidents; yet, when I’m cataloging their sins, the words “undue caution” have never sprung to mind. Could it fairly be said of any 21st-century president—George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or Joe Biden—that his real flaw was being “unduly cautious in the discharge of his official duties”? When it comes to “the most powerful office in the world,” is “undue caution” a problem worth worrying about?

Chief Justice John Roberts insists that it is. In fact, the self-styled judicial “umpire” considers the specter of presidential risk aversion grave enough to justify rewriting the rules of the game. Toward that end, in Trump v. United States, Roberts conjures up a broad suite of criminal-process immunities previously unknown to our Constitution. The new privileges shield the president in the first instance, but they’re really for us—designed to ensure that we Americans will never suffer from an insufficiently energetic executive. Thanks.… I guess?

But if you think greater risks lie in presidential recklessness and contempt for the law, the president’s new immunities may give you pause. Just how much we should worry isn’t clear to me, in part because I’m not sure how much the historically remote threat of criminal prosecution has restrained presidents over the years. But what the Court’s just done definitely isn’t going to help.

I’m certain of this much at least: as a matter of constitutional exegesis, the chief justice’s majority opinion is creative lawyering at its worst. It’s the most flagrant instance of legislating from the bench since Harry Blackmun decamped to the Mayo Clinic medical library to bone up on obstetrics and write trimesters into the Constitution.

Read the rest here.

Cato Institute: The Court Went Too Far on Presidential Immunity

In Trump v. US, a majority of the Supreme Court has laid down an astonishingly broad view of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution over official actions, even those taken for heinous motives and with no show of justification. We should heed the warnings of dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who charge the majority with concocting an “atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable” array of immunities that will too often place above the law a president bent on criminal misuse of his powers of office. 

Nowhere in the Constitution is there mention of executive immunity, which was a topic of peculiar interest to the Founders and Framers. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 69 that unlike the “king of Great Britain,” the chief executive of the United States would “be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law,” and in Federalist 77 named “subsequent prosecution in the common course of law,” in addition to impeachment, as checks on “abuse of the executive authority.”

Notwithstanding this history, it was probably foreordained that the court would find some degree of presidential immunity. The US Justice Department under administrations of both parties has long taken for granted an immunity of some dimension or other, and the current Department, former President Trump’s adversary here, did not retreat from that view in this case. Although the court had never had to rule on criminal immunity, a 5–4 majority in the 1982 case of Nixon v. Fitzgerald had recognized an immunity from civil claims, such as for wrongful dismissal, over official presidential actions.

However, the Fitzgerald Court explicitly recognized that immunity from criminal prosecution would raise entirely different issues because the public welfare is far more deeply implicated when a president commits a crime than when he may happen to commit, say, a tort.

Read the rest here.