Brief Against Tariffs

Many posts have dealt with tariffs and trade.

Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Ron Wyden, together with colleagues, filed an amicus brief against Trump tariffs: 

The Federal Circuit, Court of International Trade, and District Court for the District of Columbia all reached the same correct conclusion: the President’s imposition of tariffs under IEEPA is unlawful. 

Only Congress has the power to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,” U.S. Const. Art. I, § 8, cl. 1 and to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,” id., cl. 3. This reflects the Framers’ intent for the most democratically accountable branch—the one closest to the People—to be responsible for enacting taxes, duties, and tariffs. Hamilton, Federalist Nos. 31–36, The Same Subject Continued: Concerning the General Power of Taxation (Jan. 1788)

Congress enacted IEEPA, 50 U.S.C. §§ 1701–1710, to provide the President with the power to impose sanctions, export controls, and similar measures. It provides the President with defined powers to address national emergencies but does not confer the power to impose or remove tariffs.

Neither the word “duties” nor the word “tariffs” appears anywhere in IEEPA. Rather, IEEPA allows the President, in times of a declared emergency, to “regulate … importation or exportation” of property. 50 U.S.C.  § 1702(a)(1)(B). IEEPA’s delegated power to “regulate” is not a power to impose tariffs.

IEEPA contains none of the hallmarks of legislation delegating tariff power to the executive, such as limitations tied to specific products or countries, caps on the amount of tariff increases, procedural safeguards, public input, collaboration with Congress, or time limitations. In the five decades since IEEPA’s enactment, no President from either party, until now, has ever invoked IEEPA to impose tariffs.

The Administration’s interpretation of IEEPA would effectively nullify the guardrails set forth in every statute in which Congress expressly granted the President limited tariff authority—a result Congress did not intend.

Contrary to the views expressed by the Administration and the Federal Circuit dissent, IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs as “bargaining chips.” While this Court has held that Presidents may use IEEPA to freeze foreign assets and to then use those frozen assets as leverage in foreign affairs negotiations, Dames & Moore v. Regan, 453 U.S. 654, 673 (1981), IEEPA does not grant the President the power to impose tariffs on American citizens importing goods to generate leverage in trade talks. Nor may the President use IEEPA to override America’s trade statutes, which Congress has carefully considered and enacted over the years. The President “is not free from the ordinary controls and checks of Congress merely because foreign affairs are at issue.” Zivotofsky ex rel. Zivotofsky v. Kerry, 576 U.S. 1, 21 (2015)

This Court should hold that IEEPA does not delegate tariff authority to the President and the President’s tariffs under IEEPA are therefore unlawful.

America's Self-Lobotomy

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Stuart Anderson at Forbes:

Three of the six U.S. winners in the 2025 Nobel Prize science categories immigrated to the United States, one of them as a teenager. These examples of immigrants contributing to science and technology fields come as Trump officials have proposed or enacted new policies to restrict immigration, including that of highly skilled individuals. The Trump administration’s policies include limiting international students to fixed entry periods and restricting H-1B visas, which are typically the only practical way for high-skilled foreign nationals to work in the United States. The measures include imposing a $100,000 fee on the entry of many H-1B visa holders, as well as an upcoming H-1B rule. The latest Nobel Prize announcements provide an opportunity for Americans to learn more about the achievements of their fellow citizens.

Eric Pandey at Axios:

The pipeline for Ph.D.s out of U.S. universities is shrinking at an unprecedented rate: Spots are disappearing, interest is fading and other countries are eager to fill the void.

Why it matters: America graduates more Ph.D.s than any other country. They go on to invent things, cure diseases and win Nobel Prizes.

“There are some permanent effects,” said Emily Levesque, an astronomer at the University of Washington. “There’ll be students who never got to pursue Ph.D.s. That’s a group of experts that’s lost forever.”

By the numbers: Harvard is cutting Ph.D. admission slots in sciences by 75% and in humanities by 60%, the Harvard Crimson reported this past week.Several departments at other top universities are shrinking admit pools or pausing admissions altogether, Nature’s Alexandra Witze reports. MIT admitted fewer biology Ph.D.s this year than last. The University of Washington’s astronomy department is suspending Ph.D. admissions for the upcoming academic year.

Brown is pausing PhD admissions in at least six humanities and social science departments, per The Brown Daily Herald.

Zoom out: Trouble has been brewing for years. ”This is an acceleration of a trend that was already underway,” said Julie Posselt, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California. “It’s not a situation that we can solely place blame on the Trump administration for.”As more graduate students unionize, it’s becoming tougher for universities to afford their salaries, pushing some programs to shrink, she notes.
Even before the Trump administration started revoking international students’ visas, many were already choosing programs in Australia, China, the U.K., Germany and beyond over U.S. schools.

At the same time, the “is college worth it?” debate looms large, and many prospective students are wary of taking on debt to pursue grad school. About 70% of Americans say higher education is “going in the wrong direction,” per a recent Pew Research Center survey.

Boomers

 Many posts have discussed demographic trends, especially the decline of births and the aging of the population.

A 2018 campaign video:

Pardon Lobbying

DANIEL BARNES and CAITLIN OPRYSKO at POLITICO:

TRUMP PARDONS BINANCE FOUNDER: President Donald Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, POLITICO’s Declan Harty reported this afternoon, confirming a scoop first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

— The pardon comes after nearly a year of effort by Zhao and Binance to lobby Trump for clemency and marks a big win for Checkmate Government Relations and its founder Ches McDowell, who was hired by Binance in September. Binance paid the firm $450,000 in the third quarter for work on policy issues related to cryptocurrencies and “executive relief,” according to a disclosure report.

— Lobbying for Zhao in his personal capacity was BakerHostetler’s Teresa Goody Guillén, a leading crypto lawyer who Trump once reportedly considered to lead the SEC. Zhao hired Goody Guillén in February to work exclusively on his pardon effort, according to disclosure reports, but she appears to have played a limited role in recent months, reporting no activity on Zhao’s behalf in the third quarter. In addition to her pardon work for Zhao, Goody Guillén is part of a BakerHostetler team lobbying on Binance’s behalf — a team that includes former U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) and former House Financial Services Committee chief counsel Kevin Edgar.

— Zhao served four months in prison last year after pleading guilty to charges that he intentionally ignored anti-money laundering laws and allowed Binance to be used by criminals looking to turn illicit crypto assets into clean cash. As part of the plea agreement, Zhao stepped down from his position as CEO of Binance and agreed to pay a $50 million fine. The company was separately fined $4 billion and has since been subject to compliance monitoring by the Justice and Treasury departments.

— Binance has an on and off history of lobbying in Washington. The company’s U.S. subsidiary, Binance.US, signed its first contracts with Ice Miller Strategies and Hogan Lovells in late 2021 and went on to spend more than $1 million on lobbying in 2022. In the first nine months of 2023, as Zhao and Binance negotiated their futures with federal prosecutors, the company spent nearly $1.2 million on lobbying.

— Following the guilty pleas, Binance’s lobbying spending plummeted to zero for the remainder of 2023. Neither Zhao nor the company reported spending a dime on lobbying in 2024. But Trump’s inauguration jolted the company’s lobbying effort back to life. So far in 2025, Binance has reported spending $860,000 on lobbyists, putting it on track to equal or beat its 2023 peak spend.

"Truly American" and National Identity

Many posts have discussed patriotism and the role of religion in American life. 

The late John McCain said: "We are citizens of the world's greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil."

Public Religion Research Institute:

Most Americans (78%) believe that “America is best understood as a nation built around the idea that all people, regardless of the circumstances of their birth or station in life, have equal rights and freedoms,” while 19% believe that “America is best understood as a nation comprised of people with a shared heritage and homeland.” Majorities of Democrats (88%), independents (79%), and Republicans (70%) agree with the first statement, while far fewer agree with second statement (11%, 18%, 27%, respectively).

Majorities across religious groups and Christian nationalism groups agree that America is best understood as a nation built around the idea that all people have equal rights and freedoms.

...

When asked about how important the following traits are to being “truly American,” most Americans say that believing in individual freedoms, such as freedom of speech (93%), believing in the Constitution (91%), accepting people of diverse racial and religious backgrounds (89%), believing in the Declaration of Independence (88%), respecting American political institutions and laws (88%), and being able to speak English (75%) are very or somewhat important.

Americans are more divided over whether believing in God (57%) and being born in America (54%) are very or somewhat important to being truly American. Americans are less likely to say that being a Christian (43%) or having ancestors who served in the military in previous wars, such as the World Wars and the Civil War (42%) are important. Just 23% of Americans say that being of Western European heritage is important to being truly American.

With the exception of Western European heritage, where only one-third say this trait is important (33%), majorities of Republicans believe every other trait is important to being truly American. Conversely, fewer than half of Democrats say that being born in America (42%), believing in God (41%), having ancestors who served in the military in previous wars, such as the World Wars and the Civil War (34%), and being a Christian (29%) are important to being truly American. Majorities of Democrats say all other traits are important. Though independents mirror all Americans very closely, they are 8 percentage points less likely to say believing in God (49% vs. 57%) or being Christian (35% vs. 43%) are very important to being truly American.

"Off the Record" Is Not Retroactive

  Anna Bower at Lawfare reports a text exchange with prosecutor Lindsay Halligan:

Through the whole of our correspondence, however, there is something Halligan never said: She never said a word suggesting that she was not “on the record.”

It is not uncommon for federal prosecutors to communicate with the press, both through formal channels and sometimes informally. My exchange with Halligan, however, was highly unusual in a number of respects. She initiated a conversation with me, a reporter she barely knew, to discuss an ongoing prosecution that she is personally handling. She mostly criticized my reporting—or, more precisely, my summary of someone else’s reporting. But several of her messages contained language that touched on grand jury matters, even as she insisted that she could not reveal such information, which is protected from disclosure by prosecutors under federal law.

As a legal journalist covering the Justice Department, I had never encountered anything quite like my exchange with Halligan. Neither had my editor. Over the last several days, he and I spoke with multiple former federal officials and journalists who cover the justice system. None could recall a similar instance in which a sitting U.S. attorney reached out to chastise a reporter about matters concerning grand jury testimony in an active case.

...

After I reached out to the department for comment on Halligan’s texts, Halligan texted me yet again, for the first time in several days, insisting that our entire correspondence had been off the record. Our full exchange, linked below, allows readers to make their own judgments on that question.

...

Halligan had said quite a lot during our correspondence, although much of it was hard for me to parse. But there was an important thing she had not said during the entirety of our communications: “Off the record” or “On background” or anything whatsoever about the terms on which we were talking.

As anyone who professionally engages with the media as routinely as Halligan would know, the default assumption when a reporter speaks with a public official is that everything is “on the record,” meaning that anything the source says can be printed with attribution. If the source wishes to speak confidentially, she can negotiate how the information will be used. “On background” means that the information the source provides to a journalist can be published, so long as the journalist doesn’t reveal the source’s name or identifying information. “Off the record” means the reporter can’t print what the source tells them at all. There are other variations too. But with any condition, a fundamental premise is that the reporter must agree to speak on that basis.


In the course of my work as a journalist, I frequently agree to speak with sources on background or off the record. I take my duty of confidentiality seriously and I have never burned a source by revealing confidential communications.


I certainly would have been willing to speak with Halligan on background or off the record. But she never raised the terms on which we were speaking at any point during the two days in which we exchanged texts.

Protest 2025

A number of posts have discussed the politics of protest

The Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center has a report titled "The Resistance Reaches into Trump Country."

Protests in 2025 have reached a wider swath of the United States than at any other point on record. And the geographic reach of protest activity—the share of U.S. counties hosting at least one event—has remained remarkably high throughout the year.

Figure 1 displays the proportion of US counties that hosted at least one protest in each month of Trump’s first and second terms (depicted by the green x and blue triangle marks, respectively). The green trend line shows the moving average during Trump’s first term, and the blue line shows the moving average so far during Trump’s second term.

Figure 1: Proportion of US Counties with at Least One Protest, by Month

The largest monthly jumps of protest counties occurred in spring 2018, with the Enough Walkouts and the March for Our Lives in the month of March and the Walkout for Gun Control in April, and then again in June 2020, during the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests near the end of Trump’s first term. During the summer of 2020, demonstrations took place in just under 40 percent of all counties, during what was probably the broadest mobilization in US history up to that point.

But June 2025 came close to matching those historic levels, largely due to the No Kings mobilizations on June 14, with protests in nearly 38 percent of counties nationwide. Moreover, in 2025 protests have also expanded the movement’s footprint into new areas, even after the No Kings events of June. The cumulative number of counties that have ever hosted a protest has been climbing steadily since 2017, with noticeable surges in 2018 and 2020. A similar surge appears to be underway in 2025, pushing the cumulative share of protest-hosting counties well above 60 percent by June.

What’s most striking and novel, however, is the persistence of activity in 2025. The first eight months of the year have seen more sustained and geographically widespread protest than any comparable stretch in Trump’s first term—including the early waves of resistance in 2017 and the mass mobilizations of 2020. Protests occurred in at least 20% of US counties for four consecutive months in 2025–something we never observed during Trump’s first term. In short, the movement is not just continuing to spread into previously unrepresented parts of the country, but also maintaining its geographic reach.