Things have been relatively quiet on the tariff front in recent days, but this morning Trump brought tariff policy back to the front burner with two different announcements. First, he announced his intent to impose a 50% tariff on the E.U. effective June 1st. Second, Trump first talked about imposing a 25% tariff specifically on Apple iPhones (in reaction to reports that Apple may be seeking to move production from China to India), and then later in the day clarified that this would apply to Samsung and other phone manufacturers as well, starting as soon as late June.

I neglected to mention in my catch-up post that a few days ago Moody’s became the third of the three major bond rating agencies to downgrade the U.S. from AAA to the next-highest rating, citing the likelihood that “current fiscal proposals under consideration” (i.e., OBBBA) will lead to expanded budget deficits. In reaction the 30-year Treasury yield, which was below 4% as recently as September 2024, went above 5% for the first time in the second Trump presidency.

Yesterday, SCOTUS took action in a shadow docket case called Trump v. Wilcox, which emanated from actions Trump took to remove–without cause–a member of the National Labor Relations Board and a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, notwithstanding that there are statutes saying the President can only make such removals with cause. Many conservatives believe that such statutes are an unconstitutional restriction on the power of the executive. While the existing SCOTUS precedent from 1935, a case called Humphrey’s Executor, would suggest such removals are unconstitutional, that precedent has been weakened in various ways by SCOTUS in recent years but not yet overruled. As such, the removed board members were able to get lower courts to overturn their removals, appealing to stare decesis; Trump brought emergency action to SCOTUS to get those lower court actions reversed, pending full adjudication of the merits.

And Trump got the emergency relief he sought, in what appears to be a 6-3 decision, lifting a stay while the D.C. Circuit consider Trump’s appeals. Kagan wrote a powerful dissent, joined by the other two liberals. In determining that emergency relief was warranted, the unsigned majority opinion asserts that “the Government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.” Kagan says the majority got this exactly backwards: “[T]he relevant interest is not the “wrongfully removed officer[s’],” but rather Congress’s and, more broadly, the public’s. What matters, in other words, is not that Wilcox and Harris would love to keep serving in their nifty jobs. What matters instead is that Congress provided for them to serve their full terms, protected from a President’s desire to substitute his political allies.”

One of the reasons why this case has been of significant interest to observers is that if the President can remove members of the NLRB or MSPB, then does it follow the President could remove the Chair of the Federal Reserve Board? Here the unsigned majority opinion says no, on the grounds that “[t]he Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.” While empathetic to the majority’s deserve to avoid roiling the markets, Kagan calls B.S., concluding that “one way of making new law on the emergency docket (the deprecation of Humphrey’s) turns out to require yet another (the creation of a bespoke Federal Reserve exception).”