Ten days since my last blog post. We’ve been back from Croatia for a couple of days now, and bodily cycles are more or less back to normal by now.

OBBBA has been enacted, although in many cases we’re still getting to know what’s in the bill. Something amusing in the bill that has taken a lot of people by surprise is a tweak it made to the taxability of gambling winnings: Under OBBBA, you can only net 90% of gambling losses against your gambling winnings, instead of the previous 100%. That may look innocuous, but it’s enough to make most professional gambling strategies ineffective on an after-tax basis. For instance, if you have a strategy whose success rate is 51.3%, and you face a marginal federal tax rate of 35%, your pre-tax earnings are now zeroed out on an after-tax basis. I haven’t seen an explanation yet as to who added this to the Senate bill and why, but with Nevada a critical swing state there is some bipartisan support for amending this change after the fact.

In judicial news, SCOTUS did stay the preliminary injunction in Trump v. AFGE, thus allowing the administration to continue with plans implementing Executive Order 14210, and an associated OPM memorandum, relating to the restructuring of the federal workforce. Quoting from the unsigned SCOTUS order:

“We express no view on the legality of any Agency RIF and Reorganization Plan produced or approved pursuant to the Executive Order and Memorandum. The District Court enjoined further implementation or approval of the plans based on its view about the illegality of the Executive Order and Memorandum, not on any assessment of the plans themselves. Those plans are not before this Court.”

Sotomayor picked up on that theme in her solo concurrence:

“The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law. I join the Court’s stay because it leaves the District Court free to consider those questions in the first instance.”

Jackson was the sole dissenter, consistent with her recent theme of opposition to the Court’s approach with respect to the judicial oversight of the administration’s actions. Quoting from her dissent:

“What is at issue here is whether Executive Order No. 14210 effects a massive restructuring of the Federal Government (the likes of which have historically required Congress’s approval), on the one hand, or minor workforce reductions consistent with existing law, on the other. One needs facts to answer that critical question, and the District Court not only issued such preliminary findings based on actual evidence, it is also the tribunal best positioned to make that determination, at least initially. Put differently, from its lofty perch far from the facts or the evidence, this Court lacks the capacity to fully evaluate, much less responsibly override, reasoned lower court factfinding about what this challenged executive action actually entails. I respectfully dissent because, in addition to the Government’s failure to show the exigency or irreparable harm that is required for emergency relief, this Court could not possibly know in this posture whether the Government is likely to succeed on the merits with respect to such a fact-dependent dispute. So it should have left well enough alone.”

There will be further litigation here, but in the interim the administration may proceed with implementing further layoffs. To that end, on Friday the State Department fired 1,400 employees, representing about one-sixth of its workforce.

Elsewhere, this week a district court judge (and GWB appointee) in New Hampshire certified a class action lawsuit (“Barbara” v. Trump) relating to the birthright citizenship executive order, and issued an injunction preventing the order from being implemented against members of the certified class, which includes all babies already born or born in the future to which the order would potentially apply. As such this action has much the same effect as the universal injunctions overturned last month due to Trump v. CASA, but using the form of class action lawsuits, following the road map laid out in Kavanaugh’s concurrence in CASA. More to come here, of course.

July 9th was supposed to be the expiration date of the 90-day pause that Trump had put in place on many of his tariffs, while he worked out deals on a country-by-country basis. Over the last several days we haven’t seen any deals announced, but we have seen a lot of unilateral pronouncements by Trump of new tariff rates that will take effect–for sure, this time we pinky promise–on August 1st. Many of these announced tariffs remain eyepopping: 30% for the EU, 30% for Mexico, 35% for Canada, and 50% for Brazil. The Brazil tariff is particularly interesting because in Trump’s letter imposing it, he specifically called out Brazil’s treatment of its former President Bolsonaro, thereby tying American tariff policy to a domestic political dispute in Brazil. In all of these cases, we shall see what actually transpires between now and August 1st; and, of course, litigation continues as to whether Trump’s authority under IEEPA actually includes the ability to impose these types of tariffs without Congressional approval.

The Senate is likely to vote this week on the rescissions bill recently enacted by the House, which among other things would de-fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Trump recently announced that any Republican Senator who votes against the rescissions will lose his endorsement.

I’m starting to lose the enthusiasm for this blogging project, so we’ll see how much time I spent on it over the rest of the summer. I’ve rarely thought that the U.S. was “headed in the right direction,” as the pollsters like to put it; but right now the U.S. is (from my perspective) accelerating so rapidly in the wrong direction that it is difficult to have any faith that we can ever get back to the right course. And in that context, it’s depressing to keep focusing day after day on all the ways in which things are going wrong–the corruption, the short-sighted policymaking both domestically and globally, the upending of norms, and most of all the continual progression towards authoritarianism and the cult of personality. Still, there’s some value in documenting the journey, I suppose.