It’s Canada Day today. Also Free Agent Frenzy Day in the NHL, although this year that was fairly underwhelming with a last-minute flurry of re-signings plus the sign-and-trade to Vegas of star Leafs winger Mitch Marner.

Speaking of Canada, I was chagrined to learn that Prime Minister Carney caved yesterday, cancelling the implementation of Canada’s Digital Services Tax and announcing legislation will be introduced to repeal it. This paves the way for re-opening of trade negotiations between Canada and the U.S, but feels like a win for Trump’s bullying tactics.

The big news of the day is that the Senate, after an all-nighter, passed its version of OBBBA on a 51-50 vote, with Vance breaking the tie. As expected, Republican Senators Paul and Tillis were no votes (with Tillis having announced over the weekend that he will not run for re-election in 2026, possibly opening the door for former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper to capture the seat for the Democrats). The third no vote was Senator Collins of Maine. Senator Murkowski of Alaska was a reluctant yes, but after the vote she was critical of the artificial deadlines for passage imposed by Trump and urged that things proceed more slowly from here.

Notwithstanding that desire, the House is expected to take up the Senate version of OBBBA in the next couple of days. Can the Senate bill pass the House as is? That seems very hard to me. The Senate bill is considerably worse on the deficit than the House bill, which may cause consternation on the part of some of the deficit hawks who had voted yes before; and at the same time the Senate bill limits the House’s SALT relief to only 5 years, which may offend some of the Blue state Republicans who had voted yes. And on top of that, last week a key moderate Republican who was a yes vote on the original bill, Don Bacon of Omaha, announced he will not run for re-election and is not necessarily going to be a yes vote on the revised bill.

In other news, Mamdami was officially named the victor in the NYC Democratic mayoral primary today, after all votes from the 3rd-place and lower candidates were re-allocated in ranked choice. In the first choice ballot, Mamdami was at 43.5%, Cuomo 36.5%, and other candidates were at 20.0%. After re-allocations, Mamdami was at 53.1% and Cuomo 41.7%, with 5.1% of the original ballot not expressing a choice for one of those two. (Most outlets are ignoring the 5.1% and reporting this as a 56.0% – 44.0% win for Mamdami.) As such, Mamdami had close to a 2-1 advantage over Cuomo on the re-allocated votes, which is consistent with the conventional wisdom going into the election that Mamdami would benefit from ranked choice.