Today is Black Friday. Especially if, like me, you immigrated here from somewhere else.

Late last night, Trump published a Truth Social post asserting that his administration would “permanently pause migration” from “Third World countries”. He also asserted that his administration would “end all federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens.” The exact meaning of either of these phrases is, of course, not clear at present. Earlier in the day, the USCIS Director tweeted that his agency would perform a “full scale, rigorous re-examination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern,” later clarifying that “country of concern” referred to the 19 countries for which Trump had previously issued a partial travel ban in an early June presidential proclamation.

The proximate cause of Trump’s latest anti-immigrant screed was an attack in D.C. this week on two West Virginia National Guard members, one of whom is now dead. The assailant is a 29-year-old Afghani national who had worked with the CIA in Afghanistan and was evacuated to the U.S. with his wife and children when the U.S. exited Afghanistan in 2021, and was formally granted asylum this spring (under the Trump administration). Afghanistan is, of course, one of the 19 “countries of concern.” The assailant’s motives are unclear, although he apparently drove all the way from Washington State to D.C. in order to carry out the attack.

Turning to political news, after the Massie-Khanna discharge petition received its 218th vote and it became clear that the House vote to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act would pass, Trump withdrew his opposition to the bill in order to avoid a vote that would splinter House Republicans. In the end the bill was passed into law with only 1 House Republican voting now, and with unanimous consent from the Senate. The bill gives the DOJ 30 days to make its records from the Epstein investigation public.

One of the key Republicans to have signed the discharge petition was controversial Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. In recent weeks, MTG and Trump publicly had a falling-out, followed shortly by MTG announcing she would resign from Congress on January 5th (rather than risk being primaried by a new Trump-endorsed candidate), delaying her resignation so that she will meet the 5-year cliff vesting for Congressional pensions.

Apparently Trump never implemented the additional 10% tariff on Canada that he announced spitefully during the World Series, in reaction to Ontario’s TV ad featuring Reagan’s anti-tariff comments from 1987. TACO, or tactics?

It’s been a relatively quiet couple of weeks in the courts. There was a surprising 2-1 5th Circuit decision overturning the recent Texas mid-decennial redistricting, on the grounds that it was a racially motivated gerrymander rather than a partisan gerrymander. Alito issued an administrative stay in Abbott vs. League of United Latin American Citizens a week ago, and both sides have submitted briefs; we’ll soon see what the shadow docket brings. This week SCOTUS re-listed the birthright citizenship cases, Trump v. Washington and Trump v. Barbara, for its next conference; this could indicate that a grant of certiorari is coming as soon as next week, but it could also indicate other outcomes.

Finally, last week the indictments against James Comey and Letitia James were dismissed, on the grounds that Lindsey Halligan was not properly appointed to her DOJ post. As Ben Wittes put it, “the government and Halligan here got off on a technicality.” Next steps in both cases remain unclear, although the odds against prosecuting Comey in particular seem very long.

The government shutdown has just ended, after 43 days. A group of eight moderate Democratic Senators bucked Minority Leader Schumer and decided to provide the votes needed to get an appropriations bill through the Senate, 60-40. The bill funds the government through the end of January, and funds a small number of programs–including SNAP– for all of fiscal 2026. It also reverses mass layoffs implemented during the shutdown and prevents further layoffs through January.

Speaker Johnson brought the House back into session so that it could pass the Senate bill, which has since been signed by Trump. Before doing that, he belatedly allowed the new Rep. Grijalva (D-AZ) to be admitted, several weeks after her by-election victory. She promptly provided the 218th vote for the Massie-Khanna discharge petition relating to the Epstein files. Trump apparently lobbied both Rep. Boebert and Rep. Mace (who will be running for Governor of South Carolina next fall) to try and get them to withdraw their support for the petition, without success. As such there will likely be a House vote in the near future regarding release of “the Epstein files”. Interest in the subject was revitalized yesterday as House Democrats released some emails that Epstein had sent that referenced Trump.

With the shutdown over, the legal dispute over SNAP funding likely becomes moot. On Sunday night the 1st Circuit declined to stay the lower court’s decision, putting things back in Justice Jackson’s hands; however, by this time it was known that the Senate moderates were working on an end to the shutdown. On Tuesday, SCOTUS extended the previous administrative stay for an additional two days, over Justice Jackson’s apparent objection.

A new AP-NORC poll, released today but conducted before the end of the government shutdown, has Trump’s approval rating at a new low of 36%. On the more specific question of whether the interviewee approves of Trump’s handling of the federal government, only 33% said yes, down from 43% back in the DOGE-days of March.

Tuesday was election night in some states, and it is impossible to imagine that the night could have gone better for the Democrats.

Virginia is usually the focal point of the nation on the first Tuesday of November in odd-numbered years. In light of term limits, Republican Governor Youngkin was unable to run for re-election. Lieutenant Governor Earle-Sears, a Black woman, ran for the Republicans to replace Youngkin. Her opponent was former Rep. Spanberger, a moderate Democrat who declined to run for re-election to the House in 2024 in order to focus on this race. Spanberger was ahead several points in pretty much all polling, but she overperformed expectations, winning 57.2 – 42.6.

Spanberger also had longer coattails than expected. Democrats picked up the open Lieutenant Governor seat, 55.3 – 44.4, and unseated the incumbent Attorney General, 52.8 – 46.8. The latter victory was notable for two reasons. First, the Democratic candidate, Jones, was embroiled in controversy over a leaked text message from 2022 advocating violence against the Republican then-Speaker of the Virginia House. Second, the Republican incumbent, Miyares, had recently opined that he believed efforts currently underway in Virginia to amend its constitution’s provisions governing redistricting could not take effect until 2027, so his re-election likely would have impeded Democratic efforts to re-draw the Virginia map in time for 2026. Additionally, Democrats expanded their majority in Virginia’s House from 51-49 to 64-36.

New Jersey was the other state with a gubernatorial election this week, and as in Virginia the Democrats were running a moderate white woman with both House and national security experience. Unlike Spanberger, Rep. Mikie Sherrill had remained in the House while running for Governor. Sherrill was expected to be in a very close race against Jack Ciattarelli, who had lost the 2021 gubernatorial election 48.2 – 51.0. Instead Sherrill won decisively, 56.6 – 42.9, making her the first female military veteran to be governor of a U.S. state.

Across the river, the New York City mayoral election had attracted much national attention for its unusual three-way race, pitting the Democratic primary winner (Mamdami), the Democratic primary runner-up running on a third party line (former Governor Andrew Cuomo), and the Republican primary winner (Sliwa). Incumbent mayor Adams remained on the ballot, given how late in the election he withdrew. He eventually endorsed Cuomo, and his continued presence on the ballot was a non-factor as he attracted less than 0.5% of the vote. The day before the election, Trump (and also Musk) endorsed Cuomo. Importantly, the general in NYC is first-past-the-post, even though the Democratic primary was ranked-choice. Given these dynamics, it was generally expected that Mamdami would win, but it was felt unlikely that he would surpass 50% of the vote, raising questions as to whether he really would have a mandate for change (or whether he even vote have won under a ranked-choice scheme). However, he managed to get 50.4% of the vote, versus 41.6% for Cuomo and 7.1% for Sliwa. The idea that New York City would elect its first Muslim mayor on the very same day that Dick Cheney died would have seemed impossibly remote 20 years ago.

Moving to the other coast, all eyes were on California’s Proposition 50, a constitutional amendment needed to enact the pro-Democratic gerrymandering statute that Governor Newsom championed earlier this year, in order to counter-balance the pro-Republican gerrymandering statute that Texas had just enacted at Trump’s behest. When the campaign started, there was considerable doubt as to whether the amendment would pass, and Republican mega-donor Charlie Munger Jr. (the son of Warren Buffett’s former right-hand man) was expected to bankroll the No campaign. However, the opposition fizzled, and in the end Prop 50 passed 64-36, with relatively heavy turnout for an election with nothing else on the ballot.

Here in Minnesota, there were mayoral elections in both Minneapolis and St. Paul in which ranked-choice voting applied. In both cities, the incumbent won a plurality, but not majority, of the first-preference votes. After re-allocations, St. Paul has a new mayor, with a Hmong-American woman replacing the Black male incumbent; however in Minneapolis, re-allocations did not topple the moderate white male incumbent in favor of his Somali-American male challenger, who like Mamdami is a Democratic Socialist. A little closer to home, the Democrats held the state Senate seat in a by-election in my district, and with it retained control of the state Senate, 34-33. However, these election results now create two new vacancies in the Minnesota House in Democratic-held seats, temporarily giving the Republicans a two-seat House majority until by-elections can be held.

The last 2025 election results I want to discuss come from Georgia. I don’t pretend to understand Georgia politics, other than they do some things differently down there (e.g., Senate runoff elections) for reasons that, historically speaking, probably have a lot to do with trying to dilute the impact of the Black vote. In Georgia they have a 5-member elected Public Service Commission, in which each member represents a specific geographical district. You might think, therefore, that each PSC member would be elected by the voters of the district they will represent. No no, don’t be silly; all PSC members are elected on a statewide basis. Which has meant that. in recent years, the PSC has been an all-Republican body.

Well, there was recently a court case arguing that this electoral approach was contrary to the Voting Rights Act. Ultimately the 11th Circuit upheld the status quo; but all of the legal bickering had the impact that, in 2025, there needed to be a statewide special election for 2 of the 5 PSC district seats. And, out of the blue, the Democrats won both of these statewide elections with ease, unseating Republican incumbents with almost 63% of the vote in both races.

The morning after the elections, SCOTUS held two-and-a-half hours of oral arguments in the IEEPA tariffs cases. The general consensus is that the arguments went badly for the government, although perhaps not so badly that it is impossible to imagine Trump prevailing. Still, on the prediction markets the implied likelihood of the tariffs remaining intact fell from the high 40s before the arguments to the mid 20s afterwards. A reasonable forecast based on the tenor of questioning is for a 6-3 ruling against the tariffs, with Gorsuch, Roberts, and Barrett joining the liberals. Given how rapidly SCOTUS agreed to hear the case in the first place, there is hope that a decision will come out on an equally expedited timetable, perhaps by the end of December.

Two developments to discuss this week on the SCOTUS shadow docket front.

First, our repeating series of “6-3 SCOTUS orders overturning a lower court order prohibiting the administration from immediately implementing a new policy, with scant explanation from the majority and a lengthy dissent from the liberals” continues. The latest entry is a case called Trump v. Orr, which involves a Trump executive order requiring that, going forward, the sex marker shown on new U.S. passports must represent biological sex at birth. Jackson drew the assignment this time to write the dissent, and once again she writes a footnote of broader interest:

“Not only does the Court’s stay determination produce inequity, but it is also part of a broader pattern of this Court using its emergency docket to cavalierly pick the winners and losers in cases that are still pending in the lower courts. … This way of handling stay determinations jeopardizes procedural fairness as well, because the lower courts have an obligation to fully and fairly consider the merits of the plaintiffs’ legal claims despite the majority’s declaration of the “likely” winner. The Court’s stay-related pronouncements cannot be permitted to thwart the full legal process that our judicial system requires.”

Second, we have a very fluid situation right now relating to SNAP funding in light of the government shutdown. On Thursday a federal court in Rhode Island ordered the government to fully fund SNAP payments for November by the end of the day on Friday. The administration immediately appealed to the 1st Circuit. In mid-day on Friday, the 1st Circuit declined the administration’s request for an administrative stay, while saying that the administration’s request for a stay pending appeal “remains pending, and we intend to issue a decision on that motion as quickly as possible.” The administration then immediately went to SCOTUS, asking that by 9:30pm on Friday it issue an administrative stay.

Since this case came out of the 1st Circuit, it just so happens that the Justice responsible for handling the issue is Ketanji Brown Jackson. At 9:17pm, she issued the administrative stay that the administration requested, in a case now captioned Rollins v. Rhode Island State Council of Churches (Brooke Rollins, who I’d never heard of before, is the Secretary of Agriculture and a Texas attorney who had majored in agricultural development at Texas A&M). However, Jackson’s stay expires 48 hours after the 1st Circuit resolves the administration’s pending motion for a stay pending appeal, which Jackson reiterated “the 1st Circuit is expected to issue with dispatch.” Steve Vladeck speculates on Justice Jackson’s rationale:

“Given the gravity of this issue, it makes all the sense in the world for a justice in Jackson’s position to do whatever she could to ensure that the underlying question (must the USDA fully fund SNAP for November?) is resolved as quickly as possible—even if that first means pausing Judge McConnell’s rulings for a couple of days. If the alternative was a longer pause of McConnell’s rulings, then this was the least-worst alternative, at least for now. And regardless, imposing this compromise herself, rather than forcing her colleagues to overrule her, is, to me, a sign of a justice who takes her institutional responsibilities quite seriously, indeed—even when they lead away from the result she might otherwise have preferred if it were entirely up to her.”

Finally, as the government shutdown enters its record-breaking 6th week, Transportation Secretary Duffy announced that flight capacity at 40 large airports was being reduced by 4% effective yesterday, rising to 10% by November 14th, and possibly rising to 20% after that.

It’s been a somewhat dour weekend for me, as my Blue Jays lost the 2025 World Series in excruciating fashion a few minutes into November, losing Game 7 5-4 to the Dodgers in the 11th inning after being ahead 4-3 with 1 out and the bases empty in the 9th inning. The Jays squandered bases loaded with 1 out in the bottom of the 9th tied 4-4, and runners on the corners with 1 out in the bottom of 11th down 5-4. This one hurts.

There are election in some states the day after tomorrow. Here in Minnesota, there is a by-election in my state Senate district, and it is known that the result will determine overall control of the Minnesota Senate. On a more national level, the main races of interest are the New York mayoral race, the Virginia governor race, and the California referendum to approve Governor Newsom’s gerrymandering proposal (to counterbalance the actions recently taken in Texas). More on those races later this week.

A week ago, Trump announced the cessation of all trade talks with Canada, and imposed an additional 10% tariff. This was in response to a television ad that the Conservative government of Ontario aired during Game 1 of the World Series, an ad that consisted entirely of things President Reagan said about tariffs in a 1987 radio speech.

The Senate did this week vote to terminate Trump’s tariffs on first Brazil and Canada, and then more globally. Republican Senators Paul, McConnell, Collins, and Murkowski voted to remove all three sets of tariffs, while Senator Tillis joined in for Brazil only. Unfortunately these votes are essentially symbolic, as the House is unlikely to vote on these matters.

Somewhat more importantly, this week is when SCOTUS will hold consolidated oral arguments on the two IEEPA tariffs cases, V.O.S. Selections and Learning Resources. The latter case presents the question of whether IEEPA authorizes the President to impose tariffs, period; the former case presents the question of whether IEEPA authorizes the President to impose these particular tariffs and, if so, whether that represents an unconstitutional delegation of Congressional authority. There will lots to unpack from the oral argument, I’m sure.

In other SCOTUS activity, this week Justice Barrett called for supplemental briefing in Trump v. Illinois on a question inspired by the amicus brief of Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman. Recall from my last post that one of the three statutory pre-conditions to the President’s ability to federalize the National Guard is that the President is “unable with regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.” The administration has argued that “regular forces” refers to civilian law enforcement personnel, such as DHS and ICE employees. However Lederman argues convincingly that “regular forces” instead means the Regular Army, which is to say the military. And that would imply that this third federalization prong could only apply in situations where the President had already tried and failed to use military personnel to execute domestic laws, which in term would require invocation of the Insurrection Act.

In other news, the government shutdown continues, and the administration now claims that as of November 1st it is no longer possible to administer SNAP benefits (fka “food stamps“) to tens of millions of Americans. Judges overseeing two separate lawsuits have ordered the administration to continue funding the program. There’s an interesting juxtaposition between the administration’s claim that it can’t find a legal way to keep SNAP benefits flowing during the shutdown despite the existence of billions of dollars of contingency funds specifically earmarked for that purpose, versus its simultaneous claim that its military activities against purported drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean (and more recently the Pacific) are perfectly legal despite its lack of articulation as to why that would be the case.