Three-and-a-half weeks since my last post, which is so long that I have trouble knowing what to write about. However I wanted to get a quick post in before tomorrow, which promises to be a big day for two reasons: The oral arguments at SCOTUS in the birthright citizenship cases; and Trump’s first presidential address on Iran in the evening.

Iran, Iran, Iran… The news shifts from day to day, sometimes dramatically within a day. At this point hostilities continue, with U.S. action limited for now to air force and naval missions. However, Marines and Special Operations forces have recently been moved into the theatre of war, potentially for the purposes of invading Kharg Island, through which most of Iran’s oil exports pass. Today Trump said the war would end in “two to three weeks”, which led to a significant stock market rally.

Even with today’s rally, however, the S&P 500 is still down 4.6% for the quarter, basically all of which occurred since the war started. The average price of a gallon of gas in the U.S. now stands at $4.02, up from $2.98 before the war started; a gallon of diesel is $5.45, up from $3.76.

The war has been estimated to be costing at least $1 billion per day, and the Pentagon has floated the idea of submitting a request for $200 billion in supplemental military appropriations. It seems remote that there would be 60 Senate votes for such a bill, however, raising the spectre that the budget reconciliation process might need to be invoked to pass the military appropriations.

Is the U.S. even winning the war in Iran? That’s not exactly clear, partly because our war aims have not been consistently and clearly articulated. Many have suggested that Trump thought he could decapitate the Ayatollah and Iran would immediately install pliant new leadership, following the Maduro/Venezuela model. Instead, a defiant Iranian regime has threatened the global economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz, and America’s traditional allies have declined to get involved in assisting the U.S. military in re-opening the Strait. We are also seeing firsthand, as the Russians observed in Ukraine, the limitations of traditional military hardware against cheaper, plentiful drone technology. Trump may be inclined to declare victory and move on, but it is not clear that he can actually do that.

Returning to domestic matters, the DHS standoff remains unresolved. Last week the Senate caved in to Democratic demands and passed a clean fill to fund the TSA and other uncontroversial DHS-subagencies, before immediately adjourning for Easter break. However the next day Speaker Johnson refused to take that bill up, instead passing yet another bill to fully fund all of DHS, which is a non-starter in the Senate, who remained on break. Meanwhile, as TSA agents have started to miss multiple paychecks, airport security delays have started to become headline news, particularly at Houston’s Bush airport where security lines were 4 hours long a few days back. This prompted Trump to issue an executive order authorizing pay for TSA agents, which (a) he doesn’t have any apparent authority to do, plus (b) if he did have this authority then why did he wait a month to exercise it?

Trump’s single-minded domestic focus remains passage of the voting “reforms” in the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act, and he has threatened to not sign any other bills until it is passed. Debate on the bill has begun in the Senate, but that motion to commence debate only passed 51-48 (with Murkowski opposed). As such it is hard to imagine 60 votes could be garnered for it, and Majority Leader Thune seems unwilling to nuke the filibuster for good over this.

There were additional primary elections in certain states this month, most notably my former state of Illinois, where in most seats the primaries are more important that the general. In the Illinois 7th, where my 17-year-old kids were able to cast their first-ever votes in the primary (since they’ll turn 18 by the general), Danny Davis’ retirement after 30 years created a wide open primary, won narrowly by the candidate he endorsed, LaShawn Ford. I was also interested in the primary up where I once lived in the Illinois 9th, where Jan Schakowsky’s replacement after 30 years will be Evanston mayor and former University of Chicago mathematician (!) Daniel Biss. In the Illinois 4th, where I had lived the last time I voted in Illinois (although in the last redistricting my former condo was moved into the 3rd), there was also a retiring incumbent, but no competitive primary. This was a result of the timing of when Rep. Chuy Garcia announced his intention to not run for re-election, thus ensuring that only his chief-of-staff, Patty Garcia, actually filed to run in the Democratic primary. (Senator Daines in Montana did this exact same trick a few weeks ago, on the other side of the aisle.)

Elsewhere, Trump did not carry through with his threat to endorse one of Cornyn and Paxton for the Texas Senate primary runoff election and implore the other to drop out, and as a result both candidates remain on the ballot for the runoff. Also, the Democrats recently won a by-election for the Florida House seat that includes Mar-A-Lago (an election in which the President voted by mail, despite his strong rhetoric against mail-in voting) as well as a Florida Senate by-election, with both districts having previously been soundly Republican. This makes a total of 30 state legislative seats that have flipped from Republican to Democratic since the 2024 elections, with none having flipped the other way.

What else to discuss… The Administration continues to receive some legal setbacks, so let’s work through a few of those:

• Today, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction in National Trust for Historical Prevention v. National Park Service, preventing the administration from continuing with the White House ballroom construction project until Congress provides authorization, noting that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have.”
• Also today, a federal judge ruled in the consolidated cases NPR v. Trump and PBS v. Trump, regarding an executive order from May 2025 aimed at defunding NPR and PBS. With the Corporation for Public Broadcasting having since been dissolved, much of the relief that NPR and PBS had sought is now, sadly, moot. However, the portion of the executive order stating that “the heads of all agencies shall identify and terminate, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, any direct or indirect funding of NPR and PBS” has been ruled to be unconstitutional. Quoting from the opinion: “The Federal Defendants fail to cite a single case in which a court has ever upheld a statute or executive action that bars a particular person or entity from participating in any federally funded activity based on that person or entity’s past speech. Perhaps that is because neither Congress nor any prior Administration has ever attempted something so extreme…”
• Last week, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction in Anthropic v. Department of War, a case about the administration’s controversial decision to characterize U.S.-based AI company Anthropic as a “supply chain risk”, which as a practical matter could be a death sentence for the company. The opinion notes that “nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government.” (However, separate litigation on that subject is also pending with the D.C. Circuit.)
• Three weeks ago, a federal judge ruled that Kari Lake’s appointment in early 2025 as head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media was in violation of the Vacancies Act, and hence actions she took in that role were invalid. A week later, he ruled in Abramovitz v. Lake that Voice of America employees who had been placed on leave should be brought back to work. However today an appellate panel agreed to stay that order pending appeal.
• A week and a half ago, a federal judge ruled in New York Times v. Department of Defense that recent Pentagon actions to restrict news outlets violated the 1st Amendment.
• Finally, in two cases that came up through the SCOTUS shadow docket, the Court did not grant the administration a stay pending appeal of lower court decisions preventing the administration from revoking Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians. Instead SCOTUS set the cases for oral argument in late April, as the final cases it will hear this term. With Secretary Noem’s departure and the successful installation this month (on a 54-45 vote) of former Senator Mullin to be DHS Secretary, the Syrian case will now be styled Mullin v. Doe, while the Haitian case remains Trump v. Diot.

Finally, the third in the series of “No Kings” rallies took place on Saturday, without incident. Organizers claim over 8 million participants in over 3000 locations, up from a claim of 5 million participants in each of the two previous events (in June and October 2025). The attendees at the St. Paul rally included Bruce Springsteen (singing “Streets of Minneapolis”), Joan Baez, Jane Fonda, Senator Sanders, and Governor Walz. We probably should have gone, but we didn’t.

It has, as ever, been an eventful two weeks since my last post. A lot to catch up on:

State of the Union. I didn’t see any of this year’s SOTU speech (which is probably good for my mental health), since on that evening I was taking a long-time coworker out to dinner to celebrate his impending retirement. At 1 hour and 47 minutes, it was the longest SOTU address in at least the past 60 years. From what I read, it was an address aimed largely at his base, while Democrats felt it was largely full of lies.

Iran. When I last wrote, there was a lot of saber-rattling going on about the possibility of war with Iran, with a noteworthy concentration of U.S. military might in that part of the world. Two days after the SOTU there were talks going on between the U.S. and Iran in Geneva. Apparently those talks did not go well, because two days after that – seven days ago today – the U.S. initiated a bombing campaign in Iran. Demonstrating the effectiveness of both our intelligence and our military might, on the first day the U.S. killed Iran’s supreme leader, the 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

So: Are we at war with Iran? Under whose authority? What are our aims? Do we have any allies in this effort, apart from Israel? How long is this expected to last? Will ground troops be involved? How do the American people feel about this?

These are good, and obvious, questions. The answers coming out of the administration to these questions are muddled and amorphous.

Certainly, Congress did not approve the attack in advance. This week, Democrats advanced War Powers Resolutions in both houses that called for an immediate end to hostilities, but they failed (47-53 in the Senate, with Sen. Paul joining the Democrats but Sen. Fetterman joining the Republicans; and 212-219 in the House, with Rep. Massie and one other Republican joining the Democrats but Rep. Golden and three other Democrats joining the Republicans). After the votes Speaker Johnson said “we’re not at war”, which feels like splitting hairs at best and disingenuous at worst.

A poll taken earlier this week, after the news of Khamenei’s death, indicates that Americans are opposed to military action in Iran by a margin of 44-56, and that only 36% of Americans approve of how Trump is dealing with Iran. That strikes me as remarkably low numbers for a poll taken within days of the start of military action, and with a major success on the first day and little in the way of U.S. casualties (there have been 6 soldiers reported dead so far). If Trump thought military action in Iran would bring him a polling bump – something he repeatedly accused Obama of considering when his poll numbers were low – it’s not happening so far.

One other thing we do know is that the price of oil went up 35% this week. In recent weeks Trump has talked frequently about how gasoline prices have been coming down, although his rhetoric on that subject – including in the SOTU – has been exaggerated; now gas prices are up 14% this week, and likely headed up further.

Unlike Venezuela – where after Maduro’s extraction the remainder of the government has seemingly decided to play ball with the U.S. to avoid further turmoil – the Iranian regime shows no signs of rolling over after its leader’s demise, and as a result we may be talking about Iran for a long time.

Epstein Transparency. I haven’t been talking much about the aftermath of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but information has been coming out in recent weeks and months, at perhaps a slightly slower pace than what the law literally required, and with many unexplained redactions and omissions. Both the corporate world and foreign governments have been taking actions against people as their presence in what many are now calling the “Epstein class” has been revealed more broadly. Most notably, the former Prince Andrew, now styled Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, has been arrested and may lose his place in the line of succession. It has become fashionable in certain circles to view everything Trump now does, including the attack in Iran, through the lens of “trying to distract from the Epstein files”.

The House saw fit to subpoena a former President and First Lady recently to discuss their ties to Epstein, but their targets were not the Trumps but rather the Clintons. Democratic members noted that at least this set a precedent under which the Trumps could be subpoenaed to provide similar testimony somewhere down the line.

It became apparent that the DOJ had withheld certain FBI files relating to their interviews with a woman who had claimed, during the first Trump term, that while a minor she had been sexually assaulted by Trump after being introduced to him by Epstein. Those files were belatedly released late this week.

DHS. Things remain at a standstill in Congress with respect to the partial government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. Two days again the Senate voted 51-45 to fund DHS, but 60 votes were required; Sen. Fetterman was the only Democrat to support the measure.

However, there was some important DHS-related news this week: Trump removed DHS Secretary Noem, shuffling her to a newly created position as Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a brand new transnational organization involving the U.S. and selected Central and South American countries. His intended replacement as DHS Secretary is Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), who is cut from a similar political cloth as Noem.

What prompted Trump to finally fire a cabinet member? Pundit Charlie Sykes:

“Noem was not fired for (1) killing her puppy, (2) the cinematic brutality of ICE, (3) her cosplaying at migrant gulags, (4) the murder of two Americans in Minneapolis, or even for (5) her special assistant sidepiece, Corey Lewandowski. Nor was she fired because she lied so often and so easily — including about her victims, like Alex Pretti. As we know, lying is not a disqualification in the Era of Trump. Kristi’s problem that she lied badly and about the wrong things, and because she made Donald Trump look bad. During her incandescently awful Senate testimony, she said that Trump had approved her $200 million self-stroking ad campaign. Trump, reportedly, was displeased.”

ProPublica had done some reporting into the cronyism-cum-corruption behind this ad campaign 3 months ago, which did not go through normal government procurement efforts; but it was Sen. Kennedy (R-LA)’s questioning of Noem about it this week that reportedly was the final straw for Trump.

Primaries. Tuesday was primary night in Texas, which featured competitive and extremely expensive Senate primaries in both parties. Texas is one of the states where, should no candidate garner 50%+1 of the vote in the primary, there is a later runoff election with the top two candidates. Each party’s primary featured two leading candidates and potential spoilers.

On the Democratic side, the two main candidates were Jasmine Crockett, a 44-year-old Black woman in her second term in the U.S House after having served one term in the Texas House, and James Talarico, a 36-year-old white (non-Latino) man in his fourth term in the Texas House. (The third candidate was extremely minor and only garnered 1.3% of the vote.) The Crockett vs. Talarico matchup was an interesting litmus test for the Democratic party, even though both candidates are similar from a policy standpoint: Crockett was seen as a firebrand who could energize the base, while Talarico was seen as someone who might be able to appeal to a broader audience, particularly given his frequent references to his religious faith. Polling had been close but slightly favored Talarico, who won, 52.4 – 46.2.

On the Republican side, four-term incumbent John Cornyn faced two candidates to his right, controversial Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Congressman Wesley Hunt, one of four Black Republicans in the House. The Cornyn-Paxton race was the most expensive Senate primary in history, even though it seemed almost certain that Hunt would attract enough support to prevent either candidate from avoiding a runoff. And so it transpired, although contrary to most polling it was Cornyn who came out slightly on top, 41.9 – 40.7 – 13.5 (there were five other minor candidates splitting the rest of the vote).

With most of Hunt’s vote expected to more naturally flow to Paxton than Cornyn, Tuesday’s results raised the possibility of a Paxton v. Talarico general election matchup, albeit not until an expensive and bloody Republican runoff campaign. Of the four possible outcomes, Paxton v. Talarico is the one that many believe could actually put the Texas Senate seat in play this fall. Trump has stated this week that he intends to make an endorsement in the runoff soon – which most believe would be Cornyn – and that he expects the unendorsed candidate to drop out. Paxton’s willingness to play ball is unclear.

But perhaps the most interesting takeaway from the Texas primaries is the turnout. With extremely visible primaries in both parties, there were more votes cast in the Democratic Senate race than in the Republican Senate race, by a ratio of about 51.5-48.5. In Texas. Six years ago, when Cornyn faced only minimal primary opposition while there was a completely wide-open field on the Democratic side (with 5 candidates getting between 10% and 23% of the vote), the corresponding ratio was 49-51, and that was without a compelling Republican race. A major theme of the Biden era was the shift of Latino voters in the Texas border counties, who were previously reliably Democratic, to the Republicans. Hidalgo County, the 9th-largest county in Texas and one whose population is over 90% Latino, voted 70-29 for Obama in 2012, but went 51-48 for Trump in 2024; last week, the ratio of Democratic votes to Republican votes in the Senate primary in Hidalgo County was 77-23.

Tariffs. The recent SCOTUS decision in Learning Resources left unresolved the question of what actually happens next, with respect to the $166 billion or so of illegal IEEPA tariffs that have been collected. Judge Eaton of the Court of International Trade issued an order on Wednesday in a case called Atmus Filtration v. U.S. ruling that “all importers of record whose entries were subject to IEEPA duties are entitled to the benefit of the Learning Resources decision,” distinguishing this situation from the “no universal injunctions” concept from Trump v. CASA on the grounds that the CIT already has national geographic jurisdiction and exclusive subject matter jurisdiction on this matter.

As such, Eaton ordered CBP to stop collecting IEEPA tariffs and start refunding tariffs already collected, without importers needing to file suit. On Friday, CBP responded with a seemingly earnest explanation of why it couldn’t immediately do that, but committing to developing a new capability within 45 days to allow it to issue the refunds.

Meanwhile, Trump’s new post-Learning Resources tariffs, imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, are the subject of a new lawsuit in the CIT brought by 24 states, with Oregon as the lead plaintiff. Oregon v. Trump makes the interesting argument that while the never-used Section 122 authorizes the temporary imposition of tariffs to combat “large and serious balance-of-payments deficits”, those balance-of-payment deficits were only possible under the fixed-rate exchange system that was in effect when the bill was passed but was ended in 1976. As a result, per plaintiffs’ theory, the tariff authority granted to the President in Section 122 is now illusory, because the precondition to use that authority can no longer be met in a world where the U.S. dollar is not pegged to the price of gold or other foreign currencies.

Finally, we end by staying in the legal world, on a somewhat more frivolous note:

The War on Big Law. Recall that last year, Trump had issued executive orders singling out several law firms, some of which caved in to the President’s extortive tactics, and others of which sued. Rulings in four different similar suits had all gone against the government at the lower court level and are being consolidated on appeal to the D.C. Circuit. The government’s opening brief in the appeals was due yesterday.

Four days earlier, on Monday, the government filed a notice that it was voluntarily dropping the appeals, with the consent of the four law firms. This seemed to reflect the widely held belief that the government really has no case here. However… the next day, the government filed another notice that it was withdrawing the previously day’s abandonment of the appeals and would be preceding with the case. (One imagines Trump heard about this and was not pleased.) The law firms’ response was, okay fine, but we oppose any delay in the deadline for filing the government’s opening brief. So far I haven’t heard whether the government got its brief filed yesterday or not.