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.