What was it Ford said when Nixon resigned, “our long national nightmare is over”? Well, today “our long Minnesota nightmare” may be over: Tom Homan announced at a press conference the impending end of Operation Metro Surge.

However, D.C. remains at loggerheads over DHS funding. Last week House Democrats prepared a 10-point list of demands, but it wasn’t until last night that the White House made an offer, which Democrats said was inadequate. Today the Senate took up a vote to pass the DHS funding bill that had previously passed the house, but Democrats remained united (save for Fetterman) and the bill failed. As such funding for the TSA, FEMA, and other arms of the DHS will expire on Saturday, although ICE and the CBP will continue thanks to funding previously provided within the OBBBA.

Earlier in the week Speaker Johnson found himself unable, with his reduced legislative margin, to continue playing fast and loose with House rules in order to prevent any votes on Trump’s IEEPA tariffs. As such, there was a House vote this week to cancel Trump’s 25% tariff on Canada, and it passed, 219-211, with six Republicans defecting. The Senate had previously passed a similar measure three months ago, but one imagines Trump will veto it. Still, it is a sign of a crack in the Republicans’ Trumpist unity.

This week the House passed an election reform bill known as the SAVE Act, along largely partisan lines (218-213). The bill would require proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote; based on experience from a similar law in Kansas, the number of U.S. citizens that would likely be prevented from voting under this requirement is orders of magnitude greater than the number of non-U.S. citizens currently on the voter rolls. The bill faces a likely filibuster in the Senate.

Turning to judicial news, this week a federal grand jury in D.C. refused to return an indictment against 6 sitting members of Congress, veterans all, who had released a video in November reminding military troops that they do not need to follow illegal orders. Trump had reacted very badly to the video, referring to it as “seditious behavior” potentially punishable by death. Separately, Defense Secretary Hegseth had sought to reduce the retirement rank and pay of the most prominent of the six, Senator Kelly (D-AZ), in reaction to the video; but today a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to the senator in his lawsuit (Kelly v. Hegseth) to prevent Hegseth from taking these actions, on the grounds that they violated Kelly’s 1st Amendment rights.

This week Trump threatened to block the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, the new road connection between Detroit and Windsor paid for by the Canadian government. It turns out that shortly before making that threat, his Commerce Secretary was actively lobbied by the billionaire who owns the existing bridge linking the two cities, the Ambassador Bridge.

But believe it or not, that was neither the worst nor most corrupt Trump action of late in the world of transportation. Trump has frozen $16 billion in federal funding for the Hudson River train tunnel connecting New Jersey and New York; however, per reporting, he told Senator Schumer he would un-freeze the funds if both Dulles International Airport and New York’s Penn Station were to be renamed after Donald J. Trump. Last week a federal judge ordered that funding be restored, but stayed that ruling until today; and today the 2nd Circuit declined to issue an emergency stay, putting the court ruling into force.

On Saturday there was a by-election in Houston to fill the Congressional seat in the 18th, a safely Democratic district that once belonged to President Matt Santos. Thanks to first Texas Republican intransigence, and then a failure of any candidate to garner 50% of the vote in a jungle general, this seat had been vacant for about 11 months. This weekend’s runoff election involved two Democratic candidates, with the winner seated yesterday. That makes the House currently 218-214 Republican, with 3 open seats: Governor Sherrill’s old seat (to be filled in April), MTG’s old seat (to be filled in March), and a seemingly safe Republican seat (under the old map, not the post-Proposition 50 map) in the extreme NE corner of California (to be filled in August).

Today the latest, brief, government shutdown ended, a day later than originally expected. While Trump had endorsed the compromise passed last week by the Senate and urged its swift enactment, it took Speaker Johnson an extra day to get his ducks in a row. The bill passed, 217-214, which looks deceptively like the Republicans’ current House margin. However looks are a little misleading here: 21 Democrats, mostly moderates (e.g., the retiring Jared Golden) and appropriators (e.g., the retiring Steny Hoyer), supported the bill while 21 Republicans, mostly Freedom Caucus types (e.g., Biggs, Boebert, and Massie), opposed the bill. Now the hard work begins, of trying to negotiate a compromise on DHS funding in a post-Minneapolis world in which the Democratic base is increasingly supportive of the previously radical position of defunding ICE.

Returning to Saturday, there was a very interesting election result out of Texas, in a by-election for a State Senate seat in Tarrant County. Tarrant, home to Fort Worth, is a rare example of a county that is both urban and staunchly Republican. In 2022, this State Senate seat went 60-40 to the Republican incumbent. That incumbent resigned in 2025 to become the Acting Comptroller in Texas, so there was a by-election in November which attracted 2 Republican and 1 Democratic candidates. The 2 Republicans together outpolled the Democrat, 52.6 – 47.4; however, neither Republican garnered a majority, so a runoff was scheduled for this past weekend. In that runoff, the Democrat won 57.2 – 42.8, despite reportedly being out-spent 7 to 1 and despite Trump having thrice posted on social media in support of the Republican. I keep seeing reporting that Trump won this State Senate district by 17 points in 2024, so roughly 58-41, although I have not been able to verify that myself; Tarrant County as a whole went to Trump but by a much smaller margin. Quite a result for the Democrats.

Finally, today a federal lawsuit (AAUP vs. DHS) was filed, asserting that Trump’s Gold Card immigration visa program is illegal. What I didn’t realize until the reading the lawsuit is that the way the Trump administration has implemented his Gold Card concept is by “treating a payment to [the] Commerce Department as evidence of statutory eligibility for EB-1 [extraordinary ability] and EB-2 [exceptional ability] visas, and expediting consideration of applications from individuals who make the payment.” As such, plaintiffs argue that “the Gold Card program overrides Congress’s choices—both as to who qualifies for employment-based immigration and how and under what conditions agencies may collect revenue… [and] does so at the expense of qualified EB-1 and EB-2 applicants, who are effectively crowded out of limited annual visa allotments as visas are steered to Gold Card recipients.”

The actual temperature in Minneapolis has gotten slightly warmer from the weekend’s lows (with Friday having been the first sub-minus-20 Fahrenheit day here in almost 7 years), while the rhetorical temperature has cooled a little. Greg Bovino, the controversial Border Patrol executive who was leading Operation Metro Surge here in the Twin Cities after having led Operation Midway Blitz last fall in Chicago, has been replaced by Trump “border czar”, Tom Homan. Homan suggested today that ICE plans to draw down the number of agents deployed in the Twin Cities.

Yesterday Bruce Springsteen dropped a new single, “Streets of Minneapolis”, that he wrote on Saturday after the killing of Alex Pretti. The lyrics reference both Pretti and Renee Good by name, and also name drop “King Trump and his private army from the DHS” and “Miller and Noem’s dirty lies”.

Also yesterday, 7 Senate Republicans joined all of the Democrats to oppose the omnibus funding bill previously passed by the House, putting a government shutdown this weekend in play. Today a compromise has apparently been reached, under which all of the non-DHS components of the House Bill remain intact and DHS funding is provided for an additional 2 weeks only, thus allowing further opportunity for debate. The Senate is expected to vote on the compromise later tonight and Trump has urged its passage. The House may not return from its break early enough to prevent a technical government shutdown, but it will be back on Monday.

Today Senator Klobuchar officially announced her run for Minnesota Governor to replace Tim Walz, who said today that he is done with elective office, ending speculation that he might seek to appoint himself to the Senate to replace Klobuchar. Speaking of the gubernatorial race, earlier this week one of the announced Republican primary candidates, Chris Kabel, announced he was dropping out on the grounds he could no longer in good conscience support the Republican party in the wake of the ICE occupation of Minnesota.

Finally, today Trump filed a lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department, seeking $10 billion as compensation for the fact that in 2020 a Treasury contractor obtained and leaked Trump’s tax returns. It will be interesting, and perhaps depressing, to see how the government responds to this lawsuit.

It continues to be a very long and difficult month, especially in Minnesota.

Last week was the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, a meeting that I suspect in time will be remembered primarily for a speech delivered by Canadian PM Carney about what lies ahead for middle powers in a world where the rules-based international order has been cast aside and “great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests.” Trump responded to the speech by rescinding Canada’s invitation to his newly established Board of Peace, and then later threatening Canada with more tariffs and referring on social media to Carney for the first time as “Governor Carney”, an epithet he used repeatedly with PM Trudeau.

Greenland was a major topic going into Davos. Trump had sent the Norwegian PM an unhinged text message that, after it leaked, was originally assumed by the right to be inauthentic until it was then confirmed that Trump had ordered copies of the text sent to all Western European leaders. After European leaders rallied behind Denmark, Trump then threatened a new 10% tariff on several Western European countries, which prompted EU threats to derail the trade deal agreed upon last year. Then, after things had gotten very tense, suddenly they weren’t: Trump announced he had reached a “framework of a future deal” on Greenland with the Secretary General of NATO. Was this another manifestation of TACO? At this point we don’t seem to know.

Nor do we know much more about the future of Venezuela than when I last wrote. Although we did have the farcical situation a week and a half ago where the reigning Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a female Venezuelan opposition leader, visited the White House and formally presented her medal to Trump. It remains completely unclear what, if anything, she got out of this piece of performance art. The glee with which Trump “accepted” the medal launched a thousand memes of Trump accepting awards that didn’t belong to him, of which perhaps my favorite was Rob & Fab from Milli Vanilli presenting Trump with their Grammy award.

We are now only several days away from another potential government shutdown, as the resolution to the previous shutdown required that certain spending bills be enacted by the end of January. The House reached bipartisan consensus on the necessary bills and then adjourned, leaving things in the hands of the Senate. Hold that thought.

Still no decision from SCOTUS on the IEEPA tariffs case. This week they did hold a very unusual oral argument in a shadow docket case, namely Trump v. Cook, arising out of Trump’s purported firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. The post-argument consensus is that Cook is unlikely to immediately lose her post; it is less clear as to whether the justices will simply allow the litigation to proceed in the lower courts, or instead make a ruling that would end the controversy in Cook’s favor now.

But the main story of the week remains the situation in Minnesota, where a federal surge of ICE personnel has been met by nonviolent resistance from residents and criticized by many as an unwelcome invasion. Friday was the coldest day in the Twin Cities in almost 7 years, with the temperature at sunrise being -22 F and the windchill making it feel like -40 F. Schools were cancelled, and many local groups had called for a general strike. There was a surprisingly well-attended anti-ICE rally in downtown Minneapolis Friday afternoon, given how cold it was. However, a potentially tense situation was holding steady.

And then, yesterday morning, ICE agents killed a 37-year-old man on the streets of Minneapolis. Alex Pretti was a white U.S. citizen, an ICU nurse at a VA hospital. He was standing on a sidewalk with a phone in one hand videoing events and his other empty hand raised in the air. ICE agents pepper-sprayed a protestor that he was videoing. He went to assist her, and the ICE agents first pepper-sprayed him, then threw him to the ground and started attacking him. While they were subduing him, they discovered he was carrying a firearm, for which he had the appropriate legal permits; however, he never brandished the firearm before it was confiscated by ICE agents. After his firearm was confiscated, ICE agents fired about 10 shots into him in a manner of seconds.

At least, that is the version of events as they appear to neutral observers from available videos. If you instead listen to DHS Secretary Noem and her minions, Pretti was an “assassin” who “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” And it is fascinating to see the Second Amendment crowd contort themselves over how this was somehow Pretti’s fault, for legally carrying a firearm that he never brandished.

Governor Walz and Mayor Frey and Minnesota AG Ellison were already upset over the entire situation here, but Pretti’s killing has pushed everything into high gear. And it may have some immediate national implications, as several Senate Democrats now indicate they are unwilling to pass the DHS appropriations bill that had just narrowly passed the House.

In more picayune political news, Trump has taken the unusual step of endorsing a primary challenger to a Senator from his own party, throwing his support behind Louisiana Rep. Julia Letlow in her challenge against Sen. Cassidy. This is the thanks the physician-Senator gets for, against what I assume was likely his better medical judgment, casting the deciding vote in favor of RFK Jr as HHS Secretary. Julia’s husband Luke died of COVID-19 shortly after winning election to the House in 2020 but before taking his seat; she won the special election to replace him.

It’s been a difficult week, especially here in Minnesota.

It seems like ages ago by now, but on Monday Governor Walz made a surprise announcement that he would not be running for re-election this fall. This comes in the wake of continuing concerns about fraud in the administration of COVID-era Minnesota state programs, concerns that were recently inflamed by MAGA wing “journalists”. It seems likely that Senator Klobuchar will run in place of Walz, which would soon create a second Senate opening here (with Tina Smith already having announced her retirement).

Jonathan Cohn had a balanced article about the Minnesota fraud scandal in the Bulwark this week, and made some important points about the broader context of the scandal:

“The assistance programs of Western and Northern Europe tend to be universal, meaning they offer help to everybody, while the programs in the United States tend to be targeted, meaning they serve narrow, carefully defined sectors of the population. That creates incentives to game the eligibility criteria. Another difference is that the European governments are more likely to provide housing or deliver services like childcare directly. The United States, by contrast, outsources more of that work to the private sector, which means there are more opportunities for organizations and businesses to raid the public treasury.

This system didn’t develop by accident. It’s the result, in part, of a decades-long campaign by conservatives to limit or shrink the size of government, and to privatize public services whenever possible. And while there are plenty of intellectually defensible arguments for this approach—like a philosophical preference for lower spending and taxes or belief the private sector will be more efficient and innovative—it does require more aggressive oversight.3

“As long as you don’t have government directly provide those services, then you either have to invest more in auditing and monitoring these service provisions—or you have to be willing to deal with some failures and some scandals that come up every now and again,” Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan and expert on how government actually works, told me.

The American system works best when there are safeguards in place to prevent fraud and abuse. In case you haven’t noticed, the Trump administration has adopted precisely the opposite approach since taking office—cutting personnel who guard against fraud rather than adding them, and weakening internal safeguards rather than strengthening them.

“Many of the cuts the Trump administration has made have been to reduce parts of the government that take on fraud,” Moynihan said.”

But the real news of the week here in Minnesota occurred on Wednesday, in Minneapolis, only a few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed a few years ago. In an incident witnessed by dozens and caught on cellphone videos, both by bystanders and by the assailant himself, an ICE agent (Jonathan Ross) killed a 37-year-old white female US citizen (Renee Good), shooting into her car at close range as she was attempting to drive away.

As with so many stories today, the narrative of this incident varies dramatically depending on which side of the political spectrum you inhabit. To hear DHS Secretary Noem and Vice President Vance tell it, Good was a “domestic terrorist” who was impeding a law enforcement operation and then attempted to flee, placing the ICE agent’s life in danger with her car and prompting him to fire in self-defense. Forensic video analysis performed by the NYTimes and other organizations paints a very different story, suggesting that the agent (who apparently had been run over by a car several months ago in a different operation) was not in any danger. Good’s motivations are also murky, as she appears to have been coming home from dropping her 6-year-old son off at school, rather than “engaging in domestic terrorism”. As such, many in Minnesota want to see Ross charged with murder, while the Trump administration characteristically remains unrepentant. Tensions are high here.

Speaker Johnson’s grip on his caucus appears to be continuing to slip, as this week 17 House Republicans crossed to floor to help pass a bill that would belatedly extend the Biden-era expanded premium subsidies for ACA individual medical insurance plans for an additional three years. The bill is not seen as having a chance to pass the Senate. Also, on Friday SCOTUS returned from its winter break and released one opinion, but it was not the eagerly anticipated opinion in the IEEPA tariffs case.

Speaking of tariffs, a working paper from two academics got some media attention this week. They argue that, due to various exemptions, the effective tariff rates observed in late 2025 are roughly half of the stated tariff rates, which helps explain why the higher tariff regime’s impact on the general economy has been muted so far. They also assert that virtually all of the higher tariffs are being borne by the U.S. rather than by exporters (via price reductions). Dan Drezner, reacting to the researchers’ findings:

“In a lot of ways, Trump’s trade policy is a synecdoche of the Trump administration’s overall policy shifts. There are horrible headlines, followed by policy that is only about 50 percent as horrible as the original pronouncement. Then Trump supporters exult in the fact that predictions of doom turned out to be false. Of course, the effect is like praising a doctor because he only injected half as much arsenic as was previously thought into a patient.”

Trump made three statements this week that I can hardly believe were uttered by a Republican President. First, he said that the U.S. should place limitations on the ability of certain corporations to own certain property (barring large institutional investors from owning single-family homes). Second, he said that the U.S. should place limitations on the ability of certain corporations (namely, defense contractors) to return capital to investors (through buybacks or dividends) and to compensate their senior executives. Finally, he said that the U.S. should place limitations on the interest rates charged to consumes on certain unsecured loans (credit card balances). These policies sound like they came out of Senator Warren’s mouth. Trump also stated this week that he wants to see a 50% increase in federal defense spending. At least that sounds like a Republican President’s position, even if it’s a batshit crazy thing to propose.

Finally, the wonderful world of foreign policy. I don’t think we have much more clarity about the future of Venezuela than we did when I last posted, other than Trump is clearly hot-to-trot to get American hands on Venezuelan oil, which always felt like the most likely root cause of his intervention. Yesterday he convened a White House meeting of the leaders of the U.S. oil industry, attempting to browbeat them into investing $100 billion in Venezuela, a country that on multiple previous occasions has expropriated American oil investments. So far they don’t seem to be biting.

And then there’s Greenland, about which the rhetoric keeps increasing. Yesterday Trump said, in reference to conversations he’s had with Danish officials, that “I would like to make a deal the easy way, but if we don’t do it the easy way we’re going to do it the hard way.” Something I just learned is that in 1916, when Denmark ceded the Danish Virgin Islands to the U.S., the U.S. Secretary of State made a formal declaration that “the Government of the United States of America will not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.” In light of Venezuela and Greenland, tensions are once again rising in Canada about the possibility of threats, whether economic or military, from the southern neighbor.

In my last post a few days ago, wrapping up the first calendar year of the 2nd Trump Administration, early on in the post I wrote: “We are not yet at war with Venezuela, although events still seem to be trending in that direction.”

Yesterday morning the world woke up to the news that, overnight, the U.S. military had successfully executed a mission to forcibly extract Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife from their home in Caracas, and extradite them to New York City to await trial on various federal charges, mainly around narco-terrorism. In essence, an attempt at regime change via decapitation, wrapped in the guise of facilitating a criminal prosecution.

Thirty-six hours later, there is still a great deal of uncertainty around what this means for the future of Venezuela. I watched Trump’s news conference from Mar-A-Lago, which was uncharacteristic of me as I have a great deal of difficulty listening to the man speak. On this occasion, it was fascinating. He had no teleprompter, but there was clearly a written text that he was supposed to be reading, and hence much of the time he had his head down as he was reading verbatim from the prepared text. But then every couple of sentences he would get bored, and his head would go up and he would start riffing, before eventually putting his head down again and returning to the text. I would love to see a transcript of his speech that is aligned with his head movements, so that we can deduce which of his words were carefully planned and which weren’t. I strongly suspect that the unplanned words included the following quote, which quickly became the biggest piece of news from the press conference: “We will run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”

It is also unclear what this foreshadows for the future of American foreign policy. In his speech Trump talked about the “Donroe Doctrine”, a term that I hadn’t heard before but was mentioned in a November 2025 NYTimes article as having originated in a January 2025 NYPost headline. Trump reiterated in a phone interview today that “we do need Greenland, absolutely.” He has also made comments over the past day that could foreshadow military action in Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. It does, however, seem fairly clear that a U.S. who is willing to take this type of action against Venezuela is uninterested in taking a hard line against Chinese aggression towards Taiwan or Russian aggression towards Ukraine.

It’s been over a month since I’ve blogged, and with my busy season at work about to start in the next couple of days, I don’t imagine I will have much to say over the next several weeks either.

Things continue to progress in what I view as a deeply negatively direction for this country, albeit not at a particularly rapid pace. We are not yet at war with Venezuela, although events still seem to be trending in that direction. Notwithstanding Trump’s apparent belief that drug smuggling is a major national security concern, he recently continued his war against the war on corruption by pardoning the former president of Honduras, who had recently started serving a 45-year federal sentence for cocaine trafficking. Trump has been trying harder in recent weeks to broker peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, but the endgame remains unclear. Trump continues to express his interest in annexing Greenland against the will of a NATO ally, having recently named Louisiana’s Republican governor as a “special envoy to Greenland,” a post the governor described as “a volunteer position to [help] make Greenland part of the U.S.” And the administration recently announced its intention to start de-naturalizing U.S. citizens (due to purported misrepresentations made during the naturalization process) at approximately a 100-fold increase over historical rates.

With SCOTUS yet to rule in the IEEPA tariffs cases, there have been no significant developments in trade policy as of late, nor have the impacts of Trump’s tariffs yet had much influence on the general economy. After official inflation figures were not published for October 2025 thanks to the government shutdown, the November 2025 figure was only 2.7%, down from September’s 3.0% and at the same level as in November 2024, albeit still higher than the Fed’s target of 2.0%. Unemployment ticked up to 4.6% in November 2025, up from 4.2% in November 2024. The S&P 500 is up 16.5% for calendar year 2025, thanks in some part to the OBBBA’s extension of the TCJA’s tax regime and in other part to a potential bubble in AI-related stocks. Trump recently rated the economy “A+++++” under his watch, although a recent poll has Trump significantly underwater on his handling of the economy, 36 – 57.

Last week we finally had a 6-3 SCOTUS shadow docket ruling that was against the administration instead of for it, in Trump v. Illinois. Recall that in this case the 7th Circuit ruled that Trump’s attempt to federalize the National Guard for deployment in Chicago was unlawful. As foreshadowed by the Court’s November request for supplemental briefing of the issue addressed in Marty Lederman’s amicus brief, a majority of the court believes that a stay of the ruling is not warranted on the grounds that the reference in the Milita Act to “regular forces” does indeed refer to the military and not to civilian law enforcement. So, that’s one. The ruling was extremely textual in nature, allowing the Court to weigh in without needing to get into thornier issues, which may not be a great sign of the Court’s willingness to address those issues in a situation where there wasn’t a clear alternative offramp.

Looking back on the year holistically, I feel pretty down about it. My major concern is that many of the changes that Trump has wrought to the country this year are things that in practice will be nearly impossible to reverse in the absence of constitutional reform, which in turn is nearly impossible to imagine.

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.