It feels like we’re in a calm before the storm, on multiple fronts.

There are 4,000 federalized National Guard troops and 700 Marines presently in L.A., at an estimated cost of $134 million for a 60-day deployment. Their mission is a little unclear, and perhaps changing by the day: there is now a lawsuit, styled Newsom v. Trump, requesting a TRO to prevent the administration from proceeding with their purported “plans to use Marines and federalized National Guard to enforce immigration laws and other civil laws on the streets of our cities,” as contrasted with the more legitimate use of soldiers to protect federal property and personnel.

The propaganda battle over what exactly is going on right now in L.A. has run amok. California’s lawsuit asserts that “there is no invasion or rebellion in Los Angeles; instead there is civil unrest that is no different from episodes that regularly occur in communities throughout the country, and that is capable of being contained by state and local authorities”. Contrast that with the rhetoric coming from Trump and his allies, using words like “invasion” and “insurrection” to describe the L.A. protests, and with Trump asserting that “if we didn’t do what we did, Los Angeles would be burning to the ground.”

Trump’s politicization of the military took another turn yesterday with a speech at Fort Bragg (renamed by Trump in March, after having been changed to Fort Liberty by Biden in 2023), ostensibly to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the formation of the U.S. Army, but in practice a standard-issue Trump rally but with uniformed troops cheering on the President’s partisan attacks. So much for the long-standing Department of Defense directive prohibiting active-duty personnel from engaging in partisan political activities.

In other news the Federal Circuit, sitting en banc, issued a per curiam order granting the administration a stay pending appeal in the V.O.S. Selections case, which means the IEEPA tariffs remain in effect for now. The order signals the intention for oral arguments to take place on July 31st, noting that “these cases present issues of exceptional importance warranting expedited en banc consideration of the merits in the first instance.”

Speaking of tariffs, there was news today that trade talks in London between China and U.S. had resulted in an agreement, but as of this writing we are still waiting to see exactly what that agreement is. From the New York Times: “For many analysts, the London meetings raised questions about what exactly had been gained by Mr. Trump’s aggressive trade tactics against China over the past few months, or whether his actions had ultimately backfired. ‘What exactly are we getting that we weren’t already getting before?’ asked Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank. ‘This deal suggests there was never a real plan.'”

Nothing to speak of out of SCOTUS so far this week, although tomorrow is a scheduled day for issuance of opinions. Within the past couple of days, both sides have submitted their briefs in Trump v. AFGE, the administration’s request for a stay of the lower court’s order preventing the administration from (as plaintiffs put it) acting to “unilaterally dismantle agencies across the federal government without allowing the federal courts adequate opportunity to consider and rule on the serious separation of powers concerns”. SCOTUS action on this and other shadow docket cases could come at any time, rather than as part of the more orderly roll-out of opinions on orally argued cases.

Still nothing substantive out of the Senate on OBBBA, although that could change any day. Trump has set an objective that he wants to be able to sign a bill by July 4th.

While it’s unlikely to have legislative legs, yesterday Senator Hawley (R-MO) co-sponsored a bill to increase the federal minimum wage to $15. In 2016, the addition of the $15 minimum wage to the Democratic party platform was considered a major victory for Sen. Sanders and the party’s left-wing; now, the policy has been embraced by one of the most socially conservative, albeit simultaneously populist, members of the Senate.

Finally, in a widening of the administration’s wars on D.E.I. as well as on (Columbia and) Harvard, today there is reporting from Bloomberg that the Treasury Department plans on issuing an IRS Revenue Procedure that would “bar private, nonprofit schools from remaining tax exempt if they favor any racial groups in matters such as financial assistance, loans, use of facilities or other programs,” which would likely require “ending many programs that try to counter longstanding disparities in wealth and higher educational experience among certain minority groups, including Black and Hispanic students”.

The dominant story over the weekend has been actions taken by the Trump administration in response to what, at least initially, were relatively benign protests in different parts of L.A. at ICE facilities.

On Saturday Trump announced that he would be calling up 2,000 California National Guard troops to protect federal agents and buildings, notwithstanding that Governor Newsom had not requested that the National Guard get involved. Trump’s authority to take this action comes from a statutory provision allowing the President to call up the National Guard whenever “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

From the Editorial Board of the New York Times, in today’s paper, under the headline “Trump Calling Troops Into Los Angeles is the Real Emergency”:

“The National Guard is typically brought into American cities during emergencies such as natural disasters and civil disturbances or to provide support during public health crises — when local authorities require additional resources or manpower. There was no indication that was needed or wanted in Los Angeles this weekend, where local law enforcement had kept protests over federal immigration raids, for the most part, under control. Guard members also almost always arrive at the request of state leaders, but in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom called the deployment of troops “purposefully inflammatory” and likely to escalate tensions. It had been more than 60 years since a president sent in the National Guard on his own volition. Which made President Trump’s order on Saturday to do so both ahistoric and based on false pretenses and is already creating the very chaos it was purportedly designed to prevent.”

Also from the NYT’s opinion pages today is David French, who as a reminder was considered in 2016 by “Never Trump” Republican forces as a potential independent Presidential candidate, in a piece titled “America Is No Longer A Stable Country”:

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Trump administration is spoiling for a fight on America’s streets. On Saturday, after a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests degenerated into violence, the administration reacted as if the country were on the brink of war. The violence was unacceptable. Civil disobedience is honorable; violence is beyond the pale. But so far, thankfully, the violence has been localized and, crucially, well within the capacity of state and city officials to manage. But don’t tell that to the Trump administration. Its language was out of control. … The administration’s language was extreme. Its actions, so far, have been more limited. But that’s small comfort. The potential next step is plain to see. If the administration (in its sole discretion) believes that this first, limited deployment is insufficient, then it will escalate. It will shout “Insurrection!” and “Migrant invasion!” to justify more military control and perhaps the invocation of the Insurrection Act.”

And a few minutes ago I saw a chyron on the TV saying that several hundred Marines are being deployed to L.A. Which would appear to indicate that Trump is about to assert authority under the Insurrection Act.

In the midst of all this, California AG Rob Bonta has announced California will sue the U.S. over its nationalization of California’s National Guard; and Trump was quoted in a press availability as supportive of the concept of arresting Governor Newsom. Fun times.

Less than a week after Trump gave Musk a glowing farewell to government service in the Oval Office, yesterday the growing Trump-Musk schism went into hyperdrive. Over the course of the day, Trump and Musk traded social media posts that included Musk suggesting that the reason AG Bondi hasn’t released the so-called “Epstein files” is that Trump is himself in them, and Trump suggesting that the federal government should cancel all of its contracts with Musk’s companies. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon also called for Musk’s deportation on the grounds that 30 years ago Musk reportedly overstayed his student visa, after dropping out of Stanford but staying in Silicon Valley to work on his first startup. Tesla stock went down 14% yesterday as the feud played out in public during the trading day, and it only recovered 3% today. The ramifications of the schism on Republican politics remain murky.

While earlier in the week there was a hope that some Senate committees would start to roll out OBBBA markups this week, that hasn’t happened yet, and progress seems complicated.

The same judge who had previously granted Harvard a preliminary injunction against the DHS action on student visas has also granted Harvard a temporary restraining order against the Presidential proclamation on student visas. Harvard’s amended complaint argues that the use of Presidential authority to bar admission of a “class of aliens” doesn’t work in this situation, since the proclamation would allow any or all of those aliens admission to the U.S. for purposes other than studying at Harvard.

Something happened earlier in the week that I neglected to mention: The administration filed a recissions request with Congress, asking for its approval to not spend $9.4 billion of previously appropriated funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and for various foreign aid activities. Congress has 45 days to act on the request, which requires only a simple majority of both houses. Such requests have been basically unknown in recent decades; Trump tried one in his first term but it failed in the Senate. The House may vote on it next week.

Today SCOTUS took action on a shadow docket case, SSA v. AFSCME, overturning the 4th Circuit’s en banc denial of an administrative stay on a lower court ruling enjoining the administration from providing DOGE with full access to all Social Security Administration records. The 3 liberals would have upheld the stay, and Justice Jackson wrote a dissenting opinion (joined once again by Sotomayor, but not by bridge-builder Kagan). Continuing with the theme of her dissenting opinion last week in Noem v. Doe, Jackson objects to the majority’s approach in applying the “irreparable injury” prong of the Nken factors when it is the government asking for a stay rather than another party. Today she writes:

“[T]he Court grants a stay permitting the Government to give unfettered data access to DOGE…despite its failure to show any need or any interest in complying with existing privacy safeguards, and all before we know for sure whether federal law countenances such access. The Court is thereby, unfortunately, suggesting that what would be an extraordinary request for everyone else is nothing more than an ordinary day on the docket for this Administration. I would proceed without fear or favor to require DOGE and the Government to do what all other litigants must do to secure a stay from this Court: comply with lower court orders constraining their behavior unless and until they establish that irreparable harm will result such that equity requires a different course. The Court opts instead to relieve the Government of the standard obligations, jettisoning careful judicial decisionmaking and creating grave privacy risks for millions of Americans in the process.”

Sticking with judicial activity, there was an extremely strange situation two days ago in Texas. It started with a DOJ announcement that it was suing the state of Texas over a decades-old state law that extends in-state tuition rates to undocumented students who have been present in Texas for at least 3 years before graduating high school. Efforts were made this spring in the Texas Senate to repeal the law, but the bill never made it to the floor for a vote. Six hours after the lawsuit was filed, controversial judge Reed O’Connor (perhaps best known for his 2018 ruling that the ACA was unconstitutional, ultimately overturned by SCOTUS in 2021’s California v. Texas) approved an order permanently enjoining the law.

How did that come to pass?!? Well, the putative defendant, Texas AG Ken Paxton, had in the interim filed a joint motion with the DOJ agreeing to a consent judgement that the law was unconstitutional. And, the original DOJ lawsuit had been filed not in Austin, where the state government is located, but in Wichita Falls, guaranteeing that the case would end up on O’Connor’s docket. Clearly, the fix was in from the start. Steve Vladeck commented that this whole endeavor “sets a new (low) standard for shameless hypocrisy on the part of both the U.S. Department of Justice and the Texas Attorney General’s Office,” noting that SCOTUS precedent clearly indicates that the courts have no authority to adjudicate in “transparently collusive lawsuits.” It will be interesting to see if somebody will intervene in the case in order to appeal this decision to the Fifth Circuit.

Finally, there was a major new development this afternoon in the Abrego Garcia situation, but since I haven’t provided any background about it yet in this series and since this post is already very long, I will leave that for a later post.

Today the Congressional Budget Office released its official analysis of the OBBBA as passed by the House several days ago, estimating that it would increase the budget deficit by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years. This comes as unwelcome news to the Republicans, who have been asserting that the bill will not increase the deficit at all, and who have responded today by attacking the impartiality of the CBO. I’ve started working on my own summary of the CBO analysis but I think that post will need to wait until the weekend.

Three new executive actions of interest from Trump today.

First, continuing his administration’s war on Harvard, Trump has issued a proclamation that “it is necessary to restrict the entry of foreign nationals who seek to enter the United States solely or principally to participate in a course of study at Harvard University or in an exchange visitor program hosted by Harvard University,” asserting the authority to do so under provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that “authorize the President to suspend entry of any class of aliens whose entry would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” This action attempts to use another route to implement a policy that a federal court had recently enjoined. Harvard has issued a brief statement calling the proclamation “yet another illegal retaliatory step taken by the Administration in violation of Harvard’s First Amendment rights.”

Second, Trump issued a proclamation imposing a travel ban on citizens of 12 countries (including Haiti and Somalia) and a partial travel ban on citizens of a further 7 countries (including Cuba and Venezuela). Unlike the controversial travel ban from early in Trump’s first term, which appeared to be rooted in animus towards Muslims, this ban appears to be grounded in data on visa overstay rates as well as concerns about countries’ passport issuance capabilities and/or historical unwillingness to accept repatriation of their deportable citizens.

Third, Trump issued a memorandum asserting that “there are serious doubts as to the decision making process and even the degree of Biden’s awareness of” executive actions taken towards the end of his term (including judicial appointments and acts of clemency), and ordering an investigation into “whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President.” This comes in the wake of a new book last month, co-authored by CNN anchor Jake Tappen, regarding Biden’s cognitive and physical deterioration and the steps taken by close aides to keep that largely hidden from the world. (Incidentally, a couple of weeks ago Biden was diagnosed with prostate cancer that has metastasized to the bone; his prognosis remains uncertain.)

Finally, a new district court ruling today in the J.G.G. v. Trump case, which relates to the Venezuelans that were deported in mid-March under the Alien Enemies Act to a notorious prison in El Salvador known as CECOT, with the planes already in the air by the time Judge Boasberg from D.C. was able to issue a temporary restraining order against the deportations. The gist of today’s ruling is that “Plaintiffs’ ability to bring habeas challenges to their removal must be restored … Defendants must facilitate Plaintiffs’ ability to proceed through habeas and ensure that their cases are handled as they would have been if the Government had not provided constitutionally inadequate process … absent this relief, the Government could snatch anyone off the street, turn him over to a foreign country, and then effectively foreclose any corrective course of action.” Today’s decision does not address the merits of the government’s use of the AEA; that topic will be the subject of oral arguments in front of the 5th Circuit on June 30th in a separate case, the case formerly known as A.A.R.P. v. Trump but likely to be known going forward, for sake of minimizing confusion, as W.M.M. v. Trump.

Today Trump officially enacted his threatened increase in steel & aluminum tariffs, effectively tomorrow, from 25% to 50%. There is an exemption for the U.K. while the countries continue to try and implement their recently touted trade framework, one intended aspect of which was a reduction in U.S. tariffs on British steel from the 25% rate.

Musk has only been out of government for a few days, but already major cracks are showing in the Trump-Musk alliance. Today Musk called the OBBBA a “disgusting abomination” and then, hours later, posted that “in November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people.”

Senate committees are expected to release their markups of OBBBA in phases this week, with the aim for the full Senate to vote on a bill before the end of June. Encouragingly, Majority Leader Thune today appeared to rule out playing the nuclear card of overruling the Senate Parliamentarian; as such, we can expect there will be some “Byrd droppings” of non-budgetary provisions that snuck into the House’s version of the OBBBA, such as the controversial 10-year moratorium on enforcement of state AI-related laws (a provision that, today, Rep. Taylor-Greene claimed to have known nothing about, saying that said she’d have voted against the bill if she’d realized that was in it), or the controversial provision limiting federal judges’ ability to hold government officials in contempt of court when they disobey court orders (which Rep. Flood of Nebraska admitted last week was unknown to him when he voted for the bill and indicated he opposes).

Trump v. AFGE reached the SCOTUS shadow docket today. I had missed where, late last week, a 9th Circuit panel voted 2-1 to deny the administration’s request for a stay of Judge Illston’s preliminary injunction pending appeal. As such today the administration took its request for a stay to SCOTUS. The circuit justice, in this case Kagan, has given plaintiffs a week to respond to the government’s application.

Finally in political news, one-time Tea Party Republican Congressman Joe Walsh announced today he is joining the Democratic party, five years after he left the Republican party to become an independent. Walsh: “I used to be a conservative Republican. The Republican Party is no longer conservative, it’s authoritarian. I’m still a conservative, so now I’m a conservative Democrat.” The re-sorting of the electorate continues.

We’ve made it to June.

Quiet weekend. On Friday Trump did announce his intention to raise existing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from 25% to 50%, effective this coming Wednesday (June 4th). This tariff action is unrelated to the broader tariffs that were the subject of the V.O.S. Selections case, but instead is an expansion of action Trump first took in 2018 under authority granted by Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. More recently, the E.U. has indicated it “is prepared to impose countermeasures,” perhaps waiting until mid-July, but perhaps earlier.

Speaking of V.O.S. Selections v. Trump, some of the legal analysis in the wake of the lower court decision has focused on the so-called major questions doctrine, a term of art that has loomed over much of the Roberts Court’s jurisprudence but wasn’t used in a SCOTUS majority opinion until 2022. The general idea behind the doctrine is the belief that, with respect to an issue having “vast economic and political significance,” Congress would need to clearly delegate to a regulatory agency authority to address that issue, as opposed to the regulatory agency being able to claim authority under some more general statutory provision. One distinction between V.O.S. Selections and the major questions doctrine cases is that here, with respect to tariffs, we are talking about the delegation of Congressional authority to the President himself rather than to a regulatory agency. Should that difference matter? Will SCOTUS think it matters? Stay tuned.

In other news, Ukraine successfully launched a coordinated drone attack on air bases throughout Russia, damaging as many as one-third of Russia’s long-range bomber forces. Also, Trump withdrew his nomination for NASA administrator, tech billionaire (and close friend of Elon Musk) Jared Isaacman, citing a “thorough review of prior associations.” This is believed to refer to the fact that Isaacman had previously donated to Democratic Senators Kelly and Casey, although the NYTimes’ reporting asserts that Trump was told about this back in December.

In my last post I mentioned the late-breaking news on Wednesday night about Trump’s commutation of the federal life sentence of gangster Larry Hoover. It turns out that was only the vanguard of a flurry of pardon and/or commutation activity that became public yesterday. As the NYTimes’ Glenn Thrush put it, “Trump is employing the vast power of his office to redefine criminality to suit his needs — using pardons to inoculate criminals he happens to like, downplaying corruption and fraud as crimes, and seeking to stigmatize political opponents by labeling them criminals.”

This week’s acts of clemency included the following:

• James Callahan, a labor leader who failed to report $300,000 of personal gifts from a vendor his union used;
• Michael Grimm, a former Republican Congressman who resigned in 2015 after being convicted of tax evasion, for which he served several months in prison;
• Jeremy Hutchinson, a former Republican state senator in Arkansas who resigned in 2018 after being indicted on tax fraud charges, of which he was convicted and sentenced in 2023 to 46 months in prison;
• John Rowland, a former Republican governor of Connecticut who resigned in 2004 to avoid impeachment on corruption charges, for which he ultimately spent several months in prison, and then a decade later was convicted and imprisoned on charges relating to election law violations;
• P.G. Sittenfeld, a former Democratic Cincinnati city councillor who was convicted on bribery and extortion charges and whose appeal was rejected by the 6th Circuit in February;
• Charles Scott, a 70-year-old who was sentenced in February to 42 months in prison on securities fraud charges related to a pump-and-dump scheme;
• Imaad Zuberi, a Trump supporter who was sentenced in 2021 to 12 years in prison for campaign finance crimes, obstruction of justice, and unregistered foreign agent charges; and
• Marian Morgan, who in 2013 was sentenced to 35 years in prison in connection with a Ponzi scheme that she and her husband (who, unlike his wife, pled guilty and has already been released from prison) ran called Morgan European Holdings.

These are the people that this President feels were unfairly treated by the justice system: tax evaders, people who abused a position of trust for personal gain, people who circumvented federal election law, pump-and-dump perpetrators, Ponzi schemers. One wonders why he is drawn to their tales of woe.

In other news, now that we are 130 days into the Trump presidency the period of time that Elon Musk can serve as a “special government employee” has lapsed, and as such today he officially bade farewell to DOGE and, at least on paper, re-entered private life. Coincidentally, today the NYTimes published a new expose on Musk’s drug use (including the accusation that SpaceX, a government contractor, has tipped its CEO off to the timing of mandatory drug tests he needs to take) and child custody disputes.

Turning to the legal front, today SCOTUS (in a shadow docket case called Noem v. Doe) allowed the Trump administration to go through with its plans to revoke the Biden administration’s so-called CHNV parole program, a series of four different programs that offered roughly half a million individuals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela the ability to be in U.S. on humanitarian grounds. A district court and, eventually, the 1st Circuit had issued stays of the administration’s action; but today SCOTUS lifted the stay. The underlying legal issue at hand is whether the administration can categorically revoke parole for a whole class of people, or whether case-by-case determinations are necessary.

With the stay lifted, litigation on the merits of that issue will continue, but in the interim the half-million people covered by this program become theoretically subject to deportation orders. Justice Jackson wrote a blistering dissent, joined only by Sotomayor (and interestingly not by Kagan), noting that “[t]he Government bears the burden of showing why it, or the public, will be irreparably injured should it be prevented from exercising its policy preferences now—i.e., while the lawfulness of this agency action is being litigated” and concluding that such burden was not met, weighing against the prospect of having “the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.”

Now for some quick updates on other legal situations I’ve been following.

First, Harvard: The morning after DHS informed the university that its ability to enroll international students was being revoked, Harvard successfully got a temporary restraining order in place. At a hearing yesterday, the same judge indicated she was willing to issue a preliminary injunction, but asked the two sides to attempt to negotiate the terms of that injunction before she steps in.

Next, the Court of International Trade’s ruling against Trump’s invocation of IEEPA to impose tariffs: Here the next morning the Federal Circuit granted the government’s request for an administrative stay of the ruling while it considers the government’s motion to stay the judgment pending appeal. As such, for now the tariffs remain in effect. Both parties need to submit briefs by June 9th, so we may have further action on this in a couple of weeks. One imagines that either way the Federal Circuit rules, this will ultimately make it to SCOTUS. Somehow there is also a separate case in the D.C. Circuit covering the same issues, so there could also be action coming out of that appellate court as well. (I have also learned belatedly that the named plaintiff, V.O.S. Selections, is actually a wine importing business.)

Lastly, the AFGE case arguing that DOGE, OPM, and OMB’s re-organization of the executive branch without Congressional approval was unlawful. Here I missed last week that Judge Illston issued a preliminary injunction “to pause large-scale reductions in force and reorganizations,” in line with her previous temporary restraining order. As such the ball here is now with the 9th Circuit.

Finally, two pieces of news related to judicial nominations, of which the first batch under Trump 2.0 is just starting to filter out.

Yesterday Attorney General Bondi sent the American Bar Association a letter informing the ABA that, contrary to decades of practice, the administration will no longer ask judicial nominees to sit for ABA interviews or complete ABA questionnaires in order to allow the ABA to assign ratings to nominees. Bondi’s justification for this is that the ABA’s ratings “invariably and demonstrably favor nominees put forth by Democratic administrations,” from which Bondi imputes a political bias on the ABA’s part rather than a competency bias on Democratic administrations’ part.

In a perhaps related development, the previous day Trump made the controversial nomination of Emil Bove to the 3rd Circuit. Bove was one of Trump’s personal defense attorneys during his various legal issues in 2023 & 2024, and was rewarded for his service by being named Acting Deputy AG in January. While in that role, he was the official who ordered DOJ subordinates to dismiss the corruption charges against NYC Mayor Adams, leading to the vocal resignations of several DOJ prosecutors–including some with impeccable Republican credentials–in what has been called the Thursday Night Massacre (echoing back to a famous Watergate-era event). I wasn’t blogging back in February when all that went down, but having Bove back in the public eye gives me a second chance to quote from the instantly famous resignation letter sent to Bove by Hagan Scotten, a former clerk to both Kavanaugh and Roberts:

“I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

Some days, there’s just so much news…

A few minutes after I clicked ‘publish’ on the previous post, news broke that the Court of International Trade ruled, in a case I previously mentioned captioned V.O.S. Selections vs. U.S., that none of Trump’s tariffs are a lawful exercise of Presidential powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.

The 3-0 ruling in V.O.S. Selections breaks the tariffs into two types: the “Trafficking Tariffs”, announced against Canada and China and Mexico in February and March; and the “Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariffs,” announced on ‘Liberation Day’ in early April and thereafter.

With respect to the Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariffs, the court ruled that they “do not comply with the limitations Congress imposed upon the President’s power to respond to balance-of-payments deficits. The President’s assertion of tariff-making authority in the instant case, unbounded as it is by any limitation in duration or scope, exceeds any tariff authority delegated to the President under IEEPA. The Worldwide and Retaliatory tariffs are thus ultra vires and contrary to law.”

With respect to the Trafficking Tariffs, IEEPA empowers the President to take actions to “deal with” an unusual and extraordinary threat, and the court ruled that these tariffs do not “deal with” the threat posed by fentanyl trafficking because there is no direct link between the tariffs and the emergency . Quoting from the opinion: “If “deal with” can mean “impose a burden until someone else deals with,” then everything is permitted. It means a President may use IEEPA to take whatever actions he chooses simply by declaring them “pressure” or “leverage” tactics that will elicit a third party’s response to an unconnected “threat.” Surely this is not what Congress meant when it clarified that IEEPA powers “may not be exercised for any other purpose” than to “deal with” a threat.”

The government will of course appeal, and appeals from this particular court go to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. We shall see how rapidly this court case progresses.

In other late-breaking news today, Secretary of State Rubio issued a two-sentence statement saying that the government will take action to “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those…studying in critical fields,” as well as “enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications” from China and Hong Kong. This comes in the wake of action the previous day to stop scheduling new student visa interviews while the government rethinks its approach to vetting applicants’ social media postings.

Also tonight, Trump announced a puzzling sentence commutation of 74-year-old Larry Hoover, a notorious Chicago gang leader and drug kingpin. Hoover was already serving a 150-year state sentence for a 1973 murder conviction when, in the 1990s, he was sentenced to life on federal racketeering charges for running the Gangster Disciples from prison. As such, while Hoover may soon be released from the federal supermax facility, Trump’s commutation doesn’t impact his state conviction and as such he may remain behind bars. Rapper Kanye West, a vocal supporter of Trump, had argued for Hoover’s clemency with Trump as far back as 2018.

Something I’d not mentioned previously is Trump’s ambition to build a “Golden Dome” missile defense system — a modern-day version of Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, which was decades away from technological feasibility. Trump thinks this can be built by the end of his term, for $175 billion. On the other hand, he appears to need Canadian cooperation, not unlike what Canada has historically provided for NORAD, in order to build it. And, as has been on the front of my mind this year, U.S.-Canada relations are in a very delicate state thanks to Trump’s frequent “51st state” comments.

Trump played the “51st state” card again yesterday in a social media post, suggesting that while an independent Canada would need to pony up $61 billion to cover a portion of the Golden Dome costs, Canada would get it for free if annexed by the U.S. Perhaps the best-case scenario is that “Canada will pay for the Golden Dome” becomes to Trump 2.0 what “Mexico will pay for the wall” was to Trump 1.0. Prime Minister Carney’s office responded today with a statement that “the Prime Minister has been clear at every opportunity, including in his conversations with President Trump, that Canada is an independent, sovereign nation, and it will remain one.”

Speaking of Canadians, one of my favorite political writers, David Frum, has a new piece in The Atlantic called “The Trump Presidency’s World-Historical Heist.” After reciting a litany of early Trump 2.0 corruption initiatives, including some I haven’t mentioned, Frum observes that:

“Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books; discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial African dictatorship.”

After backing that statement up via a walk through past examples of Presidential corruption, Frum concludes his article with the following:

“The emoluments clause depends on congressional enforcement, backed by the ultimate sanction of impeachment and removal. And if Congress does not enforce it? Then public opinion remains the only sanction. Cynics deny that public opinion matters, but Trump is not one of them. His belief in how much popular disgust for corruption matters is precisely why he and his supporters worked so hard to promote dark legends about rivals: the Bushes, the Clintons, the Bidens. Those stories were not based on nothing, but the closer anyone looked, the less there was to see. The Trump story, by contrast, is almost too big to see, too upsetting to confront. If we faced it, we’d have to do something—something proportional to the scandal of the most flagrant self-enrichment by a politician that this country, or any other, has seen in modern times.”

One of my other favorite chroniclers of our time, appellate lawyer Adam Unikowsky, wrote a comprehensive article today talking about the A.A.R.P. case involving the Alien Enemies Act. I’ve been following this situation somewhat closely, and yet much of this article was new to me.

In an early April case, Trump v. J.G.G., SCOTUS reinforced that the people the administration seeks to remove under the AEA have a right to due process: “AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act. The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.” Here Unikowsky describes how the administration responded to the decision in J.G.G.:

“And so the government quickly devised a new notice protocol to comply with J.G.G. … Much of this post will describe a dramatic series of events and filings on April 18 that culminated in a Supreme Court injunction. But the government didn’t tell the courts or the detainees’ lawyers about this new protocol until after the events of April 18. The government wrote the new protocol and immediately started implementing it without telling anyone what it was. As far as I can tell, the government first disclosed the new protocol in a federal court filing on April 23—well after the government attempted to start deporting people pursuant to the new protocol. Moreover, even on April 23, the government attempted to file this new protocol under seal, opposing its public disclosure…”

This new protocol involves giving a detainee a form advising them that they have been determined to be a TdA member and will be deported, and allowing them to make one phone call. The protocol also says that if the detainee doesn’t express a desire within 12 hours of receiving the form to submit a habeas petition then the detainee can be immediately deported, and that even if that desire is expressed then the detainee only has 24 hours to actually submit the habeas petition before being deported. But, the form doesn’t tell the detainee that they have the right to file a habeas petition! Nor does the detainee know that they only have 24 hours to get the petition filed. Nor was the form also provided to the lawyers of those detainees who already had immigration lawyers. Nor was the ACLU, who actively wants to provide legal representation to these detainees, given a list of the detainees’ names or allowed to visit the facility without a specific name of the detainee they wanted to meet with. An illusion of due process, rather than actual due process.

Unikowsky ends his lengthy article with the following passage:

“I usually wince when people say that a Supreme Court decision delivered “justice.” In almost all Supreme Court cases, both parties have a claim to the mantle of justice, and the Supreme Court’s decision reflects nothing more than the fact that the winning party had stronger legal arguments. Almost all, but not all. From time to time, the Supreme Court finds a way to deliver justice. In A.A.R.P., the Supreme Court delivered justice.”

My last topic for today is something I talked about on multiple occasions last year: TMTG, the Trump-owned company that owns Truth Social and trades under the ticker DJT. As a company, it remains unprofitable, having reported $31.7 million of losses for 1st quarter 2025 on $0.8 million of revenue. As a stock, it has continued to support a market capitalization in the mid single billions, with its stock price having briefly gone above $40 in the days before the inauguration and below $20 during the April bear market.

But TMTG has other ambitions. Last month, TMTG and Crypto.com signed an agreement to bring thematic exchange-traded funds to market, under the Truth.fi brand. And this week, TMTG announced that it would raise $2.5 billion of new financing and use the proceeds to buy and hold bitcoin, making TMTG the latest in a series of what financial columnist Matt Levine refers to a “crypto treasury companies”.

Levine has noted repeatedly in his newsletter that crypto treasury companies as a group — the most famous of which is the former software company MicroStrategy Inc., now known simply as Strategy Inc. — have seemingly found a way to print money: When they raise $X to buy a crypto asset, their market cap increases by a multiple of $X. This happened earlier this week to a moribund public company called SharpLink, who announced it would receive $425 million of new financing and buy Ethereum with it, and saw its market cap increase by $2.5 billion.

So, what happened when TMTG did the same thing? Its stock went down by 10%. Levine has a theory:

“[T]he obvious appeal of the crypto treasury strategy for most small US public companies is probably along the lines of “nobody is paying attention to our tiny company, but if we announce we’re buying a big pot of crypto, retail traders will get excited and overpay for our stock.” And then that doesn’t work for Trump Media because, you know, retail traders already got excited and overpaid for its stock. There is only so much attention that anyone can pay to Trump Media, and just doing more stuff — even otherwise pretty reliable stuff like announcing a Bitcoin treasury strategy — is not really additive. The pool of retail investors who could get excited about Trump Media stock, but were not already excited about Trump Media stock, is small, and the Bitcoin treasury pivot doesn’t seem to have found any more of them.”

Today brought two further instances of Trump using his pardon power on politically sympathetic people who had been convicted of white-collar crimes.

First, Trump pardoned a man named Paul Walczak who was sentenced last month to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay $4.3 million in restitution for tax crimes, relating largely to withholding Social Security taxes from his employees’ pay but then keeping the money. I’m sure it is pure coincidence that three weeks ago Walczak’s mother, a major Trump supporter, attended a $1 million per head dinner for super-PAC MAGA Inc. at which Trump was the keynote speaker.

Next, Trump pardoned reality TV stars Todd & Julie Chrisley, who were convicted in 2022 of bank fraud and tax evasion. Their daughter Savannah was a speaker at the 2024 RNC.

I haven’t talked much yet about Trump’s war on BigLaw, which is a subset of the retribution theme. Trump issued several executive orders targeting specific major law firms, ones having some connection or other to various legal actions taken against him in recent year. Some BigLaw firms, most notably Paul Weiss, negotiated with the administration to get the exeucitve order rescinded. Others have sued.

And, they’ve been winning. In early May a federal judge permanently enjoined the administration from enforcing its executive order against Perkins Coie; late last week a different federal judge did the same with respect to an executive order against Jenner & Block; and today a third federal judge declared that the executive order against WilmerHale was unconstitutional. Of course, one imagines there will be appeals.

In political news, Sen. Tuberville (R-AL) announced today that one term was enough and, instead of running for re-election in 2026, he will run for Governor of Alabama (the Republican incumbent being term-limited). I look forward to the eventual departure of the Senate’s least competent member. Also, another poll shows Rep. Ocasio Cortez as a surprisingly heavy favorite — this time, 54-33 — to unseat Sen. Schumer in a hypothetical Democratic primary (although it appears this poll only surveyed Democrats in New York City rather than statewide).