"The average American household spent an extra $1,000 this year thanks to tariffs"

 

The Supreme Court emerged from its winter recess on Friday, and the justices appear to have spent that break with pens in hand. In a 6-3 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court ruled that President Donald Trump had no authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to impose sweeping tariffs. Roberts was joined by conservative justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and the court’s three liberal justices: Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The ruling totaled 170 pages, including a 63-page dissent from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and several concurrences. As SCOTUS blog’s Amy Howe wrote after the decision, “In a part of the opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts said that Trump’s reliance on IEEPA to impose the tariffs violated the ‘major questions’ doctrine – the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly.” While there remains some uncertainty—the justices did not address whether anyone who’d paid tariffs were due refunds, and Trump could try to implement tariffs again under different statutes—businesses across the country that rely on imported goods were undoubtedly relieved. In a piece we published Friday morning just hours before the decision, John McCormack interviewed Beth Benike, a small-business owner who’d invented the “Busy Baby Mat” to keep toddlers occupied while dining out and had been selling her product since 2019. John wrote:

Things had been looking up for Benike and her small business’s five employees—until President Donald Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, 2025. At the time, Benike had a container ready to ship from China with $160,000 of product. “My tariff was going to be like an additional $230,000 on top of that,” Benike recalled. “I would have had to come up with that money within the 30 to 45 days it takes for this stuff to get to America.” Benike could not afford the $230,000 tariff, so her product languished in China until Trump later reduced tariffs below their “Liberation Day” highs (yet still higher than they were at the start of the year). But the damage had been done: For two months, her product was out of stock. Over the past year, Benike had to cut staff from five employees to three. “I cashed in my retirement and didn’t pay myself all summer, went through all my family savings to just stay afloat,” Benike said. “I would say, conservatively, we had half a million in lost revenue because of the tariffs.”

In the weeks leading up to the ruling, a few data points had brought home how clearly Trump’s trade policy has been hurting Americans. Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation published a report finding that the average American household spent an extra $1,000 this year thanks to tariffs. And on February 12, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a study showing that, contrary to what Trump has claimed since first imposing his “Liberation Day” tariffs, that the burden of paying the tariffs has fallen almost exclusively to Americans. In Wanderland, Kevin D. Williamson noted that while Americans are paying $94 out of every $100 in tariff revenue, there are plenty of other, hidden costs to tariff policy:

A tariff that adds $10 to the price of a tire does not necessarily mean that the price of a tire in the shop goes up $10, but it may mean that there are no tire-shop employee bonuses at the end of the year, that employees are expected to take on additional work at no additional pay, or that the tire store owners decide to wait another year to have the shop painted and the parking lot resurfaced. The guy who owns the local restaurant that used to be a favorite of the tire shop manager will not be conscious of the fact that a tariff schedule is the real reason the manager takes his family to dinner there once a month instead of two or three times a month—and that the commercial painter and the guy who owns the asphalt company are not making up the difference but instead are cutting back, too—but he will notice that it is a little bit harder to come up with the money to send his kids to summer camp this year.

Trump has long claimed that the threat of tariffs has enabled him to secure pledges of foreign investment, and in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, he wrote, “I have successfully wielded the tariff tool to secure colossal Investments in America. …In less than one year, we have secured commitments for more than $18 trillion, a number that is unfathomable to many.” In Capitalism, Scott Lincicome agreed with one aspect of Trump’s claim—the part about the number being unfathomable— “because it’s completely—and impossibly—untrue.” Scott debunked, on a number of fronts, the notion that Trump had secured $18 trillion in foreign investment—starting with the fact that the White House itself touts only $9.6 trillion in pledges that it attributes to the “Trump Effect.” And within that $9.6 trillion, some spending is for expenses, not investment; some likely won’t happen (India’s pledge to buy more U.S. liquid natural gas); and some can’t happen (as with promises from the EU, “because government officials in these places don’t have the authority to control private firms’ purchasing decisions.) ...  -The Dispatch Weekly

"More Chaos": Trump Hammered for Plan to Double Down on Tariffs After Supreme Court Ruling

 

Donald Trump defiantly vowed to continue slapping tariffs on imported goods on Friday after the US Supreme Court overturned the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs he implemented last year. In a press conference held hours after the Supreme Court ruled against the president’s tariff regime, Trump said that he had other tools at his disposal that allowed him to hit foreign products with taxes.

Among other things, Trump said he was going to issue a 10% global tariff using his authority under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 that allows the president to levy tariffs to address “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits with foreign nations.

However, as a Friday analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute explains, any tariffs enacted through Section 122 expire after 150 days without authorization from Congress, which in theory could put vulnerable congressional Republicans on the spot to vote for or against the president’s signature policy this summer right before the 2026 midterm elections.

The president’s decision to plow ahead with his politically unpopular tariffs drew immediate criticism from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who said during an interview with MS NOW that Trump was creating even more economic uncertainty. “What he’s done is just doubled down and tried to make it worse,” Klobuchar explained, “which, of course, is going to create more cost and chaos for the American people.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman also predicted more chaos in the months to come from Trump’s trade policies, particularly when it comes to businesses that will now lobby to get back the money illegally seized from them by the president’s unconstitutional tariff regime.

Writing on his Substack, Krugman argued that Trump finding alternative means to levy tariffs would not “obviate the need to refund the tariffs already collected,” because “if you seized money without constitutional authority, finding other revenue sources going forward doesn’t make the original seizure legal.”

David Frum, staff writer at The Atlantic, predicted that the coming lawsuits aimed at getting refunds for the illegal tariffs would be a massive mess. “The post-tariff litigation is going to be nightmarish,” he wrote on social media. “Wrongfully taxed plaintiffs will now sue for return of their illegally taken money. Can their customers then sue for a portion of the higher prices caused by the wrongful taxes? More Trump chaos.”

However, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent downplayed the possibility of American businesses and consumers getting refunded for the tariffs. While speaking at the Economic Club of Dallas on Friday, Bessent was asked if he expected a “food fight” for the $175 billion in tariff revenues that government has illegally collected since April. “I’ve got a feeling the American people won’t see it,” Bessent said of the tariff money.

However, some Democrats indicated that they were not simply going to let the administration getting away with money they unlawfully confiscated from US businesses and consumers. “Donald Trump illegally stole your money,” wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “He should give it back to you. Instead Trump is scheming up new ways to force Americans to pay even more.”

Democrats on the US House Ways and Means Committee wrote that “Trump does not want to refund the money he illegally stole from you,” vowing the party “won’t stop fighting to get your money back.”

Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker wrote Trump a letter after the Supreme Court ruling demanding that the president provide every family in his state a $1,700 refund for the tariffs, which he said “wreaked havoc on farmers, enraged our allies, and sent grocery prices through the roof.”

-Brad Reed, Common Dreams

 

Are we "being led to another war in the Middle East by our newest coterie of buffoons"?

 

The Laurel and Hardy negotiating team of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, coupled with Trump’s appalling ignorance of world affairs and megalomania, seem set to push the U.S. into yet another debacle in the Middle East, one the Congress has not approved, and the public does not want.

The demands imposed on Iran by the Trump White House are no more acceptable to the regime in Tehran than those imposed on Hamas in Gaza under Trump’s sham peace plan.

Trump’s demand that Iran shut down its nuclear program and give up its missile capabilities in return for no new sanctions is as tone deaf as calling on Hamas to disarm in Gaza. But since we have long dispensed with diplomats, who are linguistically, politically and culturally literate, who can step into the shoes of their adversaries, we are being led to another war in the Middle East by our newest coterie of buffoons.

The U.S. and Israel foolishly believe they can bomb their way to decapitating the Iranian government and installing a client regime. That this non-reality-based belief system failed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya eludes them.

---

The promise of no new sanctions will not incentivize Iran to broker an agreement. Iran is already crippled by onerous sanctions that have gutted its economy. This will do nothing to break the economic stranglehold. 

Iran will not give up its nuclear program, which has the potential to be weaponized, or its ballistic missile program, which Israel said it would target in an air attack. Israel’s reputed nuclear arsenal of some 300 warheads is a powerful incentive for Iran to retain the capacity to build a nuclear arsenal of its own. Iran, like Hamas, is never going to render itself defenseless against those seeking its annihilation.

An aerial attack on Iran will not be like the 12-day assault last June against Iran’s nuclear facilities and state and security facilities. Then Iran calibrated its response with symbolic strikes on Al Udeid air base in Qatar in the hopes that it would not lead to a wider, protracted conflict. 

If an aerial assault is launched, Iran will have nothing to lose. It will understand that appeasing its adversaries is impossible.

Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Afghanistan. Iran is not Lebanon. Iran is not Libya. Iran is not Syria. Iran is not Yemen. Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world, with a land mass equivalent to the size of Western Europe. It has a population of almost 90 million — 10 times greater than Israel — and its military resources, as well as alliances with China and Russia, make it a formidable opponent.

Despite Iran’s relative military weakness, when set against the combined forces of the U.S. and Israel, it can inflict a lot of damage. It will do this as swiftly as possible. Hundreds of American troops will likely be killed. Iran will certainly shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil chokepoint that facilitates the passage of 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. This will double or triple the price of oil and devastate the global economy. It will target oil installations along with U.S. ships and military bases in the region.

Mounting losses and a huge spike in oil prices will provide the fodder for Trump, and his vile counterpart in Israel, to ignite a sustained regional war. This is the cost of being governed by imbeciles. God help us.

---

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Buy my new book “A Genocide Foretold"

 

The Context You Need to Understand the Supreme Court's Tariffs Decision

 

The most shocking thing about the Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources, the tariffs case, is that three Justices would have let Trump use a statute that doesn’t mention tariffs to impose ones that are unrestricted in amount or length. Fortunately, the other six said no.

We discussed this case extensively ahead of oral argument on November 5, last year. Congress has the power to impose tariffs. But it has, in some cases, “loaned” them to the president, in specific grants with limitations. 

Here, the Court considered this administration’s claim that the president had the power to impose tariffs, without any limitations, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The administration contended that the president has that power because the statute says that the president can regulate the importation of foreign goods if there is “any unusual and extraordinary threat” that poses a national emergency.

This is the common thread throughout Trump’s efforts to seize power that doesn’t belong to the presidency throughout the course of this administration: Find a statute that gives the president “unusual” powers during a national “emergency” and then proceed to drive a truck through our laws and norms with it. 

He did that with deportations by claiming the extreme powers the Alien Enemies Act affords a president during wartime applied because he thought a Venezuelan gang was invading the U.S. He did it with the National Guard, claiming crime was so rampant in American cities that he was entitled to federalize the National Guard to enforce the law. 

It’s the one consistent principle of this president: Accumulate and exercise as much power as possible, whether the Constitution assigns it to you or not.

In both of those cases, with deportations and the Guard, the Supreme Court administered a slap on the wrist to the administration, ruling against them in preliminary shadow docket rulings. The tariffs case is different; it has been fully briefed, and there was an oral argument before the Court. 

Today, the Justices issued a 170-page decision, explaining their reasoning, which doesn’t happen with shadow docket cases. I’ll be reading the opinion and digging into the nitty-gritty of it; we’ll discuss it in detail over the weekend. But I wanted to give you a quick baseline for understanding the “holding” (the ruling): IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. 

It’s an important decision about the constitutional balance of power between the three branches of government. Remember that this president has both 1) claimed an outsize share of Congress’ power, and 2) argued the courts lack the power to review his decisions at every opportunity since he returned to office. Today, the Supreme Court told him to quit stealing from Congress and reaffirmed its own ability to engage in judicial review. 

It is a very important decision, perhaps the most important we’ve seen from the Court since it went the opposite direction and expanded presidential power in the criminal immunity case. Finally, they’ve pumped the brakes on the runaway presidency.

That doesn’t mean the Supreme Court is suddenly the hero of the Trump era. As we started out by noting, the decision was 6-3. The dissents came, predictably, from Thomas and Alito, and perhaps less so, from Kavanaugh. 

But the decision should have been 9-0. And we still have a long way to go before the end of this term, including Callais, the gerrymandering case, and other voting rights cases, where the Court could put a heavy thumb on the scales of justice and influence the outcome of the midterm elections and the political balance of power in the country for a generation. This is a good decision, in this specific case, for now. That’s the most I’m prepared to say before we see the remainder of the Court’s decisions.

As I wrote to you back in November ahead of the oral argument: “This is not a case about tariffs in general or about whether they are good policy. It’s a case about specific tariffs that President Trump imposed in February and whether he had the statutory authority to impose them…

We studied the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s decision that rejected Trump’s effort to impose tariffs using IEEPA (I-E-Pa), the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, for the very simple reason that the Act, unlike other statutes that do give a president the right to impose tariffs, doesn’t mention tariffs at all. 

It does not give the president any authority to impose them under the statute that he has expressly said he used to do so. This is the kind of textualist argument conservative justices have backed in other cases, and to abandon that approach here would be a sharp and hypocritical departure for them. Last term, Justice Gorsuch wrote that the justices’ primary focus should be on the text of the statute.

The Constitution gives the power to impose taxes, which includes tariffs, to Congress. Because IEEPA doesn’t extend that power to the president, his use of it here is just a power grab, the kind of practice the Supreme Court should push back against if it intends to remain relevant to the American experiment. 

The Federal Circuit’s decision pointed out that while other laws expressly give the president the power to impose tariffs, IEEPA does not. Congress knows how to give the president the power to impose tariffs when it wants to and because it did not do so here, that should be the end of the inquiry. The administration should lose here…” Thankfully, it did. More on this later.

You’ve just read this in-the-moment explanation of an important, but lengthy, Supreme Court decision without a paywall. Paid subscribers make that possible. If you want to help me keep this work available to everyone—and get extra benefits along the way like the Friday Night “Five Questions” interview columns (tonight’s is extra special)—please join us.

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-Joyce Vance

 

Trump's assault on the First Amendment continues

MAGA bad faith attacks on “wokeness” and left-wing “censorship” have obscured their thinly veiled effort to eradicate the history of non-whites, normalize racism, silence critics, and demand that white Christian nationalism be foisted on the rest of us. A year into Donald Trump’s autocratic rule, no one should doubt what the regime is up to.

Unabashed racism and antisemitism are part and parcel of MAGA’s verbiage and ideology. The vendetta against progressive academics; the movement to establish religion (and anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry) in public schools; and the assault on DEI (going as far as eliminating grants designed to combat certain population’s health issues) underscore the game-plan to insulate their own repulsive speech and falsehoods from any adverse consequences (social, political, economic or professional), while demolishing facts and crushing everyone else’s free speech rights.

The Trump regime enforces this double standard with authoritarian venom. From punishing foreign students for pro-Palestinian demonstrations to physically assaulting and threatening peaceful anti-ICE protests to frivolous lawsuits bullying media outlets and clamping down on late night talk show hosts, the MAGA regime has undertaken a censorship campaign not experienced since the Red Scare. Two recent cases highlight Trump’s dual threat to free speech: enforced conformity to a MAGA worldview, and punishment for dissent.

In a decision this week, U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania held that the Trump regime’s removal of an educational display about enslaved people from “The President’s House” exhibit at the Independence National Historical Park impermissibly attempted to rewrite history, warranting a TRO on behalf of the city of Philadelphia to stop further desecration of the site.

Rufe began powerfully:

As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.

This was an easy case based on a simple reading of the relevant statute and undisputed historical fact. The legislation at issue authorized the Interior Department “to enter into cooperative agreements with the city of Philadelphia to assist in the preservation and interpretation of the property.” It specified that “no changes or alterations shall be made in the property within the Independence Hall including its buildings and grounds . . . except by mutual agreement.” The Trump regime acted unilaterally, and hence, illegally.

After dismissing specious claims that the court lacked jurisdiction to review the matter, Rufe held that the cooperative agreement authorizing such displays “clearly emphasizes the role of slavery and the importance of recognizing paradoxes at Independence National Historical Park.” Rufe slammed the government’s argument that “truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. . . . [s]olely because, as Defendants state, it has the power.”

The court knocked down the Trump regime’s argument that it alone could determine facts (just as courts have refused to buy into the regime’s lies concerning an “invasion” from Venezuela or a “rebellion” allowing national guard to occupy cities). “An agency, whether the Department of the Interior, NPS, or any other agency, cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership, regardless of the evidence before it,” Rufe concluded.

In sum, Rufe upheld the proposition that the Trump regime, so long as district courts have the will to enforce the Constitution, does not have the power to override statutes, disregard history, or exercise dictatorial control over our national narrative. “Each person who visits the President’s House and does not learn of the realities of founding-era slavery receives a false account of this country’s history.” This principle is essential to preserving the true history of America while staving off dictatorship.

Crushing dissent

In another recent holding, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon for the District of Columbia blasted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s effort to punish retired Navy officer Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) for a video with five House and Senate colleagues reminding armed services personnel to follow the Constitution. (The utterly dimwitted and constitutional ignoramus Jeanine Pirro failed to obtain an indictment against Kelly and his colleagues.)

Leon declared that while current service members have less robust First Amendment rights, “no court has ever extended those principles to retired service members, much less a retired service member serving in Congress and exercising oversight responsibility over the military. This Court will not be the first to do so!”

The judge, showing a preference for exclamation marks and fondness for folk lyrics, also rebuked Hegseth’s claim that the court lacked sufficient facts to decide the case:

This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees. After all, as Bob Dylan famously said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” To say the least, our retired veterans deserve more respect from their Government, and our Constitution demands they receive it!

Leon concluded that rather “than trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired service members, Secretary Hegseth and his fellow Defendants might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired service members have brought to public discussions and debate on military matters in our Nation over the past 250 years.” He added, “If so, they will more fully appreciate why the Founding Fathers made free speech the first Amendment in the Bill of Rights!”

These cases illustrate well-established features of Trump’s lawless regime that either utterly lacks any understanding of the First Amendment, American history, and basic legislative interpretation, or (more likely) chooses to disregard all three. It aims to harass, chill speech, and penalize its opponents for daring to object to the frightful MAGA worldview.

Trump’s bludgeoning of opponents about inarguable facts (e.g., George Washington owned slaves, military personnel are obligated to follow the Constitution — not the whims of one mad king) is as much intended for his adherents’ consumption. His insistence on blatant falsehoods (e.g., election denial) forces allies to debase themselves by embracing obvious falsehoods. Forcing his own side to comply with absurd and easily disprovable assertions is a telltale sign of an aspiring strongman.

Finally, the regime’s lawyers’ incessant refrain that courts have no role in controlling the executive shows Trump’s utter contempt for checks and balances. Increasingly, however, courts appear to be growing impatient with this arrogant assumption of executive supremacy. If they want to deter further overreach and deter disobedience to court orders, judges should start sanctioning government lawyers for speciously arguing that the courts are irrelevant.

We need not indulge MAGA cultists who insist they are virtuous victims, muzzled by the left. The only ones muzzling critics are the historical and constitutional know-nothings who repeatedly try to rewrite history to comport with their goal of establishing a white supremacist autocracy. Such maneuvers are un-American — and cannot stand if our democracy is to survive.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is reader-supported. To receive new posts, help with litigation, and keep this opposition movement alive and engaged, please join the fight by becoming a paid subscriber.

 

FBI won’t share Alex Pretti shooting evidence, Minnesota authorities say

A Minneapolis resident keeps watch for federal agents on a city street in late January. Photograph: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

Minnesota law enforcement authorities have said the FBI is refusing to share any evidence on its investigation into the death of Alex Pretti, the man killed by federal immigration authorities in late January. Pretti was shot on 24 January by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials in Minneapolis just two weeks after an immigration official shot and killed Renee Good and 10 days after the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Minnesota’s bureau of criminal apprehension (BCA), a state-level criminal investigative law enforcement agency, said the FBI had formally notified it that information or evidence relating to Pretti’s shooting would not be shared. How has the Minnesota governor responded to the news? Tim Walz demanded an “impartial” investigation into the shootings. “Trump’s left hand cannot investigate his right hand,” he said.

 -The Guardian

Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr.’s passing

 

With Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr.’s passing, we lose one of the dwindling numbers of direct links to Martin Luther King, Jr. and to the mid-20^th century Civil Rights generation. From the Lorraine Motel to stewardship of Rainbow/PUSH to his own presidential campaigns to his successful hostage negotiations to Barack Obama’s election to the Black Lives Matter movement, he was front and center in racial justice fights, a symbol of both the tremendous progress and the enduring, at times exhausting, presence of White supremacists who seek to erase history and undo decades of hard-won gains.

While the country lacks a singular figure to lead the racial justice movement, the number of organizations and plethora of elected figures (including the likely next House Speaker) are part of Jackson’s legacy, a permanent army of civil rights activists who stand in opposition to the Make America White Again ideology at the heart of Trumpism. The challenge that was at the heart of Jackson’s work — the creation of a true multi-racial democracy — has never been more acute in the modern era.

It is always worth recalling Jackson’s iconic lines from his speech to the 1984 Democratic Convention: 

"Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow — red, yellow, brown, black and white — and we’re all precious in God’s sight. America is not like a blanket — one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt — many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt. Even in our fractured state, all of us count and all of us fit somewhere. We have proven that we can survive without each other. But we have not proven that we can win and progress without each other. We must come together."

The Trump regime presents the greatest attack on that vision of pluralistic democracy and racial justice in the modern era. Should the MAGA partisan hacks on the Supreme Court succeed in eviscerating the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, the political map will resemble the political landscape in the Jim Crow era in which Black and Hispanic voting power was minimal to nonexistent, representatives at all levels of government were overwhelmingly White, and one-party rule prevailed in the South.

Jackson would certainly recognize The SAVE Act, which would impose onerous proof of citizenship requirements to vote, as the latest MAGA disenfranchisement project, part of the never-ending assault to deprive communities of color access to the polls. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and 130 organizations have decried the assault on voting rights as being driven by “unprecedented disinformation campaigns and intrusions on the ability of states to make sound decisions on how to run their elections.” The effort to now require a birth certificate or passport to establish qualification to vote would be the culmination of a voter suppression drive begun over decade ago:

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), 31 states have enacted 114 restrictive voting laws, which disproportionately burden voters of color. The harm has been palpable: Racial disparities in voter turnout have been increasing, particularly in areas formerly protected by the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provision, which the Court dismantled.

The object of the new burdens on voting is obvious. “Approximately half of American adults do not have a passport, and two-thirds of Black Americans do not.…Nationwide, 69 million married women do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.” Transferring sensitive voter information to a federal database would only “increase the likelihood that citizens will see their registrations wrongly purged or their personal information compromised.”

All of this smacks of the literacy and poll tests imposed in the Jim Crow South, a set of mechanisms designed to make the electorate unrepresentative of the general population in order to maintain white dominance.

As the Legal Defense Fund explained after House passage of the worst voter suppression bill in over one hundred years, “The SAVE America Act would functionally dismantle online and mail-in voter registration, target election officials with egregious levels of civil and criminal liability, and disenfranchise millions of Americans by forcibly requiring documentary proof of citizenship and photo identification when registering to vote and when voting at the polls.” LDF continued: “Only 6% of voters currently register in person at an election office and over 146 million Americans do not currently own a passport.”

Rev. Jackson’s death occurring at the time as the SAVE Act looms over our democracy reminds us of the urgency of unity in fighting to reclaim the promise of America. His life’s work should inspire us not only to defeat the SAVE Act, confront ICE’s massive assault on civil rights, and overturn the assault on the social safety net, but to aspire to a better vision of America. Rev. Jackson reminds us:

"Our time has come. No grave can hold your body down. Our time has come. No lie can live forever. Our time has come. We must leave the racial battle ground and come to the economic common ground and moral higher ground. America, our time has come. We come from disgrace to amazing grace. Our time has come. Give me your tired, give me your poor, your huddled masses who yearn to breathe free and come November, there will be a change because our time has come." 

He was right in 1984, and his words ring just as true today. Our time has come.

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 Photo: United States Mission Geneva, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Research on Alzheimer's Disease

 

To consolidate memories, our brains replay them during periods of rest as a kind of 'replay mode'. A new mouse study suggests that disruptions to this process could contribute to the memory loss that accompanies Alzheimer's disease. According to the research team from University College London, these findings could lead the way towards opportunities to diagnose Alzheimer's at an earlier stage and to treat the associated brain damage.   

"Alzheimer's disease is caused by the build-up of harmful proteins and plaques in the brain, leading to symptoms such as memory loss and impaired navigation – but it's not well understood exactly how these plaques disrupt normal brain processes," says neuroscientist Sarah Shipley. "We wanted to understand how the function of brain cells changes as the disease develops, to identify what's driving these symptoms."  

The mice in the study were given an Alzheimer's-like condition, with toxic build-ups of amyloid-beta protein in their brains. When navigating mazes, the test animals showed signs of being unable to lock a spatial map into their memories. Both during the maze challenges and while the mice were at rest between sessions, Shipley and her colleagues monitored activity in their hippocampi, a region of the brain containing location-memory neurons known as place cells.  Brain replays were scrambled in Alzheimer's mice, who also performed worse on maze tasks. (Shipley et al., Curr. Biol., 2026)

For the mice to recall where they've been, these cells must fire in a particular order. As the memories are 'saved' for longer-term storage, that sequence of activation repeats, like a replay. The frequency of these replays didn't change in mice with amyloid-beta plaques in their brains, but the ordering of the sequences did. It was as if the memories were scenes in a mini movie, which were chopped up and stored in different places.

This was seen in maze behavior, too, with the affected mice often forgetting which parts of the maze they had already visited, even in the same session. The place cells also became less stable over time, with the cell-to-location mapping becoming messed up. 

Although this study used a model of Alzheimer's in mouse brains, there are good reasons to think the same kind of breakdown is happening in humans with the disease – something that could be confirmed through future studies. "We've uncovered a breakdown in how the brain consolidates memories, visible at the level of individual neurons," says neuroscientist Caswell Barry. "What's striking is that replay events still occur – but they've lost their normal structure. It's not that the brain stops trying to consolidate memories; the process itself has gone wrong."

Alzheimer's disease is a complex condition with multiple risk factors. There are various potential causes and numerous impacts on the brain, which may be working together or separately. Part of the difficulty for researchers comes in trying to work out what's driving the progress of Alzheimer's, and what's happening as a consequence of it – and there's that uncertainty around amyloid-beta build-up too.

Studies like this add pieces to the overall jigsaw, letting us see more of the 'big picture' of Alzheimer's – and how all these causes and consequences fit together as brain functionality degrades over time. Each new discovery means that we might be able to spot signs of the disease earlier – giving more time for treatments and support to be put in place – and develop treatments to target certain parts of Alzheimer's. In this case, that might be drugs that help to sharpen replay activity in the hippocampus's place cells. 

However, that won't be possible until more research can specifically identify the processes at play and how they can be safely tweaked.  "We hope our findings could help develop tests to detect Alzheimer's early, before extensive damage has occurred, or lead to new treatments targeting this replay process," says Barry.

The research has been published in Current Biology.    

  

Context Matters: Trump Administration Summons Secretaries of State

 

Despite Donald Trump’s claim earlier this month, U.S. states are not agents for the federal government in elections. State officials don’t work for him. Trump said it as part and parcel of his stab at getting Republicans to take over state elections—Trump said they should be “nationalized.” I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway,” he said, adding that it’s a “disgrace” how “horribly” some states run elections. Anyone who has been watching knows what this is about. 

It’s more of the same from the candidate who asked state officials in Georgia to find him 11,780 votes so he could overturn the result in an election that he lost. With Trump, his complaints about others are always projection: He wants to make sure he can steal the midterm elections if his party loses, and no better way to do them than to get election administration out of pesky officials who insist on doing a fair count.

Hence Trump’s appeal to “nationalize” elections. He wants to take control. That context makes it particularly interesting that federal agency “election partners” from FBI, DOJ, DHS, the Postal Inspection Service, and The Election Assistance Commission “invited” election officials from across the country to a briefing on “preparations” for the midterms. 

Secretaries of state and local officials run each state’s election. Not the president. While they might coordinate with their local U.S. Attorney(s) in advance of an election, a nationwide call like this is unprecedented, particularly in the absence of a credible, identified threat from a foreign country that would require, say, cyber intelligence coordination.

The call is being organized for February 25. No one seems to know precisely what it’s about. But Trump’s claim that majority Black/Democratic counties, like Fulton County, Georgia, aren’t fit to run elections, and they should be taken over by Republican interests, is a pretty good bet.

The email invite is signed off on by Kellie M. Hardiman, who identifies her role as “FBI Election Executive,” a position I have not heard of previously. As a career federal prosecutor and a U.S. Attorney for eight years during the Obama administration, and as someone whose responsibilities included election protection, I’m fairly familiar with DOJ’s internal architecture for this work. NBC reported that one state election official said that “No one has heard of this person — and we’re all wondering what an 'FBI Election Executive' is.”

NBC also reported that “An FBI spokesperson said in a statement Friday: ‘The Election Executive is not a new role. There have been designated executives in previous election cycles to take point on coordinating election related matters and speaking on behalf of the FBI.” 

This is not completely out of bounds. DOJ doesn’t get involved in deciding who won a specific election, but they do investigate claims of fraud (there have been exceptionally few successful prosecutions, and when they are brought, for the most part, they seem to involve fraud on behalf of Republican candidates). 

There are meetings among state and federal partners in advance of elections. But it feels different in a cycle where the president is openly seeking greater control and making false claims about fraud where elections are run by his political opponents. And most of DOJ’s election protection work, at least in Democratic administrations, involves pushing back against voter suppression (like this case). Those are civil cases and the FBI and other law enforcement agencies do not get involved in them.

Hardiman wrote to state election officials that the FBI and other federal agencies “would like to invite you to a call where we can discuss our preparations for the cycle, as well as updates and resources we can provide to you and your staff.” State officials are concerned.

NPR correspondent Miles Parks put it like this: “President Trump wanted a bigger role in local processes. Just two months into his second term, he signed an executive order aimed at adding new voting restrictions, for instance. Most of that has been blocked by the courts at this point. But he also laid off much of the election security staff at the Department of Homeland Security. And I was talking about all of that with the secretary of state of Minnesota, Steve Simon, who's a Democrat, and he said the idea of federal interference is on election officials' minds as they game plan out every scenario.”

Following the execution of a search warrant on election officials in Fulton County, Georgia, based on old, disproven claims of elections fraud, a bipartisan group of “more than a dozen election officials” told Politico: “they fear Trump is laying the groundwork to undermine results still months away.”

Chief among those concerns is the risk of federal troops or an executive branch agency like ICE being deployed to the polls, which could easily intimidate voters who have watched ICE indiscriminately arrest people and put them into deportation proceedings, only checking their immigration status after the fact (more here). But that is the sort of move that would be likely to provoke nationwide outrage. Don’t expect it to be the Trump administration’s only move.

Trump began issuing executive orders designed to make it more difficult for Americans to register and vote as soon as he took office. The SAVE Act is circulating in the Senate (we discussed it recently here). And the administration has been seeking states’ voter rolls, which could provide it with fodder for making wholesale challenges, and permitting private parties in states to do so too, forcing individual voters to go on the defensive and prove they are eligible to vote and disrupting state proceedings. That is most definitely not the kind of burden that should be imposed on Americans’ fundamental rights.

Trump has said that Atlanta and other cities with Democratic strongholds as seeing “horrible corruption on elections.” “The federal government should not allow that,” he said Tuesday. “The federal government should get involved. These are agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”

Last April, a federal judge enjoined Trump from enforcing his executive order on voting. She wrote, “A president cannot make new law or devise new authority for himself—by executive order or otherwise. He may only wield those powers granted to him by Congress or by the Constitution.” She pointed out that “our Constitution entrusts Congress and the states — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections.”

Presidents do not get to dictate the rules in our elections. But to ensure this election is free and fair, it appears that state election officials, along with federal judges, will have to keep the president in check. They will have to keep him for usurping power that is not properly his, as he has done on so many other occasions. Do you know who your secretary of state (they have different titles in some states) is?

Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told me, “In any other year, the invitation might seem innocuous, but in the context of Trump’s assault on the rule of law and threats to elections, the odd invitation raises concerns. I’ll be attending with skepticism.”

Here is a list of election officials in every state. If you aren’t already, get familiar with yours. And make sure they know you’ll be watching how they handle the meeting on February 25. Call them or send them a letter in the next day or two, letting them know that you know Donald Trump isn’t entitled to “nationalize” our elections and you expect them to uphold the law.

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We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

Marco Rubio’s Imperialist Munich Speech Seen as a "Cause for Worry, Not Applause"

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s defense of Western colonialism and imperial power at the Munich Security Conference and the applause his remarks received from attendees were seen as deeply unsettling in the context of the Trump administration’s brazen trampling of international law, including the recent kidnapping of the president of a sovereign nation.

While Rubio gave lip service in his remarks to multilateral cooperation with Europe in what he called the global “task of renewal and restoration,” he made clear the US would carry out its agenda alone if needed and accused European allies of succumbing to a “climate cult,” embracing “free and unfettered trade,” and opening their doors to “unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies,” echoing the rhetoric of his boss, US President Donald Trump.

Rubio lamented the decline of the “great Western empires” in the face of “godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come”—and made clear that the Trump administration envisions a return to “the West’s age of dominance.”

“We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” said Rubio. “We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history.”

Attendees at the Munich conference—which notably did not include representatives of Latin America at a time when the Trump administration is embracing and expanding the Monroe Doctrine—gave Rubio a standing ovation: “Standing ovation for Rubio in Munich. Standing ovation for Netanyahu in Washington,” wrote Progressive International co-general coordinator David Adler, referring to the Israeli prime minister’s visit to the US capital last week. “We are ruled by a transatlantic clique of criminals and mid-wit minions who clap like seals when their white supremacy is laundered by the language of ‘Western values.’ Sick stuff.”

Critics viewed the US secretary of state’s speech—both the explicit words and its undertones—as a self-serving interpretation of the past and a dangerous vision of the future, and expressed alarm at the celebratory response from the Munich crowd.

Geopolitical analyst Arnaud Bertrand called Rubio’s address “one of the most revisionist and imperialist speeches I’ve ever seen a senior American official make, and that’s saying something.”

“Basically the man is openly saying that the whole post-colonial order was a mistake and he’s calling on Europe to share the spoils of building a new one,” Bertrand wrote on social media. “When an imperial power is speaking to you of sentiments, of how much they like you and how they want to partner with you—the much weaker party—that’s cause for worry, not applause.”

Nathalie Tocci, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Europe, compared Rubio’s address to US Vice President JD Vance’s openly hostile attack on European nations during his Munich speech last year.

“Rubio’s message was more sophisticated and strategic than Vance’s. But it was just as dangerous, if not more so, precisely because it lowered the transatlantic temperature and may have lulled Europe into a false sense of calm,” Tocci wrote in a Guardian op-ed on Monday. “As Benjamin Haddad, France’s Europe minister, said in Munich, the European temptation may be to press the snooze button once again.”

“If Europeans were comforted by a false sense of reassurance as they walked away from the packed Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich,” Tocci added, “they risk walking straight into the trap that MAGA America has laid for them.”

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

"The Framers did not imagine the sort of restraints necessary to contain a manipulative [pathological] narcissist"

When we reflect on our great presidents (e.g., George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, the Roosevelts), the good ones (e.g., Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower), and even the poor ones (e.g., Herbert Hoover, James Buchanan), we can at least say they understood our basic constitutional framework. Even ones guilty of major legal, policy, or moral transgressions (e.g., Watergate, the Red Scare, Vietnam, the Iraq War) had some redeeming qualities and accomplishments. Until this one. Without sarcasm, many Americans wonder if we can get back to a time when a “merely bad” president was the worst we could expect. In other words, we shudder at the possibility that the floor for presidents been permanently and completely eradicated so that future Donald Trumps are possible if not likely. Plainly, we cannot rely on the discernment of the American people. They did elect the most despicable, corrupt, cruel, ignorant, and lawless president ever to hold office, knowing a great deal about what he intended to do. As much as we admire Alexander Hamilton, his observation in Federalist No. 68 turns out to be laughably, tragically wrong: The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.  Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.  It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. The Framers did not imagine the sort of restraints necessary to contain a manipulative [pathological] narcissist wielding an enormous propaganda apparatus and determined to break laws and norms. We need more protection than we have currently to prevent another Trump — or even a mild imitation of him. Some tools included in the Constitution (e.g., presidents chosen by electors) became a dead letter with the rise of political parties and partisan fervor. Frankly, removal of the president by impeachment or even via the 25th Amendment has become virtually impossible. Other tools have atrophied for lack of attention (e.g., an enforcement mechanism to prevent receipt of foreign emoluments). And an intellectually dishonest and partisan MAGA Supreme Court majority with an anti-originalist view of an all-powerful chief executive has demolished critical constraints on the presidency (e.g., broad criminal immunity). “Right-sizing” the presidency and putting in additional guardrails therefore should be top priorities. No single solution is going to stop malicious figures from an autocratic putsch, but we can make it much harder for such a figure to do real damage to our democracy, Ideally (and in keeping with the Framers’ intentions), we want a president, for example, whom foreign governments or domestic donors cannot buy. There are legislative fixes: Make it a crime to give or receive a foreign emolument of more than $25 in value (or a domestic emolument of any value). Alternatively, pass a law (with an enforcement mechanism) to make such transfers subject to civil forfeiture or a 100% tax. Congress could pass similar laws (with criminal, civil forfeiture, or tax penalties) requiring presidents to sell or put all business operations and investments in a blind trust before taking office — and, no, letting your sons run your company is not a blind trust.  If we are really fed up with financial corruption, constitutional amendments to reestablish presidential criminal liability and ban dark money could be pursued unless a reformed Supreme Court reverses Trump v. U.S. and Citizens United. Legislation with simple “no dictator stuff” could easily gain traction: No major White House renovations without congressional authorization, no naming any federal or quasi-federal organization or structure for a sitting president (make the Kennedy Center great again!), and no book/movie/rights deals for any president or spouse while in office. (The Framers would be aghast, no doubt, that such things were even contemplated.) There are many legislative fixes to curtail presidential unilateral power (e.g., war powers, emergency powers, rescission). But allocating the right for lawmakers or others to bring enforcement actions is essential. Likewise, reviving the Bivens Act to allow civil actions for individuals to recoup damages against any executive branch official could put teeth into presidential restraints. In addition, Congress needs a mechanism to enforce contempt findings that does not depend on enforcement by the administration it is holding in contempt. Moreover, voters, media and political parties need to rethink the way we evaluate presidential candidates. Grilling them on the specifics of policy/legislation is as useless as it is misleading. The issues will change, presidents will compromise when it comes to real legislation, and campaign promises will fade from memory. Instead, much more attention should be paid to foundational issues about democracy and values (e.g., Do immigrants have rights? Are treaties the law of the land?). We still may not get candid answers, but the responses to those sorts of questions (or hypotheticals about pardons, donors, and financial impropriety) would be a whole lot more revealing than asking about a 24-point plan for legislation that is unlikely to pass. It is frankly harder to disguise one’s deeply held beliefs (or lack thereof) than to toss out unrealistic political promises. No future president should ever have as much power and leeway for corruption and abuse as this one. Generally, shrinking presidential power, building up other branches, and imposing statutory and constitutional restraints on presidents should be no-brainers. Ultimately, getting candidates, parties, and voters to focus on character, judgment, and understanding of our Constitution might be the most helpful means of getting back to an era in which the worse we had to fear was a “C-” president. (And can we all agree no presidents older than 75?) The Contrarian is reader-supported. To receive new posts, enable our work, help with litigation efforts, and keep this opposition movement alive and engaged, please consider joining the fight by becoming a paid subscriber.

Photo: (Mathieu LEeMauff/iStock)