The first internal poll for Gavin Newsom’s redistricting ballot measure was, as one senior strategist saw it, as palatable as “warm spit.”
Just 38 percent of voters supported having the Legislature redraw the state’s congressional maps, according to the previously unreported mid-July survey. Forty-five percent were opposed. The California governor’s maneuvering to take on President Donald Trump wasn’t simply on slippery ground. It was underwater.
“It would have felt irresponsible to walk back into the room and to look people in the eye and say, ‘We should move forward with this,’” recalled Jim DeBoo, the campaign’s de facto quarterback.
A loss here would reverberate well beyond Sacramento: Trump could point to California — the state that sued, defied and mocked him — as proof that even a blue-state bulwark was no match for his drive to rejigger the midterm playing field, while Newsom would own a massive whiff against his favorite foil. It would be the Fox News chyron Democrats most fear: “TRUMP BEATS CALIFORNIA.”
It’s easy now — with 15 weeks of hindsight — to see Proposition 50’s decisive win as expected, even anticlimactic. The election was called as soon as the polls closed.
But the outlook was anything but certain back when Democrats were still clinging to hope they could bluff their way out of a precarious and costly redistricting arms race. The sobering initial poll was a fork-in-the-road moment for Newsom and his political inner circle. Perhaps, some on the team suggested, getting voter approval was too heavy a lift.
Nevertheless, they plowed ahead, building up a daunting cash advantage, unifying a bruised party and galvanizing voters around an anti-Trump message — all in a matter of weeks.
Their win will echo across the national political landscape — an unambiguous rebuke to Trump from the nation’s most populous state and for Newsom, a springboard in his likely presidential campaign. With Prop 50’s passage, Democrats could net as many as five additional House seats, which will be crucial to their party’s chances of flipping the House in the face of GOP gerrymandering efforts in several red states. And while California stood alone for months as the sole blue state to press ahead with mid-decade redistricting, now Democrats in other states such as Virginia are poised to jump into the fray.
As California goes …
Our country is under threat from a tyrannical president and a fascist movement and if we’re going to survive as a democracy we have to take risks.
With 10 naval vessels and 10,000 troops already deployed to the Caribbean—the largest military buildup there since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis—and a carrier strike group led by the USS Gerald R. Ford taking up position, some sort of military attack on Venezuela appears imminent. U.S. President Donald Trump’s rationale for this aggressive military action is that Venezuela is a hub of drug trafficking and that supplying drugs to U.S. consumers is the equivalent of an armed attack on the United States, justifying a military response.
But the real aim is to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government and then, by cutting off the flow of Venezuelan oil to Cuba, fulfill the Republican right’s decades-long dream of collapsing the Cuban government. It’s a strategy that John Bolton, national security advisor in the first Trump administration, tried without success in 2019, but Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio now intends to try again.
This explains Rubio’s obsession. But their plan may not work any better than all the ones that came before:
If Washington manages to unseat Maduro, then his successor would very likely cut off oil shipments to Havana, striking another blow to an already reeling Cuban economy. U.S. success in Venezuela could also threaten Cuba’s national security if the Trump administration, intoxicated with the win, decided to expand its aggressive military interventionism.
But Havana is no longer as dependent on Venezuela as it was a decade ago.
The alliance between Havana and Caracas was formed in 1998, when Chávez was first elected as Venezuela’s president, advocating “21st century socialism.” Chávez and Fidel Castro developed a strong personal bond even before the election. Chávez saw Castro as his mentor; Castro saw Chávez as his protégé.
In 2000 and 2003, the two countries signed cooperation agreements for Venezuela to provide Cuba with petroleum at subsidized prices in exchange for the services of Cuban medical personnel deployed to Chávez’s working-class constituencies. At the peak of this trade, from 2008 to 2015, Cuba received more than 100,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd) while nearly 30,000 Cuban doctors and technicians served in Venezuela
But beginning in 2016, Venezuelan oil production began to decline due to mismanagement and poor maintenance. By the middle of 2018, it had fallen by half. Over roughly the same few years, the global price of oil also fell by about half, drastically cutting Venezuela’s revenue. Oil shipments to Cuba declined as Venezuela sold more production for its own benefit. By 2024, shipments had fallen to 32,000 bpd and have been even lower this year.
The shrinking supply of Venezuelan oil has exacerbated its perennial shortage of foreign exchange currency. Power blackouts have become routine and domestic production is suffering from lack of fuel. But there’s a silver lining for Cuba in these dark clouds: Havana is less dependent on Venezuelan oil now than it was a decade ago.
In 2014, Cuban economist Pedro Vidal estimated that the sudden, complete loss of Venezuelan oil would knock 7.7 percent off of Cuba’s GDP. But since Venezuela’s largesse has already fallen by almost three-quarters and the price of oil is now roughly half of what it was then, Cuba has already absorbed most of the shock that Vidal predicted. Moreover, as Cuba’s energy crisis has worsened, Mexico and Russia have been willing to increase their oil shipments at concessionary prices to fill at least part of the deficit.
Cuba is an old fashioned right wing, anti-communist, white whale that seems weirdly anachronistic in 2025. I guess the fact that they’re using the word “communist” to describe everyone who opposes them shows some kind of resurgence on the MAGA right, but I really don’t think any of the rank and file see Cuba as the enemy. They don’t even know what the word really means. It’s the woke libs they want to vanquish.
Having said that, I will be surprised if Trump doesn’t get a huge rally round the flag effect if he starts bombing and regime changing. It is not natural for the right to be pacifists — they are a bloodthirsty lot. Maybe the America First thing is real this time. But I’m skeptical.
The risk in drawing aggressive gerrymanders, as Republicans did in a few red states and plan to do in several more, is that your candidates inherently get put in more competitive districts. In wave elections, those newly vulnerable lawmakers can get swept away.
“Tonight is such a blowout so far that I wonder if it gives some Rs pause about redistricting in states that are still pondering it,” tweeted Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at UVA. “They already needed to ‘stress-test’ the districts (and they did in TX-NC-MO, I think, even considering tonight), but still.”
If Tuesday is a sign of where the midterm winds are blowing, the Republican gerrymanders may lead to bigger Democratic gains — on top of the big Democratic (Gavin Newsom) win, as voters approved a defensive California gerrymander by almost 64 percent.
As we all were schooled relentlessly after the last election, not all Hispanic voters are the same. So, maybe all those Texas Latinos are now permanently Republican no matter what Trump and his henchmen do. But if they were actually voting on the economy last time as everyone says and didn’t realize that Trump would have masked thugs racially profiling and brutalizing them, citizen or not, they might not be so anxious to vote GOP again. We’ll see.
I’m not going to predict election outcomes anymore because I’ve obviously very bad at it. I can’t understand why anyone would vote for these fascist morons no matter how hard I try so neither reason or instinct can be relied upon to guide my thinking. But I do believe that last night’s results in the Latino districts in Virginia and New Jersey says something:
Trump made significant inroads with Latinos during the 2024 presidential election. In fact, no Republican presidential candidate won a higher percentage with Latinos — ever.
But there have been signs that Latinos were moving away from Trump. Poll after poll has shown that, and Tuesday night was the first time it showed up at the ballot box in a significant way. Spanberger and Sherrill, the governors-elect from Virginia and New Jersey respectively, both won Latinos by 2-to-1 margins, according to the exit polls.
Going deeper into New Jersey specifically, Trump won Passaic County in North Jersey, a county that is nearly half Latino, according to the census. He was the first Republican presidential candidate to win it since 1992. Trump won it by 3 points, but Sherrill won it by 15.
There are 10 counties in New Jersey where Latinos make up at least 1-in-5 people, per the U.S. census. Sherrill not only won them all, she expanded Democratic margins and flipped three Trump had won.
Maybe that’s just a fluke. But if I were a Republican I’d be worried.
After 13 years, Mississippi Democrats have broken the Republican Party’s supermajority in the Mississippi Senate. Voters elected Democrats to two seats previously held by Republicans, reducing the number of Republican senators in the upper chamber from 36 to 34—one fewer than necessary to constitute a supermajority.
When a party has supermajority status in the Mississippi Senate, it can more easily override a governor’s veto, propose constitutional amendments and execute certain procedural actions.
The Mississippi Democratic Party called the victory “a historic rebuke of extremism.”
Bolts points to this one, which will be very important for the next elections as long as Trump and his minions are on a jihad against voting rights:
Three Democratic justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court have defeated an unusually high-profile Republican bid to unseat them. They secured large statewide victories on Tuesday, following an historically expensive campaign centered largely on the court’s role in defending voting and abortion rights.
The results preserve Democratic control of this all-important court for at least two more years. Barring any unexpected retirements, Democrats will enjoy a 5-2 majority until the next Pennsylvania Supreme Court elections, which are slated for 2027.
And Tuesday’s results mean that Republicans are now unlikelyto win an outright majority until 2029 at the earliest; the best they could hope for in two years is to force a tie on the court.
Conservatives made no secret that they were hoping to take back the court in time for the next presidential race. In this most populous of swing states, the supreme court has in recent years ruled against Republicans in several high-stakes election lawsuits. Since flipping the court in 2015, the Democratic majority has struck down a Republican gerrymander, upheld mail-in voting against conservative attacks, and rejected every one of Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania lawsuits to invalidate the 2020 presidential election.
“The projected victory for the three of us speaks well of our democracy,” one of the winning justices, David Wecht, told Bolts on Tuesday night. “We all campaigned on the basis of vindicating the Pennsylvania constitution’s free and equal elections clause, and we’re all committed to continuing to vindicate that right.”
Democrats may have a blue wave building. But a lot of what has to happen is just grinding it out in state and local races like these.
By the way, if you haven’t seen all the results go on over to Bolts. They have it all. Reading it is like a tonic after the last years of self-flagellation and second guessing. Democrats won big everywhere just a couple of weeks after 7 million people showed up to protest in the streets.
The Democrats won big last night. There were probably a lot of reasons unique to each race. But this was the biggie:
And that’s Real Clear which includes a number of GOP polls that artificially raise Trump’s average.
How about this?
Now let’s see what the Republicans do. Let’s see what the institutions do. Let’s see what the media and the corporations do. We’re going to find out if they really like being Trump’s little minions or if they just bought the hype that he was invincible.
For someone who was so powerful in his day, the tributes that have come after the death of former Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday at the age of 84 have been muted. Save for a perfunctory statement issued by the White House and noting that flags over government buildings should be lowered to half-staff, as of Wednesday morning President Donald Trump has said nothing in tribute — although he owes Cheney a debt of gratitude.
But as one of the most consequential politicians of his era, Cheney left a mark on American politics and government that has changed the system forever. His legacy is much more complicated than anyone would have expected when he left office in 2009 as the most unpopular vice president in American history.
According to a New York Times/ CBS News poll, during his last year in office, Cheney’s approval rating dipped as low as 13%. The country had soured on what he and President George W. Bush had wrought, including the “War on Terror” and the Iraq war, both of which Cheney had championed, pushing the limits of presidential power from the vice president’s office. While his approval ratings would rise slightly over time, in the end Cheney remained a unique figure in American politics, unpopular on both sides of the aisle.
There was a time when this would have been unthinkable. He had been part of the Republican establishment for decades before he became vice president, having served in politics since he took a one-year fellowship in Washington, D.C., for a Wisconsin GOP congressman in 1968. The following year, he met Donald H. Rumsfeld, who had recently been appointed to helm President Richard Nixon’s anti-poverty office. Under Rumsfeld’s patronage, Cheney’s ascent to power began. By 1975, at the age of 34, he was named chief of staff to President Gerald Ford — the youngest in history.
After Ford’s defeat in 1976 by Jimmy Carter, Cheney returned to Wyoming and was elected as the state’s lone congressman for ten years, becoming a highly influential Reagan Revolutionary. In 1989, President George Bush appointed him secretary of defense, and from his perch in the Pentagon he oversaw controversial military operations in Panama and the Gulf War. Cheney left government following Bush’s defeat to Bill Clinton in 1992 to become CEO of the oil services company Halliburton until 2000, when he was called upon to help his old boss’s son, GOP nominee George W. Bush, select a vice president — and he recommended himself.
Despite his own lack of military experience — like President Donald Trump, he had deferments throughout the Vietnam War — Cheney was an unreconstructed hawk, rarely seeing a war he didn’t want to fight. During his hiatus from government after serving as secretary of defense, he became a prominent member of the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank whose goal was “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.”
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a whole world of opportunity opened up to the claque of neoconservatives in Bush’s orbit, who had been agitating to go back into Iraq to depose its leader Saddam Hussein. Under the rubric of War on Terror, Cheney spearheaded a propaganda campaign to gain political support for attacking Iraq — which had nothing to do with 9/11 — and helped the CIA manipulate intelligence to imply that Iraq was actively producing weapons of mass destruction. We all know the results of that horrific decision.
Uniquely for a vice president, the effects of his decisions and influence are still being felt. Cheney believed in the unitary executive theory before it became de rigueur among Republicans. He and other Reaganites believed presidents had been dangerously constrained by what they saw as an overreaction to Nixon’s criminal behavior. Cheney set out to reverse that trend, advising Bush to push the limits of executive power.
He was an unrepentant believer in torture, and years after leaving office he continued to claim its legality, saying it should be employed as necessary. Cheney even went so far as to argue that the office of the vice president was essentially a fourth branch of government, completely immune from oversight because of its dual role as a member of the executive branch and president of the Senate, which meant that neither branch had the authority to question him. Democrats cried foul, but Republicans went along with him. The public shrugged.
As historian Rick Perlstein, the preeminent historian of the conservative movement, has written in his forthcoming book “The Infernal Triangle: How America Got This Way,” which is expected to be published in 2026, Cheney literally believed that a president should have the power of a king. In the 1980s, Cheney was the ranking Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, which was essentially about the president usurping the will of Congress to pursue his own policy goals. The committee ultimately recommended that Congress make it harder for the president to break the law. Cheney, in charge of the minority report, objected to that idea.:
“Chief Executives are given the responsibility for acting to respond to crises or emergencies,” his draft text read. “To the extent that the Constitution and laws are read narrowly, as Jefferson wished, the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law.”
Based on those words, Dick Cheney should be one of Donald Trump’s favorite people — and the entire MAGA universe would be overcome with grief and praise at his passing.
But that’s hardly the case. Beyond Trump’s lack of tribute, the paeans that have been given by Republicans have only been short and stilted. There certainly is not the widespread glory and acclaim one would normally expect for such a central figure in the Republican Party.
We all know why Trump and MAGA aren’t shedding any tears over Cheney’s passing. Sure, Trump ran against the Iraq war in 2016, asserting that Bush and Cheney were stupid for going in, and then for not keeping the oil once they did. Trump pretended to be against all the “forever wars,” but his rhetoric was mostly in service of his image as someone who could obtain world peace simply through the “art of the deal.”
No, the crime that cannot ever be forgiven was that Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, a hawk as conservative as her father who became congresswoman from Wyoming and ascended into the House Republican leadership, committed political treason when they dared to stand against Trump after Jan. 6 and refuse to back down. And unlike most of their fellow Republicans, they even endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, in 2024. Nothing could be more disloyal in Trump’s eyes.
Much of what is being written about Cheney on the occasion of his death presents him as a man of principle, someone who never wavered in his beliefs, even when it required him to buck his own party. That would be admirable if it weren’t for the fact that most of his beliefs were abominable. And it must be said: As laudable as Cheney’s rejection of Trump was, we never heard him reject the premise that has made Trump the most dangerous president in American history, someone who is on the precipice of bringing the entire American experiment in democracy down.
The irony is that Cheney’s decades-long dream of a unitary executive has been achieved. The president is now acting with the “monarchical prerogatives” he believed was needed — and Cheney was appalled by what he is doing with them. But it shouldn’t have taken a real-life demonstration of how that could happen. After all, the country was founded by people who had already lived that experience. They had put their lives on the line to create a democratic republic, answerable to the people and not a king.
Cheney’s legacy would have been somewhat redeemed if he had admitted that the philosophy he espoused and the work he did for decades laid the groundwork for the destruction of democracy we are witnessing.
But he didn’t. And Donald Trump would be nowhere without him.
Ahead of Tuesday’s New York City election won decisively by Zohran Mamdani, the Washington Post Editorial Board published a hit piece on him. Those who worried that the purchase of the Post by Jeff Bezos would seriously degrade the paper’s jounalism have their worst fears confirmed. Comically, in a fashion worthy of The Onion.
“Zohran Mamdani’s success is a warning,” the lead opinion blared. “How did a socialist with almost no governing experience become New York’s mayoral frontrunner?” the Post asks.
A reader not in Donald Trump’s pocket might ask instead, how did a philandering, career con-man with no governing experience, strings of ex-wives and bankruptcies, and a “university” courts closed as a fraud become president of the United States? And a second time after having his charity shuttered as a personal slush fund, two impeachments, 34 felony convictions, four criminal indictments, and a violent insurrection?
One of the most notable aspects of Mamdani’s political success is that voters know what they’re getting. The young politician was born into a life of wealth and privilege, and from that perch he adopted a worldview centered around destroying the economic system that made his adopted country thrive.
Strike Mamdani and insert Trump and you’ve got the man who invited billionaires like Bezos to stand behind him at the presidential inauguration on January 20. Days later, Trump himself set about destroying the economic system that made this country thrive. Ask American soybean farmers if they are thriving now. Somehow the Post missed all that and without a hint of irony raised the alarm about a man who wants to set up five not-for-profit groceries.
Mamdani “has had only one full-time job outside of politics,” the Post warns. Outside of reality TV, Donald Trump had never worked outside his small family business before the Oval Office.
Bezos will champion “personal liberties and free markets” whatever it does to his paper’s credibility. Including with editorials arguing for unfettered markets because “many American failures are often the result of government intervention rather than a free market run amok.” Tell it to the nearly 9 million people who lost their jobs and at least 10 million who lost their homes in the 2008 crash of Wall Street.
The nation’s capital, a city that is the seat of the federal government and home to many thousands of public servants, and a city that Democratic presidential candidates generally carry with around 90 percent of the vote, has three conservative voices and no longer has a single liberal newspaper.
Right-wing owners are buying up major news outlets from coast to coast. “We are at most a few years away from the mainstream media becoming controlled top to bottom, with a few very exceptions, by ultrarich conservatives and their hirelings,” Tomasky writes.
What is to be done? Well, some say this doesn’t really matter that much—people get their news from TikTok, so liberals should focus on social media, podcasts, YouTube. I have no beef with this argument. Liberals are way behind conservatives in these realms. But legacy media outlets still matter because of who reads them. And they are being taken over by right-wing and libertarian billionaires who want quite simply to destroy the idea of the public weal.
So this is what is to be done: Rich liberals need to get together, see all this for the democracy-ending crisis that it is, and pool tens of millions of dollars into an organization that will buy existing media outlets (traditional and social) and start new ones. They have been asleep to this problem for 20-plus years. Well, as one of my favorite proverbs has it, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the second-best time is now. If The Washington Post becoming right-wing doesn’t make these people want to take spade in hand and plant some trees, what on earth will?
Except too many rich liberals are like old-guard Democrats. Too out of touch and short-term in their thinking.
Democrats dominated the first major Election Day since President Donald Trump returned to the White House.
And while a debate about the future of the Democratic Party may have only just begun, there are signs that the economy — specifically, Trump’s inability to deliver the economic turnaround he promised last fall — may be a real problem for Trump’s GOP heading into next year’s higher-stakes midterm elections.
Democrats won and won big. In Virginia, in New Jersey, and in New York City and elsewhere. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger will be Virginia’s first female governor. She won by 15 points. In New Jersey, the New York Times reports, “Mikie Sherrill cruised to victory in a governor’s race that polls had projected would be neck and neck.” She won by 13 points. And Zohran Mamdani, 34, will be New York City’s next mayor. He defeated old-guard Democrat, Andrew Cuomo, by nearly 9 points. Mamdani will be the youngest mayor in over a century after turnout that was the highest since 1969. CNN called the California Proposition 50 redistricting question a win for Gov. Gavin Newsom with 0 percent reporting. With over a quarter of votes yet uncounted, “Yes” leads by 28 points.
As for the “future of the Democratic Party,” brace for the punditry to robotically ask: “Who represents the new face of the Democratic Party going forward, Zohran Mamdani or Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill?” Just as robotically, Democrats asked that question should answer with “Yes.”
Mamdani: "New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant." pic.twitter.com/QF3up3c4k0
Republicans already haveananswerready for their xenophobic base. The otherwise know-nothing-about-that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) tossed off a long X post about Mamdani salted with “extremist, “Marxist,” “dangerous,” and “radical, big-government socialist.” Very predictable. New Yorkers have salty words and gestures in response to that. They also have a new mayor-elect.
Do you understand the assignment?
Last night on MSNBC, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) gave a response to the “face of the party” question worth watching if you missed it. Voters in line were heard calling out some of the Democratic establishment. They understood that they were not just voting against the Trump agenda and for Mamdani, AOC said. They turned out in numbers to rededicate the party to the needs of working people, and their cost of living and civil rights, as well as to defeat the old guard of the Democratic Party who are on notice.
“We have a future to plan for. We have a future to fight for.” The message behind Mandami’s election is that Democrats who won’t do that together will be left behind. “Do you understand the assignment of fighting fascism right now?”
Trump’s getting really steamed about the filibuster. Sure, he believes he can just order the world to his liking but he wants Republicans to have to bend the knee publicly to every crackpot, bullshit idea he comes up with. It will be interesting to see if they acquiesce to this as they’ve done with everything else:
President Trump’s Truth Social demands to end the filibuster are just a hint of his coming rampage if Senate Republicans hold out against him, advisers tell Axios.
Most Senate Republicans have no interest in nuking the filibuster. But Trump’s frustration is the first clear sign that the shutdown, which becomes a record on Wednesday, is getting to him.
“He will make their lives a living hell,” one Trump adviser told Axios.
“He will call them at three o’clock in the morning. He will blow them up in their districts. He will call them un-American. He will call them old creatures of a dying institution. Believe you me, he’s going to make their lives just hell,” the source continued.
Another adviser emphasized: “He’s really mad about this.”
For weeks, Trump wasn’t paying close attention to the shutdown out of a belief that Democrats would eventually drop their demands.
Now, he is starting to put Republican senators on blast for not changing the filibuster, which requires 60 votes for most legislation, arguing it gave Democrats leverage to shut down the government for a record amount of time.
“The more he thinks about it, the more he thinks the filibuster outrageous and anti-democratic,” one of the advisers said.
Trump was already steamed about the Senate’s “blue slip” tradition, which has allowed Democratic senators to block certain judicial nominees.
Some of the newer, populist Senate Republican voices are warming to the idea.
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) raised the idea of changing the filibuster to end the shutdown last month on Fox News, saying, “Let’s make this a Republican-only vote.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) expressed willingness to do away with the filibuster if needed. Hawley said if he’s “got to choose between feeding 42 million Americans who are needy and have to have federal food assistance to eat, or defending the arcane rules of the Senate — I’m going to choose those people.”
Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) also told Axios he would be willing to change the filibuster rules “under certain circumstances.”
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said he understood Trump’s frustration, “but I think that Democrats are about to cave” by the end of the week. When pressed to clarify whether he opposed ending the filibuster, he responded, “I said what I just said.”
He wants every last one of them publicly lined up to kiss his ring.
The filibuster is the last excuse some of them have for not openly joining the fascist takeover. This would be the final capitulation.
Aides have spent weeks strategizing how to reconstitute the president’s global tariff regime if the court rules that he exceeded his authority. They’re ready to fall back on a patchwork of other trade statutes to keep pressure on U.S. trading partners and preserve billions in tariff revenue, according to six current and former White House officials and others familiar with the administration’s thinking, some of whom were granted anonymity to share details of private conversations.
“They’re aware there are a number of different statutes they can use to recoup the tariff authority,” said Everett Eissenstat, former deputy director of the White House’s National Economic Council during Trump’s first term. “There’s a lot of tools there that they could go to to make up that tariff revenue.”
The contingency planning underscores how much is at stake for Trump, who has used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law designed for national emergencies, to impose tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner — the foundation of his second-term economic agenda. The justices will weigh whether the law gives the president broad power to impose economic restrictions — or whether Trump has stretched it beyond what Congress intended.
If the court curtails that power, it could upend not only the White House’s “America First” trade strategy but also the global negotiations Trump has leveraged it to shape.
The article goes into how the court could upend a whole lot of Trump’s economic and foreign policy (by simply reading the clear meaning of the Constitution!) but from my perspective it doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal. Everything is already chaotic so unwinding it wouldn’t make it any worse.
Here are the contingency plans, such as they are:
Aides concede that other tariff authorities are not a “one-for-one replacement” for the emergency law, though they confirmed they are pursuing them.
In fact, the White House has already laid some of the policy groundwork under those authorities, such as the 1970s-vintage Section 301, which the U.S. used against China in Trump’s first term, or the Cold War-era Section 232, which allows tariffs on national-security grounds.
The administration has launched more than a dozen 232 investigations into whether the import of goods like lumber, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and critical minerals from other countries impairs national security. Since January, Trump has used that authority to impose new tariffs on copper, aluminum, steel and autos.
It has also opened a 301 investigation into Brazil’s trade practices, including digital services, ethanol tariffs and intellectual property protection. It’s a model officials say could be replicated against other countries if the court curtails IEEPA — and could be used to pressure countries into reaffirming the trade deals that they’ve already negotiated with the United States, or to accept the rates that Trump has unilaterally assigned them.
But those tools come with challenges: Section 301 investigations can take months to complete, slowing Trump’s ability to impose tariffs unilaterally or tie them to unrelated goals like ending the war between Russia and Ukraine or stem the flow of fentanyl across the U.S. border.
Section 232 offers broad discretion to impose tariffs on national-security grounds, but because the levies are sector-based, they are typically applied across a product category, limiting Trump’s ability to pressure individual countries.
And imposing new duties on global industries like semiconductors or pharmaceuticals, as Trump has threatened, could upend recent agreements the administration has reached with trading partners, especially China, which negotiated a trade truce last week.
“This detente may have weakened the president’s resolve to go forward with the 232s. We’re worse off than we were,” a second person close to the administration said.
The U.S. has already promised to delay fees on Chinese vessels arriving at U.S. ports following the conclusion of a Section 301 investigation on China’s shipbuilding practices as a result of the Thursday meeting between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The U.S. also agreed to delay an investigation into China’s adherence to its trade deal from Trump’s first term.
Section 122, meanwhile, allows only short-term tariffs of up to 15 percent and for no more than 150 days unless Congress acts to extend them — a narrow clause meant to address trade deficit emergencies. The authority could potentially serve as a bridge between an adverse court ruling and new duties Trump wants to put in place using other authorities.
Then there’s Section 338 — a rarely used provision that’s been on the books for nearly a century. In theory, it could let Trump swiftly impose tariffs of up to 50 percent on any country, if he can explain how they are engaging in “unreasonable” or “discriminatory” actions that hurt U.S. commerce. Section 338 does not require a formal investigation before a president can impose tariffs, but would likely face similar legal challenges.
Yeah, whatever. Anything to stop Trump from seizing more unilateral power.
Meanwhile, some people think he should just go through Congress the way the Constitution says he must. But the Senate has surprisingly taken a small stand against that:
At least four Republicans are openly opposed to the global tariffs — bucking Trump in a series of symbolic votes last week. And it’s unclear whether there’s appetite for a vote on Trump’s tariffs in the House, which has been shielded from weighing in on the tariffs until the end of January, after Republican leadership blocked votes on Trump’s national emergencies.
