The Senate Must Scrap the Big Beautiful Budget and Start Over
Refusing to grapple with America’s debt problem is bad enough. Maneuvering to make it even bigger is unforgivable.
Friday, May 30, 2025
Court Tariff Rulings are a signal to Trump that he needs to get his sycophant Mike Johnson to put in a bill to impose a 10% import tariff on everything from everywhere and then the Donald should just concentrate on China
Keep it Simple Stupid
Mercurial tariff rate changes for example a 20% rate for the EU one day, then 10% and now 50% threatened for July 9th shows a complete lack of understanding of the months long timetable of placing an order at a foreign factory and its arrival at a U.S. port. Its for this good reason that tariffs are the purview of a slow acting Congress and hopefully the Supreme Court may force President Trump to use his sycophant Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to put up a bill to impose a 10% import tariff on everything from everywhere.
As a counter Congress should compensate by also trashing the ninety nine (99) chapter import tariff schedule that keeps a mini industry of bureaucrats and legal eagles on both the government and private side doing useless work. As for compliance 10% is easy to figure and thereby hard for importers to avoid.
After weeks of Mr. Trump claiming he could leverage his relationship with the Russian leader to bring peace, Mr. Putin’s continued aggression has prompted even Mr. Trump to question whether he has been strung along.
Deal Maker or Duped? Trump’s Embrace of Putin Shows Few Results.
The American president’s preference for praising and excusing the Russian leader has yielded no progress toward peace in Ukraine.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Luke Broadwater
Reporting from Washington
Monday, May 26, 2025
The Senate is not wrong in having voted against California’s onerous electric-vehicle mandate
Liberation Day for Gas-Powered Cars
The Senate votes to end California’s EV quota. Will Newsom give it up?
The infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff, enacted in 1930, helped transform a financial panic into a worldwide depression. The 1932 elections were cataclysmic for the Republicans, giving Democrats control of the White House for 20 years, the Senate for 44 of the next 48 years, and the House for 58 of the next 62 years. In 1934 Congress adopted the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, which delegated power to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to negotiate reciprocal trade reductions and back the world out of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.
Tariffs Mean Electoral Defeat for the GOP
The debacle of 1932 is the most famous example, but Republican (and Whig) losses span the period 1842 through 2020.
By
Phil Gramm
and
Donald J. Boudreaux
Mr. Gramm is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University. They are the authors of “The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism.” Mike Solon contributed to this article.
Sunday, May 25, 2025
It appears that the White House finally sees Mr. Netanyahu for what he is: a weak Israeli leader with seemingly little or nothing to offer Mr. Trump, who appears more interested in trade, business and a Nobel Peace Prize than in continuing to fund an endless war.
GUEST ESSAY
GUEST ESSAY
Suddenly Trump Is No Longer Buying What Bibi Has Been Selling
Ms. Zonszein is a contributing Opinion writer and a senior Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group. She wrote from Tel Aviv.
“Do you recommend the tuna salad?” he asked.
Ordering
Dear Diary:
When I was an undergrad at Fordham, my older brother came to New York for a short visit. I met him at Penn Station to spare him having to navigate the D train to the Bronx by himself.
He had been living in California for a while and he walked through the station as though he had brought a West Coast fog with him.
After allowing almost everyone to push past us up the stairs to Eighth Avenue, I suggested we step into a nearby deli. The line at the counter was not short, but it was moving swiftly.
Protectively, I stepped in line first. I noticed my brother studying the menu on the wall and felt a sudden panic.
“Decide what you want before you get to the front,” I blurted out.
He looked at me as if I had told him that he needed to take off his clothes. Unfortunately, I had no time to explain or get his acknowledgment. It was my turn.
In an effort to show him what I had been trying to say, I stepped up to the counter.
“I’ll have the No. 1,” I said.
My brother was next. I held my breath.
To my horror, he did not just reveal that he was not ready but went further than that.
“Do you recommend the tuna salad?” he asked.
— Kathy Eppright
Saturday, May 24, 2025
The market ignores that Elon Musk is all hype with Tesla share price rising 43% since departing from a ruinous to his brand obsequies hundred day with Trump.
Angry Elon Is Back. That’s Good for Tesla.
Now is the moment for Musk to channel his fury into executing on the company’s long-promised pivot to driverless cars.
Tesla's Europe Sales Nearly Halve In April
Thursday, May 22, 2025
I hope very much that Mr. Biden’s coming months are full of grace and meaning, that his cancer responds to treatment and that his prognosis is good. I wish, however, that he had done a better job earlier of planning for the worst, and hope that others in similar circumstances — especially those worried about their own legacies — learn from his example.
Denial Is a Bad Strategy if You’re an Aging President
Dr. Bedard is a geriatrician, palliative care doctor and writer.
Also think of Woodrow Wilson and his wife as acting President
Robert Kennedy is not wrong about banning soda purchases using food stamps
In Approving Soda Ban for Food Stamps, U.S.D.A. Reverses Decades of Policy
The Trump administration approved a first of its kind waiver for Nebraska, allowing a ban on soda purchases through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, starting next year.
Does Florida have any children left for DeSantis to share an education agenda to reshape schools across the nation?
On Education, DeSantis’s Florida Paved the Way for Trump’s America
Once bitter rivals, the president and the governor now share an education agenda they hope will reshape schools across the nation.
We can curse the ambition and greed that cause men and women to cling to power for too long. At the same time, however, we should also light a candle of gratitude for the men and women who do their duty and then stand aside, content to allow the next generation to take its turn. Justice Souter was one of those men.
The Man Who Knew When to Step Down Man Who Knew When to Step Down
 | By David French |
On May 8, an extraordinary American died. He set an example that seemed unremarkable at the time but looms much larger in hindsight. I’m speaking of Justice David Souter, and regardless of what you thought of his jurisprudence, he made one decision that every American should applaud and every American leader should emulate.
He knew when to step aside.
President George H.W. Bush nominated Souter to the Supreme Court in 1990. He was confirmed the same year, served 19 years on the court and retired in 2009. He wasn’t a young man then — he was just shy of his 70th birthday — but it turns out that he had lots of years left to live.
He was still performing at a high level. I didn’t share his judicial philosophy (and frequently disagreed with his rulings), but I never doubted his integrity or his intellectual rigor. Lawyers who argued before him knew that he could be a formidable justice. He routinely exposed and picked apart weak arguments.
After he left the court, he spent the next 16 years as one of America’s quietest public officials. He heard cases at the Court of Appeals (retired Supreme Court justices sometimes hear arguments at the Courts of Appeals), but he rarely spoke publicly, and he made almost no news at all. He served his country, he went back home and we hardly heard from him again.
There was a time when Justice Souter’s decision would be unremarkable. Justices retired all the time, and while some stayed in office well into their 80s (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and John Paul Stevens were 90 when they retired), for most of American history, the average age of retirement for Supreme Court justices hovered between 66 and 73 years old.
I’m talking about retirement for an obvious reason — once again, Americans are embroiled in arguments about the advanced age of all too many of our judges and politicians. And once again, the nation is confronting a profound political and legal transformation that might not have happened if only powerful people (and their powerful enablers) let someone else have a turn.
I don’t want to pile on Joe Biden. He is facing a terrible cancer, and enough ink has been spilled about the consequences of his decision to run for re-election in 2024 in spite of his cognitive decline. Besides, he’s hardly the only politician or judge to hang on too long.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on the bench at age 87, handing her seat to Donald Trump to fill. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, died in office at age 90. Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican, is 91. Senator Mitch McConnell is 83. President Trump would be the oldest serving president in American history but for Biden. Trump turns 79 next month. By this metric the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, is a virtual adolescent — he’s 74.
In fact, since 2022 eight members of Congress have died in office, all of them Democrats. The most recent was 75-year-old Gerry Connolly, who succumbed to esophageal cancer on Wednesday.
What is going on? The simplest answer is probably the most correct. Powerful people like to stay powerful. Or as Mike Donilon, a senior Biden adviser, said, “Nobody walks away from this. No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter.”
And thanks to modern medicine and modern conveniences, members of the laptop class can stay productive deep into old age.
Compounding the problem, the principle that powerful people want to remain powerful isn’t confined to justices, presidents or senators. Every leader is surrounded by a team of people who gain their own power, their own prestige and their own wealth through their association with the leader, like planets orbiting a star.
The story of Joe Biden isn’t a story of an older man desperate to hold on to power as the people around him begged him to step down. It’s the story of the people closest to him asking him to run again and even manipulating him to keep him in the race.
As we know from his son Hunter Biden’s business, Joe Biden’s power was key to the family’s financial success. And the Biden family wasn’t the only family to profit from Joe’s power. As James Kirchick wrote in an excellent Politico article about Biden’s enablers, “Donilon’s niece served on the National Security Council, deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed’s daughter was Biden’s day scheduler, and all four” of the White House counselor Steve Ricchetti’s children “had administration jobs.”
Donilon himself reportedly negotiated a $4 million fee to work on Biden’s 2024 campaign.
But the simple — and human — desire to cling to power isn’t the only reason politicians refuse to step aside. Older politicians remain in office because people keep electing them. An apathetic public often votes for incumbents out of sheer inertia.
It becomes easy, in those circumstances, to see yourself as indispensable. There’s a certain degree of self-confidence inherent in the decision to run for office (or accept a judicial nomination) in the first place, and that self-confidence is amplified not just by the friends, family and colleagues who sing your praises but also by a partisan public that cheers you on.
I distinctly remember the roaring crowd that Biden addressed the day after his dreadful debate performance in June 2024. I also remember the partisan backlash whenever any politician or journalist sounded the alarm about his decline. If Biden wanted reassurance, there was no shortage of people available to tell him that he was the only man for the job.
Yet the problem goes deeper than that. We live in a country that is positively obsessed with career success and thus defines people through their work more than through their family — or even their individual virtue. In many of America’s elite circles, you are your career, and when your career is over, how much of you remains?
Again, this isn’t simply a problem for judges and politicians. The problem isn’t solely how the powerful define themselves; it’s how we define them. It’s how we choose whom to respect and honor. It takes a person of real fortitude and self-respect simply to walk away.
That brings us back to Justice Souter. In the days since he died I’ve had a chance to interact with two of his former clerks, and they both noted that he did not center his existence around the court. As Kevin Newsom, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, told me on the “Advisory Opinions” podcast, “He was the one guy who didn’t think that being on the U.S. Supreme Court was the pinnacle of one’s existence.”
In an email, Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia, told me that Souter “viewed serving on the court as a great honor but also a civic duty, and like other civic duties, its burden should be spread around.” In addition, Waxman observed, “he never saw himself as indispensable or specially endowed for the role, but as one of many who could serve well.”
Judge Newsom said, “He really thought, ‘My life is bigger than this.’ And by ‘bigger,’ he didn’t mean that he’d go on to greater power and fame after the court. Instead, he meant being outside and reading books.”
That sounds like a beautiful life to me.
I’m 56 years old and a father to three kids and already a grandfather to two. I don’t consider myself to be old, but I am old enough to start to think about how to finish well. I also love my job and want to do it as well as I can, as long as I can. But I cannot allow the love of my job to overshadow the deeper things in life.
Even if I could write the most powerful and beautiful columns in the English language, which I certainly can’t, that would still not be as important as loving my family. And at the end of my time on this earth, I want my wife, children and grandchildren to remember me for loving them far more than they remember me for any degree of talent or influence in law or politics.
Perhaps my favorite verse in the Bible is Micah 6:8. I quote it all the time: “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
Many of our leaders are so confident in their ability to do justice that they forsake kindness and humility, especially humility. Yet, as the old saying goes, “The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.”
We can curse the ambition and greed that cause men and women to cling to power for too long. At the same time, however, we should also light a candle of gratitude for the men and women who do their duty and then stand aside, content to allow the next generation to take its turn.
Justice Souter was one of those men.