The Court of International Trade ruled Thursday that President Trump's 10% across-the-board tariffs — imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a provision never before used — are illegal. Duties will continue collecting while the administration appeals, according to Axios.

The Founders did not build a republic to be governed by emergency workarounds. Article I of the Constitution assigns the power to regulate commerce and levy duties to Congress — not the executive — for exactly this reason: concentrated power answers to no one.

The duty here belongs to Congress. Every year it loans its authority to the executive branch and calls it convenience. Courts enforcing the constitutional order are not the enemy of good trade policy — they are the last check on a legislature too comfortable surrendering the powers it was elected to hold.

The White House has submitted a $1.5 trillion military spending request to Congress — not to defend American soil, but to sustain a pattern of offensive military action the administration has carried out against Venezuela, Iran, and others, none of which posed an imminent threat to the United States.

Said President Trump: "We're fighting wars" — offered as the reason ordinary Americans cannot have childcare, Medicaid, or Medicare.

The Founders gave Congress the power to declare war and hold the purse for a reason. The defense appropriations bill is the last remaining check Congress holds over an executive that has already brushed off war powers resolutions. What Congress votes on next is not a budget line. It is a question of honor.

Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini lobbied Senate lawmakers earlier this year to strip a provision from crypto legislation that would have blocked the listing of digital assets vulnerable to price manipulation, according to Politico.

Think about what that means at the shop-floor level: the same exchanges that profit from listing a token want the rule barring risky, manipulable tokens gone. They don't want guardrails — they want your retirement savings exposed to assets their own traders can move at will.

The boardroom wrote the consumer-protection rules out of the bill. That's not deregulation — that's the rigged game in plain sight.

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled 4-3 on Friday to void a redistricting referendum that would have redrawn the state's congressional map to a 10-1 Democratic tilt — overturning it before a single candidate filed under the new lines. The court found the legislature cast its first required vote on October 31, 2025, after early voting had already begun and 40 percent of ballots were already cast, violating the constitutional requirement that two separate legislative sessions — with an intervening election between them — must approve any amendment.

Said Justice Arthur Kelsey for the majority: "While the Commonwealth is free by its lights to do the right thing for the right reason, the Rule of Law requires that it be done the right way."

The constitutional order does not bend because the calendar is inconvenient. The Founders built procedural guardrails for exactly this reason — so that no faction, in any season of power, could rewrite the rules of self-governance on the fly. The 6-5 map holds.

Jeffrey Katzenberg's invite-only WNDR26 confab wrapped up its fifth year at the Rosewood Miramar in Montecito — poolside Bieber concert, Chris Rock judging a Lego competition, Oprah interviewing a Chanel CEO. Press barred. No social media allowed. No plus-ones, either.

The guest list reads like a cap table that owns Washington: NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, Palantir's Alex Karp, Alibaba's Joe Tsai, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, Anduril's Palmer Luckey. Said one attendee: "It's the head of every major tech company, and then a handful of celebrities like Oprah, Bieber, Kendrick and the rest are AI billionaires."

Some say these are just rich people having fun. The deeper issue is that the same men setting your drug prices, your streaming bills, and your kid's feed are coordinating off the record — then walking back into boardrooms that set policy for the rest of us.

As of April 13, the United States Navy has enforced a full blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, with roughly 15,000 American service members executing the mission. US Central Command reported Friday that more than 70 tankers — with capacity to carry over 166 million barrels of Iranian oil valued at $13 billion or more — are currently held in check. F/A-18s struck an unspecified number of Very Large Crude Carriers attempting to breach the line.

President Trump called Thursday's strikes "love taps." Analysts have warned the blockade risks triggering a return to full-scale war.

The republic is at the edge of war. Fifteen thousand Americans are in harm's way. The Founders gave Congress the power to declare war for exactly this reason — so that no single man could walk the nation into the fire alone. Article I still stands. The question is whether the men and women sworn to uphold it remember their oath.

On May 1, Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commissioner Moshe Marvit got a single email from a Trump aide: his job was terminated, effective immediately. No cause cited. No hearing. The government cut off his work phone the same day, and the commission laid off staff over the following weekend.

Federal law says mine safety commissioners serve six-year terms and can only be removed for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." Said Marvit's lawsuit: "Congress gave the President the authority to remove commissioners in a delimited set of circumstances."

The Supreme Court is set to rule this summer — in a parallel case involving a fired FTC member — on whether those removal protections are constitutional at all. Until then, coal and hard-rock miners are left asking who's minding the shaft. Working folks don't get due process when the boss fires them either, but the law said this one did.

The ADL's 2025 audit report recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States — down from 9,354 in 2024, the highest total the organization had ever logged. The headline number looks like progress. It is not.

The drop traces almost entirely to the collapse of campus protest activity. What remains is harder and more dangerous. Jews were killed in Washington, D.C. and Boulder, Colorado in 2024. The ADL notes that campus incidents, even after the decline, remain nearly three times higher than 2021 levels.

A republic that cannot protect its citizens' safety and dignity in the public square is a republic that has stopped keeping faith with the oath it made to itself. The Founders understood that ordered liberty demands enforcement — not tolerance of violence against any of its people.

A federal prosecution that put a Cincinnati city councilman in prison — not for taking cash, not for personal enrichment, but for accepting a lawful, publicly disclosed campaign donation from people who shared his stated policy views — has now been repudiated by two branches of the federal government.

The Supreme Court unanimously ordered the Sixth Circuit to vacate its prior ruling. President Trump issued a full and unconditional pardon. Yet the charging theory that made P.G. Sittenfeld a federal inmate still stands — ready to be used again.

Said the federal prosecutor, on the record, when the trial judge asked whether policy agreement plus campaign donation was enough to send a case to a jury: "I think that would be right."

South Carolina Republicans moved in May 2026 to extend their legislative session for the sole purpose of redrawing the state's congressional map — a maneuver reported by The Hill as occurring under pressure from President Trump, with Rep. Jim Clyburn, the state's lone House Democrat, as the clear target.

Said Clyburn: "Republicans in the South Carolina state legislature began the process of extending their session to allow for the redrawing of the state's congressional map. We cannot let them succeed."

The Founders did not design the constitutional order so that the party in power could engineer its own permanence between census cycles. Redrawing lines to erase a sitting member's seat — whatever one thinks of that member — is the kind of move that corrodes the republic's foundation long after the immediate victor is forgotten. The oath is to the Constitution, not to the map that best serves the party holding the pen.

President Trump announced plans to cut American troop levels in Germany beyond the Pentagon's previously stated withdrawal of roughly 5,000 soldiers. Speaking to reporters in Florida, Trump said: "We're going to cut way down. And we're cutting a lot further than 5,000" — offering no timeline or final number.

The announcement sharpens an ongoing dispute with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over who bears the cost of European security. Germany, the continent's largest economy, has spent decades sheltering behind American soldiers and American taxpayers.

Eisenhower warned in his farewell address that permanent overseas commitments — built to serve contractor balance sheets as much as national defense — would hollow out the republic from within. The question worth asking is not how many troops we pull back, but whether Congress, under its Article I war powers, has ever formally authorized this posture — or whether the boardroom and the bureaucracy simply kept renewing it without asking the American people.

Democratic Sen. Peter Welch (Vt.) and Rep. Dave Min (Calif.) sent letters to 17 recipients of Trump pardons or commutations this week, asking whether clemency was exchanged under pay-for-play circumstances, The Hill reported May 7.

The pardon power sits in Article II of the Constitution — placed there by the Founders as an instrument of mercy and justice, not a revenue stream. Whether the allegations prove out or collapse under scrutiny, the question itself demands an answer the republic can trust.

The Cadet Honor Code holds that a soldier neither lies, cheats, nor steals — nor tolerates those who do. That standard doesn't retire when a man leaves the field and enters public office. The republic's long memory is watching.

President Trump announced Thursday via Truth Social that the United States will give the European Union until July 4 to reach terms on trade or face significantly higher tariffs, according to reporting by The Hill. Trump described a prior call with European Commission leadership as 'great,' suggesting negotiation channels remain open — for now.

The date chosen is not accidental. July 4 is the republic's founding compact made visible — a reminder that American sovereignty, including sovereignty over its own commerce, was bought at a price no Brussels bureaucrat was present to pay.

The Founders vested the power to regulate foreign commerce squarely in Congress under Article I — a power too long delegated away to executive agencies and trade tribunals. Whatever one thinks of the leverage strategy, the underlying demand — that foreign markets treat American workers as equals, not marks — is the older and harder right.

A hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius — a cruise ship carrying passengers from at least 28 countries — is now a full-scale international health operation. The ship is docking off Tenerife after Spain agreed to admit it at WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus's personal request. Roughly 145 people from 23 countries remain onboard. Three confirmed cases, including the ship's own doctor, were already evacuated to the Netherlands.

The working theory: a couple infected before boarding — during a bird-watching trip through Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina — brought Andes virus onto the ship. Andes is the only hantavirus known to spread person to person. The largest prior outbreak hit Epuyén, Argentina in 2018–2019: 34 confirmed cases, 11 dead.

Said WHO's Abdi Mahamud: "We are in a similar situation right now, a cluster in a confined space with close contact." Real public health work — contact tracing, genetic sequencing across labs in South Africa, Switzerland, and Senegal — is running. This is what functional disease response looks like. Pay attention.