“Over the last eight months, the Trump administration has run roughshod over Congress and its constitutional prerogatives. Trump’s decision to ignore the TikTok ban on his first day in office may seem minor in the grand scheme of things, but it foreshadowed a series of far more aggressive moves to usurp much of lawmakers’ constitutional authority: dismantling congressionally-created agencies, redirecting congressionally appropriated funds and implementing a massive tax hike on the American public in the form of Trump’s chaotic tariff regime.
The vast majority of this was made possible by congressional Republicans, who have largely turned a blind eye to all of Trump’s gambits, and by the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, who have handed Trump a series of victories this year in his wide-ranging efforts to both unilaterally slash the federal government while dramatically expanding the powers of the presidency.
The acquiescence to Trump’s TikTok reprieve this year has been a far more bipartisan affair, but it has been a constitutional farce all the same, and it is not over yet.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/19/tiktok-trump-xi-deal-law-column-00571832
Why have a Congress if the president can just ignore its laws? Why have a Constitution if the president can just ignore it? The power to spend is clearly given to Congress. The President is supposed to execute that spending. This is the president refusing to faithfully execute those laws, clearly violating the division of powers spelled out in the Constitution.
“The Supreme Court on Friday extended an order that allows President Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5 billion in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.
With the three liberal justices in dissent, the court’s conservative majority granted the Republican administration’s emergency appeal in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.
The Justice Department sought the high court’s intervention after U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ruled that Trump’s action was likely illegal and that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/supreme-court-keeps-place-trump-204620328.html
“The Food and Drug Administration plans to approve a new use for the generic drug leucovorin in the coming weeks to treat kids with “cerebral folate deficiency and autistic symptoms,” according to a POLITICO Magazine opinion piece by federal health leaders published on Monday.
The officials — FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, National Institutes for Health Director Jay Bhattacharya and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz — pointed to research they say suggests leucovorin, also known as folinic acid, may help children who are deficient in folate, a vitamin. They said there was evidence leucovorin, which is currently used to treat cancer and anemia patients, can help children with autism improve their verbal communication. But they emphasized in the opinion piece that the drug “is not a cure for autism.”
While scientists say leucovorin, a form of vitamin B, could be promising for a subset of autism patients, they cautioned that the current data is limited and the drug needs more research.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/22/fda-to-approve-prescription-drug-to-treat-certain-children-with-symptoms-of-autism-00575580
Our Coming Plutocracy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wetEKGZdUo
“Trump’s Nashville speech discussed bitcoin interchangeably with “crypto,” but bitcoin is fundamentally different from other cryptocurrencies. It runs on a decentralized, peer-to-peer software network and issuance schedule that, by design, can’t be tampered with by centralized authorities. It provides a way to send value over the internet without trusting third-party intermediaries. Like the gold standard, it’s a neutral monetary system; unlike gold, it has no physical properties, making it harder to seize or censor. If bitcoin fully succeeds, governments will no longer be able to steal from their citizens by printing money, and they’ll no longer be able to cut people off from payment networks and banking services.
“Crypto,” on the other hand, typically describes a set of centrally issued tokens, usually administered by foundations, neobanks, and tech companies. Most “crypto” projects are outright scams or pyramid schemes; most have failed to find (or never looked for) real-world adoption.
The major exception is “stablecoins,” which have emerged as the crypto industry’s killer application. They work like casino chips: a stablecoin company issues $100 worth of digital dollar tokens and simultaneously backs them with $100 of “high-quality” assets, typically U.S. Treasuries. Stablecoins aren’t routed through the conventional banking system, so they move easily across borders and are readily accessible in parts of the world where the dollar is in high demand.
Stablecoins’ key innovation isn’t technical; it’s regulatory arbitrage. They mean dollars for anyone, with no rules. Like bitcoin, they’re a quasi-permissionless, internet-native form of money; unlike bitcoin, they rely on the U.S. dollar for their value and are almost entirely administered by companies.
…
As early as 2018, millions of people in Iran, Turkey, Nigeria, and Argentina began using Tether as an “offshore” dollar that local authorities couldn’t easily confiscate. With stablecoins, a refugee in a war zone can access dollars just as easily as a London bank. A recent study from ARK Invest estimated that there are 200 million stablecoin holders, compared to a billion holders of paper dollars. As countries like Russia and Iran attempt to coerce their citizens into using collapsing local currencies, the people are increasingly turning to stablecoins, which are hard to ban.
There is significant bitcoin adoption in authoritarian countries and collapsing economies as well, but many prefer stablecoins to mitigate price volatility. Stablecoins track the dollar, while bitcoin floats. Like the dollar, stablecoins gradually lose value over time, but they don’t experience wild price swings.
…
unlike bitcoin, stablecoins require users to trust the companies that issue them. The tokens can be frozen, inflated, or remotely confiscated—and if the company issuing them commits fraud, they can become worthless. They’re a useful tool, but they aren’t in the same category as bitcoin, which is essentially freedom money.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/12/donald-trump-is-not-the-bitcoin-president/
“George Retes was denied access to an attorney, wasn’t allowed to make a phone call, was not presented to a judge, and was put in an isolation cell before being released with no charges.
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[he] was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies for three days and nights despite telling officers he was an American citizen and his identification was in his nearby car.
…
“United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh released a concurring opinion essentially blessing the use of racial profiling by the Trump administration’s immigration enforcers, even as critics warned American citizens’ rights would inevitably be violated.
The stops of people who are legally in the country are “typically brief,” Kavanaugh asserted, “and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.””
https://reason.com/2025/09/12/immigration-agents-held-a-u-s-citizen-and-veteran-for-3-days-without-checking-his-id/
“Washington’s proposal to link Israeli withdrawals with Hezbollah’s surrender ignores decades of political entrenchment and risks fueling wider conflict.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/12/u-s-plan-to-disarm-hezbollah-is-a-diplomatic-dead-end/
“the idea that people—especially young men—would not be radicalized if it weren’t for social media belies most of human history.
I’ve been listening recently to a podcast called A Twist of History. One episode details Adolf Hitler’s attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic in 1923. Another episode features a riot during a Shakespearean performance in New York City in 1849, fomented by Ned Buntline, a nativist newspaper pundit with ambitions of fame and notoriety. Both instances featured fringe political elements, violence, and deaths.
History is littered with examples like these: men driven to violence by people in close physical proximity, sometimes with the help of inflammatory political rhetoric printed in pamphlets and newspapers.
…
if he encountered bad ideas online, it’s because the internet is now where we encounter ideas. If he cloaked his violence in the language of internet memes, it’s because that’s where culture is these days.
In another era, he may have encountered bad ideas at a town hall and dressed up his horrific act in different slogans. But a man with a capacity for such premeditated and dramatic violence is a man with a capacity for such things in any era. And conversely, countless billions of people encounter the same online ecosystem without committing assassinations.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/15/social-media-didnt-kill-charlie-kirk/
“Economists have long known that tax expenditures make our taxes unnecessarily complicated, distort pragmatic economic decision making, and mostly benefit hand-selected political constituencies. My Mercatus Center colleague Jack Salmon and I have spent time demonstrating that most tax expenditures don’t offer broad-based relief but rather narrow carveouts that erode critical tax revenue while tilting the scales toward the special interests that sell whatever we’re nudged into buying.
Tax expenditures stand in sharp contrast to a neutral tax system—one that taxes income and consumption consistently and only once, trusts individuals to make buying decisions without manipulation, and leaves resource allocation to markets. Special-interest tax credits should ultimately be terminated.
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Deducting the interest on mortgage payments has virtually no effect on whether someone buys a house. It mostly leads to larger mortgages and bigger homes for wealthier households. That’s a subsidy for the upper middle class.
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The exclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance (ESHI) payments is the single largest individual tax break, costing in excess of $3 trillion over the next decade. Most employees would take the insurance their employers offer with or without this incentive. It ends up inflating the size and cost of plans, driving up health spending, making it more necessary to insure through one’s employer, and entrenching workers in their current jobs.
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The implications are clear: Tax credits and deductions are generally not harmless ways to help taxpayers. They are costly, distortionary privileges captured by industries and interest groups. They complicate the tax code, mask the true size of government, and fail to deliver the promised bang for the buck.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/11/washington-says-tax-breaks-help-people-instead-theyre-corroding-the-tax-code/
Trump’s H1b Visa 100k fee will increase the cost of doing business in America, which means a smaller economy and less jobs. It also incentivizes companies to offshore labor rather than use people in the U.S. who spend some of their salaries in-country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOpw1nTJzxI