So. Hakeem Jeffries meets with Jared Kushner. Followed by multiple daily e-mails from Jeffries begging me for $$’s to flip the House. Yo, Hakeem, any money that I send will go to candidates who support someone else for Speaker. We square? Unsubscribe.
Delaware City And Motiva–Quite the unusual arrangement:
For nearly two decades, the refinery on the outskirts of Delaware City has paid the local government millions of dollars in exchange for officials promising not to annex the massive industrial complex.
This year, a $300,000 “voluntary contribution” from the Delaware City Refining Company as part of that agreement accounted for nearly 14% of the town’s 2026 budget.
The current agreement, enacted in 2023, governs how much the refinery will put in Delaware City’s coffers through 2037. Previously, the contracts were called PILOT, or payment in lieu of taxes, agreements — made in exchange for the government’s promise to not annex parcels owned by the refinery that are currently in unincorporated New Castle County.
By the time the current agreement expires, the refinery will have paid some $5.2 million to the city since 2008. Over the years, annual payments have varied from $50,000 to a maximum of $300,000.
According to the 2023 agreement, payments taper down starting next year. From 2027-2031, the refinery has agreed to pay Delaware City $200,000 annually, with payments reducing down to zero by 2038.
The contract notes that it was “on the request of the City” that the refinery “contribute greater amounts during the initial years of this agreement to meet the more immediate revenue needs of the city.”
Mayor Paul Johnson Sr. said that when the agreement was recently up for renegotiation, the refinery’s owner, PBF Energy, wasn’t exactly interested in continuing to pay the town hundreds of thousands of dollars. But without that funding, the city would have to find another way to cover over 10% of its annual operating budget. The agreement predates Johnson’s tenure, which began in 2019.
To ease that pain, the refinery and city officials ultimately agreed to de-escalate payments, with more money coming up front to help build out Fort DuPont and the nearby resort campground to increase the city’s tax revenue to make up for what the refinery has been contributing over the decades.
Ah, yes, The Underwater City At Ft. DuPont. Conceived of, and financed by, two of Delaware’s most corrupt elected officials–Our PAL Val Longhurst and Nicole ‘No Longer’ Poore. With disgraced former legislator Dick Cathcart holding the purse strings to the project. Memo to Delaware’s Inspector General: This entire unethical enterprise DEMANDS an investigation.
Hegseth Destroys Armed Forces. He’s a character right out of ‘Dr. Strangelove’:
Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, the service’s top civilian leader, who clashed repeatedly with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the ouster of key combat-tested Army leaders, handed in his resignation to President Trump on Monday, administration officials said.
Mr. Driscoll’s resignation was expected but it comes at a tumultuous time, as the military’s largest service faces its busiest period since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Army air defense soldiers are playing the leading role in defending U.S. troops in the Middle East from increasingly sophisticated Iranian missile attacks. The Army’s command in Europe is providing critical intelligence and other support to Ukraine as it fights to hold off a larger Russian force.
And Mr. Hegseth has in the meantime initiated a series of firings and feuds that has left the Army essentially rudderless as it struggles to deal with the threat posed by cheap, deadly drones and missiles that have pounded U.S. bases in the Middle East.
Mr. Driscoll met with Mr. Trump in person to hand in his resignation and discuss the current state of the Army, said one official, who like others in this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues.
Trump Gets His Ballroom. 5-4. With a blistering dissent from the (usually corrupt) John Roberts:
Last fall, President Donald Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House so that he could build a gigantic honking ballroom in its place, using a conspicuously fuzzy combination of private donations and hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds that lawmakers very much did not appropriate for that purpose. Federal law prohibits the construction of any new buildings on federal property in Washington, D.C., without the “express authority” of Congress, which, in news I am sure will astonish you, Trump did not bother obtaining first.
In an unsigned 5-4 opinion published on Monday, though, the Supreme Court decided that a president’s unilateral decision to bulldoze part of the White House was totally fine. The justices in the majority strained to avoid saying as much; in the final paragraph of their opinion, they expressly stated that it does not “pass upon the legality of the government’s East Wing project.”
The thrust of the majority opinion is that Hoagland and the Trust probably do not have standing to sue over the ballroom, since “mere offense, disagreement, or distaste does not qualify” as the sort of “concrete and particularized injury” necessary to establish standing. The majority also found that Trump would suffer “irreparable harm” if he were not allowed to build the ballroom right now, based on the sworn declarations of various Trump gremlins who solemnly attested that their boss’s vanity pet project is very, very important, and that each passing day that he can’t complete it is both a national security risk and a grave injustice.
In a dissent joined by the three liberals, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that under Supreme Court precedent, the Trust has done enough to show that it has standing. As a “historical preservationist,” Roberts argued, Hoagland “can be aesthetically injured in a concrete, particularized way by the transformation of a historic building that she frequently enjoys.” By barring the Trust from suing, he concluded, the majority was allowing “the Executive’s likely infringement of the Legislature’s power of the purse…to continue.”
This part is of course descriptively right. But the problem with the dissent is that it accepts the majority’s framing—that technically, doctrinally, legally, the case is not about whether Trump can tear down part of the White House to build the Altria Coinbase Palantir Technologies Ballroom Presented By Truth Social, which is a real thing happening right now. Instead, the dissent is as focused as the majority on the intricacies of Article III standing, as outlined by the Court in (among other cases) Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife and Spokeo v. Robins in 1992 and 2016, respectively—stuff that is interesting to civil procedure professors and basically no one else.
I close on a proud personal note today. After 25 years, my wife Jacqi retires as the Pharmacy Manager of the Walgreens Branmar store. While she’ll continue to do some shifts as a ‘floater’, a grandchild beckons. She has won national awards (Jacqi, not the grandchild), has trained probably hundreds of pharmacists and technicians on immunization, and has retained the goodwill and affection of her fellow Branmar pharmacy folks. It’s been her home for 25 years. She’s a great pharmacist, a better person, and she can’t wait to start spoiling baby Temma. While I wish her a long and happy retirement, it has just dawned on me that I’d better get out of the house more. You know, for marital comity. We will be celebrating in style today!
What do you want to talk about?
