Category Archives: National

Tulsi Hits the Bricks. Who’s Next?

Once again DL’s crowdsource choice as the next henchman to go survived. Our voters thought Kash Patel, exposed as treating his job like an extended frat party, would be sent back to podcasting on the Bongino Express. Instead it was Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, whom voters previously predicted would precede Pam Bondi out the door.

The shelf life on the female members of Trump’s cabinet is rather short, isn’t it? Gabbard resigned yesterday, though reports say she was pressured into it by the White House, meaning Trump’s record remains unblemished. When Labor secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned last month amid various scandals, Delaware Congresswoman Sarah McBride predicted Gabbard would be next to go because “he only fires women.”

So who’s on the chopping block now? A new poll appears at right. Because Trump is running out of women to sack, we’ve included former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, head of the Small Business Administration, so Linda McMahon isn’t the lone female. If you have a suggestion for someone else to add, leave it in the comments.

New Poll – Who’s Next?

Lori Chavez-DeRemer walked the plank to pursue opportunities in the private sector, since critics made it difficult to run scams in the public sector any longer. So once again a DL longshot came in.
Chavez-DeRemer was the DL voting public’s fourth choice.

Tulsi Gabbard was the favorite, and given the shrinking number of women to whack, she might be again. Kash Patel was second choice, Pete Hegseth third. with Howard Lutnick, JFK Jr. and Chris Wright far behind.

So we give it another go. Who’s next? Kash Patel is in a pickle – you know it’s bad when Hegseth thinks you should dial back your drinking – but Tulsi Gabbard is now the last prominent woman standing. Or could a longshot like JFK Jr. finally have run out of leash? Linda McMahon has been added to the field to give Donald another possible distaff choice. Somebody could find out by tweet at any time, so make your prediction today!

DL Open Thread Saturday, April 18, 2026

Whoopee! Trump says the Strait of Iran (sic) is open again! And you can believe what Trump says, right? Especially on Friday afternoons. Tell ya what, though, you go through first. No links because at publication time nobody actually has any clear idea of what’s going on.

It seems Secretary of Belligerence Pete Hegseth isn’t the only administration official with a drinking problem. The Atlantic has a paywalled article detailing heavy boozing by FBI director Kash Patel, with details that should sound familiar to anyone who’s ever been to a frat party (the link goes to an unpaywalled summary).

Give Wilmington Mayor John Carney credit for his commitment to recycling. He’s named old standby Claire DeMatteis to serve as director of Wilmington’s Human Resources Department.

You might have heard that some Delaware lawmakers are debating a bill that would exempt tips from the swipe fees banks collect on credit card purchases. Illinois has already passed such a law, though it doesn’t take effect until July 1, and the banking industry wants very badly to make sure no other states follow suit. That’s why they’ve already spent more than $100,000 lobbying Delaware legislators to kill the bill. In the meantime, those who remember something called “cash” can always leave a tip that way.

Speaking of tips, you might have seen the stupid PR stunt Trump pulled on Monday when he had a woman now known as Doordash Grandma deliver a sack of McDonald’s burgers to the White House. The story was bullshit from top to bottom – do you really think a delivery driver would be allowed through the gates? – but Amanda Marcotte points out that the bottom is lower than you might think. Grandma actually has a tragic story – she’s making food deliveries to help pay the medical bills for her husband’s cancer treatment.

Elon Musk’s war against Delaware’s Chancery Court is in its final stages, and the court seems eager to have it over with. Bloomberg Law has the details.

The messy split between the world’s richest person and America’s corporate capital cleared another hurdle this week when a judge dismissed the last Tesla Inc. investor lawsuits filed in Delaware, effectively sending them to Texas. The ruling came days after Musk’s bias allegations led the chief of Delaware’s Chancery Court to reassign the litigation under bizarre circumstances.

If Delaware’s top tribunal upholds the April 13 decision after a likely appeal, the tech titan will get his prize: home court advantage in a jurisdiction jury-rigged to kill shareholder suits in the cradle. Texas now lets businesses restrict so-called derivative litigation to investors owning at least 3%, which for Tesla means just Musk.

“It’s time for the Delaware-Musk relationship to be severed,” said University of Richmond law professor Jessica Erickson. “It’s not healthy for anyone involved. It needs to end. But the outcome here certainly raises questions about whether other companies might try the same tactics.”

“What I think this reflects is that at least one Delaware judge just doesn’t want to be in the business of policing Elon Musk anymore,” said Colorado Law professor Ann Lipton.

For all Delaware’s problems, at least it’s not in the Arid, Arid West. The American Prospect has a long read on the looming water wars over the dwindling Colorado River supply. Meanwhile, there are more than 370 golf courses in Arizona, so cry me a river.

The floor’s yours.

DL Open Thread Friday, April 17, 2026

Data centers: To know them is to hate them:

[T]he share of Virginians saying they’d be “comfortable” if a new data center were built in their community has plummeted to half the level it was at just three years ago. In 2023, 69 percent of state residents said a new data center was fine with them; today, that figure stands at just 35 percent. Democratic support for such data centers has collapsed from 72 percent three years ago to a bare 28 percent today; Republican support has sunk by a smaller but still impressive 20 percentage points, from 67 percent in ’23 to 47 percent in ’26.

And that’s in a state where the tax structure has actually made it a boon to public finances. In most places, including Delaware, that won’t be the case.

Remember when SCOTUS chief justice John Roberts said their job was calling balls and strikes? Yeah, right. Tell that to Big Clarence:

Thomas delivered a televised broadside against progressivism, a political philosophy he described as an existential threat to America and the principles that founded it 250 years ago.

“Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” Thomas said. … “[Progressivism] holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government,” he said. “It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”

He said that the values enshrined in the 1776 Declaration of Independence have “fallen out of favor” among Americans — a trend perpetrated, he argued, by “intellectuals” and the nation’s colleges and universities. Thomas also said he believes many people no longer believe “all men are created equal” and deserving of “unalienable rights” protected by a limited government.

You want to slag Joe Biden? Slag him for botching the Senate hearings on Clarence Thomas, the most corrupt justice in the history of the Supreme Court.

Trump, meanwhile, is slavering at the prospect of replacing Thomas with someone younger. Alito, too.

You know why conservatives love guns? Because they’re fucking scared of everything, even (checks notes) computer programmers from the Indian subcontinent:

FRISCO, TEXAS – Far-right activists are seizing on a new example of the America they fear. It’s a booming, Texas city home to the Dallas Cowboys’ practice facility and a PGA golf resort.

The activists’ problem? The city’s population of Indian immigrants and people of Indian descent has grown dramatically in recent years as the town has massively expanded. Per the 2020 census, it was America’s fastest-growing city. The 2000 census put Frisco’s population at 33,000. By 2020, it was 200,000; the city’s mayor told TPM he estimates the current population to be around 250,000. With that growth, the demographics have also shifted. The 2020 census estimated that around a quarter of Frisco residents were Asian; city planners now estimate that Asians account for one-third of the population.

City officials boast about what they regard as the fruits of years of planning: multinational tech corporations with new offices in the city, endless soccer fields, a new library with a massive T. rex skeleton inside, a gleaming megamall, and, of course, the HQs of the Dallas Cowboys and PGA America. Vast, freshly built housing tracts coat the landscape. The few trees are thin and new.

But for a coterie of area activists and influencers, the influx of Indians — some on H-1B work visas, others citizens of Indian descent — is a real-life example of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Under that idea, elites are replacing white Americans — sometimes referred to by right-wing activists as “Heritage Americans” — with nonwhite foreigners in a bid to gain political power. That narrative about Frisco has been magnified in recent days by national political figures. Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX), who represents a district near Frisco, cited the city’s demographic changes during a recent podcast appearance to demand an end to the H-1B worker visa program.

“We’ve got communities like Frisco that have been totally transformed, whether it’s Islamic immigration or immigration from anywhere else in Asia,” Gill said. “I don’t want to hear Muslim calls to prayer in my community. I do not want the caste system socially in the schools that my kids are going to because we’ve had so many people come to the United States who are not assimilating into American culture.”

You’ll note the Sharia Law bugaboo raised again. If these people are afraid of religious law, maybe they ought to stop pushing their own version of it.

The floor’s yours.

New Poll: Who’s Next Redux

After our last poll, it took just one week for Trump to pull the trigger on Pam Bondi, so let’s see if it takes that long for the next domino to fall.

The rumor mill is awash with possibilities. Most pundits, noting the femalitude of Trump’s first two sacrificial lambs, see Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Tulsi Gabbard in the Dotard-in-Chief’s crosshairs, but let’s face it, neither reason nor consistency figure large in Trump’s decision-making.

Pam Bondi was only the third choice of the crowd for our last poll, which had Pete Hegseth as the most likely cabinet member to walk the plank. Let’s see if voters can do better this time. Don’t dally – with his failures coming bigger and faster, we might not have to wait a week to find out.

BREAKING: Trump Fires AG Bondi

Those who predicted her firing in our DL Poll may collect their prize–a free subscription to Delaware Liberal.

She apparently was fired because most of the attempted prosecutions of Trump’s enemies fell apart.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04/02/us/trump-news”

“The dismissal of Ms. Bondi, 60, ends a turbulent 14-month tenure as attorney general in which she tried desperately to appease a boss who demanded unimpeded control of the Justice Department to pursue politically motivated investigations against targets of his choosing, even when prosecutors warned that there was no evidence to do so.

The president’s support for Ms. Bondi has been steadily eroding since last summer, when her initial mistakes in managing the release of the Epstein files created a political liability for Mr. Trump among his supporters. He has also complained about her shortcomings as a communicator and TV surrogate — a role he thought would suit her talents.

Who’s next?

Song of the Day 3/12: Dean Martin, “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head”

The absurd story about Donald Trump giving his bootlicking cabinet Florsheim dress shoes that they’re all afraid to not wear has a perfect follow-up: The company that makes them is suing his administration for a refund of his arbitrarily imposed tariffs.

After the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs illegal, Thomas Florsheim Jr., CEO of Weyco, told reporters that his company paid a rate as high as 145% on shoes it imported from China last year. When it moved production to India, imports from that country were hit with tariffs too. Well, ain’t that a kick in the head.

Dean Martin recorded the Jimmy Van Heusen-Sammy Cahn tune in 1960 for the original “Ocean’s Eleven,” the 1960 Rat Pack heist film. Martin recorded it in an arrangement by Nelson Riddle and released it as a single that failed to chart.

The version used in the movie featured the Red Norvo Trio and used a different arrangement than the one Martin recorded.

Once the movie left theaters, the song sank into oblivion until it turned up on an album of Martin’s greatest hits in the late ’80s. Then Robert DeNiro used it in his directorial debut, “A Bronx Tale,” in 1993. Dozens of singers have recorded it since, and it turns up fairly often in period films.

Democratic Skunks in the Middle of the Road Not Dead Yet

Anybody who wants to see progressive government should realize that Republicans, who hate all Democrats, are not the people working hardest to block the path to progress. That distinction goes to the so-called “moderate” Democrats, who are nothing but pro-business shills who lack the sadistic streak necessary to win GOP primaries.

This has been obvious in Delaware for more than a decade, ever since the Tea Party loons purged the GOP of their Mike Castle-style moderates. In the years since, we’ve seen imposters who run as Democrats but get lots of campaign donations from Castle Republicans (looking at you, Matt Meyer), as well as self-interested pro-business labor organizations like those represented by Aunt Jemima-loving James Maravelias.

Instead of offering voters a clear choice between a GOP that serves the rich and a populist party that holds the rich accountable, so-called centrists want to do the same thing Republicans do: Lie to voters about whose interests they’re really out to protect.

You can’t find clearer evidence of this than an event held in South Carolina earlier this month by Third Way, the “moderate” bunch who still think we’re living in the Bill Clinton era. American Prospect published a report on it a couple of days ago.

A group of Democratic Party moderates gathered in Charleston, South Carolina, last Sunday and Monday for an [invitation-only} event organized by Third Way, an influential group in the party’s moderate wing.

The event, entitled “Winning the Middle,” brought together elected officials, prominent pundits, data gurus, communication savants, and industry figures with one goal in mind: how to block a progressive from winning the party’s nomination for president in 2028.

What is immediately apparent watching the event is a total lack of any positive vision. Rather than propose a worked-out centrist platform, or even suggest opposition to the Trump administration, the event largely defined itself in opposition to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Third Way president Jonathan Cowan gave a speech that focused not on what Republicans are doing to destroy the country but all the progressive things his group opposes.

Explaining their health care vision, Cowan said that the assembled luminaries stood for “universal health care under the ACA, not Medicare for All and the end of private insurance.” While Cowan adopted the left’s rhetoric of “universal health care,” he failed to note that the Affordable Care Act not only has not achieved universal health care, but also only became net popular seven years after its passage, following an attempted repeal by the first Trump administration. The ACA was an improvement in many ways, but it was hardly the easy messaging win Cowan was making it out to be.

On work in the 21st century, the assembled moderates “believe in the dignity of work, not UBI [universal basic income]. And for that work to lead to wealth, we desperately need a new economic bargain for the working class.” On energy issues, Cowan outlined a 2010-vintage vision of “all of the above on clean energy, not just wind and solar,” as if renewables were not the cheapest form of power in history, and oil now shooting past $100 a barrel.

As if the speech were not already vague enough, on cultural issues Cowan stated that “we know we must be reasonable and normal,” and that “we can respect the humanity of transgender Americans while enforcing strict rules to protect kids.” What rules, precisely? Are we talking about right-wing gender inspectors at every middle school track meet? Because that’s how those “strict rules” tend to work out in practice.

Though the affirmative vision for the world may have been lacking, confidence in their diagnosis of the problem was not. The fact that the Democratic Party is more unpopular than ever before—even among its own base—was repeated ad nauseam, proof that the party had drifted so far left it had alienated even its own voters. The solution to this historic unpopularity? Coordination between the invitees to lock progressive candidates and groups out of the party.

I’ve probably exceeded fair use limits as it is, so to quote El Somnambulo, read the whole thing.

Song of the Day 3/10: Travis, “New Shoes”

If you had asked me whether this story was real or something that ran in the Onion, I’d have guessed the Onion, but no, it’s real. It seems Donald Trump is in the habit of giving his aides a rather odd gift: $145 Florsheim men’s dress shoes. I’ll quote the Raw Story report, and tell me this doesn’t sound like the Onion:

According to a Wall Street Journal report by Alex Leary, the president has developed an obsession with the footwear and has made gifting them a ritualistic part of his Oval Office operations.

Trump has been known to suddenly pivot conversations to his “incredible” new shoes. During a January lunch with Tucker Carlson, he handed the media personality a pair of brown wingtips without warning. At cabinet meetings, he asks recipients: “Did you get the shoes?”

Some officials appear to feel compelled to wear the shoes in Trump’s presence despite their reservations, which has included putting them on and lacing them up during Oval Office meetings. One female White House official remarked: “All the boys have them.” Another joked: “It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them.”

The president has developed a system for the shoe distribution. He guesses people’s shoe sizes in front of them, asks an aide to place an order, and a week later a brown Florsheim box arrives at the White House — sometimes signed by Trump with a note of gratitude.

It’s the signed shoe boxes that make it art.

If this story line had been included in “Veep,” critics wouldn’t have just accused Armando Ianucci of jumping the shark. They would say he jumped a shark with a frickin’ laser beam attached to its head.

Travis formed in Scotland in the late ’90s and is popular in the UK, where nine of its 10 albums made the Top 10, but hasn’t had much success in the U.S. “New Shoes” appeared on its 2013 LP “Where You Stand.”

Important Lessons From Recent Elections

You might think the successful primary campaigns of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico are as different as, well, New York City and Texas. Mamdani is a Muslim democratic socialist, Talarico a Christian populist. But Michael Lange contends they both triumphed with similar strategies.

The Texas Senate Primary, pitting charismatic State Representative James Talarico against firebrand Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, featured almost none of the sharp ideological contrasts that defined the New York City Mayor’s race. … Still, there are remarkable similarities in how Talarico and Mamdani ran their underdog campaigns, compared with how Crockett and Cuomo – frontrunners flush with name recognition – failed to capitalize on their pronounced early advantages.

These nuances, not explicitly ideological, translated into how their coalitions manifested: Crockett’s base (older, Black) mirrored Cuomo’s, whereas Talarico’s coalition (younger, college-educated, White, Hispanic, lower-propensity) is reminiscent of Mamdani’s.

Mamdani and Talarico combined style and substance. They consistently released algorithm-oriented vertical videos, becoming omnipresent in the feeds of younger voters. (Talarico has credited Mamdani’s “Halalflation” video for inspiring a similar spot on high prices at the Texas State Fair.)

Each made a point to campaign seemingly everywhere, while making deliberate and nuanced outreach to lower-propensity voters. Both modeled a positive campaign ethos, rarely going negative on their opponents, while eschewing barn-burning rhetoric for inclusive and direct public addresses – neither ever raises his voice in speeches.

Told to downplay their religion, neither Mamdani, a practicing Muslim, nor Talarico, a devout Presbyterian (and seminarian), obeyed such tired orthodoxy. Ahead of the Democratic Primary in June, Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan, a seventeen-mile sojourn, alongside his supporters; when first running to flip a state legislative seat from red to blue, Talarico crisscrossed the entirety of his suburban district on foot.

But most importantly, these common aesthetics and values were paired with a unifying, class-based message: Mamdani’s articulation of the affordability crisis has been widely adopted (to varying degrees of success), but Talarico’s “it’s not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom” has emerged as a well-calibrated, swing-state adaptation.

Many political pundits have focused on the individual brilliance of Mamdani and Talarico, routinely at the expense of the voters who came together to support them both. In doing so, they have sorely underestimated the replicability of their respective coalitions elsewhere in the United States.

DL Open Thread Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026

The Epstein Files are like radioactive material with a long half-life, still killing the careers of people like Larry Summers, the overrated economist, long after the pedophile at the center of it all exploded. Summers out-creeped most others involved by seeking Epstein’s advice on bedding a younger colleague and “mentee” long after Epstein was convicted. Relentless reporting by the Harvard Crimson finally forced his resignation from the university.

Consequences haven’t materialized for Trump, of course, unless you count his ever-plummeting poll numbers. But there’s a chance that’s changing. As you’d expect from a gang of blithering idiots, the DoJ’s purge of Trump material in the files wasn’t entirely successful. Traces remained of allegations by a woman who said that Trump raped her when she was 13 years old, and other documents pertaining to her interviews with the FBI are missing. Democrats have seized on the discrepancies to hammer AG Pam Bottle-Blondie as the liar she so obviously is.

Political coverage is often disparaged by comparing it to coverage of horse racing, which is an insult to horse racing. Sure, horse’s asses are involved in both, but at least the horses run in an actual race rather than a popularity contest.

Regardless, the handicappers are having a field day in Texas, where both Democratic and Republican pols are gunning for the Senate seat held by John Cornyn. Democrats are bludgeoning each other over the contest between Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who garners a lot of attention with colorful criticism of her GOP colleagues, and clean-cut preacher boy James Talarico, who got lots of free media when CBS wouldn’t let Stephen Colbert interview him. A poll taken just before that foofaraw showed Crockett comfortably ahead.

The Republicans are in even more disarray as Cornyn is running neck-and-neck with one-eyed sleazeball AG Ken Paxton, with some other jerkwad taking enough of the vote to make a runoff likely. Is this the year Texas Democratic voters finally make their presence felt? As a horse player, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Knowledgable people who warned that so-called “smart” appliances could be hacked to act as spyware got confirmation this week. A Spanish engineer tried to hack his Chinese-made robot vacuum cleaner to respond to commands from his Playstation controller. He succeeded beyond his intent – he gained access to not just his own vacuum but 7,000 others around the world as well.

The Verge reported that the situation came to light when Sammy Azdoufal was trying to reverse-engineer his new DJI Romo vacuum so that he could control it with his Playstation 5 gamepad.

Azdoufal soon discovered that when his self-styled remote control app started communicating with DJI’s servers, “it wasn’t just one vacuum cleaner that replied. Roughly 7,000 of them, all around the world, began treating Azdoufal like their boss.”

Azdoufal found that he could look and listen through the vacuums’ live camera feeds and collected more than 100,000 messages from the devices. He could also use any robot’s internet protocol (IP) address to determine its approximate location. Azdoufal reportedly said he was not trying to hack into other devices. And, in fact, he contacted the Verge to inform the publication of the vulnerability.

The company claims to have fixed it, but the unanswered question for me: Who the fuck buys a $2,000 vacuum cleaner instead of hiring a housekeeper?

The floor’s yours.

DL Open Thread Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2026

I don’t watch State of the Union speeches because I avoid self-promotion no matter who the president happens to be, but apparently the Screeching Shitbag delivered the longest-ever such speech, apparently so he could cram in all the lies. I’ll chalk it up as a win for Trump on the basis that he didn’t foam at the mouth or shit his diaper. The mainstream news media sanewashed it, of course. Josh Marshall at TPM described it as low-energy and said the Democrats’ refusal to clap or stand for any of it got under his graphene-thin skin.

I can’t claim Maine is a good barometer for the country as a whole, but polling there shows the states Democrats are in no mood for business-as-usual centrism. The Democratic Senate primary there for the opportunity to challenge concern troll Susan Collins pits aging moderate Gov. Janet Mills against upstart oyster farmer Graham Platner.

The University of New Hampshire’s Pine Tree State Poll, released Tuesday morning, showed that Platner has built momentum since October. Five months ago, 58% of likely Democratic voters said the 41-year-old oyster farmer was their first choice to be the state’s next senator, compared with 24% who preferred the governor.

Now, with the June primary less than four months away, undecided voters have broken hard in Platner’s favor: 64% said he’s their first choice, while Mills has only jumped up to 26%.

It’s perhaps an unsurprising result, as Democratic voters overwhelmingly support the kind of economically populist anti-oligarchy politics that Platner – a proponent of Medicare for All and a federal billionaires’ tax, with backing from labor unions and Sen. Bernie Sanders – has unapologetically championed.

But Tuesday’s poll suggests his message is resonating beyond Democrats. Where a race between Mills and Collins has the Democrat leading by a single point, within the margin of error, Platner would be expected to win the general election comfortably with 49% of the vote to just 38% for Collins.

With the nation’s military poised to strike Iran, why hasn’t Trump pulled the trigger yet?

According to the reports, in a recent White House meeting with many top officials present, Gen. Dan Caine – whom Trump selected, and has since highly lauded, as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – said that a shortage of munitions and the absence of any allies would make a prolonged war with Iran very difficult. (In previous conflicts with Iran, some Gulf allies in the region have actively assisted; this time, they say they won’t even allow U.S. or Israeli planes or missiles to fly over their territory.)

Perhaps Trump figured it would be easy to bring the mullahs of Tehran to their knees. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s former fellow real-estate tycoon, now his chief emissary to crises around the world, suggested as much in an interview on Fox News over the weekend. Witkoff said Trump was “curious” as to why Iran hadn’t “capitulated” to the looming threat of an American attack. “Why,” Witkoff wondered, “under this pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do’? And yet, it’s sort of hard to get them to that place.”

Of all the remarks that Witkoff has uttered over the past year signifying his unsuitability for the job he’s been inexplicably handed, this one might take the proverbial cake. Why haven’t the Iranians surrendered before a shot is fired? Maybe because: A) Trump has offered them no serious way out of the crisis (the negotiation positions that Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have put on the table would be unacceptable to any head of state B) he’s left American military personnel and allies in the region vulnerable to a retaliatory attack, and C) he’s explicitly threatened to bring down Iran’s regime, so retaliation would likely be extreme, as there would be no reward for restraint.

The Trump regime’s war on Minnesota goes beyond the ICE attacks. The unbridled greed of Republicans threatens to unleash ecological disaster on a sensitive wilderness area.

The House of Representatives, at Rep. Pete Stauber’s urging, voted to roll back a ban on mining in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest. The 20-year “mineral withdrawal,” first implemented during the Obama years, had been reestablished by the Biden administration to protect the crown jewel of Midwestern federal lands — the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The GOP vote to rescind the ban relied on an arcane legal maneuver and was a handout to one primary beneficiary — the Chilean mining giant Antofagasta Plc and its subsidiary Twin Metals Minnesota, which are seeking to build a copper-nickel mine on national forest land just outside the borders of the Boundary Waters. Conservationists see the mine as a major pollution risk that could contaminate the region’s interconnected waterways, including the lakes and rivers within the wilderness area itself.

The wilderness area sits in a region which contains a major complex of copper, nickel and other platinum-group minerals. As AI data centers, electric vehicles and the like drive up copper prices, Twin Metals Minnesota wants those riches, and has worked the levers of power in Washington D.C. for more than a decade to get its way.

While the company pours money into lobbying efforts, it has found numerous energetic allies on Capitol Hill, chief among them Rep. Stauber. Last summer, he and his fellow Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee introduced a provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that could have provided Twin Metals with mining leases in perpetuity, while blocking judicial review of those leases. That provision ultimately failed, but Stauber is back for another round of political maneuvering.

Last month’s House vote to rollback the 20-year mining ban in Minnesota was accomplished using a little-known law called the Congressional Review Act, or CRA, which allows Congress to rescind regulatory rules issued by federal agencies. The 1996 law was rarely used before Trump’s first term, but Congressional Republicans have in recent years relied on it with increasing frequency to gut regulations that they dislike.

The floor’s yours.

BREAKING: Supreme Court Strikes Down Most Trump Tariffs

From the NYTimes:

The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that President Trump exceeded his authority when he imposed sweeping tariffs on imports from nearly every U.S. trading partner, a major setback for his administration’s second-term agenda.

The court’s 6-3 decision has significant implications for the U.S. economy, consumers and the president’s trade policy. The Trump administration had said that a loss at the Supreme Court could force the government to unwind trade deals with other countries and potentially pay hefty refunds to importers.

Mr. Trump is the first president to claim that a 1970s emergency statute, which does not mention the word “tariffs,” allowed him to unilaterally impose the duties without congressional approval.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the statute does not authorize the president to impose tariffs.

“The president asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it,” the chief justice wrote.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh dissented, with Justice Kavanaugh warning that any refund process could be a substantial “mess.”

Well, yes, a ‘mess’ entirely caused by Trump.