They Do It Again

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With just 39 days to go before the midterm elections the conservative majority on the Supreme Court couldn’t keep its hands off the ballot box. Once more they have used its secret shadow docket to overrule two detailed lower court decisions, allowing their patron Donnie Trump to include records from the Social Security Administration (SSA) in the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database made available to state offices. This allows states to request bulk searches using full or partial SSNs and linked SSA’s master files to verify citizenship for voter registration. Critics fear that states could use the system to purge large numbers of valid voters from their rolls ahead of the midterm elections.

The decision is bad because the Court should not be getting involved in elections, which the Constitution makes clear is, absence legislative action by Congress, a matter for the states to administer. Trump has in fact been pushing Congress to take such action but has failed to get new laws enacted in spite of a majority in both the Senate and the House. Once again, the conservative Court majority just can’t resist tipping the scales in favor of their president.

On the other hand, the order in Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters is not expected to have much of an impact on this November’s election. That is because states are not required to use the federal system, as they might be is a new federal law was anacted, and there is little interest among local and state election officials for it, because it has mistakenly flagged U.S. citizens as noncitizens in past searches.

The Court majority, clearly embarrassed by criticism of its use of the emergency docket to render significant judgments without explanation has, at least, been writing short explanations in recent actions. In this case they wrote that a lower-court ruling which had blocked the administration from rolling out the system was improper because it inhibited “the federal government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”

The emergency ruling was unsigned and gave no vote count, but the court’s three liberal justices joined in dissent, making the 6-3 party line vote obvious. In that 12-page dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the majority’s decision created the conditions for some states to cancel the voter registrations of at least some recently naturalized citizens or to force them to provide proof of citizenship before voting.

“The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” she wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Federal law establishes a 90-day “quiet period” before elections, in which wide-scale changes to state voter rolls cannot be made. The provision is meant to avert last-minute chaos in elections and is expected to prevent states from kicking large numbers of voters off their rolls in the weeks leading up to the midterm. Even the majority recognized that the 90-day rule “limits the potential impact” of the court’s action. However, the majority added that states should have the ability to use the federal system to make inquiries about voters on a case-by-case basis.

The conservatives on the Court could have left this matter alone. But that is not their style. The primary issues remain to be hammered out in the lower courts, as they should be. The real threat will be to the election for president in 2028.

Interestingly, the Court also unanimously blocked a Republican-backed congressional map in Missouri for a third time, People Not Politicians v Robert Onder, reverting the state to its 2022 map boundaries for November. With this action the Supremes rejected an appeal backed by the Republicans and the Trump administration, stating that Missouri must conduct its 2026 congressional election using the 2022 map lines following a state court determination that the newer map required voter referendum approval.

It has been a busy summer for the Court. The regular Court term doesn’t even start until October 5!

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Trump Über Alles

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Our petulant little leader has thrown another hissy fit. Donnie Trump has decided he doesn’t want any members of the news media asking questions he doesn’t want to answer, or printing stories he doesn’t like. As his latest attempt to stifle the press, he banned representatives of the cable channels CNN and MSNOW and the web site POLITICO from the White House campus, ordering the US Secret Service to confiscate their press passes. The two cable services immediately setup their cameras across the street.

WIU Professor of Broadcasting emeritus and Instagram commentator Samuel Edsall (@tvsam1) has imagined some mock dialogs which I copy here and which sum up the latest brilliantly:

Trump – “CNN, MS NOW and Politico are banned. They report FAKE NEWS.”
Media – “Name one story that was fake.”
Trump – “You said I’m threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center.”
Media – “You are.”
Trump – “Oh. Well, you guys say bad things about me.”
Media – “Because you do bad things.”
Trump – “Oh.”
Media – “And you lie all the time.”
Trump – “I never lie.”
Media – “That’s our favorite.” 

The rule of law has never meant anything to Trump, and we can expect all three news organizations to file petitions to block him as soon as the courts open for business. For the record, here are the precedents:

Sherrill v. Knight (1977): The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that once the White House sets up press facilities, it cannot exclude a credentialed journalist without a compelling reason. The court established that excluded reporters must receive explicit factual notice, a chance to respond, and a written explanation (due process).

CNN v. Trump (2018): When the Trump administration revoked CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s press pass following a contentious news conference, CNN sued. A federal judge ordered the pass restored, ruling that the sudden revocation violated the reporter’s Fifth Amendment due process rights because the administration’s decision-making process was arbitrary and opaque.

Karem v. Trump (2020): The D.C. Circuit upheld a ruling blocking the Trump administration from suspending the press credentials of Playboy correspondent Brian Karem. The court reaffirmed that due process protections apply to White House press badges and that the government must provide fair notice before attempting discipline.

Associated Press v. Budowich (2025): After the administration restricted AP access to the Oval Office over an editorial naming dispute regarding the Gulf of Mexico, a federal court granted a preliminary injunction finding the selective exclusion amounted to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

Press access to the White House is not the only issue Trump ranted about in the last week. Getting his name on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts remains high on his agenda. Here is another Edsall imagined dialog:

Americans – “Can you do something about inflation?”
Trump – “I want my name on the Kennedy Center.
Americans – “How about gas. Diesel is at a record high.”
Trump – “I want my name on the Kennedy Center.”
Americans – “Do you have any exit strategy on the Iran war?
Trump – “The greatest president in the world, ME, needs his name on the Kennedy Center.”
Americans – “Are you hearing anything we say?”
Trump – “I want my name on the Kennedy Center.” 

Trump is not the only person living in a fantasy world. Vice-President and chief supplicant JD Vance has taken to pursing a fascinating line of reasoning as he campaigns on behalf of Republican candidates in the upcoming midterm election. The most recent NBC News poll shows Trump’s sinking ratings threaten to drag down Republicans as voters blame him for high prices and a shaky economy. Vance doesn’t even try to defend the record. He has been reduced to pleading with voters to give the administration more time to make good its promises.

Edsall again:

JD Vance – “Give us another chance. Give us another couple of years to continue to work on all the amazing things we’ve been doing for the past two years.”
America – “You promised no new wars.”
Vance – “Its an excursion.”
America – “He said on day 1 he would end inflation.”
Vance – “Affordability is a hoax.”
America – “He promised to cut our energy bill by 50%.”
Vance – “He did?”
America – “And interest rates.”
Vance – “He said that?”
America – “And end the Ukraine war.”
Vance – “Never mind.” 

Fiction? Fact? Speculation? These days, what’s the difference?

Update 9-21

As predicted, the three news organizations filed a lawsuit against Trump and others demanding their press access to the White House be restored. They have asked for an emergency temporary restraining order. I have uploaded their complaint here.

The case has been assigned to Judge Timothy Kelley. He handled the 2018 lawsuit CNN v. Trump noted above. He has scheduled a hearing for Sept 23.

One of the blocked networks, CNN, was scheduled to be the “pool” covering Trump today and feeding video to all the pool members. With CNN access denied, the pool decided not to cover Trump today as he travels to New York for a speech tomorrow at the United Nations.

Bryan Boughton, the Washington bureau chief at Fox News and the acting chair of the television pool consortium, wrote in a note to pool members on Monday that the decision to halt TV pool coverage “follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties.” In the note, which was obtained by The New York Times, Boughton wrote that pool coverage of non-presidential events would continue as normal. “We will provide updates as this situation develops,” he wrote.

The New York Times live blog

The five networks that have suspended their pool coverage of President Trump — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC — just issued a joint statement: “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

Michael Grunbaum, Media Reporter, The New York Times

For the first time in my 30 years of covering the White House, the president will not have a network TV camera covering his everyday official actions and travels.

Peter Baker, Chief White House Reporter, The New York Times

Update 9-24

All three media outlets that President Donald Trump banned from the White House were allowed back in Sept. 24 after US District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee. ruled that the revocation of their credentials probably violated the Constitution.

Judge Kelly had ordered the administration to respond by 12:30 p.m. ET. CNN, MS NOW and Politico announced that their reporters were let back in just after noon, though many of them were initially denied access in the morning. Micah Stopperich, director of White House press operations, submitted a statement to the court that the press credentials were restored Thursday morning and available for retrieval before 10 a.m.

#####

9-11 at 25

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Empty holes. Water flows into them like fountains into a bottomless pit. Names of the dead engraved in the stone ringing the perimeter. It is quiet, almost serene.

This is where the twin towers stood. Until the morning of September 11, 2001.

It is not quiet at the moment. As I watch the scene on television, the plaza is packed. The grieving are reading the names of the 2,977 people who died that day at the hands of 19 terrorists who commandeered two airplanes and drove them into the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. They also hijacked two other planes and drove them into the Pentagon in Washington, 184 died there, and into a field in Pennsylvania, where 40 died.

On September 11, 2001, I was the Bureau Chief for public television’s Nightly Business Report. Our newsroom and studio were on Trinity Place, two blocks south of Tower #2. I lived on Rector Place in Battery Park City, a community built on land reclaimed from the Hudson River using landfill from the excavation of the Trade Center site. A view of the south side of Tower #2 filled my bedroom window.

Today I regularly teach students who had not yet been born in 2001 or were so young 25 years ago that they have no direct memory of what was the most traumatic day of my life. One third of the people living in the United States today were not here on that day.

I have written about these events several times. I will not do so again now. The memories bring back images that produce nightmares. I talk to someone about that. I’ve also put down my thoughts as well as I will ever be able to and you can, if interested, read them here.

The US stock markets never opened for trading that day. Since market news accounted for half of the content of our broadcast, we canceled our report that night, which allowed the PBS NewsHour, based in Washington, DC, extra time to produce an expanded report. But in midafternoon, before the police ordered us to evacuate our office building, we were able to get a transmission link to DC, and we transmitted the pictures our brave camera crews had recorded of the disaster.

Then we turned on the lights, and I sat down on our set, looking well worn, and described what I had seen in an interview with the NewsHour‘s Ray Suarez. As it turned out, that interview was the last transmission we made from that lower Manhattan location. You can watch the entire NewsHour program here. My interview is at 24:30. Six months later, I filed an expended look back, and look ahead, for Nightly Business Report, which I’ve uploaded here.

The rebuilding which I talked about in that six-month story, did take a very long time. But it did succeed. Lower Manhattan is booming and there is little, save for the memorial at the actual Trade Center site, to remind one of the tragic events of that day. A single new tower, One World Trade Center, is as of this writing the tallest building in North America and the Western Hemisphere. Battery Park City is revitalized and renewed, and in great demand. My wife and I moved to New Jersey in 2002. We lived for twenty years in Montclair. We are now in Princeton.

I still reflect on the events of that day from time to time. Here are several disjointed observations.

There was an amazing sense of unity in the nation following the tragedy. The political parties came together in a unified way pledging to rebuild and reform. As the process proceeded, we lost much of that unified spirit. The use of federal funds to help New York City recover dissolved into the usual partisan battles. Why, some wondered, should the nation have to “bail out” New York City? That question ignores that fact that it was not New York City’s foreign policy that had drawn the ire of the terrorists who perpetrated the attack.

The attack itself has changed in our collective memory. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in an internal memo leaked to the media advised its reporters not to refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as “terrorist attacks” without attribution. This political correctness is absurd.

The 9-11 attack was perpetrated by the Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaeda. The ringleader, Mohamed Atta, flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower. The Central Intelligence Agency informed President George W. Bush that its Counterterrorism Center had identified the attacks as having been the work of al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden. In 1996 bin Laden issued the first of two fatwās (Arabic: “religious opinions”) declaring a holy war on the United States. His goal was to draw the US into a large-scale war in the Muslim world that would overthrow the existing order and establish a single Islamic state.

Intelligence services from around the world, including Russia, helped the US locate bin Laden. He was in Afghanistan and believed to be in a mountainous area known as Toro Boro. Yet he managed to escape. Bin Laden was finally located in Pakistan in 2011. He was killed there by US Special Forces. Al-Qaeda released a statement publicly acknowledging bin Laden’s death and vowing revenge. They are still out there. We should not forget.

In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, the US received unprecedented support from nations around the world. NATO invoked for the first time and only time to date its Article 5, acknowledging that an attack on one was an attack on all. This is the same NATO Donald Trump consistently ridicules, threatening to leave the alliance.

When the US closed its airspace on 9-11, Canada, in what came to be known as Operation Yellow Ribbon, took in between 225 and 240 flights at 17 airports and cared for passengers. One town, Gander, on the island of Newfoundland, took in 38 planes. Gander at the time had fewer than 10,000 residents. Yet it welcomed more than 6.,500 passengers and crews from around the world. This is what friends do, even if Trump insists on treating the Canadians as an enemy today.

Domestically, it was determined that failures by many in the US intelligence community to share information crippled efforts to detect the threat which led to 9-11. With little objection, lawmakers vastly overhauled the laws, eliminating restrictions on information sharing, creating a new super intelligence bureaucracy, and a Director of National Intelligence.

It also created a new national police agency, the Department of Homeland Security, moving into one department virtually all the federal police agencies in the nation. It also provided for an expansion of federal policing efforts to create a domestic police force which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Federal Emergency Management Agence (FEMA), the US Coast Guard, and the US Secret Service.

DHS employs more than 240,000 people. Its very existence reflects a new culture of anxiety and fear in the nation on which Bin Laden waged war. I would not go so far as some and say he won that war. But while he may be dead and gone, he has had a profound impact on the United States. We are different post 9-11. We are, for good or bad, forever changed.

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Mayor Mamdani of Hamas

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There he is, Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York City, appearing in a video produced with all the trappings of a State of the City address or another important civic event and at taxpayer expense.

If Mamdani looks annoyed, it is probably because he is. He found himself forced to admit one of his major campaign issues was a promise that he could never deliver. In other words, he had to admit he lied. Throughout his campaign Mamdani promised voters he would arrest Benjamin Netenyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, should he ever have the temerity to show up in New York City. Netenyahu is expected to do just that to make his annual speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September.

In his high-profile video address, Mamdani admitted that New York City lacks the legal authority to arrest Netanyahu. That is true and was well known even while Mamdani was scoring political points with his pledge. When he threatens the Israeli prime minister, Mamdani references an arrest warrant issued for Netanyahu by the International Criminal Court. But the United States is not a party to the ICC and does not recognize its jurisdiction, a fact which makes the warrant worthless in the U.S. The ICC’s selection of targets to investigate is demonstrably political and biased. And its leadership faces severe allegations of sexual assault and misconduct. A 2002 law broadly prohibits US cooperation with the ICC.

In addition, the United States is a signatory of the United Nations Charter, and to the “host country agreement,” No. 147 in the United Nations Treaty Series. The charter and the agreement guarantee access by diplomats to the UN Headquarters in New York City. Delegates to the UN also enjoy diplomatic status and diplomatic immunity. This is binding under federal law. Heads of state visiting the US are under protection of the Secret Service. Did Mayor Mamdani imagine that when Mr. Netanyahu’s motorcade leaves the UN, the NYPD can pull it over and kidnap a head of state? The idea is preposterous.

So why did Mamdani make his promise?

It might be that the new mayor of the nation’s most populous city is just ignorant of these details. A New York City mayor need not be schooled in the art of foreign policy. But Mamdani is an intelligent man. He is well-schooled. He is a charismatic speaker. His words are well chosen.

No, ignorance does not explain this. The explanation is much simpler. Mamdani is obsessed with Jews. His head is filled with Jews. Mamdani hates Jews. He has, in fact, made a career out of exploiting his hatred of Jews before, during, and after his election. And he channeled his hostility toward Israel and its people by attacking Netanyahu in front of the world.

His video statement makes his position clear. Mamdani called the Israeli Prime Minister a “war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people”. He accused Netanyahu of the deaths of over 73,000 people, targeting hospitals, blocking humanitarian aid, and starving civilians. He demanded that the United States federal government step in, join the ICC, and execute the arrest warrant itself.

“Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large,” Mamdani said. “While we cannot end the genocide on our own, we can decide whether our silence will become another weapon, and we can examine every tool we have to defend the humanity and dignity of all people.”

Each claim is simply the reiteration of the antisemitic tropes Jews have been subjected to for millenniums. And by far better men than Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani tries to make a distinction between Jew, Israeli, Zionism, and antisemitism. Those who believe that is possible have a fundamental misunderstanding of what each term means.

I have generally avoided getting into the discussion of those tropes mainly because I have found that people who repeat them are not willing to discuss history, facts, or even grammar. They have a view that rejects civilized debate. I should probably knock them down in future posts. For this post I’m going to stick with what Mamdani says and does. His words and actions show what he is and has always been.

Mamdani took office on January 1, 2026. You might think he would address New York City’s challenges. Housing affordability is a real issue with market-rate rents near historic highs. The rising cost of living is squeezing families, small businesses continue to struggle, and public safety concerns are on the rise, including an increase in reported sexual assaults. These are the things a mayor should focus on.

Instead, on that first day, he found it necessary to officially revoke Executive Order 52, which had formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. That stripped away key protections for Jewish New Yorkers amidst rising hate crimes. He has since boycotted cultural events involving his Jewish constituents like the city’s Israel Day Parade.

In July Mamdani announced appointments to an 18-member Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, which screens and recommends judicial candidates for local courts. Mamdani did not appoint a single Jewish lawyer to the committee. He apparently could not a Jewish lawyer he felt was qualified. He did find Muslims to appoint.

Hate crimes against Jews have risen on Mamdani’s watch. NYPD officials reported 205 confirmed hate crimes against Jews between January and July 2026, up from 189 during the same period last year. Jews were targeted in more than half of all hate crimes, or 57%.

On August 14, 2026, a 46-year-old man named Larry Montes violently disrupted a Friday night Shabbat service at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. He shouted antisemitic slurs, struck a 63-year-old female congregant in the face, and assaulted a security guard. On July 23, 2026, a 51-year-old man named Raul Morales targeted and stabbed a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke near a synagogue on the Upper West Side. The attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the violent episode.

Yet Mamdani issued his first mayoral veto against a bipartisan City Council bill intended to combat antisemitism by expanding protest security around schools. He argued the bill would suppress free speech and harm labor, reproductive rights, and pro-Palestinian student demonstrations. He lifted the restriction on boycotting Israel. Nothing had happened yet. No crisis had landed on his desk. He walked in, and this is what he reached for first.

Manmdani has always had a perverse definition of “genocide.” While quick to apply the term to Israel, during a July 2026 press conference, he explicitly declined to label the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, as a genocide. As a New York State legislator, he formalized his alignment with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and openly accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. He has denied Israel’s right to exist as a specifically Jewish state.

Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, has been active on social media since she was a teenager posting in 2015, “Tel Aviv shouldn’t exist in the first place.” She apologized when those posts resurfaced. Watchdog groups and publications like Jewish Insider reported that Duwaji’s personal account had “liked” multiple Instagram posts that appeared to cheer on or celebrate the Hamas attacks on Israel in which 1,200 Israeli civilians were slaughtered, and 251 hostages were abducted and taken into the Gaza Strip.

Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a academic whose work on colonialism and Israel has faced severe allegations of antisemitism. A Columbia University professor, Mahmood Mamdani’s academic writings, which his son Zohran has credited as a major influence on his own political worldview, frequently center on the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

We are not asked our ethnicity or religion when we vote in the United States. But exit polls consistently showed roughly 33% of Jewish voters supported Mamdani in the November 2025 election, with 63% supporting independent Andrew Cuomo, and about 3% for Republican Curtis Sliwa.

Go figure.

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The Trump Court’s Summer

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The Supreme Court is only two thirds of the way through its three-month summer vacation. But the conservative majority has kept busy facilitating Donald Trump‘s marauding destruction of the institutions of the government, both physical and abstract. In so doing they have supported his strategy to wreak havoc on the nation, sowing a path of destruction so quickly his opponents can’t mount a defense quickly enough to stop him from achieving his goals. Their embarrassingly rash decisions make a mockery of the judicial process and the rule of law.

Mail-In Ballots

Using the tool of the Executive Order Trump has directed the United States Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots only to people on a federal list of voters. Never mind the fact that the Constitution assigns to the states control over the election process absent specific legislation passed by Congress. Never mind the fact that the law establishing the USPS charges it with delivering the mail and little more, making any attempt by that organization to restrict the mailing of ballots by the states and their return by the voters illegal. Never mind the fact that in spite of  Trump’s whining that mail-in ballots lead to election fraud not a single court has ever found such fraud affecting the outcome of an election. The Supreme Court members who Trump refers to as “my judges” interrupted their summer vacation to do his bidding.

The Executive Order has been challenged in multiple courts. Several issued injunctions, stopping the order from being implemented pending a full court review. This is known as preserving the status quo and with less than 60 days until the election, agrees with past challenges to election law and procedure.

Which sent Trump running, as he has done so many times before, to “his” judges. They found, on their emergency docket and without any formal brief or public arguments, that the status quo meant don’t interfere with Trump while the case is pending. This stands the entire concept on temporary injunctions on its ear. Trump v. California was decided on a strictly partisan vote, 6-3.

A whistleblower report to Congress from inside the USPS says the service is rushing out “untested” technology that could “derail” the upcoming election. State officials, in many cases about to send out their mail ballots, have no idea how they should respond to the order’s requirements. They only know they face criminal charges for failure to comply.

That is clearly what the conservative majority wants. They did caution that their order was preliminary and not a final decision on whether the administration’s order “will necessarily be lawful” once the plans are complete. “On that score, time will tell,” the majority said in the 10-page, unsigned order. But of course, the election will have come and gone and who knows how many voters will have been kept from casting their ballots by Trump’s action. Which is what he wants. The Court could have dealt with the substantive issues right then and there and eliminated the uncertainly. But that is not their plan.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, with a separate 23-page dissent, considered the merits. “The President does not have any legal authority to require that elections be conducted in accordance with his preferences,” she says, “or to withhold delivery of mail-in ballots that are not formatted consistent with the President’s wishes.”

The Ballroom

And then comes the matter of the ballroom. Everyone who has ever rented a place to live knows full well the lease does not give you the right to damage the place, least you sacrifice your security deposit and be subject to a lawsuit for additional damages. So, what do you think “We the People,” landlords of The White House, should charge Donald Trump? He has trashed the joint from end to end.

The West Wing offices have been gilded to look like the French Palace of Versailles. The lawns and gardens have been paved over like a roadside motel. And the East Wing has been totally destroyed and rising in its place is some sort of monstrosity which will dwarf the historic residence the people loan every four years to their president.

The conservative majority which dominates the Court won’t stop it.

Again, a district court granted an injunction to stop the building pending a full hearing on the key question, “Can a president do what he wants with the White House?” Again, the conservatives on the Supreme Court stayed the injunction, finding that preserving the status quo meant letting Trump continue pending the court hearings. Trump has the workers on the job 20 hours day with the clear expectation that he will have his giant ballroom finished before the court issues a final ruling. That is characterized by another French term, a fait accompli.

In July 2025, the White House said the ballroom would be funded by private donations and cost about $200 million. Later, the cost was adjusted to $400 million. Now, the price tag is closer to $600 million, according to contractor invoices, and about half will be paid by taxpayers. No surprise. The ballroom will be built with missile-resistant columns and a drone-proof roof. What will it cost if the next president decides to pull it down?

The Supreme Court’s shadow docket ruling, National Park Service v National Trust for Historic Preservation, didn’t address the legality of the project. Lower courts said the construction required congressional approval. The decision focused on whether the plaintiff, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, had the standing to bring a lawsuit. The trust had to show that the ballroom’s planned construction would, among other things, cause board member Alison Hoagland “harm.” How can a building inflict pain, and how could such suffering be quantified?

In a declaration, Hoagland wrote: “I would suffer both professional and personal injuries, including to my aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests.” Hoagland, a historian, said she enjoyed walking past the White House and feared that Trump’s addition would distort the building’s character.

This shadow docket ruling was so disgusting even Chief Justice John Roberts couldn’t stomach it, breaking with his five conservative collogues to join the liberals 5-4 and writing the dissent.

Wrote Roberts, “The White House is not just any building, and — when it comes to historic preservation — Hoagland is not just any person. In failing to appreciate as much, the Court misconceives the plaintiff’s injury, allowing the Executive’s likely infringement of the Legislature’s power of the purse and authority to regulate federal property in the District of Columbia to continue.”

The Trump administration didn’t go through the usual review process. But the Republican-controlled Congress, as usual, is not willing to do anything about it. Trump’s desire seems to be to remake Washington in his image. And to leave his name and likeness on as many parts of the government as possible.

An overhaul of the East Potomac Golf Links is about to begin. Trees are already facing the axe. A 250-foot triumphal arch will, according to the White House, start construction within weeks. Trump threatens to tear down the Kennedy Center unless he can put his name back up under the name of the fallen president.

Designed by Trump. Approved by nobody.

#####

Dolly Parton

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Often when I read the term “icon,” which means a person worthy of veneration, used to describe someone who has died I wonder if the accolade isn’t being overused. This is not one of those times.

Dolly Parton died on Tuesday in Nashville, surrounded by the people she loved. She was 80 years old. When the news broke, something happened that almost never happens anymore. Tributes came from everywhere. Country legends and rock stars. Faith leaders and Hollywood notables. Democrats and Republicans, all saying the same thing. In this terribly divided nation in a terribly divided world Dolly Parton passes away, and for a few days we agree on something. We agreed on Dolly, an icon to be mourned as a member of our own family.

Dolly was one-of-a-kind. That’s the exact definition of another often-misused word, “unique.” Unique cannot be qualified, a grammatical error that drives me up the wall every time I read it. The word applies, unqualified and unadorned to Dolly Parton. And that’s another thing. The proper second reference is “Parton.” Why can’t I bring myself to call her anything but “Dolly?” I never met her. But I think of her as a friend I wish I’d had.

Imagine having 11 Grammy awards, 3 Emmys, 25 no. 1 hit Billboard singles, and after you’re gone, no one is talking about that. They are just talking about how genuine and kind you were and about the impact you made on the world. How amazing.

Dolly was born in 1946 in a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee, the fourth of twelve children. Her family was, by her own description, “dirt poor.” Her father paid the doctor with a sack of cornmeal. She grew up wearing clothes her mother stitched together. One coat, sewn from rags, became one of the most famous songs she ever wrote. Her father, Robert Lee, was one of the smartest people she ever knew, and he never learned to read or write. She carried that her whole life.

She wrote more than three thousand songs. “Jolene.” “Coat of Many Colors.” “9 to 5.” “I Will Always Love You,” which became, in Whitney Houston’s recording, the best-selling single by a solo woman in history. Seven decades on stage.

She was merry about her public persona and invented a Dolly who would be famous forever. She said she modeled her look on the “town tramp.” She famously said, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” Asked by a young fan how long it took to do her hair Dolly exclaimed, “How do I know? I’m not there.”

She could have rested on those achievements and on her riches. Instead, she put as much effort into her philanthropy as she did into entertaining. She built a theme park, “Dollywood,” in the Tennessee hills that employs thousands of the people she grew up with. She became the wealthiest woman in the history of country music, and she did it while being underestimated at every turn by people who saw the wig and the rhinestones and missed the mind underneath. In 2020, she contributed $1 million to Vanderbilt University for virus research, which helped kick-start Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.

In 1995, thinking about her father and all the doors that stay closed to a person who can’t read, she started mailing free books to children in her home county. One book a month, from birth until age five, addressed not to the parents but to the child, so that a little kid in a cabin like the one she grew up in would get something in the mail with their own name on it. That program became the Imagination Library. It has now given away more than 300 million books across five countries.

Britain was one of those countries. The day after Dolly died the Band of the Coldstream Guards (the King’s Guard) played “9 to 5” outside Buckingham Palace in her honor. She once said, when they lay her down, she’d be thinking of the Imagination Library. And she made sure it wouldn’t end with her. Her team says she worked right up until the day she died and spent her last years building a plan to keep the books coming for decades.

Dolly turned her success and made it into a machine for lifting other people up. In her home county, she watched kids drop out of high school. She started offering every student who stayed and graduated a check for five hundred dollars. The dropout rate, in a place where it had always been stubbornly high, fell through the floor.

She never identified as a Republican or a Democrat. Only as a “hypo-crat,” she joked. She glittered with authenticity and empathy. The Democratic Socialists of America saluted her. Donald Trump said, “There has never been anyone like her, and never will,” before lowering flags to half-staff in her honor. Twice, the Trump administration offered her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the government’s highest civilian honor. Both times, she turned it down. When President Joe Biden took office, Parton said, his administration contacted her about it, too, but she didn’t accept. “If I take it,” she explained, “I’ll be doing politics.” Anyway, Parton added, she didn’t deserve it.

Her fans are young and old, working-class and wealthy. They live in tiny towns and big cities. She was deeply religious but never proselytized. She asked, “Who are we to judge?” “I don’t criticize and condemn,” Parton once said. “I love and accept.”

Her film work was natural and honest. Her co-stars praised her professionalism. The included Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Burt Reynolds, Sylvester Stallone, Julia Roberts and Queen Latifah. Among the films, “9 to 5” (1980), “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas’”(1982). “Rhinestone” (1984). “Steel Magnolias” (1989). “Joyful Noise” (2012).

“There are few finer songwriters, male or female, that have ever lived,” said the pop singer Pink in her 2022 speech inducting Parton into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She called her “one of the greatest storytellers of our time, of any time.” “She crafted heartbreaking and soul-stirring stories about the lives of people often overlooked,” Pink added. Parton’s songs, she noted, make up “a narrative of painful, beautiful, poetic melodic commentary on what it’s like to be human, and what it’s like to be a woman in America.”

Play the music. Screen the films. Mark the passing of an icon.

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That Damn Debt

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The official U.S. total public debt outstanding breached $40 trillion for the first time in history. It stands at $40,047,426,000,000 according to data released by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. It has increased by about three trillion dollars since January 20, 2025, when the current administration took office.

Considering how much he likes to brag about setting records you’d think Donnie Trump would be in front of the cameras proclaiming, “Biggest debt in history! No one has ever seen a debt as big as this. America is first! We’re winning.”

Instead, fearless leader is attending auto races and showing off his new helipad, $5 million dollars’ worth of big, ugly, granite adorned with his name and sitting on the White House lawn. Something else a future president will have to remove.

Trump left it to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to downplay the event, blame the record debt on Joe Biden, and insist the economy will “grow” out of it. The problem with that is obvious. The economy is growing at a rate of about 2%. The debt is growing at the rate of about 6%. As they say, the math ain’t mathin’.

To be fair, as the graph above makes clear, the debt has been growing steadily for decades under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Some of that is growth. Some of that is inflation. The key to watch is not the total debt amount but the ratio of debt to the nation’s total economic output, the GDP. The debt-to-GDP ratio compares a country’s total government debt to its gross domestic product (GDP). It shows a country’s ability to pay back its debts. The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is now roughly 124% to 125%.

Trump has stated dozens of times across his campaigns and presidencies that he would control, reduce, or completely eliminate the national debt and federal deficit, famously vowing during his 2016 campaign to wipe out the entire national debt within eight years. Despite these promises, Trump legislative actions, such as the 2017 and 2025 tax cuts, caused substantial increases in annual budget deficits and the overall national debt.

As this graph shows, there is a pattern which began in the Reagan years. The Republicans cut taxes without cutting spending. That increases the annual budget deficit and accelerates increases in the debt. Democrats take control and reduce the deficit, only to have the Republicans repeat the trend the next time they get in control. (By the way, I had AI assistance in doing the actual drawing, but I am responsible for finding the numbers and designing both graphs. The numbers come from the Federal Reserve and the Department of Commerce.).

While Republicans like to blame Democrats for the debt, the facts don’t bear that out.

This graphic summarizes the changes in the total debt going all the way back to the Reagan administration. It was then that I first heard the term “trickle-down economics.” The idea was that if you cut taxes for the top backets, they will spend more money, and the effects will pass down to the people in lower brackets. It sounded good to me at the time. But the evidence since has shown it doesn’t work. Nothing trickles. The rich just get richer and the gap between the rich and the rest of us grows larger.

To finance the debt the government borrows money., It does that by issuing securities, Treasury Notes and Bonds. The interest rate it pays is the “cost” of borrowing. More borrowing, more securities. To convince investors to keep buying trillions of dollars in new debt, the U.S. government must offer competitive interest rates. The 10-year treasury yield is currently about 4.7%. The bond market is struggling to meet the demand.

Bessent is doubling long-term government bond buybacks to curb rising rates and inject liquidity into the debt market. On August 19, 2026, the Treasury Department shocked Wall Street by announcing it will increase its buyback operations for 10-year to 30-year bonds to at least $4 billion per operation, up from the previous $2 billion cap. Bessent is executing a strategy he calls a “Treasury Twist“. By purchasing less-liquid, older (“off-the-run”) long-term bonds, the Treasury removes overall duration from the market. To fund these purchases, the Treasury issues short-term bills. This shifts supply to parts of the yield curve better equipped to absorb it. Critics argue that the sudden, unscheduled policy shift disrupts the Treasury’s traditional framework of being regular and predictable, causing further investor anxiety.

Bessent’s action is like putting a Band-Aid on a wound that needs a torniquet. He has joined Trump in an alternate reality. The market isn’t buying it.

When the government borrows hundreds of billions each month, it competes directly with private borrowers for capital. The massive government demand can push up overall interest rates across the entire economy. This means Americans end up paying significantly more for mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, and business loans.

And just like a household credit card, a larger balance means a larger monthly minimum payment. Net interest payments are quickly becoming one of the largest single components of the federal budget. Every dollar spent on interest is a dollar that cannot be spent on infrastructure, national defense, scientific research, tax cuts, or programs like Social Security and Medicare.

If investors eventually begin to worry that the U.S. will never be able to pay back its debt through normal revenues (taxes), they may fear that the government will simply print more money to cover the gap. Flooding the global economy with dollars to inflate away the debt devalues the currency. For us everyday Americans, this manifests as persistent, long-term inflation, reducing the purchasing power of our hard-earned savings and wages.

Time for Donnie and Bessent to play another round of golf.

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