“Presidential power is now running rogue. Congress needs to push back at its roots and use the War Powers Resolution of the 1970s to end both the Iran War and the continuing War on Terror. The president’s own party is paralyzed by congressional members’ fear that an adverse tweet from Trump will end their political careers, even though there should be strength in numbers to do the right thing. However, many should be even more frightened that the American people will fire them in November if they don’t act to end this pointless war of choice now.” (05/15/26)
“The pardon power is different from other constitutional powers. It is unchecked and absolute: There is no other branch of government that can interfere with a president’s pardons. The Constitution was created in the shadow of absolute royal power; it was designed to resist the corruption of such power. The division of government into three separate branches is meant to ensure a system of checks and balances on government power. From this perspective, the pardon power stands out: The unilateral pardon power looks like the last remaining remnant of royalism in the Constitution. … Do Donald Trump’s pardons give us good reason to change the rules of the Constitution? Is it time to put the brakes on solo pardon power? I think there are lessons to be learned from the president’s abuse of office.” (05/15/26)
“The golden age of airline service was also an era of restriction and high prices. From deregulation to the downfall of no-frills Spirit, competition exposes what travelers are truly willing to pay for.” (05/15/26)
“The federal Food and Drug Administration nannies have been tormenting Americans for decades, which is no surprise given the pitfalls of putting bureaucrats in charge of such an important function as determining the safety of our food supply, and evaluating drugs and medical devices. Frankly, it’s amazing that we all haven’t starved to death or been denied basic medications, given the FDA’s Byzantine approval process. … One of the benefits, however, of the Trump administration’s Overton-Window-shifting approach toward health policy is its lighter touch toward substances that previous administrations had approached with a prohibitionist view.” (05/15/26)
“Two recent news items have spurred the return of the tariff issue to the front burner of American politics. First (at the time of writing), President Trump will attend a summit with People’s Republic of China (PRC) President Xi Jinping in May. Second, U.S. Steel has announced plans to resume operations at its Gary, Indiana, tin mill. And, again, one will hear the Free Traders shrilly bemoaning how ‘tariffs are a tax on consumers.’ If one were to honestly accept the Free Traders’ logic that a company passing off its costs of compliance with a federal statute and/or regulation on to consumers constitutes a ‘tax,’ one would then be required to declare almost every governmental decision touching upon the health, safety, and welfare of the nation a tax as well.” (05/16/26)
“‘Could this be the Antichrist?’ So wondered out loud today’s most popular conservative voice … about President Donald J. Trump. That commentator, Tucker Carlson, then answered himself: ‘Well, who knows?’ Later, speaking to Lulu Garcia-Navarro with The New York Times, Mr. Carlson denied (thrice) ever verbalizing that eschatological question. Of course, as Scott Jennings points out, Tucker contextualized the matter by asserting that the president was ‘more of a hostage’ to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in deciding to go to war against Iran. ‘Seems to me it has to be one or the other,’ offered Jennings. ‘Are you a supernatural evil being or are you some weak hostage or slave to other people?'” (05/15/26)
“The ruling is a victory not just for one Texas title company, but for the principle that agencies like FinCEN can only do what Congress actually authorized.” (05/15/26)
“Much of the panic around AI rests on pointing out absolute advantages. LLMs can write clearly and convincingly. They summarise large documents quickly. They generate passable Python scripts in seconds. In these discrete tasks, AI is a direct competitor. If a job is merely a collection of such tasks, the human worker is in trouble. The Ricardian challenge, however, is to identify where AI has a comparative advantage and whether this manifests itself at the job level. Comparative advantage is determined by opportunity costs. For humans, the binding constraint is time. For AI, the constraint is compute. These are very different constraints, and they are different enough to keep humans in the picture.” (05/15/26)
“President Trump’s much-heralded trip to Beijing, the first summit in Beijing since 2017, yielded nothing of value. The only good thing about it was that Trump evidently did not give away the store on Taiwan or on exports of sensitive technology. One concrete thing that President Xi Jinping might have done didn’t happen. Xi could have agreed to put pressure on China’s ally, Iran, to split the difference with Trump and end the war. But neither the official communiqué nor White House leaks said anything about progress on Iran. The real work, if any, will continue behind the scenes. There have been leaks that China agreed to buy more U.S. oil, agricultural products, and Boeing planes, but that has not been confirmed by the Chinese side.” (05/16/26)
