Analysis: Kevin Warsh has three reasons to hold off on a Fed rate hike this week
Source: Politics · Bias: Center
Summary
At the Fed’s July meeting, the new chairman will reveal how he weighs energy shocks, AI-driven price pressure, the task forces and pressure from Trump.
Analysis: Kevin Warsh has three reasons to hold off on a Fed rate hike this week
Center
At the Fed’s July meeting, the new chairman will reveal how he weighs energy shocks, AI-driven price pressure, the task forces and pressure from Trump.
Brian Hurton died alone in East Kilbride, Scotland, after calling 999 twice, complaining of severe breathing problems. Dispatchers told him…
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A top immigration policy expert accused a right-wing online news source of spreading an “outrageous lie” on Monday about the US Department of Homeland Security’s top statistician, who resigned over the weekend and cited President Donald Trump’s “war on immigrants” as a major reason for his departure.America First Post wrote in a post on social media that Marc Rosenblum, who until recently was the executive director of the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), “easily could’ve been underreporting deportations or illegal populations, ruining data.”Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, countered that Rosenblum sought under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration to publish “the most transparent data on immigration enforcement ever; monthly information on [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection] arrests and removals, stuff that had NEVER been published before.”Such data has not been published since the first days of Trump’s second term in the White House, said Reichlin-Melnick, as the president has ramped up deportation operations and federal agents have violently carried out his anti-immigration agenda—arresting more than 10,000 people in a recent five-day span and killing at least 11 people during enforcement operations.In a post on LinkedIn, Rosenblum wrote that over 10 years, the team he managed at OHSS grew from 11 people to 45 people under the Biden administration.“We matured official data processing to update monthly,” wrote Rosenblum. “We launched new lines of daily and weekly internal reports. We massively expanded our analytic capacity.”“My OHSS co-workers are outstanding career federal civil servants. They are smart, mission-focused experts who produce high-quality results in a challenging and often hostile work environment,” he continued. “But it will come as no surprise that I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration. Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.”Daniel Delgado, a former DHS deputy assistant secretary for immigration policy, said the department was “far better off for the work that Marc accomplished, no matter how hard the current incompetent leadership try to hide it.”David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute—which has found that the majority of immigration arrests made last year were of people who had no criminal convictions—told NOTUS last November that under the Trump administration, DHS was providing “no accountability, no way to assess, no public understanding about what’s really going on that is not curated by a press release from the agency.”Reichlin-Melnick has also frequently spoken out about the lack of data being publicly released by DHS to back up its claims about immigration arrests.While DHS has repeatedly claimed in public statements that its agents are getting “the worst of the worst off our streets,” the agency’s own “Worst of the Worst” database released late last year showed less than 10,000 people who had been arrested—a tiny fraction of the 220,000 people who had been detained by federal agents up to that point.“Marc Rosenblum was one of the most dedicated civil servants I’ve ever met, a man who spent his career working to get DHS to share more data,” said Reichlin-Melnick. “Since Trump took office last year, his office has been repeatedly blocked from sharing previously public data.”
In all likelihood, the Federal Reserve Board will leave interest rates unchanged when it concludes its two-day meeting on Wednesday. Yes, inflation remains above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, but that is largely because of transitory factors such as higher energy prices, which are a consequence of geopolitical events rather than excessive demand by American households. Importantly, […]
President Donald Trump’s latest effort to weaponize the Department of Justice against his enemies will fail for a simple reason: geography. This is according to former federal prosecutors, who told NBC News that Trump’s attempt to prosecute ex-special counsel Jack Smith will almost certainly meet the same fate as the president’s other recent lawfare endeavors. As one lawmaker characterized the likely outcome, “It will get laughed out of court.”As NBC News explains, “Trump has made no secret that he thinks former special counsel Jack Smith should be prosecuted, but his administration would be likely to have a tough time pursuing the charges a top Republican in Congress recommended last week.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), a staunch Trump ally, advised that Smith be prosecuted for allegedly misleading Congress regarding the investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. But according to several former federal prosecutors, Smith will likely be saved by two things. First, it’s a matter of location. “The Sixth Amendment requires criminal prosecutions to be brought in the jurisdictions where the crimes were committed,” explains NBC. “Because Smith testified in person in Washington, several former prosecutors said, the charges would need to be brought in Washington.”“I don’t see a way this could be charged elsewhere,” Mike Romano, a former attorney in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, said of any potential attempt to charge Smith over the testimony. “It happened in D.C. when he testified at Congress; it would have to be charged in D.C.”In D.C., however, “grand jurors have previously rejected novel cases against people Trump wants imprisoned.” Grand juries are comprised of local residents, and in D.C., Trump secured a mere 6 percent of the vote in 2024. Because of this, the city’s jurors “have generally stood as a bulwark against some of the administration’s most aggressive maneuvers, including a failed effort by allies of Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, to indict six sitting members of Congress over a social media video back in February. While most federal grand juries often act as rubber stamps for assistant U.S. attorneys and almost always find the prosecutors have met the low threshold of probable cause, D.C. grand juries have pushed back against cases in Trump’s second term, including declining last summer to indict a man on a felony charge for tossing a Subway sandwich at an officer.”What’s more, says Gregory P. Rosen, a former supervisor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, the case against Smith is unlikely to succeed simply because there is a “high bar to prosecute.”“Even if you could get a charge to technically clear the bar, any competent prosecutor still has to ask the threshold question: Is this worth bringing? Is the juice worth the squeeze?” Rosen said. “I have a hard time — to say it mildly — seeing how this gets past a grand jury, let alone in front of a jury that has to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”He does note, however, that good-faith prosecution may not be the point, explaining, “What the administration has done so far has been to bring weak cases that nonetheless make a splash in the news, suggest that there is some wrongdoing by people and create a real drain on people’s time and money and resources to have to defend themselves. That’s not how the criminal justice system is supposed to work.”Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) seconded this assessment, saying, “This referral, if ever brought before a judge, will get laughed out of court. But success on the merits is not the goal. It is meant to harass Jack Smith. It is meant to please their Fox News viewership. It is meant to whitewash their own participation in a scheme to overthrow our elections.”
Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh will face a challenge this week in deciding whether to raise interest rates as the central bank stares down high inflation and geopolitical uncertainty. This will be Warsh’s second meeting leading the central bank, and his most challenging, as there appears to be a split on the Fed board over […]
Closed ceremonies for the Republican senator, a stalwart ally of President Trump, will be held in Washington on Tuesday before a procession and public funeral in South Carolina the next day.
Closed ceremonies for the Republican senator, a stalwart ally of President Trump, will be held in Washington on Tuesday before a procession and public funeral in South Carolina the next day.
Rob Schneider, a Hollywood star who has grown controversial in recent years for his ties to the MAGA movement, is publicly opposing the Texas GOP.The bizarre reason is that he believes they have let Islamic law take over the Lone Star State.Schneider, a notorious conspiracy theorist who has long pushed crank medical misinformation and quack cures for illnesses, took to X on Monday to outline his case against senior Republican officials in Texas, including Gov. Greg Abbott, and attorney general turned Senate candidate Ken Paxton."I never thought I would watch the Islamic and Marxist threat seize large parts of our great nation," wrote Schneider. "For years we have seen the damage this alliance has done to Europe, and now we are witnessing the same damage unfolding in the blue states. What I never fully understood until recently is how deeply this threat is already embedded — and how rapidly it is gaining power —inside red states."Schneider then went on to list what he saw as the evidence Texas is under siege by an Islamic takeover."Organizations with terror ties receive nonprofit status and political access while most elected officials either pander or look the other way," wrote Schneider, accusing Texas of being complicit through taxpayer funding of "madrasas." "Does anyone even care what is happening to the children trapped inside these abusive training schools that pump out imams? Your state has Sharia courts, Sharia judges, and Sharia patrols — and not one has been shut down.""I will keep speaking until every Texas politician takes this transformation seriously and understands the threat that every Texas citizen is up against — because this threat is advancing," wrote Schneider, before slamming the GOP for "the protective circle around their most powerful elected leaders — Ken Paxton, Greg Abbott, and Dan Patrick."Conspiracy theories about Islamic takeovers of Texas have propagated for years, spread by pointing to immigrant communities that have taken root in the state. Recently, a moral panic erupted over an Islamic event planned at a water park in North Texas.