Good morning, my fellow Americans. Season after season, year after year, the tides have come in and out of New York Harbor long before the name New York had ever been spoken; Lenape dugouts crossed these currents. It was on these waters, tall masts crested the horizon, captained by explorers like Verrazzano and Hudson, after […]
President Donald Trump's own government is warning residents in the Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland area that the July 4 fireworks display will likely cause air quality to reach the worst safety ratings on the scale.Politico's E&E News reported on Thursday that, ahead of the "massive" fireworks display, the president's planned activities for Saturday are likely to cause “hazardous” conditions.The National Park Service included the detail in a draft analysis given to Politico, saying that the 35- to 40-minute program will deploy more than 850,000 fireworks shells. That's more than 100 times what is typically launched on Independence Day, which shoots off 17,000 to 20,000 shells, said Northern Virginia Magazine. The usual event is touted as among the largest in the country each year. This year, Trump wants to set a record for the most fireworks ever used. The current record is 810,904, held by Iglesia Ni Cristo (Church of Christ) in the Philippines. It was set on New Year's Eve in 2016, according to Guinness World Records.The “worst-case” scenario, the National Park Service estimated that the explosions that are set to go off in 10 different locations will "create more than 2,000 micrograms of fine particulate matter — PM2.5 — per cubic meter on the National Mall." It's the kind of air quality seen during the 2023 wildfires in Canada, which blew smoke into the Northeast US. Los Angeles air quality has long been the worst air quality in the U.S. and at no point in the past 20 years has it reached the level that Washington will on the 4th, the American Lung Association data shows. A similar comparison would be Loni, India, is the worst and most polluted in the world currently, the "Live Air Quality Map" shows. In their case, the micrograms of fine particulate matter reach approximately 46.6 µg/m³. On the evening of the 4th of July, the Washington metro area will be approximately 4,190 percent worse than the most polluted city in the world. "The Capital Weather Gang," the irreverent local weather outlet for the city and the immediate area of the National Mall, will be the worst of the worst as the wind blows the smoke to the east. It means that southeastern Washington will get the brunt of the blast. Dr Tracey Lynn Perez Koehlmoos commented that those wards of Washington have "the worst pediatric asthma population in the U.S." The second-worst or "very unhealthy" category level will cover the lower half of the entire district. The northern part of the district and all of the northeast Virginia suburbs and Maryland east of the district, will likely be exposed to particulate matter that could be bad for those with existing breathing problems like asthma. That part of Maryland that is farther north of D.C. will have "moderate" air quality. According to the Washington Post, neither the Interior Department nor the National Park Service responded to questions about the warnings.
The Supreme Court spent its just-completed term sidelining Congress and amassing power for the ascendant branches of government: the presidency and the court itself.Why it matters: As the court strips Congress of its power, decisions over people's money, jobs, votes and health shift toward the president and nine justices appointed for life.After this term, Congress can't insulate regulators from the president, limit political parties' spending or require race-conscious voting districts.The big picture: For decades, conservative lawyers have argued the Constitution grants all executive power to one person: the president.The theory, called the unitary executive, holds that no one who enforces federal law is independent of the president. This term, it won out again and again.Between the lines: The justices overturned precedents, second-guessed Congress, brushed aside facts found by lower courts and applied textualism in ways even some adherents questioned.The result is a court increasingly willing to cast off constraints.Take the Federal Trade Commission case. In Trump v. Slaughter, they chose which parts of the FTC to keep (the powers Congress gave it) and which to shed (the independence Congress designed)."The Roberts Court has adopted for itself a line-item veto," Boston University legal historian Jed Shugerman, a well-known critic of unitary executive theory, tells Axios. It keeps the parts of a law it likes and tosses the rest.Zoom in: The court made it nearly impossible to use the Voting Rights Act to challenge maps that dilute Black and Latino voting power.It struck down limits on coordinated political party spending that the court had upheld in 2001.It curbed Congress' power to make state officials pay damages when they violate federal funding laws, in a case brought by a Rastafarian inmate whose head prison guards forcibly shaved.The court also allowed the president to keep withholding $4 billion in congressionally-appropriated foreign aid, at least for now — a move critics said encroached on Congress' most fundamental power, the purse."The real headline of the current term is 'Supreme Court rules for itself, 6–3,'" Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck tells Axios, even if it comes at the expense of Congress, lower courts, and, "every once in a while," President Trump.More and more of the court's power now flows through its so-called shadow docket, in which cases skip full briefing and argument, and orders arrive fast, unsigned and often unexplained.There, the justices have refereed Trump's most contested moves: immigration crackdowns, frozen foreign aid, mass firings of federal workers, changes to voting maps, transgender passport restrictions and more.Reality check: The president didn't win everything. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote all three major rulings against Trump: blocking emergency tariffs, sparing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook for now, and rejecting his order to end birthright citizenship.The court reached for whatever legal philosophy delivered the result it wanted, Shugerman says.To end the FTC's independence, the court invoked a rigid rule: the president controls the executive branch. To spare the Fed's autonomy the same day, it carved out an exception that Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett rejected as an unprincipled "contradiction."Race was a constitutional problem when Louisiana relied on it to protect Black voting power. But allegations that racial animus motivated the Trump administration's decision to end protections for Haitian immigrants didn't stop the court from green-lighting the policy."Some days the court is originalist, and other days it's not," Vladeck says. The justices, he says, use history and text "the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination."Yes, but: Trump's biggest defeat doubled as the term's loudest warning.On birthright citizenship, four justices were willing to say Trump's order didn't violate the 14th Amendment.The fact that a position deemed "outlandish as recently as a decade ago got four votes," Vladeck says, will "embolden" the next wave of once-fringe constitutional arguments.The bottom line: Congress grows weaker every year, the executive branch gets stronger, and everyone waits to hear from the strongest branch of all: the Supreme Court.
The Oversight Project unveils a plan to combat birthright citizenship effects through mass deportation, ICE at hospitals, and birth tourism crackdowns.
The US decided against renewing its trade deal with Canada and Mexico, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said, choosing instead to conduct annual reviews of the pact in a move that risks adding uncertainty for companies producing goods across North America.
The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, will remain in force for another a decade provided no one country decides to exit. Annual reviews instead of a longer-term renewal open the door to years of contentious negotiations. Bloomberg National Security Reporter Nick Wadhams says this change is because Trump wants to change the deal. (Source: Bloomberg)
