Pelosi's Losing Legacy

Townhall 

When the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act came up on the House floor on April 5, 2000, it had significant bipartisan support. Sixteen Democrats cosponsored the bill, and 77 voted for it.

As explained in its official summary, this bill would prohibit "an abortion in which the person performing the abortion deliberately and intentionally (1) vaginally delivers some portion of an intact living fetus until the fetus is partially outside the body of the mother, for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the fetus while the fetus is partially outside the mother's body; and (2) performs the overt act that kills the fetus while the intact living fetus is partially outside the mother's body."

One Democrat who did not vote for this bill designed to protect innocent human lives was Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California.

She went down to the House floor and spoke out against it. "I rise in strong opposition to the so-called Partial Birth Abortion Act," Pelosi declared.

"This is a very sad debate today," she said. "Abortion is a failure in every respect. We want to keep them safe, and we want to keep them legal."

When the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act came up again in the House in 2003, Pelosi again voted against it. But that year, then-President George W. Bush signed it into law.

Pelosi is now nearing the end of her congressional career, but her support for taking the lives of unborn and partially born children will forever be at the dark center of her legacy.

Another part of her legacy will be her advocacy for higher taxes.

When President Donald Trump's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was considered in the House in December 2017, Pelosi was an adamant opponent. As analyzed by the Heritage Foundation, this act cut taxes for working Americans. "The reform will produce larger incomes, more jobs, more investment, and ultimately, more economic opportunity," said a Heritage Foundation report. "In 2018, taxpayers will save an average of $1,400, and married couples with two children will save $2,917."

But Pelosi condemned this bill as a tax cut for the rich.

"Today is a very sad day in the history of America because we have, on the floor, probably the worst bill in recent times to come to the floor," she said when it came up for a vote on Dec. 20, 2017.

"Today, the Republicans take their victory lap for successfully pillaging the American middle class to benefit the powerful and the privileged," she said.

"It is all about the Republicans in Congress," she said. "They have in their DNA trickle-down economics."

After Trump took office in 2017, having campaigned on building a wall to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, Pelosi not only opposed the project but said something about it she would not have said about taking the life of a partially born baby. She declared it "immoral."

"The Democrats do not support the wall," she said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on April 23, 2017.

"The president, I think, talking about this wall is expressing a sign of weakness," she said. "He's saying, 'I can't control our borders. I have to build a wall.' We certainly would like to -- We have a responsibility to control our borders. Building a wall is not an answer, not here or any place."

From 2007 through 2010, during Pelosi's first term as speaker of the House, more than 2.5 million aliens were apprehended trying to illegally cross the southwest border, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump's strategy was to stop this massive flow of illegal migrants. "Before Biden stopped new construction on the wall," U.S. News and World Report reported in 2021, "the Trump administration had built 458 miles of what it dubbed 'border wall system,' according to final figures compiled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and provided to U.S. News."

In Trump's second term, the number of illegal crossings on the U.S.-Mexico border has now dropped to a half-century low. "Unlawful crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2025," reported CBS News, "plummeted to the lowest level since the early 1970s, amid the Trump administration's sweeping clampdown on illegal immigration, internal federal statistics obtained by CBS News show."

Does anyone hear Pelosi applauding?

In an interview with The New York Times after the 2024 election, Pelosi claimed that the number of illegal aliens entering the country during former President Joe Biden's term had been less than during Trump's first term. "I don't think we were clear enough by saying fewer people came in under President Biden than came under Donald Trump," she said. Politifact's Maria Ramirez Uribe then published a story countering this claim.

"Border Patrol agents have encountered people trying to illegally cross the border between official ports of entry 7.2 million times under President Joe Biden's administration compared to 1.8 million times under President-elect Donald Trump," wrote Uribe.

Pelosi will be remembered as a Democratic leader who opposed some of the most positive things the federal government did during her time in office.

Podcast and entertainment thread for Nov 5

 

Say, has it really been a year now since I partied with all of you on the best night of politics in my life? 😄

The Erosion of Self-Reliance: How Government Dependency Is Reshaping the American Soul

American  Thinker 

In the shadow of every government shutdown, a deeper crisis emerges, one not of policy, but of identity. The headlines may focus on delayed paychecks, frozen programs, and political gridlock, but beneath the surface lies a more troubling revelation: millions of Americans, including the middle class and federal employees, have become so conditioned to government assistance that they no longer know how to navigate hardship without it. This is not merely an economic issue; it is a cultural and spiritual unraveling. The American ethos of personal responsibility, once the bedrock of national pride and familial strength, is being quietly replaced by a subconscious belief that survival itself depends on the state.

A Nation Built on Self-Reliance

Fifty years ago, the average American understood that life was unpredictable and often unforgiving. Families saved for emergencies, churches and communities formed safety nets, and personal pride was tied to one’s ability to provide and persevere. Government programs existed, but they were limited in scope and seen as temporary bridges, not permanent lifelines. The middle class, in particular, took pride in its independence. To rely on government aid was not a badge of shame, but it was certainly not a default expectation.

In those days, when hardship struck, a job loss, a medical emergency, a cold winter without heating oil, people turned first to family, then to community, and finally to their own ingenuity. They bartered, budgeted, and leaned on one another. Churches organized food drives, neighbors shared firewood, and civic organizations offered support. The government was a last resort, not a first response.

The Rise of Dependency Culture

Today, that hierarchy has inverted. The government is now the first call in crisis, and for many, the only one. Programs like SNAP, heating subsidies, and unemployment insurance have expanded far beyond their original intent. What was once a temporary aid has become a way of life for millions. Even among the middle class, those with stable jobs and decent incomes, the reflex to seek government support during disruption has become normalized.

The recent government shutdown revealed this shift in stark terms. Federal employees, many earning above the national median, were seen lining up at food banks after missing just one paycheck. The narrative was not one of resilience, but of helplessness. Where was the emergency savings? Where was the family support? Where was the community response? The answer, too often, was nowhere. The expectation was simple: the government would take care of it. And when it didn’t, panic set in.

This is not to diminish genuine hardship. There are Americans who truly need help, those facing disability, chronic illness, or generational poverty. Compassion demands that we care for them. But when able-bodied, well-paid individuals crumble at the first sign of disruption, it signals a deeper problem. We have not just built a safety net—we have built a psychological cage.

The Emotional Toll of Dependency

What makes this shift so insidious is its emotional consequence. To believe that one cannot survive without government aid is not just disempowering—it is depressing. It strips individuals of agency, pride, and purpose. It replaces the dignity of provision with the anxiety of waiting. It fosters a mindset of passivity, where people no longer ask, “What can I do?” but instead, “What will they do for me?”

This dependency erodes the very qualities that once defined the American spirit: grit, creativity, perseverance, and stewardship. It weakens families, as individuals outsource responsibility to bureaucracies. It undermines communities, as neighbors become strangers in line at government offices. And it distorts the role of government itself, transforming it from a facilitator of freedom into a surrogate parent.

Conditioning the Middle Class

Perhaps most alarming is how this mindset has infiltrated the middle class. These are not the traditionally vulnerable populations that social programs were designed to support. These are educated, employed, and often politically engaged citizens who, despite their resources, have come to see government as their primary safety net. The conditioning is subtle but powerful. Tax refunds are treated as windfalls, not returns. Stimulus checks are expected, not appreciated. Subsidies are demanded, not debated.

This conditioning breeds entitlement, not empowerment. It teaches people to plan around government cycles rather than personal goals. It discourages savings, because aid will arrive. It diminishes work ethic, because assistance is guaranteed. And it creates a fragile society, one that cannot weather storms without federal intervention.

The Cost to the Nation

The financial cost of this dependency is staggering. Entitlement programs consume a growing share of the federal budget, funded by the taxes of hard-working Americans who often receive little in return. But the cultural cost is even greater. We are raising generations who equate government with survival, who see personal responsibility as optional, and who view self-reliance as outdated.

This is not sustainable. A nation cannot thrive when its citizens are conditioned to wait rather than act. It cannot innovate when its people are afraid to fail without a safety net. It cannot lead when its middle class is emotionally and economically tethered to bureaucracy.

A Call to Renewal

What America needs is not just policy reform, it needs cultural renewal. We must reawaken the virtues of personal responsibility, family stewardship, and community resilience. We must teach our children that pride comes not from what the government gives, but from what they build, save, and share. We must restore the idea that hardship is not a death sentence, but a call to courage.

Churches must reclaim their role as first responders in crisis. Families must rebuild the bonds that make them strong in adversity. Communities must organize not around grievance, but around generosity. And individuals must rediscover the joy of taking care of their own, not because they have to, but because they want to.

Conclusion

The government shutdown was more than a political event—it was a mirror. It showed us who we have become: a nation increasingly dependent, increasingly passive, and increasingly disconnected from the values that once made us proud. But it also offers a chance to change. To choose self-reliance over dependency. To choose dignity over entitlement. To choose freedom over fear.

If we do, we will not only survive future shutdowns, we will thrive beyond them. Because the true strength of a nation is not in its programs, but in its people. And when those people remember how to take care of themselves and each other, no shutdown can shut them down.

The Trouble With SNAP

Townhall 

One more huge miscalculation to heap on all the others regarding the Democrat government shutdown was that the cut-off of SNAP benefits revealed that there are 42,000,000 people getting food stamps. Now, the shutdown may be over by the time this goes to print – even the dumbest Dems are starting to sense it’s been a disaster – but one lasting impact will be the revelation that so many people in the country are getting handouts. Normal people are tired of it – there’s no way that 42 million people are so grossly disabled they can’t support themselves or their families, and we’re sick of doing it for them.

Note that I did not use the words “citizens” above. I used the phrase “people in the country” because you don’t need to be a citizen to get a handout. You just need to be. They’ll scream that “illegal aliens can’t get food stamps by law!” and fail to note the illegal part of “illegal alien.” Let’s leave the accounting gimmicks aside for a moment – “See, the free money they are getting for food is a different program than EBT, so let’s pretend illegal aliens are not getting free money from hardworking Americans when they shouldn’t even be here at all.” If these criminals – yes, being an illegal alien is a crime – will cavalierly ignore our immigration laws, you can bet they are not going to be particularly careful to observe our laws about receiving free money from people who earned it. 

But why should legal aliens get any welfare at all? Go home if you can’t cut it here. There was once the idea that if you came here, you should not be a public charge. That’s gone – now the idea is “Welcome to America, here’s stuff actual Americans worked for and that we extracted from their paychecks because you fake Americans are more American than these terrible actual Americans.” If immigration is so awesome and these people are so amazing and hardworking and stuff, how about we treat them that way? How about we expect them to contribute to us, not vice versa. They are not doing us a favor.

But let’s not let the Americans who sponge off the system get off scot free. Too many Americans are bums, deadbeats, and/or losers with their paws out, looking to cash in on the efforts of others. Every regime media story is a tale of woe about some victim of circumstances who absolutely must be on the dole forever because, well, look how sad she and her seven kids by eight fathers are. And look at the iPhone, PlayStation, and big screen in the background of the shot. Scratch a sob story and you will almost inevitably find bad choices, dumb moves, and laziness paired with a sense of entitlement.

Here’s what we need to do – adopt the old presumption that everyone must support themselves and their families. Period. Yeah, it’s hard sometimes, yet somehow most of us manage to do it and also support the dead weight. And those of us bearing their burden are getting sick of it. We have social media to thank for some of this. The TikTok welfare queens – Reagan was absolutely right about them, no matter how hard the Dems lie and deny – making EBT Day videos, loading up their shopping carts with free junk food, as the next generation of sloths capers about, are a blessing. Their smug entitlement is a red flag, and we are the bulls. 

But what about the disabled? There’s “disabled” and then there’s actually disabled. We are under no obligation to refill the bottomless EBT debit card of some massive behemoth in perpetuity because she found some quack to sign a paper attesting to her diagnosis of “Allergic to work.”

Along with the presumption of self-sufficiency should come the return of shame. You should feel bad if you have to take government money. Are there circumstances where this happens, where bad things occur outside your power that force you into having to take charity? That could happen. It’s not common – the vast majority of people in dire straits get there in whole or in part because of their own actions or (often) inactions. But you should want off as soon as you can. You should have some pride, and it should hurt your pride not to do what other adults easily accomplish – support yourself and your family. 

But Kurt, that’s mean! No, it’s honest. Do you respect someone who fails to support himself or others? No, you don’t, because you know that self-sufficiency is the baseline for being worthy of respect and that welfare is a soul-crushing vortex of failure. So, what you are doing when you pretend that one taking welfare is just like everyone else is lying. I say we stop lying to ourselves and to the people who need to be splashed in the face with a bucket of ice-cold “Get your Schiff together.”

 Are you subject to the Mark of Cain forever because you once went on public assistance? Of course not. That’s stupid. We all screw up. We all do things we wish we had never done, things we are not proud of. I bought a Springsteen album once. While I generally made good decisions, it is possible I could have ended up (for as short a time as I could possibly be) on some form of welfare. But you can get past it and grow. It does not define you; you screw up and get up. That’s what we want – people who make mistakes to fix them and get back in the game. Lots of people we respect were intertwined with the dole; “were.” They got out of it, and they are stronger for it. But this fraudulent, self-serving lie that being on welfare is no biggie – it’s self-serving because we place our feeling good about being “nice” over actually helping by doing the hard and sometimes unpleasant work of telling people they are screwing up – condemns people to a future of misery, mediocrity, and mendacity.

We see cookies at Safeway marked “EBT ELIGIBLE,” and we’re told, “Don’t poor kids deserve a cookie?” And they do deserve a cookie. Every kid should get an occasional cookie – not too many, or they become JB Pritzker. But that cookie should be provided by their parents, who should work to earn the money to buy it. Neither you nor I owes that kid a cookie, and it is especially repellent that we are forced to labor and then have the fruit of our work extracted from us by men with guns – police come and put you in prison for failing to pay taxes – so that others can redirect our money toward other people’s kids. If you want a kid whose parents aren’t cutting it to get a cookie, go buy it yourself. No one’s stopping you, but that means forgoing the sweet satisfaction of making others perform your charity. Forcing us to buy it is the injustice; to the extent the kid is being wronged by confection denial, talk to mommy and (too rarely) daddy. We are not morally obligated to care more about other people’s kids than the other people do.

But we are morally obligated to care about the poor. That’s non-negotiable. It’s in the Bible. We must give charity. Give charity, not have it stolen from us by the government to be redistributed to satisfy the egos of do-gooders who think the height of doing good is to do it with other people’s money.

But when we give charity – and we must – we should also pay heed to how the Bible reflects on other aspects of the issue of poverty. It admonishes people to care for themselves and their families. The parables highlight the importance of diligence and honest work. It forbids treating the poor unjustly, but that is different from forbidding the expectation that people will make an honest effort to support themselves and their own. 

We can and must help – with favors, teaching, examples, and yes, giving our own money. But our help should be to lift them out of the cesspool of poverty, not let them float in it. Far too many in our broken culture want a lot of poor people. Some want it for political power. Some make their own money off “fixing poverty” – how many Dems draw a paycheck from some “anti-poverty” NGO that does nothing but perpetuate pathologies? And others love having a bunch of poor people because it gives them an opportunity for moral preening and a chance to scold us for failing to be as caring as they are.

The idea of 42 million people on food stamps is a cultural, social, political, and moral abomination. We need to fix that. We need to re-establish basic common-sense principles. You support yourself and your people, and if you are a foreigner and you can’t, leave. It’s not being hard, nor is it being mean. It’s being clear – we’re done catering to deadbeats.

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Justice Jackson Is The Supreme Court’s Mean Girl

Jackson has completely forgone the Kagan approach of building bridges instead of burning them.

The  Federalist 

To negotiate in good faith or go scorched earth?

That appears to be the key question plaguing the U.S. Supreme Court’s liberal justices as they strategize on how best to lose in key cases that come before the bench, according to a new report.

Published Friday by New York Times lacky Jodi Kantor, the extensive exposé features claims from anonymous confidants and associates of the justices about an alleged ongoing dispute among the court’s Democrat appointees. This friction, according to these unnamed individuals, centers on the justices’ differing views on how to effectively navigate the court’s current makeup and dominating originalist jurisprudence.

In one camp are Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, both of whom have sought to establish cordial relationships with their Republican-appointed colleagues. The article specifically homes in on Kagan, and how she has strategically sought to find areas of compromise with her conservative colleagues — namely, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett — to try and narrow the scope of a ruling (or, on rare occasions, produce a left-wing “victory”) in any given case.

In the other camp is the Supreme Court’s newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson. According to the sources who spoke with the Times, it is Jackson’s public remarks and penchant for using antagonistic language in her dissents that are purportedly irking Kagan.

“Admirers of Justice Kagan say she is prudent to show restraint, displaying her frustration only in flashes. Justice Jackson’s outspokenness could risk those votes, or further erode faith in a court that may yet stand up to Mr. Trump, they say,” the report reads.

Since joining the high court, Jackson has regularly employed aggressive (and quite frankly, embarrassing) rhetoric to trash her conservative-leaning colleagues. In one particular case involving the Trump administration before the court’s emergency docket earlier this year, for example, the Biden appointee authored a lone dissenting opinion all but accusing the Republican appointees of abandoning all proper jurisprudence in order to bend over backward for the government.

“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”

The hostile opinion seemingly demonstrates the failures of Sotomayor and Kagan to avoid causing any unneeded friction between the conservative and liberal factions. According to the Times, the two Obama appointees attempted to “advise and coordinate with Justice Jackson” on the tone of her opinions at the outset of her SCOTUS career, in an apparent effort to help sustain their bid to court Barrett, “whose vote they desperately needed.”

Although Jackson “sometimes deferred, softening or withdrawing opinions,” the Times reported, “she also felt compelled to express frank disagreement even if it caused friction.”

“By the summer of 2024, two years into Justice Jackson’s tenure, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan had grown worried that their newer colleague’s candor and propensity to add her own dissents were diluting the group’s impact, according to their confidantes,” the report reads.

What’s notable about the entire Times piece is that, even if it were never written, the behind-the-scenes dynamics it describes have largely played out in the public eye for Americans to see. Read through any of the court’s recent major decisions and emergency docket orders, and the diverging strategies among the left-wing justices could not be more obvious.

While Sotomayor and Kagan have shown some semblance of restraint in their criticisms of the majority’s decisions, Jackson has held little back, often allowing her personal animus to trickle into her opinions.

Frustrations with Jackson’s antics among her conservative-leaning colleagues appeared to reach a breaking point in the court’s Trump v. CASA case earlier this year. Writing for the 6-3 majority on the scope of nationwide injunctions, Barrett blasted Jackson’s dissenting opinion as “a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever,” and that “is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”

What’s become glaringly apparent, as further indicated by the Times’ story, is that Jackson has completely forgone (assuming she considered it at all) the Kagan approach of building bridges instead of burning them. Rather than forge professional, working relationships and write to convince her colleagues to come around to her side of the argument, she’s opted to pen left-wing “girl boss” fiction for her legacy media fanbase.

That strategy may garner her glowing articles and “news” segments, but it’s not getting her anywhere with her Supreme Court colleagues — conservative or liberal. It simply makes her the school mean girl whom everyone tolerates but can’t stand all the same.

Here’s What To Watch For As SCOTUS Weighs Trump’s Emergency Tariff Powers

‘It really feels like this is a coin flip in terms of the outcome,’ Heritage Foundation Chief Economist E.J. Antoni told The Federalist.

The  Federalist 

Following an action-packed overseas trip to Asia last week, President Donald Trump is gearing up to tackle the next challenge facing his administration: a legal battle over his tariff policy.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hold oral arguments in a pair of consolidated cases known as Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc. As The Federalist previously reported, these cases specifically center around the legality of Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs on goods from foreign nations making their way into the United States.

Enacted in 1977, IEEPA grants the president the power to “deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.” The Supreme Court will address the question of whether Trump’s invocation of tariffs under the statute’s existing provisions is lawful.

“It really feels like this is a coin flip in terms of the outcome,” Heritage Foundation Chief Economist E.J. Antoni told The Federalist. “Not only am I uncertain on how [the justices] are going to interpret the law, but I’m also uncertain on how they’re going to interpret the economic situation because there are competing economic theories here. … I think it could go either way.”

Background

The origins of these cases date back to earlier this year, when Trump invoked IEEPA to impose tariffs on a variety of countries. As described by the president, he did so in response to existing “unfair trade practices” that lead to trade deficits, as well as to punish countries like China for failing to “blunt the sustained influx of synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, flowing from the [People’s Republic of China] to the United States.”

Invoking IEEPA’s language, the president reasoned that these problems constitute an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States. 

It wasn’t long after the issuance of his April 2025 “Liberation Day” tariffs that Trump and his administration were the subjects of two separate lawsuits: one filed by Learning Resources, Inc. (and hand2mind, Inc.) and another by V.O.S. Selections, Inc.

The former’s legal challenge was brought in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which initially granted their request for a preliminary injunction but ultimately paused the block as proceedings in the case continued.

Meanwhile, V.O.S. Selections’ suit resulted in the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) issuing a permanent injunction that prevented a number of tariff-related executive orders from taking effect. Upon appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit — after hearing the case en banc — ultimately affirmed the CIT’s ruling that the tariffs are unlawful but terminated its injunction and remanded the case for further proceedings.

SCOTUS agreed to take up both cases (consolidated) in early September.

Key Arguments

In their respective filings with SCOTUS, Learning Resources and V.O.S. Selections argued that the president lacks the constitutional authority to impose tariffs under IEEPA. They specifically cited the first clause of Article I Section 8 of the Constitution, which states that, “Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”

“IEEPA does not give the President the vast power he has seized,” Learning Resources’ petition for certiorari reads. “IEEPA does not mention the word ‘tariff’ or ‘tax,’ and no other President in its nearly 50-year history has ever relied on it for tariffing power.”

In its Sept. 19 motion on the merits of the cases, the Trump administration argued the opposite — that “President Trump’s IEEPA tariffs are plainly lawful” and that “Congress has long granted the President broad authority to employ tariffs to address emergencies.” “IEEPA,” the Justice Department claimed, “continues that tradition by expressly authorizing the President to ‘regulate * * * importation’ of foreign goods to address declared national emergencies.”

“Presidents have relied on IEEPA to address a wide array of emergencies and ‘IEEPA embodies an eyes-open congressional grant of broad emergency authority in this foreign-affairs realm,’” the motion reads. “President Trump determined that tariffs are best suited to address the trade-deficit and drug-trafficking emergencies, and those determinations warrant deference. IEEPA provides that Congress and the political process, not the judiciary, serve as the principal monitor and check on the President’s exercise of IEEPA authority.”

The Road Ahead

While the Supreme Court (and other courts) has tackled matters involving tariffs throughout its history, it remains unclear how the justices will grapple with Trump’s use of IEEPA in these two cases, according to Antoni.

In expressing uncertainty about how the high court will come down on the issue, the Heritage fellow noted the differing consensus among economists about whether trade deficits “are always a problem.” He further questioned whether and how the justices will deal with such differences when handling these cases.

“Even among the economics field, you don’t have the kind of universal agreement that I would’ve, at one point, expected” about the trade-deficit argument the administration is making, Antoni said. “So, if you don’t have it there, it should be no surprise if you don’t have the same kind of agreement among laymen. And in this case, when it comes to the Supreme Court, they are economic laymen. This isn’t their area of expertise, and that’s not a knock on them.”

Antoni went on to add that, regardless of how SCOTUS comes down on the cases, the president and his administration have “so many other tools at their disposal” outside IEEPA to implement tariffs to tackle what they consider to be economic and national security issues.

“There are other ways that the president and his administration can put these tariffs into place, and so I would expect that that’s just basically gonna continue,” Antoni said. “It’s a more arduous process. It’s more difficult to get those things in place, but I have no reason to think that the administration is simply gonna say, ‘Well, they took one tool out of our tool kit and now we give up. We’re never gonna try this again.’”

Oral arguments in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Solutions are expected to begin at 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday. A final decision on the matter is not expected until later in the Supreme Court’s 2025-2026 term.

The Attacks On Heritage And Kevin Roberts Are Really About Foreign Policy And J.D. Vance

Genuine concern about antisemitism on the right is being hijacked by neocons to attack J.D. Vance in hopes of re-taking control of the GOP.

The  Federalist 

Let’s get something straight about the civil war breaking out on the right: it’s not primarily about Tucker Carlson “platforming” or “normalizing” Nick Fuentes, or about Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ decision to defend Carlson, or even about the rise of antisemitism on the right.

The primary target here isn’t Carlson or Roberts, but Vice President J.D. Vance. And the people targeting him are Never Trump foreign policy interventionists who hope to destroy the MAGA movement and take back control of the Republican Party after Trump is gone.

Genuine concern about Carlson interviewing Fuentes, and about the kind of antisemitism that Fuentes and his followers espouse, is being hijacked to wage a proxy war on Vance because of his America First noninterventionist foreign policy views. The idea is to smear Vance as a dangerous antisemite and someone who can’t be trusted in the White House.

There is of course room for good-faith disagreement on the right about whether Carlson should have interviewed Fuentes, or the timing and wisdom of Roberts’ statement. There’s also room for vigorous discussion about how best to persuade young people like Fuentes to abandon their most odious, antisemitic views. Those are important debates, and conservatives of good will should by all means have them. Concern about antisemitism on the right is legitimate and warranted.

But what’s happening now is something else entirely. It’s a political op, and the target is Vance. The collective struggle session that has unfolded on the right in recent days — ritual denunciations of Carlson and Roberts, performative virtue-signaling on X — has been carried out by the people most opposed to an America First noninterventionist foreign policy after Trump.

Among these are of course the editors of the Wall Street Journal, who first misrepresented the Carlson-Fuentes interview and then accused Roberts of “Jew-baiting” and being an “apologist” for antisemitism. Anyone who knows Roberts or is familiar with his work will recognize how outlandish this accusation is. The only possible reason to make it is to discredit the substance of his statement, which had directly to do with foreign policy and freedom of conscience: “Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class,” Roberts said, reflecting a commonplace view on the MAGA right.

Erick Erickson was more direct. He took to the pages of The Free Press to bemoan the “moral rot eating the American right,” first slamming Fuentes and Carlson and Roberts — but then quickly pivoting to Vance, who “has avoided disavowing these figures.” Later, Erickson equates antisemitism with criticism of U.S. foreign policy toward Israel, again focusing on Vance. “When confronted by a young man in a MAGA cap questioning why the U.S. is supporting Israel’s ‘ethnic cleansing in Gaza,’ Vance did not dispute the presupposition. Instead, he said, Israel is ‘not controlling this president.’ Left unaddressed was the implication that the Jewish state had been allowed to control past presidents.”

Erickson calls this “moral cowardice” — as if that settles it. But of course it doesn’t. There’s plenty of room for legitimate debate about Israeli influence over American foreign policy in the past, and about whether that influence serves the interests of the American people. Chalking it up to racism and antisemitism is a way to shut down debate — and more importantly, to smear Vance as a closeted antisemite.

All of this is part of a larger anti-Vance strategy of the interventionist GOP establishment. Simply put, the people who lost control of the Republican Party in 2016 want it back, either by ensuring Vance is not the 2028 nominee or that he has to go through a bruising GOP primary before the general election. If they can’t control Vance, they would rather he lose to a Democrat than carry Trump’s MAGA movement and America First policies forward.

This, and not concerns about antisemitism, is what much of the recent outrage and barely-disguised calls for violence from unreconstructed neocons like John Podhoretz are really about. Anyone who actually watched the Carlson-Fuentes interview could see that it was clearly an attempt by Carlson to offer Fuentes some fatherly correction and redirection, specifically on the matter of Jews and collective guilt. Maybe Carlson’s interview style isn’t to everyone’s liking, and reasonable people can disagree about the prudence of interviewing Fuentes, but the idea that Carlson was amplifying Fuentes without challenging him is simply not true.

Which makes the focus on Vance all the more conspicuous. It’s no secret that Vance’s foreign policy views are largely shared by Carlson — as well as a growing element on the American right. For years now, Carlson has been opposed to almost all U.S. foreign intervention overseas — even when they were popular. He spoke out against the drone strike that took out Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in 2020 during the first Trump term, and at least initially opposed the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities earlier this year. He’s been a staunch critic of U.S. funding for Ukraine in its ongoing war against Russia — so much so that when he was fired from Fox News in 2023, Republican lawmakers anonymously praised the decision, telling corporate media outlets that with Carlson off the air it would make it easier to send funding to Ukraine.

So when Carlson criticizes U.S. funding for Israel, it’s part of a larger critique of U.S. foreign policy — namely, that intervention in overseas conflicts might be good for war-hawks in Washington but it’s not good for the American people, who are increasingly and understandably tired of American involvement in foreign wars, directly or indirectly.

It’s a critique shared by Trump. Arguably, it was Trump’s noninterventionist foreign policy in 2016 that set the entire Republican establishment against him. Recall on the GOP primary debate stage in February 2016, Trump denounced George W. Bush and the Iraq War, calling it a “big, fat mistake.” No other candidate was willing to do that in 2016, even though Republican voters broadly agreed with Trump. He forced a reckoning with the neocon element in the GOP and defeated it by taking over the party and winning the White House.

It was Trump’s rejection of failed Bush-era interventionism that made him an enemy of the establishment GOP and neocon interventionists like Liz Cheney and Mitch McConnell. That’s why so many of them joined in on the Russia collusion hoax, the Ukraine impeachment hoax, the Jan. 6 hoax, and quietly cheered on Biden’s lawfare.

Vance of course shares these noninterventionist views. That’s why many of the most notorious neocons campaigned hard against Vance in the summer of 2024. As my colleague Sean Davis noted last week, arguably the first assassination attempt against Trump, just before his formal nomination, “was timed to prevent him from picking J.D. as his vice president. Lindsey Graham spent the weekend before the convention demanding that Trump pick someone, anyone, other than J.D. And foreign policy was the primary reason.”

That obviously didn’t work, but the neocons haven’t given up their campaign against Vance. Their new tactic is to go after people like Carlson and Roberts and anyone else who dares to criticize U.S. support for Israel, smearing them as antisemites. The goal is simple: to connect noninterventionism with antisemitism. Back in February, Sen. Lindsey Graham criticized what he called a “growing isolationist movement” in the GOP. “It’s beginning to include Israel,” said Graham. “In the past it really hasn’t, but now it’s more open, and so there is an element of our party that’s saying, we don’t want to get sucked into endless war because of Israel.”

Neocons like Graham are starting to figure out that America First Republican voters aren’t going to accept funding endless foreign conflicts, or even funding Israel’s wars. They know that foreign entanglements and inventions overseas are unpopular with voters on the right, and that if Trump’s MAGA movement continues after Trump leaves office they won’t be able to bring back their interventionist foreign policy. So they’re running a psy-op labeling everyone who criticizes interventionism as an antisemite, preparing the rhetorical ground to smear Vance as a “Jew-baiter.”

And if you think that’s outrageous or unplausible, consider that’s what they just did to Kevin Roberts, of all people.

Make no mistake, there is a very active fight going on within conservative circles right now about the future of the MAGA movement and the GOP. Anti-Trump establishment elites are scheming about how to regain control of the party. They will do or say almost anything to achieve that goal.

In that context, understand that genuine concern over antisemitism on the right, and much of the outrage you see online, is being hijacked and used as a proxy to wage political warfare. Its object is not antisemitism but U.S. foreign policy, J.D. Vance, and the future of the GOP after Trump.