“The Supreme Court announced Tuesday it will take up whether President Trump can use emergency powers to justify sweeping tariffs on trading partners across the globe, agreeing to the administration’s request to hear its appeal — and fast,” The Hill reports.
“The expedited schedule will have the justices take the bench for oral arguments in the first week of November, a late addition to the calendar.”
Eli McKown-Dawson: “The more the state aligns with national trends, the more vulnerable she’ll be — to the point where the race is a toss-up, or even leans Democratic, as some early statistical models show. But she’s probably less vulnerable than a naive read of the data would suggest. We sometimes talk about ‘generic’ candidates, but Collins has been about as far from a generic Republican as you can get when it comes to getting reelected in Maine.”
“So we’re in what I’ve taken to calling a Schrödinger’s Collins situation: she’s simultaneously one of the most vulnerable Senate incumbents and as much of a Maine institution as the lobster roll.”
“Two key figures in the Iran-Contra affair quietly married last month, nearly 40 years after the scandal rocked U.S. politics and President Ronald Reagan’s administration,” CNN reports.
“Israel on Tuesday ordered the evacuation of the entire city of Gaza, the first time it has done so in the run-up to its planned full invasion of the largest urban center in the Gaza Strip’s north,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“House Democrats privately exploded Tuesday at their emerging strategy to focus on health care in the upcoming government funding fight, saying the party should demand more for its votes,” Punchbowl News reports.
“These members added Senate Democrats must be willing to shut down the government if needed.”
“Twenty-one days before the government funding deadline, angry rank-and-file House Democrats told their leadership that the health-care-focused strategy is seriously lacking and exudes weakness.”
“These Democrats don’t think it’s enough to ask to extend enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies. They want Democratic leaders to take the fight to President Donald Trump and Hill Republicans — even if it means a government shutdown.”
Aaron Blake: “He has campaigned for a decade on ending wars and even recently lobbied extensively for a Nobel Peace Prize. But his second term has involved increasingly threatening – and potentially risking – military confrontations.”
“The bellicose rhetoric has kicked into overdrive in recent days.”
“A bipartisan House resolution directing the Justice Department to release all of its investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein appears poised within weeks to draw enough backers to force action on the House floor,” the New York Times reports.
“But while the effort will probably remain a headache for President Trump and Republican leaders, there is still no guarantee it will receive a vote and little chance that the Justice Department would comply even if it did.”
“Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, took the unusual step of ordering the National Security Agency to retract an intelligence report on Venezuela,” the New York Times reports.
John Ganz: “It used to be that one could roughly say that while paleocons were fascists at home, reimagining America as a white ethnostate, they were relatively more dovish abroad and skeptical of foreign entanglements, while the neocons were fascists abroad, favoring unabashed imperialism, foreign adventures, and unilateral wars, but broadly in support of center-right liberal democracy at home.”
“The current fusionism of the right is the worst of all possible worlds: fascist at home, fascist abroad.”
Matt Glassman: “The Democrats are well-positioned to win the House in 2026 and perhaps even make serious gains in the Senate. Thermostatic public opinion is real in America, and the public almost always punishes the president’s party in the midterms. Trump is incredibly unpopular and his party remains divided over a number of his major policies.”
“It can be hard in politics to do nothing, but if the Democrats strategically shut down the government, they will likely hurt themselves on the margin electorally, for no real potential upside.”
Robert Reich: “Under ordinary circumstances, people like you and me — who believe that government is essential for the common good — would fight like hell to keep the government funded beyond September 30.”
“But we are not in ordinary circumstances. The U.S. government has become a neofascist regime run by a sociopath…”
“So I for one have decided that the best route is to shut the whole fucking thing down.”
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
— Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissenting opinion.
“For more than 15 years, before they conducted any operation to arrest an immigrant in the United States, officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division have been required to fill out a form with details about their target — name, appearance, known addresses and employment, immigration history, any criminal history and more — and give it to a supervisor for approval,” NBC News reports.
“This year, in a sign of how the agency has moved from targeted enforcement to broad street sweeps under the Trump administration, that policy has been ended.”
Andrew Egger: “In a way, Donald Trump and his allies have spent their entire political lives preparing for this moment. The whole miserable decade of ‘alternative facts,’ of witch hunts, of flooding the zone with shit—it all amounted to a long, powerful education for his base. It’s a training in a certain kind of zen meditation, in which stories damaging to Trump pass from the eyes and ears directly out of the body without ever intersecting the brain. By now, the base has gotten in their 10,000 hours. They’ve become masters of the craft. They can perform all sorts of remarkable feats—the media-cope equivalent of lying on beds of nails while cinderblocks are smashed on their chests. These cinderblocks, they whisper serenely, are just a liberal plot. If I pay attention, the Democrats win.”
“This Epstein story might as well be their final test. They’ve clamored for years for more information about Epstein’s sexual-deviant associates—and here Trump is, wallowing in that muck of perversity, clear as day. Trump plainly thinks he’s got them well trained enough that he doesn’t even need to find a good cover story. They’re ready to excuse him all on their own.”
“Brazil’s Independence Day has become the moment for the country’s nationalist, right-wing movement to take to the streets, protest the left and hoist the yellow and green of the Brazilian flag,” the New York Times reports.
“This year, it carried a new banner.”
“An American flag the size of a basketball court unfurled over several lanes of São Paulo’s main avenue on Sunday, with demonstrators holding the flag aloft as they protested the expected conviction this week of former President Jair Bolsonaro on charges of planning a coup.”
President Trump declined to discuss his birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein released by the convicted sex trafficker’s estate, calling it a “dead issue,” NBC News reports.
Said Trump: “I don’t comment on something that’s a dead issue. I gave all comments to the staff. It’s a dead issue.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
