I realize that everyone else in the universe is focused on today’s elections, but I nonetheless can’t get a news article from last week’s New York Times out of my mind. In “Trump Erupted After Learning of Alina Habba’s $50 Million Deal,” Tyler Pager explains what prompted the president’s anger. Here’s the lead:

President Trump erupted last week after he learned that one of his former lawyers, Alina Habba Mildon, secured a contract worth more than $50 million to work for a billionaire Venezuelan family.

Was the president angry because a big payoff to a former presidential aide appears unseemly? Not quite.

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Number 33 in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy, this time focusing mostly on White House and Department of Justice attempts to meddle in the midterms, and countermeasures by states and others: 

• Last Wednesday a federal judge told the Department of Justice threats of criminal prosecution against California election officials “must stop.” He probably didn’t mean DOJ should roll out those threats to state election administrators nationwide. DOJ has hinted that it may charge officials with “aiding and abetting” voter fraud if they decline to cull ballots on DOJ’s say-so. But Samantha Trepel writes at Just Security that prosecutors would be highly unlikely to pin such a rap on the officials since, to aid and abet, “as explained in the Ninth Circuit’s model jury instructions, “[i]t is not enough that the defendant… unknowingly or unintentionally did things that were helpful” to the commission of a crime. “The evidence must show beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant acted with the knowledge and intention of helping the crime’s commission.”
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Are you graduating from law school in 2027, or are you a lawyer with roughly 0–2 years of legal experience? Do you want to write briefs on the most important cases of the year to defend individual liberty and robust constitutional rights? Then, apply to be a legal associate at the Cato Institute for the 2027–2028 term.

Are you a current law student looking for a summer 2027 internship, and do you likewise want to research and write on the most important cases in the country? Apply for a Cato Institute internship with a placement in our Center for Constitutional Studies, where you’ll support everything the Center does.

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New research about the effects of post-2008 bank regulation confirms what I’ve argued since the financial crisis: increased bank regulation will often lead to more ills. 

The study looked at the effect of 

two major regulatory changes that took effect in 2013: the phased implementation of Basel III capital requirements and stress tests required under the Dodd–Frank Act. … [S]ince construction loans are relatively risky and require substantial capital under these rules, the policies may have encouraged the largest banks to reduce this type of lending.

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Recently, the American Primary Aluminum Association issued a report claiming as proof that the 50 percent Section 232 “national security” tariffs should stay in place. Some of the report withstands scrutiny. High-purity aluminum matters for military hardware, and the report notes that no smelter in the United States or any NATO country can make it (p. 2). Aluminum also makes up a small share of costs for most finished goods, so the per-unit price effects are relatively modest. The defensible version of this argument is a very narrow, national security case. Yet the report does not make the case. Three problems stand out. 

Are the Tariffs Working? The Report Can’t Say

The report lays out a simple test: tariffs should raise aluminum prices and spur investment, and “If they do not, they are not working” (p. 16). At the same time, the report waves away the costs and argues that the tariffs’ price effect is small. It says the tariff shows up only in the Midwest Premium, the US delivery premium on top of the London Metal Exchange (p. 3), but also that the premium tracks global conditions rather than tariff coverage—and the recent spike predates the 2025 tariff escalation (p. 16). 

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New US Census Bureau statistics released October 29 show that the immigrant share of the US population remained essentially flat from July 2024 to July 2025, but the Latin American immigrant population fell by nearly half a million. Despite a significant increase in immigration during President Biden’s term, the immigrant share of the US population has grown more slowly since 2010 than during any comparable period since the 1960s. 

• In 2025, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) estimated that there were 50.4 million immigrants, legal and illegal, in the United States—up from 50.2 million in 2024.
• In 2025, the share of the US population who were immigrants, legal or illegal, was 14.7 percent—effectively unchanged from 14.8 percent in 2024.
• From 2010 to 2025, the immigrant share grew by 1.8 percentage points, an average of just 0.12 points per year, the slowest pace since the 1960s.
• Since 2006, effectively all immigrant population growth has come from Asia (47 percent), Latin America (41 percent), and Africa (13 percent).
• Without high immigration rates going forward, the total US population will decline.

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