For nearly a decade, the executive branch has abused the broad, highly discretionary tariff authorities Congress granted it throughout the 20th century. These abuses have imposed high economic costs on American firms and consumers; undermined the United States’ international standing; and fueled rent-seeking cronyism in Washington. Thus far, Congress has failed to rein in those abuses by reforming the underlying laws and reasserting its constitutional authority over tariffs and trade policy. To be sure, the political costs of limiting the executive branch’s powers—particularly concerning policies that benefit many well-connected, highly concentrated special interests and are simultaneously intertwined with sensitive issues like “national security” and geopolitical competition with China—are high for most legislators. 

But what is indefensible is for Congress, knowing about the economic costs and political dysfunction engendered by executive tariff abuse, to grant even broader and highly discretionary tariff authorities to the White House—and this president in particular. Yet, that is exactly what Congress did on September 16, when the House of Representatives passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026.

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George Anibowei is a Dallas immigration lawyer and a naturalized US citizen who travels abroad regularly. Since October 2016, border agents have searched his cell phone without a warrant five times. During the first search, agents copied the entire contents of the device, including privileged communications with his clients. Nearly a decade later, the government still has that data.

Mr. Anibowei sued the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, challenging the agencies’ policies that let agents rummage through travelers’ devices with no warrant and, for so-called basic searches, no individualized suspicion at all. The district court denied him relief, and the Fifth Circuit affirmed. Mr. Anibowei now seeks Supreme Court review. 

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Around the country, state and local officials dodged a flaming arrow when the Supreme Court on September 14 struck down a recently adopted rule from the US Postal Service that threatened to throw into chaos this year’s midterms. 

Nearly one in three votes in federal elections is cast by mail. Mail voting burgeoned during the pandemic and has remained popular because voters find it convenient. Eight states, mostly in the West, have chosen to conduct federal elections entirely that way. 

President Donald Trump has criticized mail voting as rife with fraud, on his usual scanty evidence. He instructed the Postal Service to adopt a rule under which it would refuse to carry ballot mail unless states first sent the federal government a list of voters receiving mail ballots and also put new markings, including unique individual barcodes on the envelopes used to carry ballots in both directions, to and from the voter. 

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In an important baby step toward stopping racial discrimination, the Census Bureau has issued a notice in the Federal Register of its intent to add to Title 15 of the Code of Federal Regulations a new section 70 that would exclude questions about residents’ race or ethnicity as part of the decennial census short-form questionnaire. This is a first step in fulfilling President Trump’s Executive Order to end “demeaning and immoral race- and sex-based preferences,” but the rule under consideration is much too weak and narrow. (The same notice also proposes changes to how the decennial Census identifies “usual residence,” but that is an entirely different topic not discussed here.)

Of course, advocates for growing government power to manipulate and control are hysterical about even this modest reduction in racial discrimination in official statistics. They claim that distinction by race has been an important part of the decennial census as mandated by the Constitution since the first census in 1790. But this objection reveals the inherent flaw in continuing to count people by race. 

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In this case, a family in Parksley, Virginia, ran into an onslaught of opposition to their food truck from their local government. This resulted in an October 2023 ordinance specifically banning food trucks. But in enacting this ordinance, the town committed to the plaintiffs that they could continue to operate their food truck until May 2024, when their business license expired.

Plaintiffs then dared to complain about the food-truck ban to the press. The mayor saw this as a “betrayal” and became “angry … for the media attention that depicted Parksley’s government in a negative light.” In direct response to plaintiffs’ protected speech, the mayor instructed the town attorney to renege on the town’s commitment and send plaintiffs a cease-and-desist letter requiring them to immediately shut down their business. As the town attorney was drafting the letter, he stumbled across a previously unknown catch-all zoning ordinance that prohibited anything not expressly permitted (including food trucks).

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The bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus in Congress has embarked on a project well suited to its mission: devising a set of principles meant to bring peace to the gerrymandering wars that have been raging for so long. I’m among many people the caucus staff consulted in advancing this effort and went down to Capitol Hill in that capacity this summer to speak with participating caucus members at a productive meeting.

Since then, on July 1, the caucus released a framework for gerrymander reform that would be practicable, national in scope, and not tilted toward either party. It’s built around four core reform themes:

1. Redistrict once a decade. Congress can and should confine redistricting to once every ten years following the decennial Census, with narrowly defined exceptions for things like court-ordered remapping. It’s a good candidate for an early fix because the norm collapsed only recently, having been widely, though not perfectly, observed for decades before that. 
2. Enact nationwide uniform standards: Require congressional districts to be drawn using clear, objective criteria while rejecting partisan advantage and incumbent protection as legitimate goals. As I never tire of pointing out, the Constitution’s Elections Clause, by its terms, authorizes Congress to set uniform standards for districting, and the legislature has in the past prescribed standards covering key elements of good districting, such as compactness. 
3. Support approaches that reduce partisan influence. That might include independent commissions, algorithmic mapping, and other mechanisms that promote public confidence. There is an appropriately humble tone to this plank, one involving support but not command, because it is not clear that the Elections Clause power necessarily empowers Congress to make these demands of states and because we are far from any settled state of the art on many of these approaches. 
4. Prescribe methods to resolve disputes promptly at the federal level. Disputes over congressional redistricting already tend to get resolved in federal court, where there are already special rules for selecting panels and avoiding delay. Further attention could help further advance goals of speed and predictability and resolve uncertainties about issues such as the role state law plays.

In a separate release, the caucus quotes me: 

“Gerrymandering is one of the problems best suited to bringing lawmakers together to put the national good over party interest. Problem Solvers Caucus has come up with one of the best and most promising reform frameworks yet. It respects the Constitution, concentrates on areas where law can make a difference, and—importantly—doesn’t get caught up in the bad or unworkable ideas that often circulate on this subject,” says Walter Olson, Cato Institute

All of this assumes, of course, that future voters will return a Congress sincerely interested in reform that is both comprehensive and nonpartisan. I think it’s worth being prepared in case they do. 

At the end of August 1976, in the lingering patriotism of America’s bicentennial celebrations, Congress passed the National Emergencies Act, a bill meant to rein in past delegations of emergency power and ensure that the legislature maintains control over the use of such authorities going forward. President Gerald Ford, who had turned back Ronald Reagan’s challenge at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City earlier that month, signed the NEA into law on September 14.

The law was the culmination of a years-long process initiated to study the implications of terminating a 1950 national emergency proclamation, issued by President Truman during the Korean War, that was still in force and in use throughout the Vietnam War. The special committee soon realized that there were, in fact, four extant national emergencies, the oldest dating back to 1933. Dismayed that a majority of Americans had “lived their entire lives under emergency rule,” the committee was clear-eyed about where blame belonged: “This dangerous state of affairs is a direct result of Congress’ failure to establish effective means for the handling of emergencies and its willingness to defer to Executive branch leadership.” 

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