Since the Trump administration issued a Jones Act waiver in March for moving energy products and fertilizer, the data it has generated has not done the law’s defenders any favors. It shows substantial volumes moving during the suspension and new domestic commerce being spurred, which is exactly what Jones Act critics have long said would happen without it in place. What was once a largely theoretical argument about suppressed demand is increasingly based on demonstrable facts.

Unsurprisingly, groups that support the Jones Act have stepped up their campaign to kill the waiver.

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After years of fighting back against the rise of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), I’m happy to share that the United States is the first country to prohibit its central bank from creating a CBDC. 

The ban was passed as part of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. As the name suggests, the legislative package is primarily about housing policy—something my colleagues have written about at length. It’s only at the very end that Congress included a prohibition on the creation of both a retail and intermediated CBDC. 

Given the risks of CBDCs, this passage marks a great win for financial freedom. 

At the same time, however, this battle is not over. Unfortunately, Congress decided to have the ban expire at the end of 2030. This decision makes little sense. President Donald Trump already issued an executive order to ban the creation of a CBDC during his presidency. Once a new administration takes office and 2031 rolls around, these protections will disappear, and the door will reopen.

So celebrate today’s win, but don’t mistake it for the end of the story. The fight against the rise of CBDCs is not over yet.

On March 17, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security issued the broadest and longest waiver of the Jones Act since 1950, temporarily suspending the law’s domestic shipping restrictions for vessels transporting 659 types of energy products and fertilizers. Originally set to last 60 days, the waiver was later extended and is now scheduled to expire on August 16.

The waiver offers an interesting public policy experiment, providing a glimpse of how domestic shipping responds when the law’s restrictions are no longer applied and raising intriguing questions. What kinds of cargo are moving, and on which routes? Which ports and which states have seen the most activity? Has it displaced existing vessels operating under the Jones Act or created new and increased volumes of domestic commerce that otherwise wouldn’t take place? 

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On the night of November 14, 2020, Jacob Settle and his wife, Sophronia Whitehead, left their house to visit a friend. They exited through the back door into their yard, where their truck was parked. The yard was “pitch black” as the house did not have working exterior lights. As the couple prepared to leave, two Escambia County, Florida, police officers arrived to serve a warrant. The record contains conflicting accounts as to (1) what was visible from the backyard, (2) when the officers identified themselves, (3) whether Settle’s truck ever moved, and (4) whether Officer David Collier was even in the path the truck would have traveled when he fatally shot Settle.

In November 2022, Settle’s estate filed suit alleging that Collier violated his Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force. The district court denied Collier’s motion for summary judgment, but the Eleventh Circuit reversed based on its improper decision to resolve several factual disputes in lieu of a jury doing so. 

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An editorial note atop Andy Craig’s June 26 article in the UnPopulist, “The Unfortunate Necessity of Court Packing to Stop America’s Authoritarian Drift,” opens with a striking observation: “Desperate times require desperate measures.” That aphorism is ancient: it dates back to Hippocrates’s precept that very sick patients require aggressive treatment. Its wisdom has traveled through centuries: in Hamlet, King Claudius explains that “Diseases desperate grown / By desperate appliance are relieved, / Or not at all.” Craig’s article diagnoses a social pathology; he prescribes adding four new Justices to the Supreme Court. He concedes that court packing will be very hard on the patient but explains that “sometimes a smaller harm is necessary to avoid a far bigger one.” 

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“What are you doing?” former public school teacher Emma Rodriguez asked herself when she realized she wouldn’t send her own kids to her school. It was 2020, and she’d been teaching for seven years at a highly rated school in Dallas, Texas. She started thinking about her future family and what she believed as an educator. 

Emma began to dream and pray about how she could do things differently. “How could I come alongside families that maybe want to homeschool for the flexibility, the personalization of it, but just don’t want to transition from mom to teacher?” she wondered. She thought there had to be something between full-time school and full-time homeschooling. “I had no idea there was actually a term for it. It was just my thought,” she says. “As I started doing more research, I figured out there was actually the term of microschool.”

Her husband told her, “Please go live your dream. I’ll take care of you. We’ll figure it out.” She quit teaching in May 2024. After a fall spent planning, she soft-launched Lighthouse Christian Academy in January 2025 with two students—kids of a family she already knew—who happened to have empty daytime space in the after-school STEM program they ran. “They said, here’s your first two kids and here’s your space, ready, go,” she recalls. “Like we believe in you.”

Number 27 in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy, focusing this time on issues of electoral reform that will endure beyond the midterm battles of the moment:

• Reform failure: One reason reaction has been muted to the Supreme Court’s new decision in NRSC v. FEC, striking down limits on party coordination of spending with candidates, is that many close observers on the left and center agreed that the existing rules were counterproductive [Samuel Issacharoff, NYU Law Democracy Project (calling ruling a “welcome correction” and citing what “Pam Karlan and I have called the hydraulics of campaign finance regulation: money under pressure does not disappear, it finds the path of least resistance”); Richard Pildes, Rick Hasen]. 
• “In my view, there are plausible policy reasons to specify that all ballots should be in hand, not simply in the mail, by Election Day. But the Supreme Court was not presented today with that, or any, policy question” [my statement on the Supreme Court’s Watson v. RNC for Cato, together with Stephen Richer’s statement]. More from me: Maintaining accurate and up-to-date voter rolls should be ranked as a real reform priority, and Maryland is falling short [Free State Notes; also, why Maryland’s recent primary mail ballot foul-up didn’t pose a practical integrity issue, though it was embarrassing and confused voters (Alexander Shur, Votebeat; Christine Condon, Maryland Matters)]. 
• “Report: ‘Understanding How Proportional Representation Might Work in New York City’ ” [Jack Santucci (and John Ketcham}]; Discontent with California’s top-two system contributing to interest in multiparty options [Dennis Lytton, Liberal Currents]; Rob Richie discusses the proportional-ish voting method known as cumulative voting, as well as the promise of ranked-choice balloting in presidential primaries [Expand Democracy]; A caution from the Netherlands on the difficulties of national coalition formation under proportional representation [Tarunabh Khaitan and Mike Winterwerp, Social Europe]. 
• I and others have generally praised as admirable the Nebraska–Maine approach of divvying up a state’s electoral votes based on congressional district. But what if it has a dark sibling that would enable a state to use gerrymandered districts to hand most or even all of its electoral votes to a candidate who loses its popular vote? [Henry Noyes, Marquette Law Review via Electoral Law Blog]
• Reformers of an earlier day structured the Federal Election Commission so appointees from no one party could control it, which made for either partisan fairness or a kludgy guarantee of ineffectiveness, depending on who you ask. Will that structure survive the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Slaughter? [Bob Bauer, Executive Functions] 
• Meaningful representation of coherent geographical areas in national election processes seems to be less and less valued as time goes on, as witnessed by both the race to the bottom on gerrymandering and the continued momentum behind the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact electoral vote deal [Philip Wallach, American Enterprise Institute, with a discussion of “general ticket voting,” banned since the Apportionment Act of 1842, which was designed to award the party that won overall in a state its entire House delegation].