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]. 

The second Trump administration has indulged in the art of changing names. The Pentagon, the Kennedy Center, the tallest mountain in the US, and the body of water west of Florida and east of Mexico have all been objects of rebranding (or attempted rebranding). In a surprise announcement on June 16, the Pentagon’s largest geographic combatant command joined the list. According to the press release, the US Indo-Pacific Command, which has operational authority over US military forces from Hawaii west to India, has reverted to its original name, the US Pacific Command or “PACOM.”

This reverses the 2018 decision of the first Trump administration to tack on “Indo.” That revision was enthusiastically adopted first by the foreign policy community and then by the Biden administration as a proclamation linking US interests in the Western Pacific with its interests in the Indian Ocean. The Department of Defense says the reversion “honors the command’s deep historical roots” and “collective spirit.”

The change does not alter the geographic scope of the command, but the fact that it is a reversal suggests it has policy import. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby and his office, which almost certainly had a say in the decision, have worked to prioritize and discipline US defense policy toward the goal of sustaining a balance of power in Asia—particularly by denying a Chinese attack on the First Island Chain, which runs from Northern Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines. The 2026 National Defense Strategy defined this as America’s most important geographic objective short of preserving US dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth dropped “Indo” from his May 2026 remarks to the Shangri-La Dialogue, saying “our approach in the Pacific centers on deterrence by denial along the First Island Chain.” Its formal deletion is a further bureaucratic and diplomatic manifestation of this focus. 

It is also a welcome embrace of reality. The First Island Chain is the center of gravity for the US military presence west of Hawaii and the main defense perimeter of US interests across the Pacific Ocean. It contains two treaty allies, dozens of US bases, and roughly 55,000 US troops (three treaty allies and 80,000 troops if South Korea is included). By contrast, there is one US military base in the Indian Ocean—at Diego Garcia. The US has interests in the Indian Ocean and in cultivating closer ties with India, but these are peripheral to the stakes and challenges of our boots-on-the ground posture in the Western Pacific.

“Indo-Pacific” was a rhetorical and diplomatic aspiration. The phrase originated with the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who meant for it to help diversify Japanese grand strategy. The thinking was that balancing China would be easier if India were part of Japan’s strategic neighborhood. Its adoption by the US government and the members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (“the Quad” group of Japan, India, Australia, and the US) seemed to give it unstoppable cachet. But aspirations and geographic abstractions are also a route to potential mission creep. Eight years of “Indo-Pacific” did not will into being a decisive coupling of the Indian Ocean and Pacific theaters or meaningfully alter US strategic circumstances along China’s maritime frontier.

Those circumstances are imperiled, if not quite desperate. The US posture and base structure on and near the First Island Chain are a legacy of the early Cold War, when the US possessed a large conventional military advantage in the region and China had yet to field large arsenals of drones and theater ballistic missiles. Today, US forces in the Pacific are increasingly vulnerable, as are the security commitments they underpin. They are within range of at least hundreds of Chinese conventional missiles and in a conflict may become liabilities, as US bases in the Middle East have become in the Iran War. Efforts since the 2010s to improve the resilience of these forces through hardening and dispersion have not sufficiently moved the needle, so it is not surprising that an effort to “build, posture, and sustain a strong denial defense along the [First Island Chain]” is a core pillar of the 2026 National Defense Strategy.

Bringing back the Pacific Command does not magically remedy the vulnerability of our forward deployments. Rather, the change will help focus the minds of US and allied defense planners on the most urgent problem of our security role in Asia: how to sustain our regional military commitments without military dominance. 

The July 1 update that US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) provided the Court of International Trade (CIT) shows that the agency has made significant headway in returning the billions of dollars owed to US importers based on the Supreme Court’s recent invalidation of “emergency” tariffs. However, the filing also shows that frictions built into the process continue to slow the issuance of tariff refunds and that an entire class of importers—collectively owed tens of billions of dollars—might be unable to get their money back without having to sue for it.

Here’s where things stand.

On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court invalidated the tariffs that President Trump implemented last year under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). As of June 29 (more than four months after the ruling), CBP has authorized $104.29 billion in refunds and paid out $71.06 billion (including interest). Based on our calculations of the total amount owed by the government as of June 29 (taking into account interest and payouts), the government still owes importers about $100.65 billion—more than half of the total owed. 

CBP deserves credit for giving most eligible importers the opportunity to receive refunds—even if the process was not automatic. It’s also good that CBP has now rolled out Phase 2 of its refund (CAPE) system, covering entries flagged for reconciliation. Refunds could eventually climb to $130 billion of the $166 billion in IEEPA duties paid by importers (before interest).

Eventually.

Indeed, that only $71.06 billion of the approved $104.29 billion has actually been paid suggests that frictions built into the CAPE process are creating obstacles for importers seeking refunds. For example, CBP claims that refunds for 8,384 approved declarations have not been issued because the eligible importers lack proper automated clearinghouse or banking information.

A bigger problem, however, is what we and CIT Judge Richard Eaton, who has overseen the refund process, have flagged: Many smaller US firms have been unable to obtain refunds through the current CAPE process. In particular, CBP has approved refunds for nearly 60 percent of the government’s total obligations, but that $104.3 billion in processed refunds was for just 30 percent of all import entries on which IEEPA tariffs had been paid. In other words, the approved refunds mainly come from large, high-value entries—a strong indication that, as Judge Eaton noted, most refunds have thus far gone to large firms/​importers such as Walmart and Ford. This underscores what we and others have suspected since the beginning of the refund process: The deck is stacked against small firms that lack the resources to fight for and obtain what the government owes them.

Any delays caused by the government’s appeal of Judge Eaton’s universal injunction will further complicate the process. That appeal, filed before the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on June 2, challenges the injunction’s applicability to entries for which liquidation has become final (i.e., more than 180 days have passed since CBP rendered a final determination of the duties and other import charges owed on those entries). As a reminder, finally liquidated entries are not eligible for Phase 1 or 2 of CAPE processing. CBP’s latest filing indicates that it could begin processing finally liquidated entries—which cover about $11.4 billion, or 7 percent of total IEEPA tariff revenue—in a forthcoming Phase 3 of CAPE by late July. However, the government is arguing before the CAFC that CBP cannot issue refunds for these entries without the importer of record filing suit at the CIT first. 

In a preemptive move, US importers whose refunds could be affected by this appeal are making initial moves toward a class-action lawsuit that would satisfy this requirement—yet the government is also challenging this approach at the CIT.

Finally, CBP’s refund data suggest that the agency still owes another $25 billion in refunds for entries not covered in Phases 1 through 3. These include entries subject to certain anti-dumping and countervailing duties, entries for which active drawback claims or administrative protests exist, and entries not filed within ACE (CBP’s online portal for processing imports and exports). The agency’s latest filing does not provide a timeline for processing these entries through CAPE or otherwise issuing refunds.

In sum, it’s good news that refunds accounting for most of the IEEPA tariffs paid have been issued or should be issued soon and that the CAPE system’s functionality is being updated to cover additional imports. However, frictions embedded in the system and the unique hurdles faced by small businesses deserve continued attention and a quick resolution by CBP. 

The ongoing litigation is also unfortunate and worth monitoring. Collectively, the government’s actions indicate that it could end up keeping tens of billions of dollars that it unlawfully confiscated from US importers, through absolutely no fault of their own.