☕️ JEROME BOND ☙ Tuesday, July 1, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Bad news for cartel-linked illegals as 5th Circuit eviscerates ACLU; CA Dems bulldoze CEQA; hiker’s sudden death raises jab questions; Trump outmaneuvers Fed Chair Powell in 4D Fed warfare; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Today’s essential roundup includes: bad news for ganged-up illegal immigrants as Fifth Circuit Appellate panel disembowels ACLU lawyers; Democrats show signs of life as California’s blue legislature steamrolls over snail darters; mysterious, sudden, and unexpected hiker death poses uncomfortable questions; and Trump makes 3D chess moves over incomprehensible Fed policy, hinting at bigger things to come.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Appellate judges are wicked smart, and they love nothing better than toying with lawyers like cats enjoying a helpless Florida garden lizard. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story perfectly illustrating that point, headlined “Appeals Court Weighs Trump’s Use of Alien Enemies Act for Deportations.” I shall now reveal a great secret of appellate practice, which made a sly appearance in the article.

In a case that could redefine the reach of presidential war powers, the Fifth Circuit is the first to weigh whether the President can invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (AEA) —a dusty relic of the John Adams era— to summarily deport alleged members of a Venezuelan street gang. The law, originally designed to empower the president to detain or expel nationals of hostile nations during wartime or invasion, has been used only sparingly in U.S. history— mostly during declared wars.

But Trump’s Justice Department argued that the gang Tren de Aragua, which it claims has infiltrated 40 states and is tied to Venezuela’s Maduro regime, constitutes a modern-day invasion. The ACLU, representing a group of detained Venezuelan gangsters, called it a dangerous stretch —warning that redefining gang violence as war could hand future presidents a blank check to bypass normal due process protections in immigration cases.

The story reported on yesterday’s oral arguments, during which a three-judge panel questioned the lawyers about the case’s merits. At one point—and this is where the appellate magic happened— Judge Andrew Oldham (a Trump appointee) asked the ACLU lawyer, “Are we allowed to conduct a federal trial to countermand the president of the United States when he says this is an armed invasion?”

That question was a trap, and the ACLU lawyer, Lee Gelernt, walked right into it. “Mr. Gelernt,” the Times reported, “said that indeed the judges could.”

But when Judge Oldham asked Mr. Gelernt to cite a single case that supported his assertion, Gelernt admitted he couldn’t.

“Thank you for your candor,” Judge Oldham said with satisfaction. He might as well have said, “Checkmate!” And the ACLU’s fate was sealed.

⚖️ By asking whether a federal trial could override a presidential determination of “armed invasion,” Judge Oldham reframed the dispute as about separation of powers, rather than statutory interpretation or immigration process.

Appellate judges —appointed for life— do not need to know what the lawyers think. They have law clerks and sit on the most powerful courts in the country. They ask questions for one reason only: to make their jobs easier.

“We do not need to reach the issue of whether the government properly interpreted the statute, since the Plaintiffs conceded that they could not cite a single case that would permit this court to override a duly-elected president’s determination of an invasion,” the Court’s eventual order might say.

I am a litigator, not an appellate lawyer. But I have —from necessity— dabbled in appellate advocacy, and I quickly learned that the questions from the appellate panel are not posed from mere curiosity. Lawyers should tread very carefully before conceding anything in oral argument and stepping on their own garden hose.

Don’t ever concede anything. “Mr. Childers,” the judge might ask, “do you at least concede that the sky is blue?” Think hard. “Well, judge, I would have to disagree; there are clouds in the sky, and of course, the sun, and birds, planes, flying saucers, and chem, I mean contrails. And half the time it’s nighttime. So, no. The sky is not blue.”

Even the most harmless-seeming concession can metastasize into a dispositive holding. Gelernt could have bought himself time with a pivot back to his main argument: “Your Honor, even if we assume arguendo that the executive is owed deference in military matters, the question remains whether the statutory criteria for invoking the Alien Enemies Act—hostility, state sponsorship, a formal declaration of war—are satisfied. And that is a judicial question.”

Instead, the ACLU handed the court a one-sentence shortcut: no case law, no authority, no judicial override. Boom. The decision writes itself.

⚖️ It’s a fascinating case. There’s no question that gangs like Tren aren’t classic invading armies. But times change, and soft power and deniable destabilization are now the preferred military styles. And, of course, progressives themselves are masters at linguistic gymnastics. January 6th, they earnestly insisted, was an “insurrection.” The latest “national security threat” is misinformation. And so on.

They just don’t like it when conservatives do it. When the right flips the script and says, “Okay, well then a cartel-linked gang occupying apartment complexes and assassinating dissidents across 40 states constitutes a nontraditional invasion,” suddenly it’s, Whoa there, cowboy. Words have meanings.

Whether or not Tren de Aragua is a “real” invasion in the classical sense, Trump’s legal team is arguing that the modern warfare lens —cyber, irregular, decentralized, deniable— has already been legitimized elsewhere. And they’re not wrong.

We’ll see. My guess is the Fifth Circuit will uphold Trump’s AEA powers. SCOTUS is now out of session until next year. So the deportation express may be back in business soon.

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Democrats are facing a reckoning, and the nation is slowly healing. In a story ripe with good news for Californians, if not everyone, the Times ran another article this morning with the unlikely headline, “California Rolls Back Its Landmark Environmental Law.”

In 1970, then-governor Ronald Reagan passed a bill requiring government construction projects to undergo painfully extensive environmental review. He probably thought it would help save money and slow the growth of state government while pacifying tree-huggers and their pet snails. But two years later, a California court expanded the law’s scope to include all construction in the state, and then it became painfully expensive and time-consuming for anyone to build anything.

Unintended consequences.

Yesterday, in a move that would’ve been political heresy just five years ago, California Democrats —led by oleaginous presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom— torched a golden calf of the environmental left: the California Environmental Quality Act. Often hailed as the gold standard of environmental protection, CEQA has morphed over the decades into a NIMBY cudgel— wielded by everyone from environmentalists to unions to cranky neighbors to stop everything from housing projects to nature paths.

Now, in a stunning display of policy realism (or electoral panic), the Golden State’s lawmakers gutted core elements of CEQA in the name of housing and homelessness. It’s a tectonic shift: the party of regulation is de facto admitting that, as Reagan famously said, sometimes regulation is the problem.

Whether this is a course correction or just a well-dressed concession of failure remains to be seen— but the political implications are national.

It seemed as if the Times even hopes it will go national. “California’s moves,” the Times optimistically suggested, “could inspire other Democratic-led states to weaken their environmental regulations to address their housing shortages. Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota and several other left-leaning states have laws much like CEQA.”

Take a moment to consider the implications: the Nation’s most solid-blue, one-party Democrat stronghold state just embraced deregulation. And not just on the margins, but striking at the beating heart of one of its most smugly self-satisfied green statutes.

And they did it by rolling the legislative bulldozer right over the crushed political bodies of their environmental allies.

🔥 It’s the first flicker of new life in the post-election Democrat playbook. They might be finally settling down and adjusting to a new reality. Astonishingly, the Times reported the CEQA story with nuance, presenting both sides of the argument (for once), and without putting the editorial thumb on the scale with sneering, negative linguistics. There was no evident strong criticism, just sober, balanced journalism.

If the Times considered this rollback as a betrayal if liberal virtues, they’d have said so. Instead, they covered it like a regrettable but understandable evolution. Pivoting.

When The New York Times, the unofficial house organ of elite progressive opinion and liberals’ permission structure gatekeeper, doesn’t unload on California Democrats for gutting their most iconic environmental law, that’s not just silence. It’s a signal. It suggests that the progressive editorial establishment senses the political tides have washed out to sea, and even they know this is a necessary recalibration.

Apparently, deregulation, dressed up in progressive virtues like “equity” and “affordable housing,” is no longer a dirty word. Who thought we’d see the day?

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Another one. The New York Post ran a troubling story last week, headlined “Hiking influencer Hannah Moody’s cause of death revealed after being found dead on Arizona trail.” I’ll spoil the mystery: it was climate change.

By all accounts, Hannah, 31, was a lovely girl with a popular Instagram feed about her hiking adventures. Her videos were uplifting and often quoted scripture. She was found dead about a third of a mile from the park entrance, with no sign of foul play. After a puzzling delay, the coroner concluded the experienced hiker died suddenly from heat exposure.

Apart from expressions of grief and sympathy, a vein of incredulity ran through the comments:

Indeed. Neither the coroner nor any of the many news reports suggested even a hint of curiosity over the healthy young lady’s incomprehensible death and the banal explanation.

To be clear: there is no evidence of her jab status. The officials didn’t say. They probably didn’t even ask. But I’m asking.

Whenever healthy young people die suddenly and unexpectedly in everyday circumstances where normal people don’t die, the first question they should ask is: did she get the jabs?

They’re not going to get away with it, not if I can help it. I will never, ever, stop until The Reckoning becomes a distant memory. Let me know if you’re with me. Godspeed, Hannah.

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The Times, on some kind of a roll, continued yesterday’s news feast with an article headlined, “Trump Steps Up Pressure Campaign on Powell With Handwritten Note.” That’s one way to put it. It was classic Trump. He’s getting ready to do something.

CLIP: Press Sec Leavitt shows reporters Trump’s ‘handwritten note’ to Fed Chair Jerome Powell (0:58).

If ever there were a subject that blog authors avoid like the plague, a subject so mind-numbingly horrifying it sends readers fleeing for the cognitive safety of Dilbert cartoons and TikTok cat videos, that subject is interest rates on bonds. My fingers twitched nervelessly even as I typed those words in sheer authorial terror.

Here, with an uncontrollable shudder, are the basics. We, meaning Uncle Sam (with only our very best interests at heart), borrow money from foreigners by selling them “bonds,” which are like carnival coupons for future Florida Everglades oil revenues. There are all types of bonds, limited only by the demented imaginations of bankers and financial experts, the same ones who dreamed up the no-job-needed mortgage crisis of the aughts. But I digress.

We sell a lot of bonds, by paying investors interest. A lot of interest. The higher the interest rate, the more we pay. Billions. Trillions. The sky is the limit.

Now that President Trump has heroically wrestled the Biden recession under control, he wants the Federal Reserve to lower the price —the interest rate— that the country pays investors who buy our bonds. But Fed Chair Jerome “Snidely Whiplash” Powell says nyet.

Powell claims we aren’t yet out of the financial woods, so he’s just playing it safe.

Delving into the details requires entering a Lovecraftian world of ten-syllable financial buzzwords and word salad so deliberately obscure that even international chessmasters quake when they see the vocabulary list. Every commonsense objection to lowering or raising rates is met by an equal and opposite response of incomprehensible gobbledegook, meant to make us feel like morons and simply sit down and let the experts do their work.

They can’t just say, “we’re keeping rates high.” No, no. Instead, they: “maintain a restrictive policy stance to ensure inflation expectations remain well-anchored relative to the dual mandate under conditions of asymmetric labor market slack.” They don’t just talk about borrowing costs— it’s “term premiums,” “yield curve inversions,” and “nonlinear transmission effects in the neutral rate regime.” Powell whispers arcane incantations like “real rates adjusted for forward guidance uncertainty within a confidence-weighted Taylor Rule” that magically summon a dozen economists and two minor demons from the CBO.

These people never explain anything. They just obfuscate until the Blackhawks come home, piling on more and more incomprehensible gibberish until stroke-like symptoms appear in their victims, when they finally move on.

🔥 But there is a much simpler lens that lasers right through all the sulphuric smoke.

During Biden’s entire term, Powell kept rates pinned to near zero, through record inflation, multi-trillion-dollar Biden spending sprees, and a labor market tighter than a native drum because, we were told, “inflation expectations remained well anchored.” They literally denied inflation was even happening.

But then —poof!— with a new incantation, right after voters handed Trump a historic win in November 2024, the Fed suddenly rediscovered the lost country of inflation, and suddenly became a prudish paragon of restraint. All the high interest rates the Fed has so carefully and primly calculated as absolutely necessary came after the November 7th election.

It’s almost like Powell kept a framed photo of Biden on his desk labeled “In Case of Progressive Agenda Threat, Break Glass Ceiling.” Rates stayed flatter than NPR’s ratings curve until the very moment Trump clawed his way back into the Oval Office. Suddenly, the Fed “remembered its mandate,” strapped on its fiscal chastity belt, and began fanning itself about financial overheating. Weird!

While serving Biden, it was spend, print, repeat. Powell played along like a cocktail pianist on the deck of the Titanic. But under Trump’s deregulation, growth, and tax reform, suddenly the Fed transformed into the ghost of Andrew Mellon, sternly warning that the economy must be disciplined, lest it enjoy itself too much.

Jerome, nobody is buying it.

The pièce de résistance of this monetary opera was unveiled yesterday when Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, barely suppressing a smirk, held up a piece of paper like it was the Zapruder film. On it appeared a printed list of global bond rates, ranked from lowest to highest —Switzerland, Japan, China, even Russia— which are all paying less on their national debt than the United States.

And in the corner, like a note passed in study hall, Trump’s unmistakable handwriting: “Jerome — you are, as usual, too late. You have cost the USA a fortune. You should lower the rate — by a lot.” The underlying point was brutally effective: Why is the strongest economy in the world paying more to borrow than countries with capital controls, censorship, and exchange rates backed by slave labor and violence?

Of course, it wasn’t intended to be a message to Chairman Powell. I read Trump’s note as a classic Trumpian chess move, to pave the way for political possibility: removing the Fed Chair, something no president has ever tried, though many have pined for the opportunity.

🔥 Powell is standing on thin political ice. An appeals court recently upheld (for now) Trump’s removal of the Director of the inaptly named Institute for Peace, another supposedly “independent” agency created by Congress.

The legal logic is the same: if agencies exercising executive power answer to no one, who’s really running the country? The courts, now stocked with Trump-era judges who understand the assignment, have started to shift away from the old gospel of sacred institutional independence toward something more grounded— like democratic accountability.

If the President must answer to voters for the economy, why should a Fed Chair get to derail the whole train while citing “market expectations” in a dialect even judges can’t understand? The era of unabashed deferral to unelected experts is over.

The Fed doesn’t get to play shadow government anymore— insulated from consequence, immune from accountability, and cloaked in a fog of jargon so thick you’d need a hedge fund intern and an exorcist to translate. The days when “because markets” was a complete sentence are gone. Trump’s handwritten note wasn’t just a jab at Powell— it was a shot across the bow of the entire technocratic class that has run U.S. fiscal policy like an invitation-only country club for the last thirty years.

When the people elect a president who wants to cut rates, create growth, and unshackle the economy, the Fed doesn’t get to veto that from behind frosted glass. Not anymore. Not after covid. Not after inflation. Not after the American public watched in real time as expert after expert confidently delivered disaster.

“Independence” is not a blank check. Not anymore.

And if Powell thinks he can hike his way into historical sainthood while the rest of the world is trying to breathe again, he shall soon find out what real accountability looks like. Stay tuned.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Hike back here tomorrow morning, fully hydrated, for more intellectually nutritious essential news and commentary.

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