'A greater threat to Yale'

A container of wine was reportedly found inside her vehicle

'Entered into subscription agreements with multiple institutional investors'

'So why would they invite him to speak at West Point'

'The fact that he was bitten by an alligator and still continued his rampage is shocking.'

Movies & TV The Last of Us The Last of Us Wraps up an Incomplete Story With “Convergence” Will that brazen structural choice work out for them? By Molly Templeton | Published on May 27, 2025 Image: Liane Hentscher/HBO Comment 1 Share New Share Image: Liane Hentscher/HBO We’re here, at the end of it all—except we’re not. The Last of Us’s second season finale did what gamers (and any fool, like me, who had read anything about the story of the second game) expected. It ended without telling a complete story, leaving us with a cliffhanger and the promise of a different perspective in the third season. The cliffhanger isn’t much of one: Neither of these characters is about to die in a fade-to-black. The suffering happens on screen in this series.  A generous reading of “Convergence” might say that this episode asks a lot of unanswerable questions about community: What it means, what you can ask of it, what it can ask of you, and where its boundaries are. But the only person really thinking about community is Jesse. He’s in Seattle because, for better or worse, and whether she acts like it or not, Ellie is part of his community, and his role is to look out for the people in it. And yet: By coming to Seattle, he’s put the bigger community at risk—in his case, the risk of losing him as their future leader. He’s following in Ellie’s footsteps in more ways than one. If he did it for selfless rather than selfish reasons, does that change things? But community, for Ellie, is just one more source of hurt. And sometimes it’s one she turns on herself, as when she decides to tell Dina the truth about Joel and the Fireflies. Well, part of the truth. She leaves out the fact that while she long suspected Joel’s original story was a lie, she didn’t actually know that until the night before he got killed. It’s up to our interpretation whether she leaves this out because the writers thought it would be more dramatic this way, or because she’s looking for a way to hurt herself for what she’s just done. I watched the episode twice, and I saw it both ways. (The most interesting, wrenching moments in this episode are moments in which Ellie is uncertain. Put a pin in that thought, because I’m going to come back to it.) Image: Liane Hentscher/HBO When Ellie tells Dina what she did—she tells only Dina, not Jesse—she seems horrified at herself. She’s not glad that it was easy to hurt Nora. She’s found a chasm inside herself, a dark place where she didn’t know she was capable of going. If anything, she seems terrified. And doubtful. Maybe Nora didn’t really deserve that. Telling Dina the truth gives Ellie what she feels like she deserves: Dina turning away from her, saying they should go home. Ellie can’t call off her hunt, but maybe she could let someone else do it for her. She’s not so mad she won’t give Ellie a bracelet for good luck. Just like Jesse’s not so mad he won’t share his ammo.  But before they can go home, they have to find Tommy. En route to the bookstore rendezvous point, Ellie and Jesse talk; she accidentally reveals Dina’s pregnancy, which Jesse had pretty much figured out when Dina turned down whiskey, and Jesse makes fun of Ellie’s insistence that nothing’s changed. (He also tells her that Shimmer is okay; thank you, Jesse! I’m glad someone else is worried about the horse.)  Because this is Seattle, they run into a WLF/Seraphite clash—a one-sided incident in which a pack of Wolves ask a lone Scar how he crossed their line (a detail that feels like it may be relevant next season). Ellie wants to throw herself into the situation to defend the Scar kid, which is a little bit hard to swallow, given what they saw from the Scars less than 24 hours ago. But it is just one youth, and Ellie clearly feels for him. Jesse uses a bunch of perfectly reasonable arguments about why this is a terrible idea—they’re outnumbered; “This is not our war”—but for some reason skips over the one thing that seems like it would work: Dina. What would she do if they both died out there? Tommy doesn’t even know where she is. Come on, Jesse!  A detour to the WLF—using a Costco for a base of operations—tells us a little bit about what they have planned. Something big, something secret, something that scares the “sheep” in the army, as Isaac calls them. It also tells us that Abby is the Jesse of the WLF, the one who’s been tapped as the future leader. But she and most of her team are all missing. Curious. Curious, also, the relationship between Park and Isaac. She is forthright with him, challenges him, says the thing that might apply to Jesse as well as Abby: If your future leader has fucked off when you need them, maybe they’re not really your future leader. Image: Liane Hentscher/HBO In the bookstore, Tommy is nowhere to be found, so Ellie picks out a book for Dina’s unborn child—The Monster at the End of This Book, not on the nose at all—and she and Jesse talk about love and community and responsibility. (A context-less quote from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland looms over them both: “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” I am still trying to figure out what this is doing here. Morals are really not hard to come by in this show. In fact it might be nice if they were a little harder to find.) When Jesse says he didn’t leave Jackson with the woman he fell in love with because he put the community first, Ellie gets her back right up and spits, “Okay. Got it. So you’re Saint Jesse of Wyoming and everyone else is a fucking asshole.”  In this moment, yes, Ellie is being a fucking asshole. But who would have taught her to think the way that Jesse does? When, previous to Jackson, has Ellie been shown anything like care or community? Even Jackson wasn’t always kind to her. It is weird to me that the show often pivots so hard to “Ellie’s being awful now, see?” without any seeming awareness of where its own lead character is coming from. Why is she a liar? Why is she so stubborn about denying her feelings? Why, for that matter, did the show skip three months of her healing and having to deal with Joel’s death, which could have been a really, really rich mine of nuance and complexity? (Did I just answer my own question?) Ellie’s character has been reduced to spitting angry words at her friends and/or killing people and feeling terrible about it.  When they pick up a WLF SOS about a sniper and head upstairs to figure out what’s going on, Jesse is certain it’s Tommy who’s pinned them down, but Ellie only has eyes for the Seattle Great Wheel and the aquarium, certain that the aquarium is what dying Nora meant when she said “whale” and “wheel.” A few hours ago, she seemed willing to get Tommy and head home; now, with Abby maybe within sight, she reverts to her original bullheaded determination. And for once, someone calls her on it. When Jesse points out her selfishness, admitting he voted against the Seattle trip because it wasn’t in the best interest of the community, she loses her shit and throws the idea of community back in his face.  They’ve been having this argument since the first episode, and it reaches no conclusion here, because Ellie just can’t hear anybody else through her grief. Jesse doesn’t deny it when she insists that he would do the same thing if he were in his shoes, but he doesn’t agree, either. She’s determined, once again, to forget about everyone else in favor of single-minded pursuit of vengeance. Ellie’s community was Joel, and he’s dead, and she’ll strand every one of her companions in order to pursue his murderer. And yet when Jesse says “I really hope you make it,” I believe him.  I would, to be honest, like to cut the entire sequence of Ellie getting to the aquarium, which hinges on altogether too many coincidences. She keeps going. The Seraphites are still terrible, even the brainwashed children. I get it. The most interesting thing about the waterlogged sequence is the shot of Isaac looking satisfied. We don’t really know why, though he told Park there’s a good chance they’ll both be dead by morning. His war saves Ellie from certain death at the hands of the still-one-note Seraphites. It is hard to muster up a lot of interest in the WLF/Seraphite conflict when one side has been treated like (murderous) characters and the other like cartoon villains. Image: Liane Hentscher/HBO In the aquarium, Ellie finds not Abby but Mel and Owen, talking about something involving Abby—and something about leaving. They are not in agreement, and Abby herself is of a point of contention. More things to wonder about for the next year or two! But first, more tragedy. Ellie demands answers; Mel and Owen are clearly reluctant to provide them, and a lot of clearly meaningful but largely unreadable looks pass between them. When Owen says Ellie will kill them either way, Ellie insists, “No, I won’t. Because I’m not like you.” It’s almost convincing. What she did to Nora was bleak and terrible, and maybe she doesn’t want to do that again. Except to Abby.  I think there’s an emotional cheapness to the way the show reveals Mel’s pregnancy and ties her back to Dina, and at the same time, I think it’s an effective and affecting sequence. (This season is just me having two opinions about everything, and then having two opinions—this is good! I’m being manipulated!—about having two opinions.) But if there’s one thing I’m looking forward to in season three, it’s spending time with Mel, who goes into efficient medical mode even as she knows she has thirty seconds to live. It’s just heartrending, and so is Bella Ramsey’s performance as she tries, desperate and lost, to do what Mel asks. With seconds to live, Mel says “You’re doing good, you’re doing really good” to the person who just killed her and the child she’s carrying. She is an astonishing person, and I hope we see more of that.  When she asks if it’s out, though, Ellie doesn’t answer. This is a brutal way for her to suddenly and completely understand why Joel didn’t always tell people the whole truth. Ignorance isn’t bliss, but sometimes it might offer a small measure of peace. When Tommy and Jesse show up, her face, her shocked, shattered face, says “I didn’t mean to” as clearly as any words could.  The comfort Tommy offers Ellie, back in the theater as they’re preparing to head back to Jackson, is well-meant but maybe not what she needs to hear. He says Owen and Mel were part of it too; they made their choices. This is true, and he’s trying to soothe her, but further justification is the last thing Ellie needs. This, though, is a moment for softness, no matter how baffling. Jesse’s clearly furious, again, but says that he was willing to come back for Ellie—that it occurred to him that, “If I were out there somewhere, lost and in trouble, you would set the world on fire to save me.” He says this despite the fact that she just left Tommy holed up on a pier alone, sniping wolves. He says this despite everything else they’ve said to each other this episode. It just doesn’t ring true; it feels like a too-tidy ribbon tied around a complex relationship in its last moments. Maybe Jesse’s just trying to remind Ellie that her fury can be used for good. But it still feels wedged in, unconvincing. Image: Liane Hentscher/HBO RIP, Jesse, you were great, and Jackson will miss you. Presumably Abby finds the theater the same way Jesse did, or she just followed them back from the latest murder scene. This face-off is powerfully acted, fraught, almost too brief, but Abby’s fury is palpable—and Ellie’s fury is muted by fresh grief and a desperation to not have to see Tommy die right in front of her, too.  It’s very interesting that even with Ellie right there, Abby assumes the men killed her friends. It’s even more interesting how angry she is at the idea that Elie “wasted” the life Abby didn’t take from her. We’ll have to find out what that means later, as the gunshot-cut-to-black jumps back three days, to The Last of Us: Abby’s Version. But earlier in the episode, there was one very meaningful shot of Dina up in the balcony with a gun, watching the front door.  This whole episode is rich with Ellie’s uncertainty, her horror at her own actions, her flip-flopping loyalty to the people in front of her and the vengeance she wants for Joel’s death. Bella Ramsey just kills it, repeatedly, showing us an Ellie miserable and driven, torn and furious and throwing herself into deadly situations but yet, in the hands of the Scars, desperate to live. This show is at its best when it settles, uncomfortably, into Ellie’s lost moments. Those are the real difficult parts, not the bludgeon-heavy messages about violence. And then in the post-show commentary, game and show writer Halley Gross (credited with this episode along with Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann) says of the scene with Mel, “It needs to be so brutal that it is the wake-up call Ellie needs. And yet, it isn’t.” Isn’t it? I feel like I’m being shown one thing in the actual show, and then told something else by the creators. If this is true further down the line, then why say it now, when Ramsey has just clearly poured her heart into a performance that says, in her expressions, her tears, her body language, that this moment has shaken her deeply and fundamentally?  Ramsey, too, says something that doesn’t track for me: They bring up Joel’s bit on the porch, how he wants Ellie to do a little better, and then they say “And she doesn’t. She does worse.”  Okay, first, I hate the whole way this pushes me into trying to quantify these acts of violence. Not doing it. But second, Ellie is a 19-year-old who never knew a world before the outbreak. Joel was in his 50s/60s and had a whole lot more life experience when he did what he did. Do you really want audiences to pass the same moral judgment on both of these characters? Why? Why is better/worse even a metric here? I didn’t like that line last week, and I like it even less now. Image: Liane Hentscher/HBO At any rate, it is really, really time to stop watching those little post-show bits, which are mostly unnecessary explainers that reiterate what we just saw. At best, they include cool bits about how scenes were actually filmed. One thing I can unreservedly say for this show is that it is beautifully crafted, from the posters and graffiti in the theater dressing room to the greenery all over Seattle to the hauntingly empty aquarium. Seattle’s geography may not make a lick of sense, but I can mostly let that go in favor of admiring this dark, mossy vision of it. The Last of Us Part II, as I understand it, switches halfway through so that you play as Abby, and now the show is mirroring the game. Rather than a season that switches halfway through, we get a truncated season that purposefully only tells half of the story. Obviously no one can say until season three rolls around if this structure, the hiding away of Abby for most of the season, will be effective in the end. I can’t speak to how this split felt to gamers when The Last of Us Part 2 came out, though I certainly have the sense that a lot of them did not like it at all. But the notion that a so-called villain is also a complex human, that a “hero” might be flawed and morally dubious—that’s been explored a lot in television. You could watch shows about terrible men doing terrible things for years and never run out. It’s less common for those antiheroes to be young women. But a young, female antihero deserves the same complexity of writing and storytelling and character development that all those terrible, morally gray men with their own shows have, and that’s not happening here. Ellie has two modes this season: love for Dina and rage for anything that gets in her way. Her grief is too rarely visible to us as love; the show relied on last week’s flashback episode as a sort of shorthand reminder for all the things it skipped past in the rush to get to Seattle. Too often, it feels like she’s spinning from one side of this coin to the other abruptly. The emotions are oversimplified, and this extends to the people around her, too; they are angry or they are supportive. The show wants to be morally ambiguous, but too often it paints in black and white.  Will audiences wait a year or more for Abby’s side of the story? The show also made the choice to reveal her connection to the doctor Joel killed, meaning that we can already have some sympathy for her—and that it’s clear just how much she and Ellie mirror one another (they even both have the marks of Seraphites around their necks at the end). The shock of handing the story to Joel’s murderer is less intense than it might have been, and that certainly feels like a choice made in hopes that people will keep watching. Will you? [end-mark] The post <i>The Last of Us</i> Wraps up an Incomplete Story With “Convergence” appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Enemy Mine Enemy Mine Is the Queer, Anti-War Sci-Fi You’ve Been Missing ’90s Star Trek may have tackled issues of gender, race, and interstellar war — but Enemy Mine got there first.  By Meg Elison | Published on May 27, 2025 Credit: 20th Century Fox Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: 20th Century Fox In 1985, 20th Century Fox tried to convince audiences to go to the theater and see a tender story of connection between an all-American fighter pilot and a pregnant nonbinary enemy combatant by wrapping its loving heart in Homeric violence and space pew-pew dogfights.  It mostly did not work, and Enemy Mine has become an obscure science fiction film, remembered mostly for bombing at the box office. I come before you today to remind you of its lineage, the unlikelihood of its existence, and to put it in its rightful place among the great film adaptations of award-winning genre stories.  In 1979, Barry Longyear published the novella “Enemy Mine” in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Longyear would republish and collect it, writing two more stories in the same universe, and winning the Nebula and Hugo awards for novella that year. The course of adaptation hardly ever runs smooth, and British director Richard Loncraine exited the production of the film adaptation early on, citing creative differences. The German Wolfgang Peterson (Neverending Story) took over, moving production from Budapest to Munich, and starting over with principal photography. Already deep in the red, this film was in trouble from the start.  Our heroes are also in trouble from the start: we open on a laser battle in space, with fighter pilots shooting energy weapons at one another while protagonist Willis Davidge (Dennis Quaid) and copilot Joey Wooster (Lance Kerwin) inform us (with the help of some clumsy narration) that Bilateral Terran Alliance (BTA) is at war with the Dracs over territory and resources, having grown tired of fighting over the same on Earth. The Dracs are a reptilian humanoid species, but Davidge has never seen one, he confesses as he kills several in combat. A barely-there Black woman pilot is killed, and Davidge reacts out of a need for vengeance by pursuing the ship responsible into the atmosphere of a nearby planet.  After crash-landing and finding his copilot dead, Davidge sets out to hunt down the Drac pilot, whom he saw eject. The two struggle for dominance, but are distracted from killing one another by a meteor shower and the local wildlife. With no other choice, they decide to get to know each other. Our Drac is Jeriba Shigan (Louis Gossett Jr.) but Davidge calls them Jerry. Jerry and Davidge are standoffish at first, insulting one another’s values and reenacting the interstellar war in miniature.  This middle part of the film is where all its lively heart beats, and where all its most difficult and rewarding work is done. We see Davidge become interested in Jerry’s theology and philosophy, which they read from a tiny book they wear on a necklace. Together, they read verses about refusing to answer violence with violence, about the benevolent nature of responding with love to those who hate you. Despite the extensive prosthetics and complex phonology Gosset is working with, the actor does a remarkable job of making Jerry relatable, likable, and sympathetic. Quaid, in turn, shows us the softening effect that any bigot undergoes when he is confronted with an individual rather than a monolith he’s encouraged to hate out of generalized bias. The two open to one another, while still struggling for survival and building a hut out of turtle shells.  The struggle is real as winter bears down on their planet, and as Davidge discovers that scavenger teams who enslave Dracs for labor have been visiting nearby. Driven apart by cabin fever, the pair are reunited by fear and necessity. Just when it seems it might be the two of them against the world until they both die, Jerry tells Davidge they’re pregnant.  Here, we have to engage with the film’s sexuality. Though early dialogue between Davidge and his BTA comrades constructs compulsory heterosexuality in workplace banter before the crash, Davidge makes no declaration or expression of his own. He leaves behind no wife and no girlfriend. His whole life gradually shifts from hope of rescue from this planet to building a life with Jerry. Announcing a pregnancy to the only other person around usually means that pregnancy was jointly created. Indeed, Davidge reacts with the expectant joy and incredulity of a new father. Though Davidge uses “it” as his pronoun to describe Jerry, the 1985 audience knew they were watching a performance between two men; Quaid and Gossett were established actors at the time. The result is the genesis of a queer family, any way we measure it. The two castaways have been intimate in sharing space and food and care, and they will soon share a new life.  Dracs reproduce asexually, and it seems they have little control over when self-fertilization takes place. Davidge seems amazed but apprehensive about what’s to come. Jerry focuses entirely on the most important ritual of their people: a recitation of lineage that explains where a Drac comes from and how they arise from their line. Struggling to equivocate and make sense of each other, Jerry gets Davidge to tell his own family line, made more complex by having had two parents. Davidge listens to Jerry’s in return. This is vitally important to Jerry, who will (of course, since this is genre fiction) die in childbirth. Davidge will have to retain this information, and will also have to care for the child.  By the halfway point of this film, it becomes difficult to believe it’s a movie from 1985. These combatants engage with one another on bases of race and gender that we’re still fighting for today, as if they were alien worlds with which we have never yet attempted to make peace. Nonbinary ace icon Jerry says, without equivocation as they prepare to bring forth life, “I’m not a woman.” Armed with the startling knowledge that all people are people, Davidge has begun to learn the Drac language. That’s good, because he’s going to need it. Jerry dies, leaving baby Zammis (Bumper Robinson) in the Terran’s barely-capable care. When this movie came out in 1985, it was seeking its audience in Star Trek fans, who had shown they could engage critically with race and gender in science fiction since 1966. However, Enemy Mine was too early for fans of Alien Nation, which wouldn’t come along until 1989 and put mpreg on the small screen for the average American family to ponder and talk about at the water cooler. Star Trek: the Next Generation wouldn’t air its controversial episode “The Outcast,” until 1992, wherein the Enterprise crew would encounter a planet to whom all gender performance is criminalized. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would come along just one year after that, featuring a main cast member who was a woman but carried within an immortal omnisexual slug, and who had been a man just a few years before.  So, too, did the ‘90s iteration of Star Trek deal with the complications that arise from cross-racial adoption. Like other sci-fi children who grapple with the difference between who they live with and who they came from, Zammis lines up his three-fingered and clawed hand beside Davidge’s human one, and wishes he were different, wishes he were the same. Star Trek: TNG showed us Klingon, Betazoid, Cardassian, and Bajoran biracial kids who struggled in the same way. Those writers dealt with the loss of identity and stability that come from it, and the inability to separate their existence from the war, occupation, economic inequality, and racism that often cause it to exist.  But Enemy Mine got there first.  Written science fiction has always been decades ahead of both film and television, acting as a guide and a precursor to the more widely-seen types of media. Stories and novellas like Longyear’s “Enemy Mine” are like tugboats, small and mighty, dragging the barges of tv and movies out into sea. The mass of the mainstream is tough to get moving, but a stout tugboat always does its job despite the tides.  The tides were against Enemy Mine when it reached theaters. Packed with tension absent from the original novella and advertised as an action movie in space, it found its audience among fans of Star Wars; a franchise so aggressively cisnormative and heterosexual that they’d rather let a brother and sister make out than try any other arrangement, even among alien sluglords.  In the end, Enemy Mine is a sensitive sci-fi tearjerker about a bigot who sees the error of his ways, adopts the child of a genderqueer foe, and teaches that child both his own ways and the ways of the child’s lost world. In the emotional conclusion, Davidge presents himself on the Drac homeworld to recite Zammis’ litany to unite the child with his people, he does so selflessly, wanting only to repair what war and interstellar commerce have damaged. When Zammis recites his own child’s lineage, they include Davidge’s name in the line of those who brought them into the world.  Sometimes, a movie does not fail because it was in any way lacking. Art is sometimes spent too soon on an audience that is not ready to receive it.  But we might be ready now.  Enemy Mine is available for streaming on nearly every platform. Put it on when you need soft, loving sci-fi about ace and queer parenthood, or to feel some hope that a better world is not only possible, but a dream we’ve been sharing for a very long time.[end-mark] The post <i>Enemy Mine</i> Is the Queer, Anti-War Sci-Fi You’ve Been Missing appeared first on Reactor.

A video in which French President Emmanuel Macron appears to be shoved in the face by his wife Brigitte on Sunday has gone viral, although Macron claims that he and his wife were joking. President Macron, age 47, is shown in the video standing in front of the plane’s exit doors, when the hands of his wife Brigitte, 72, suddenly emerge from off-screen, pushing his face. Macron then swivels around to the camera before flashing a smile and waving. He quickly walks out of view. The video, which is authentic, does not make clear the context of the push. The incident occurred as the couple arrived in Vietnam to begin a tour of Southeast Asia. French Pres. Emmanuel Macron appeared to be pushed in the face by his wife Brigitte Macron as they arrived in Vietnam, the first stop of a Southeast Asia tour. https://t.co/nqzICGPpeY pic.twitter.com/VQnNSpMm1K— ABC News (@ABC) May 26, 2025 Macron downplayed the significance of the shove. “I was bickering, or rather joking, with my wife,” Macron later told reporters, per a translation. “It’s nothing.” His office told Reuters that the clip was “a moment of closeness,” and that “it was a moment when the president and his wife were relaxing one last time before the start of the trip by having a laugh.” 'Just joking': Macron denies dispute with wife, blames disinformationhttps://t.co/G6RgY94mNB pic.twitter.com/W8hq31nvgX— AFP News Agency (@AFP) May 27, 2025 Macron is no stranger to viral clips gone wrong.  Most recently, internet commentators claimed that he was using illegal drugs with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer—falsely asserting that a used tissue seen on a table used by the three leaders was a bag of cocaine. Macron’s office called these claims “disinformation.” “There are people who have watched videos and think that I shared a bag of cocaine, that I had one-on-one with a Turkish president and that right now I’m having a fight with my wife,” Macron told the press after them most recent incident, per a translation. “None of that is true, yet those three videos are real.” Macron has also gotten negative online attention in the past for a 2023 interview in which he secretly removed a luxury watch from his wrist while speaking about economic austerity measures. The post French President Macron Downplays Video of Shove from Wife appeared first on The Daily Signal.

As Americans began to prepare for Memorial Day weekend, the Supreme Court quietly handed President Donald Trump a significant victory in the fight to rein in the rogue D.C. bureaucracy.   In a short, two-page order, the Court stayed a district court order that directed Trump to reinstate two federal officials whom he had fired.   Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett voted for the stay. Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.  The obvious effect is that the two officials—Gwynne Wilcox and Cathy Harris, whom Trump removed from the National Labor Relations Board and and the Merit Systems Protection Board respectively—cannot retake their positions in either agency unless they win their lawsuits.   The implications, however, are far more sweeping.   From its inception during the Progressive era, the administrative state was designed to give technical specialists broad policymaking power and even broader discretion to use that power. Progressives, such as President Woodrow Wilson, believed that important matters of state should not be left to the political process, but should instead be decided by subject matter experts who should be insulated from removal by those who appointed them and unaccountable to the people who elected those who appointed them.  The result was that unelected federal bureaucrats would enjoy the ability not only to control national policy in a whole host of areas, but to do what they want regardless of who controls Congress or occupies the White House.   Of course, Progressives conceded when casting the vision for this form of administrative governance, that bureaucrats should and often would consider the views of the American people, Congress, and the president as expressed through legislation, directives, and votes. But bureaucrats would retain the discretion to act contrary to those views when they think it in the best interest of the country to do so.   That mindset lies at the heart of the administrative state. And it has pervaded the D.C. bureaucracy for decades.   It’s no wonder that scores of bureaucrats had the gumption after the 2024 election to say that they would disobey Trump if they disagreed with his policies or directives.   But this mindset, as well as the Progressive enterprise of administrative government, are incompatible with the U.S. Constitution.   The Constitution establishes a structure of government—not a list of amorphous principles.   Article I of the Constitution lists the specific legislative powers that Congress possesses. Article II declares that the executive power is vested in the president.   Part of that executive power, Article II then explains, is to appoint officers to assist the president in doing his job and implementing his policies. There’s only one limit: to appoint certain high-ranking officers, the president must obtain the Senate’s advice and consent.   In 1926, Chief Justice (and former President) William Howard Taft, writing for a majority of the Supreme Court in Meyers v. United States, reached the unsurprising conclusion that under Article II, removal of federal officers is an inherently executive function that cannot be limited by Congress. Taft obviously knew a lot about executive authority and the need to ensure that in terms of accountability, the buck would stop with the president, not with insulated executive branch officials whom the president could not remove absent malfeasance by those officials.  Nearly a decade later, however, the Court repudiated that common sense reading of Article II. In 1935, in Humphrey’s Executor, the Court held that Congress could create a multimember federal agency, insulate the agency from political control by restricting the president’s power to remove the agency’s officials and, in some instances, then enable the agency to promulgate and defend rules without so much of a by-your-leave from the White House.   So much for settled precedent.   Humphrey’s Executor is but one pillar in the Progressive’s constitutional revolution. But it is a central one that insulates federal officials from political accountability.   Or rather, it was.   Recently, the Supreme Court has begun returning to a more textually faithful reading of Article II.   In Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (2010) and Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2020), the Court struck down limits on the president’s removal powers on the grounds that they transgressed Article II.   Although the Court left Humphrey’s Executor in place in both decisions, its Thursday order in Trump v. Wilcox suggests that Humphrey’s Executor is on life support and its demise may be imminent.   For starters, the order did not address whether Humphrey’s Executor applies to Trump’s removal of Wilcox and Harris. In fact, the order did not mention the case even in passing.   Rather, in language reminiscent of Chief Justice Taft’s Meyers opinion, the Court declared that the president has inherent authority under Article II to remove executive officials who exercise executive power.   And, the Court added, Trump is likely to show that both the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board “exercise considerable executive power.”   That said, the Court noted that exceptions still exist, but it returned to the lower court the question of whether any of those exceptions apply here.   As Justice Kagan noted in dissent, though, that makes no sense because those exceptions are the progeny of Humphrey’s Executor—unless, of course, the Court is about to substantially limit Humphrey’s or overrule it outright.   On that point, she is probably right—even if much of her nine-page dissent otherwise sounds more in Progressive policy than in the original meaning of the Constitution.   The Court could not have approved of Trump ignoring what it previously said was a constitutional restriction on his removal power unless the majority thinks that Humphrey’s Executor is effectively dead.   On top of that, the Court essentially declared that regardless of whatever statutory restrictions Congress places on a president’s removal authority, if an executive official exercises executive power, that official can be removed by the president, period.   At the end of the day, Humphrey’s Executor may still be on the books, but it is hard, if not impossible, to square what the Court said and did in Trump v. Wilcox with what it said nine decades ago.   The order in Trump v. Wilcox is a welcome step in the fight to rein in the administrative state and to restore robust separation of powers. But it is only one step. Another is to end administrative lawmaking, such as by reviving the non-delegation doctrine, which would prevent Congress from giving its lawmaking power to executive agencies.   But that is a fight for another day. In the meantime, though, just as it did last year in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court appears to be putting another nail in the coffin of the Progressive vision of an unencumbered and unaccountable administrative state.   The post Supreme Court Hands Trump Win in Fight Against Rogue Administrative State appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Coast to Coast Memorial Madness Breaks Out