Rest in peace: Dick Cheney, vice president to George W. Bush, neocon extraordinaire, and rather poor marksman, died this morning at 84 due to complications of pneumonia, as well as cardiac and vascular disease.
Cheney “consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response” to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, writes the Associated Press. He took the role of veep and transformed it into something much more muscular and assertive, shaping the Bush administration’s approach to the war in Iraq. He was no fan of transparency in government and he was a huge proponent of expanding executive power.
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“In 34 years,” Cheney said in January 2002 on ABC’s This Week, “I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job….One of the things that I feel an obligation [to do], and I know the president does too, because we talked about it, is to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors. We are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years.”
“As chief of staff under President Gerald Ford in 1975, [Cheney] saw the power of the presidency diminished on his watch,” wrote Financial Times’ Caroline Daniel back in 2006. “By 1989, he had forged his own critique of Congressional overreach in foreign policy. ‘When Congress steps beyond its capacities, it takes traits that can be helpful to collective deliberation and turns them into a harmful blend of vacillation, credit claiming, blame avoidance and indecision,’ he warned. ‘The presidency, in contrast, was designed as a one-person office to ensure it would be ready for action,’ capable of ‘decision, activity, secrecy and dispatch.'”
Look at all he sowed…
Tariffs up for consideration: Tomorrow, the Supreme Court hears arguments in the case that will decide whether President Donald Trump overstepped his powers when he used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to unilaterally levy tariffs on a whole host of nations.
“This is all about foreign policy. This isn’t 1789 where you can clearly delineate between trade policy, economic policy, national security policy and defense policy. These things are all completely interconnected,” a first-term Trump adviser told Politico, articulating the MAGA-world vision of why the usage of IEEPA is defensible. “To diminish the tools he has to do that is really dangerous.”
The justices may well disagree. But if they don’t, and Chief Justice John Roberts rules in Trump’s favor, he will incur a huge loss of credibility that will say a lot about the Court’s posture toward Trump and his second term.
“Just two years ago, Roberts led the Supreme Court in rejecting a similar claim of unilateral executive power by then-President Joe Biden,” writes Reason‘s Damon Root. “If Roberts now allows Trump to get away with the same kind of executive overreach that Roberts previously stopped Biden from getting away with, Roberts’ credibility as a principled judicial arbiter will be sullied forever.”
Credibility hit aside, there are other reasons why the Court should reject the arguments put forward by the administration. “The constitutional authority ‘to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises’ as well as the authority ‘to regulate Commerce with Foreign nations,’ are assigned exclusively to Congress, which means that Trump is wielding power that the Constitution did not grant to him,” argues Root. “His tariffs thus deserve to be struck down for violating both the constitutional separation of powers and the nondelegation doctrine.” They also “violate the major questions doctrine, which says that before the president may wield significant regulatory power, the president must first point to a clear and unambiguous delegation of such power to him by Congress”—but tariffs appear nowhere in the IEEPA, so the administration will have a very hard time making that case.
If the justices don’t rule in Trump’s favor, it seems likely that his people will come up with alternate routes to do pretty much the exact same thing: “The White House has already laid some of the policy groundwork under those authorities, such as the 1970s-vintage Section 301, which the U.S. used against China in Trump’s first term,” per Politico, “or the Cold War-era Section 232, which allows tariffs on national-security grounds.” They might spend more time investigating other countries’ trade practices in an effort to gain leverage and secure more favorable deals. There’s also Section 338, “a rarely used provision that’s been on the books for nearly a century” that could let the president “impose tariffs of up to 50 percent on any country, if he can explain how they are engaging in ‘unreasonable’ or ‘discriminatory’ actions that hurt U.S. commerce.” Such things would also probably be challenged in court, but Trump could run his way through all these different approaches, test them out, impose trading havoc in the meantime, and possibly find some means of imposing his desired protectionist agenda.
Where there’s a will, there may unfortunately be a way.
Scenes from New York: Yep. Zohran Mamdani appearing on the ballot twice is predictable: He is the candidate both for the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party. I am curious about what effect Cuomo being in the second row will have, to the extent that such a thing can be studied. (And I’ve never been asked for ID when I’ve voted in New York, which always rubs me the wrong way.)
My experience voting in NYC:
1. No ID required
2. Zohran on the ballot twice in the top row
3. Eric Adams, who dropped out to avoid splitting the vote, still on the ballot
4. Cuomo in the bottom right corner, 2nd row— Seth Rosenberg (@SethGRosenberg) November 3, 2025
QUICK HITS
- Is a Seattle mayoral candidate trying out the Mamdani playbook?
- “The Trump administration said Monday that it will release enough funds to pay for a half-month’s worth of food assistance benefits in November, days after two courts ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to release the money to avoid forcing nearly 42 million Americans into food insecurity,” reports The Washington Post.
- California’s apparently spending a ton of money…guarding its vacant houses (that the state owns, due to a planned freeway expansion) from vandal-protesters, per Politico.
- Swiss taxpayers are being forced to shoulder massive rebuilding costs for villages demolished by melting glaciers.
- “Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice,” President Donald Trump wrote of the NYC mayoral candidates on Truth Social. “You must vote for him, and hope he does a fantastic job. He is capable of it, [Zohran] Mamdani is not!”
- The Rockbridge Network “aims to equip MAGA to outlive Trump,” per The Washington Post. The group of right-wing donors formed five or six years ago “is gearing up to deploy its arsenal in the 2026 midterms and in the 2028 presidential contest” with Vance as the favorite to succeed Trump.
- Free-range kids just can’t win:
My kids used to love walking to Target until the local Target changed their policy to “no unaccompanied kids under 18”
It’s v frustrating. I’m looking for chances to help my kids be independent & I have basically no societal cooperation on this project https://t.co/olwyLZ6wIG
— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) November 3, 2025
