Mostly Monday Reads: Which Century are we in?

“Size matters.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Every time I get the grocery list together these days, I think about what I need to bulk order. It’s really hard to look at a finished consumer good and find all the value-added producers along with their various locations. I wonder how the distributors are going to sort this all out. I noticed prices creeping up in the usual items. I’m pretty sure my sister has hit Costco by now and filled up the pantry. I also watched the last of the Jazz Festers leave with relief.  I bet this was their last jaunt of the year.  You can see it in the numbers.

USA Today had this analysis by Betty Lin-Fisher. “How will Trump’s tariffs affect grocery store prices? We explain.”

While higher tariffs could still be coming after a 90-day-pause, the baseline 10% tariff on all goods, plus higher duties on Chinese products already in effect are a big increase in food costs for American’s budgets, said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at The Consumer Federation of America.

“The 10% ‘default’ tariffs alone represent a truly historic federal tax increase, maybe the largest in my lifetime, with a highly regressive impact,” Gremillion said.

The tariff only applies to the value of the product at the border, Ortega said. Then there are additional costs to the product, which are accrued domestically, like transporting the goods to the store, distribution, wholesale costs and retail markups. Those things are not subject to the tariff, Ortega said.

So that doesn’t mean that the price of a particular product will go up by 10% or whatever the tariff is, Ortega said.

Overall, 15% of the U.S. food supply is imported, including 32% of fresh vegetables, 55% of fresh fruit, and 94% of seafood, according to the Consumer Federation of America, citing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Some products, like coffee and bananas, are almost exclusively grown abroad.

Tariffs are causing uncertainty from families checking off their grocery lists to companies importing food, he said.

“For consumers, this can mean added difficulties in managing a food budget. For food companies, this means havoc on supply chains that could lead to more food waste and more food safety risk,” Gremillion said.

Yup. And the FDA will not be looking around for that food safety risk now. It’s also upending Health Care, but we can rest knowing that all those generic names for medicine and things will be gender neutral now.  I know I can’t even properly pronounce most of them, let alone identify their sexual preferences.  MEDTECHDIVE has this headline: Trump policies are upending healthcare technology. “Track the effect on the medtech industry here. Policies and actions reshaping the healthcare industry began pouring out of President Donald Trump’s White House nearly from day one. Follow the changes affecting the medical device industry.”

Did I mention the youngest son-in-law is a biomedical engineer who is in charge of designing medical, surgical, and prosthetic devices?  Plus, the oldest daughter and son-in-law are doctors.  It’s just me and my youngest daughter out here trying to figure out what the economy and financial markets are experiencing. The others are just trying to deal with that, and the usual helpful regulations are being replaced with crazy ones.

Since Trump took office in late January, multiple Food and Drug Administration webpages were removed (and then restored); employees were fired from the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (and some were asked back); and the Department of Health and Human Services unveiled a plan to lay off approximately 10,000 employees, including about 3,500 at the FDA.

Meanwhile, the economy has whipsawed due to an unpredictable and aggressive tariff strategy. Later, however, pieces were delayed or walked back.

The Trump administration has reshaped the medtech industry in significant ways, and potentially long-term, in just a few months. Now that Trump has settled into power, new questions have arisen about what the many changes will mean for companies and patients, and what’s coming next.

Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon

Also, lucky us, Medicare and Medicaid modernization with be the goal of TV snake oil salesman Dr. Mehmet Oz as he takes over both. This is also from the MEDTECHDIVE.

Dr. Mehmet Oz was sworn in as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator on April 18, cementing his role as head of the agency that provides insurance coverage to millions of Americans.

During a ceremony at the Oval Office, Oz, a physician and former TV personality, said he wanted to “save” the nation’s public health programs and focus on reducing chronic disease, “modernizing” Medicare and Medicaid, and targeting fraud, waste and abuse in government insurance offerings.

President Donald Trump reiterated that Republicans wouldn’t cut Medicare or Medicaid. “Just as I promised, there will be no cuts. We’re not going to have any cuts. We’re going to have only help,” he said during the ceremony.

As I’ve spent most of this year being poked, prodded, pricked, shocked, MRI’d, Ultrasound’d, and EMG’d, I sure don’t feel good about any of this. I fret about someone disappearing all of that, plus my Social Security.

Speaking of crazy policy, I happened on this last night. This is from NBC News. “Trump says he will reopen ‘enlarged and rebuilt’ Alcatraz prison. Alcatraz Island hasn’t been used as a federal penitentiary since 1963. It had a capacity of roughly 300 people.”  I’m actually thinking this is another one of his threats to Judges since it’s way too small to hold many prisoners.  I suppose that’s one way to destroy a national park and the US Constitution in one sweep.

Alcatraz Island, a former military fortress and prison in San Francisco Bay, was turned into a federal penitentiary in 1934 and over the course of 29 years housed more than 1,500 people “deemed difficult to incarcerate elsewhere in the federal prison system,” according to the National Park Service.

According to aNational Park Service study, it was initially deemed unfit to serve as a federal institution because of its small size, isolated location and lack of fresh water. However, Sanford Bates, the director of the Bureau of Prisons in 1933,later found it “an ideal place of confinement for about 200 of the most desperate or irredeemable types.” It was formally opened as a federal penitentiary the next year.

Trump suggested in his post that he’d like to restore the facility to that purpose.

This is from Ed Mazza writing for HuffPo. This sounds a lot like his real estate deals to me. “‘Clearly Unhinged’: Critics Sink Trump’s ‘Asinine’ Plan To Reopen Alcatraz Prison. The president wants to turn the site back into a penitentiary despite the fact that it would cost a fortune.”

Alcatraz is currently part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area and has about 1.2 million visitors per year. Those who tour the island in San Francisco Bay see facilities in various states of decay. The prison was crumbling even as it was still in operation, and the high cost of maintaining it was a key reason it was shuttered in 1963.

Given those realities, restoring Alcatraz and then expanding it, as Trump called for on his Truth Social platform, would likely cost a fortune ― and then another pile of cash would be needed to maintain it.

Reopening it as a prison would also mean the loss of the tourism revenue the island currently generates as well as a loss of habitat for its thriving bird population.

The president, however, said Alcatraz’s return to use as a prison would “serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.”

His critics fired back that the idea would be an expensive boondoggle:

This just really sounds like how he’d run his business.  Also, he now wants tariffs on all incoming films.  This is about as insane as it gets.  “Trump threatens a 100% tariff on foreign-made films, saying the movie industry in the US is dying.”

 President Donald Trump is opening a new salvo in his tariff war, targeting films made outside the U.S.

In a post Sunday night on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he has authorized the Department of Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to slap a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”

“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” he wrote, complaining that other countries “are offering all sorts of incentives to draw” filmmakers and studios away from the U.S. “This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”

The White House said Monday that it was figuring out how to comply with the president’s wishes.

“Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made, the Administration is exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again,” said spokesperson Kush Desai.

It’s common for both large and small films to include production in the U.S. and in other countries. Big-budget movies like the upcoming “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” for instance, are shot around the world.

Philip Bump–writing at WAPO–has an interesting Op-Ed up today. “America’s least American president. Donald Trump isn’t making America great again. He’s making it into something else entirely.”

On Sunday, NBC News aired an interview with Trump in which he expressed ignorance of the black-letter standards of justice established in the country’s founding document.

“The Constitution says every person, citizens and noncitizens, deserve due process,” “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker pointed out. So why not bring Abrego García back to the U.S. and use legal avenues to potentially remove him?

“Well,” Trump replied, “I’ll leave that to the lawyers, and I’ll leave that to the attorney general of the United States.”

Welker noted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had admitted that even immigrants had due process rights. Trump again downplayed the idea, saying that holding hearings would mean “we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials.” This isn’t as big a hurdle as it may sound. In fiscal 2024, there were more than 900,000 immigration hearings completed. So far in fiscal 2025, there have been more than 460,000. More could be cleared if Trump hadn’t moved to fire a number of immigration judges.

Finally, Welker noted that Trump didn’t really have a choice.

“Even given those numbers that you’re talking about,” she asked, “don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”

“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”

You may recall that, in January, Trump put his hand on a Bible and affirmed to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. that he would “faithfully execute” his role as president and to the best of his “ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” But this has never been an oath he has appeared to actually take to heart.

Trump’s dismissiveness of the Constitution has manifested itself in a lot of ways. You may recall his lack of interest in leaving office when he lost the 2020 presidential election. You may be aware that he has readily, if not giddily, accepted personal income from foreign governments while serving as president. He views the law as a cudgel, not a constraint, issuing pardons for various political allies ensnared in criminal activity while directing federal law enforcement to fish for potential criminal charges against those who work against his political power.

At its heart, Trump’s approach to his role is rooted in his parochial sense of patriotism. He didn’t come to the White House after having worked his way up through lower offices, building consensus and working to appeal to a broad range of constituents. He had no appreciation for how legislation is crafted or for the hard work of reaching compromise. Perhaps most importantly, he has never indicated any robust understanding of American history or of the debates and agreements that led to the country’s creation.

In 2011, for example, Trump was asked by Stephen Colbert if he knew what the 13 stripes on the American flag represent. He said he didn’t.

More recently, Trump was asked by ABC News journalist Terry Moran what the Declaration of Independence (a copy of which the president recently had installed in the Oval Office) means to him personally.

“It means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration,” Trump replied. “A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.”

It is special to the country, of course, but not because it is a declaration of “love,” much less “unity.” As the name would suggest, it is precisely the opposite.

Trump doesn’t have the Declaration of Independence in the Oval Office because he wants its message to serve as a guidepost for his administration. He doesn’t even appear to know its message. He has it there because it is A Famous American Thing, another decoration in the newly gilded room meant to send a message about his power, not the nation’s.

Dan Froomkin–writing for Press Watch–suggests we need to keep track of all Trump’s oddities. “We need a way to aggregate what Donald Trump is doing to this country.”

News organizations, along with good-government groups and other interested parties, are doing a commendable job of chronicling the damage the Trump regime is doing to the government, the country, and the world.

But none of them, individually, is in a position to give the public the full picture. It’s just too much.

This is a feature of Trump’s strategy of “flooding the zone.” No one entity can possibly keep up.

And as we go forward, how can any one organization keep tabs on all the fallout? It’s not possible.

What we need is a central repository of information so that the full extent of the damage can be found in one place and assessed by the public — and so that there’s a comprehensive record of what needs to be fixed and restored when the time comes to do so. (Sort of like a truth commission, but in real time.)

To aggregate all the existing information, organize it, and collect new data, we need a place, a process, and people.

It makes sense to me since Trump seems to want to undocument more than just people.  Who knows how many things Doge has destroyed in the wake of having all-access to every government database and more.  He’s disappearing people, children, scientific research, due process, and entire agencies and programs.

This is a site that I was just sent to by a Blue Sky Link. This  DNYUZ  link has an article by the NYT’s by Jack Goldsmith of Lawfare fame and Harvard Law School.  This has been an issue for many people in modern times, with both parties playing the role of enablers. “It’s Not Just Trump. The Presidency Has Become Too Powerful.”  So, I need to put this example of both siderisms into perspective. “Mr. Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, is an author, with Bob Bauer, of a newsletter about presidential and executive power.”

Donald Trump’s wrecking-ball second term has revealed the full latent power of the presidency. His administration has done this most clearly in its comprehensive elimination of legal and norm-based checks inside the executive branch, its systematic disrespect of judicial process, its extortionate abuse of government power to crush foes and its destructive rhetoric and nastiness.

Yet it is important to recognize that many of Mr. Trump’s efforts to expand the powers of the office build substantially on the excesses of recent presidencies. The overall pattern of presidential action over the past few decades reveals an escalation of power grabs that put the country on a terrible course even before Mr. Trump took office again.

The presidency needs reform, and Americans must consider ways — however implausible they may seem in the context of today’s politics — to get there.

Expansionist presidential acts go all the way back to George Washington, who invited charges of monarchism with his use of the Constitution’s broad yet undefined “executive Power.” From there the presidency, with its loose design, grew and grew, with major surges during the Civil War and New Deal era. That trend continued through the 20th century, aided by the rise of mass communication, substantial delegations of power from Congress and an approving Supreme Court.

Mr. Trump’s radical second presidency is, to an underappreciated extent, operating from a playbook devised by his modern predecessors.

His use of emergency powers to impose broad tariffs is similar to a move made in 1971 by President Richard Nixon. His claims of untouchable national security authority echo arguments made after the Sept. 11 attacks by the George W. Bush administration, in which I served.

Presidents for decades have issued pardons as political or personal favors or to avoid personal legal jeopardy. Mr. Trump took this practice to new extremes in his first term, and then President Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned his son and family as well as members of his administration and Congress, in a similar pattern. Mr. Trump in his second term has already issued many self-serving pardons.

Mr. Trump’s executive-order program is an heir of the strategy used by President Barack Obama for large-scale and sometimes legally dubious policy initiatives, including some (involving immigration) where Mr. Obama had earlier admitted he lacked authority to act. Mr. Biden also confessed a lack of power but then acted unilaterally in seeking to forgive student loans.

Mr. Trump has disregarded statutory restrictions to fire officials in independent agencies including the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. But in 2021, Mr. Biden extended the Supreme Court’s unitary executive case law to fire the statutorily protected commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Mr. Biden was “the first unitary executive,” noted the legal writer Mark Joseph Stern in 2021.

Mr. Biden also purged the executive branch of Trump holdover officials who were not protected by statute, including members of arts and honorary institutions, the Administrative Conference of the United States and the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. The Biden administration’s defense of these firings resulted in judicial precedents that Mr. Trump is now wielding to clean house on a broader scale.

The Trump administration has also built on past presidencies in not enforcing federal law — for example, in letting TikTok live on despite a congressional ban. This practice finds its modern roots in the Obama administration, which asserted broad nonenforcement discretion in high-profile cases involving immigration, marijuana and Obamacare, in effect changing the meaning of those laws.

Something similar has happened with spending. As one recent paper noted, “The past several presidents have all taken significant unilateral actions intruding on Congress’s control over federal spending.” The Trump 2.0 version greatly enlarges this unilateralist pattern.

There are a lot of examples here, and it’s worth thinking about.  The Unitary Executive Theory has been around for a while, and since the Reagan years, it has picked up steam in the Supreme Court. Here is a recent article from Democracy Docket explaining the theory and relating to it to Yam Tits. The analysis is written by Jacob Knutsen.  “What Is Unitary Executive Theory? How is Trump Using It to Push His Agenda?”

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has executed a whirlwind of dismissals across the federal government that violated federal statutes and decreed numerous executive orders, including one that blatantly defied the plain language of the Constitution.

Behind the seemingly scatter-shot opening acts of his second administration, legal analysts see a common goal: to test a once-fringe legal theory which asserts that the president has unlimited power to control the actions of the four million people who make up the executive branch.

If courts — specifically the Republican-appointed majority of the Supreme Court — uphold arguments based on the so-called “unitary executive theory,” it would give Trump and subsequent presidents unprecedented power to remove and replace any federal employee and impose their will on every decision in every agency.

Rulings in favor of the Trump administration would also further jeopardize the independence of key regulatory agencies that are susceptible to conflicts of interest and political interference, like the Federal Election Commission, which oversees federal elections and campaign finance laws.

Trump and his administration have furthered the theory by repeatedly invoking Article II of the Constitution, which vests executive power in the president, to justify the recent dismissals of federal officials. They have framed the article as allowing the president to use the whole of the executive branch for his political ends.

For example, the White House Feb. 18 invoked the article to rationalize an executive order signed that same day that asserted the president’s authority over almost all regulatory agencies that were created by Congress to act independently, or semi-independently, from the president.

Frank Bowman, a scholar of constitutional and criminal law at the University of Missouri School of Law, told Democracy Docket he believes the executive order is a step toward “an open declaration of dictatorship.”

“In essence, what he’s saying is, ‘I am the law. My will is the law. My view of what the law is the only view that can ever be expressed,’” Bowman said.

I think this take on executive power is one we should get more familiar with since it’s really taken a powerful rise. The Center for American Progress features an analysis in its series on Project 2025.  This one was written back in October.”Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency. Far-right extremists have a plan to shatter democracy’s guardrails, giving presidents almost unlimited power to implement policies that will hurt everyday Americans and strip them of fundamental rights.”  It is an imperative read.  Trump knows that he can be both pope and king.

Project 2025 takes an absolutist view of presidential authority

To wholly reshape government in ways that most Americans would think is impossible, the Project 2025 blueprint anchors itself in the “unitary executive theory.”²² This radical governing philosophy, which contravenes the traditional separation of powers, vests presidents with almost complete control over the federal bureaucracy, including congressionally designated independent agencies or the DOJ and the FBI. The unitary executive theory is designed to sharply diminish Congress’ imperative role to act as a check and balance on the executive branch with tools such as setting up independent agencies to make expert decisions and by limiting presidents’ ability to fire career civil servants for purely political purposes.

The road map to autocracy presented in Project 2025 extends far beyond the unitary executive theory first promoted by President Ronald Reagan, and later espoused by Vice President Dick Cheney, largely designed to implement a deregulatory, corporatist agenda.²³ Instead, as discussed further below, Project 2025 presents a maximalist version that does not nibble around the edges but aims to thoroughly demolish the traditional guardrails that allow Congress an equal say in how democracy functions or what policies are implemented. One noted expert at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, Philip Wallach, said, “Some of these visions … start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says—and that’s just not the system the [sic] government we live under.”²⁴

If Congress is robbed of its imperative role as a check and balance on a president’s power, and the judicial branch is willing to bestow a president with almost unlimited authority, autocracy results. And presidents become strongman rulers—free to choose which laws to enforce, which long-standing norms to jettison, and how to impose their will on every executive branch department and agency.

Well, all these pithy reads should keep you busy for the day.  I hope your week goes well. I’ve got 2 doctors’ appointments, but gladly no more procedures.  And I’d like just to add if they come for professors, that I’d rather be in the gulag that holds the country’s political cartoonists.  To think, I used to just use wonderful paintings.

Happy Cinco de Mayo to all the wonderful folks of Mexican descent and to those of us who just enjoy the holiday!

What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?