Dominik Lett Following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans’ mammoth $4 trillion tax and spending law, Congress is now slowly turning to address the next series of budget debates, including annual appropriations for FY2026 and the expiration of pandemic-era enhanced Obamacare subsidies. As Romina Boccia and I outlined in our fiscal agenda paper earlier this year, ...
Neal McCluskey With Labor Day behind us, we are in full back-to-school swing. For the rest of the week, Cato Center for Educational Freedom scholars will be getting you up to speed on what’s happening in education policy as kids return to their assigned public elementary, pine-needle-cushioned forest school, hallowed Ivy League home, and more. To start things off, an ...
Patrick G. Eddington Northern District of California Judge Charles Breyer today issued a 52-page opinion and order finding that President Trump’s deployment of the California National Guard (CA NG) and active duty Marines to Los Angeles earlier this summer violated the Posse Comitatus Act—the 1878 law that generally bars the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement operations. He ...
Mike Fox The plight of Jay Carey, a 54-year-old North Carolina Army veteran, began not with a roar, but with a flicker—a flame held to an American flag in Lafayette Park. The act was a protest, a statement against what he saw as injustice, but it quickly became something else: a legal battle that would shine a light on one of ...
Chris Edwards A recent US Postal Service (USPS) forecast shows that the relentless decline in paper mail over two decades will continue in coming years. Personal letters, invites, bills, bank statements, periodicals, and advertising junk mail are being replaced by the internet. The mail-sourced revenue supporting the massive 640,000-employee USPS is disappearing. This USPS figure shows that mail volume peaked ...
Jai Kedia and Norbert Michel We and our Cato colleagues have written extensively about the flawed logic behind many of the current administration’s economic policies, especially regarding trade. Those flaws include, for instance, the notion that the trade deficit must be “balanced,” that manufacturing has been decimated, that increased trade with China “hollowed out” the middle class, that the Fed can make interest ...
Walter Olson Number fourteen in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy: No, President Trump still can’t use an executive order or unilateral presidential power to ban mail-in voting or revamp voting-machine or voter ID practice, as we keep pointing out, no matter how often he acts as if he can. He might get some of these ...
Caitlyn A. Kinard and Matthew Cavedon In the 1994 decision Heck v. Humphrey, the Supreme Court held that “in order to recover damages for allegedly unconstitutional conviction … or for other harm caused by actions whose unlawfulness would render a conviction … invalid,” a federal civil rights plaintiff “must prove that the conviction … has been reversed on direct appeal.” ...
Tad DeHaven Donald Trump’s autocratic instincts returned to the White House in January, but this time, no adults would be in the room to dissuade him from going full bore. On economic policy, an amped up tariffing agenda came as no surprise, even if the rationales and execution have been stupefying. However, it’s doubtful anyone foresaw prominent American corporations getting ...
Dan Greenberg In my post last week, I explained how David Enrich’s new book, Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, provides an idiosyncratic account of the nature and impact of New York Times v. Sullivan. In this post, I write about Enrich’s central narrative: He describes a “crusade” with a hidden mission—to ...