◼ To call the flash flooding that erupted across central Texas on July 4 a tragedy is to downplay the scope of the cataclysm. Trapped on all sides by high barometric pressure, a freak storm languished over several Texas counties for hours over the Independence Day holiday, dumping billions of gallons of water down on already saturated land. As a result, the placid Guadalupe River burst its banks by upwards of 26 feet in some places, and all in the space of just 90 minutes. One week later, 170 people remain missing or unidentified. At least 121 people died in the storm. It was a disaster. But for some, it couldn’t be just a disaster. Even as the flood waters surged, media outlets and their Democratic allies rushed to blame Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE commission for budget cuts that left the National Weather Service helpless. The meteorological class soon reprimanded their colleagues in the media. Local NWS was fully staffed—indeed, overstaffed, per protocol—during the storm. Warnings were sent out about it twelve hours in advance, and a flash flood warning for the affected counties was issued three hours before it hit. There’s room to criticize local preparedness ahead of the floods, but DOGE’s marginal cuts to executive branch spending—cuts the Senate has yet to even ratify—were not to blame for this catastrophe.

◼ Republicans’ budget reconciliation law was very big, and sometimes beautiful. Making permanent the meat of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and enacting permanent full expensing for most categories of business investment were major conservative policy wins that are good for the economy. That being said, the law also goes backwards on the SALT deduction and simplification of the tax code, by adding political-gimmick tax breaks. The law’s Medicaid reforms ease the program’s spending back to its pre-Biden baseline, and repealing some of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act’s green-energy tax credits was more than welcome. It remains the case that Republicans talk a good game on spending cuts and then don’t follow through when in power. More spending for defense and immigration enforcement were welcome, but the cuts elsewhere were insufficient, and the law keeps the national debt on its already unsustainable trajectory. It may have been worth it to avoid a massive tax hike when the 2017 tax brackets expire at the end of this year, but the failure to get spending under control will come back to haunt any Republican who wanted to be remembered for helping to bring our debt under control.

◼ Elon Musk says that he is starting a new political party, the “America Party” (not to be confused with the nativist “American Party” of the 1850s, known to history as the “Know-Nothings.”) This is both unnecessary and pointless. The American political system’s design makes it impossible for third parties to have sustained success, and not since the collapse of the Whigs in 1854 has there been an opening for a new second party. Third parties can be vehicles for a vanity presidential campaign, but the South African–born Musk is ineligible for the job. He’d need to hire a frontman, but when the American Party drafted former president Millard Fillmore to run in 1856, it swiftly discovered that the party brand was subordinated to that of the candidate. The Reform Party’s message shifted away from fiscal issues when it nominated Pat Buchanan. Similar challenges would arise in congressional campaigns; James Buckley’s single term in the Senate illustrated the difficulty of sustaining for long a position outside the party structures. In any event, Musk wants a party focused on spending and deficits—a worthy cause but one that Republicans fail to pursue because there isn’t enough public demand for it. Just ask the Reform Party—if you can still find it.

◼ Thom Tillis is not running for reelection to the Senate in North Carolina. While it is unclear when he made this decision, he announced it after declining to vote for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), a stance premised upon protests of its modest reforms to Medicaid. A confident party, having the votes to pass the bill, will give a pass to a few members of its caucus facing tough reelection bids to dissent. While John Thune and Mike Johnson each did so, Donald Trump did not, and Trump’s public broadside against Tillis was followed swiftly by Tillis bowing out. Tillis has never been either a political dynamo or a policy innovator. He won his two terms in 2014 and 2020 by less than two points each, and in the latter year he ran a point behind Trump despite his opponent imploding in a sex scandal. That said, North Carolina Republicans may regret losing both the advantages of incumbency and the steadiness of Tillis. In the 2024 governor’s race, they proved amply capable of self-destructing. In the meantime, with a year and a half to go, the White House no longer has leverage over Tillis.

◼ Massachusetts Federal District Judge Indira Talwani, a Barack Obama appointee, has decreed that the federal government must continue to fund Planned Parenthood through Medicaid for two weeks until she can decide whether to order this permanently. This is not just another injunction against a Trump executive action; Judge Talwani reversed an act of Congress, a provision of the OBBBA, on the first business day after it was signed into law. Her “temporary restraining order” is nothing of the sort; rather than preserve the status quo, she is compelling the executive branch to disburse money from the Treasury it cannot easily get back, against the express instructions of Congress. Having rushed to issue the order without waiting to hear the Justice Department’s defense of the law, she didn’t even bother writing an opinion. This is a staggering act of judicial recklessness, seemingly calculated to provoke a constitutional crisis. The president is duty-bound by his oath of office not to disburse these funds before he can appeal. The Supreme Court should back him up—not because it should sanction executive defiance of the courts, but because it should never sanction judicial defiance.

Learn about the landscape of the American Right in this limited series from DonorsTrust.

◼ The “liberation day” delay is almost up, as Trump’s pause of his April “reciprocal” tariffs is expiring soon, and the administration is now sending letters to foreign leaders about tariff rates set to take effect August 1. In the meantime, three federal judges—one appointed by Reagan and one appointed by Trump—unanimously ruled that the “reciprocal” tariffs Trump is imposing under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act are illegal. Tariffs on Brazil are the highest announced in the letters so far, even though the U.S. has a trade surplus with Brazil. Trump wants 25 percent tariffs on South Korea, even though Congress approved and Trump himself renegotiated a free-trade agreement with South Korea. Tariffs on Kazakhstan, Moldova, Brunei, and Algeria are simply capricious. Presidents should not behave this way, and they can’t. If they put an end to Trump’s tariff spree, the courts would be doing the rule of law, the markets, and American wallets a favor.

◼ A prosecutor informed a Maryland federal judge that the Trump DOJ has decided to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia rather than try him. This contradicts Attorney General Pamela Bondi, who had insisted, in announcing an indictment with great fanfare last month, that Abrego Garcia would remain in the U.S. through trial, conviction, and any sentence, and then be deported to his native El Salvador . . . which would be illegal, as it was the first time the administration did it, because Bondi’s Justice Department has not gotten reversed a 2019 order barring the alien’s repatriation. Abrego Garcia remains a removable alien, and the Supreme Court has just ruled that such aliens can be deported to third countries (countries to which they have no ties) if they can’t be sent to a more familiar country. DOJ’s reversal probably owes to a Tennessee federal court’s granting of bail in the criminal case, precisely because the two alien smuggling charges in the indictment are comparatively minor—despite Bondi’s hype, they don’t tie Abrego Garcia to MS-13’s murders, drug trafficking, and gun trafficking. He is currently detained only due to the separate removal proceeding. The administration will find a third country willing to take him rather than see him released.

◼ Churches can now endorse political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status, according to the IRS. This ends the decades-old Johnson Amendment, which prohibited houses of worship from engaging in political behavior. The IRS was sued by the National Religious Broadcasters and several churches who said the rule violated their First Amendment rights, and the IRS relented, comparing church endorsements of candidates to a “family discussion.” While churches should not be subject to costly and pointless investigations simply for occasionally weighing in on public-policy matters, pastors should carefully consider the prudence of blurring the line between partisan politics and the Kingdom of Heaven.

◼ In the now familiar pattern, the Supreme Court green-lighted a Trump executive order (EO) to begin implementing a reorganization of the executive branch and reduction in the 3 million-strong federal workforce, and there followed sound and fury from Democrats and their note-takers. But it signifies nothing. The Court was not endorsing presidential lawlessness; it was insisting on judicial restraint. The administration has not yet planned or implemented a reorganization. A Clinton-appointed judge in San Francisco assumed that Trump would violate the law, but the EO says the law is to be followed and its substance seems to steer clear of firing civil-service-protected workers or nullifying congressionally ordered missions. As the justices pointed out, there are no plans or concrete actions before the Court yet, and thus there is nothing to rule on. The Court was clear that it was not opining on any actual reorganization or force reduction; it can do that if and when the time is ripe. The succinct order echoes the court’s instruction in invalidating universal injunctions two weeks ago: “Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch.”

◼ New York financier Jeffrey Epstein may have committed suicide in a New York City jail cell nearly six years ago, but his memory has long haunted the more conspiracy-minded, who refuse to believe either that he gave up the ghost voluntarily or that the government hasn’t been covering something up about the man’s connections to celebrities and/or international spooks for all these years. Over the weekend, the Department of Justice—currently occupied by men and women who came to power promising to “get to the bottom” of all of this—have attempted to exorcise this spirit once and for all by formally acknowledging, in an official memorandum, that no further revelations from the Jeffrey Epstein case would be forthcoming: There is no “client list” to be found, no kompromat on famous celebrities or foreign dignitaries to be revealed, and the man really did hang himself. We have no quarrel with any of this; we merely suggest to Attorney General Pam Bondi that it was poor form to claim to have a copy of Epstein’s client list “sitting on my desk waiting for review” that, upon second thought, apparently never existed in the first place.

◼ Norman Tebbit, one of the last of Thatcherism’s A Team and perhaps one of those who she was closest to politically, has died. He was tough, clever, and combative, and his emergence from a (more or less) working-class background was an important sign that the once overly genteel Conservative Party was changing, and for the better. A thoughtful man of the right, kinder and funnier than he could sometimes seem, he preached self-reliance and a smaller state and proved to be a formidable performer in the House of Commons both in opposition and government. He was an effective minister, but his life was changed forever by the Provisional IRA’s bombing of Brighton’s Grand Hotel in 1984, in which he and his wife were badly hurt: She was left paralyzed. Tebbit recovered enough to become party chairman but in 1987 stepped down from front-rank politics to care for his wife. He continued, however, to advocate and defend the policies for which he stood, whether in the House of Commons, the House of Lords, or in the media. His was a vital voice, now stilled. R.I.P.