◼ Cease-fire negotiations continue between the United States and Iran. In the weeks since both countries signed a memorandum of understanding, Iranian drones have struck a Singapore-flagged container ship and a Greek-owned oil tanker. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said its naval and aerospace forces also carried out a joint missile and drone operation targeting U.S. military sites in Kuwait and Bahrain. Despite all this, President Donald Trump is an optimist. “They’re agreeing to everything that I want, and they have to,” he said of the Iranians. “Otherwise, we just go back and do what we have to do.” But the previous night, on Fox News, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said, “Iran has not been cooperative at all yet.” The Islamic regime is about as untrustworthy a negotiating partner as you can find, but we may be proving a confusing one.

◼ Denver-area Democratic voters in Colorado’s first congressional district could be forgiven for seeking out a new face to send to Washington. Melat Kiros, the candidate they elected in this week’s Democratic primary, over 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette, certainly represents change. DeGette, a glad-hander and machine politician who maintained relations with the industries she sought to regulate, has a left-wing record. But she lacked the radicalism that has become currency among the far-left activist set. Kiros deemed DeGette unequal to the moment because she failed to accuse Israel of genocide. Kiros, meanwhile, endorsed Osama bin Laden’s lunatic rationale for the September 11 attacks, claiming that U.S. foreign policy had made terrorist reprisal “inevitable.” Her victory further proves that Democratic primary voters are more and more committed to nihilism.

◼ California State Senator Scott Wiener has been a fixture in San Francisco–area politics for 15 years. As a gay advocate for the LGBT community, he has supported the left’s cultural crusades, including the most controversial policies backed by transgender activists. He has helped pass more than 100 laws. Now, Weiner seeks to succeed Representative Nancy Pelosi in Congress. But the Democratic primary base has embraced “anti-Zionist” radicalism to such a degree that even a visibly, ahem, “Zionist” individual as progressive as Wiener is anathema. Wiener has been harassed by camera-wielding activists who scream profanity and accuse him of harboring pro-Israel sentiments. Stripping the Israeli state of legitimacy is fast becoming a litmus test among Democrats.

◼ Senators Bernie Moreno (R., Ohio) and Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) have proposed one of the largest tax increases in American history. Currently, the Social Security payroll tax is 12.4 percent. The payroll tax is (like Social Security benefits) subject to a cap. It’s currently $184,500 but increases each year. Moreno is proposing to eliminate the cap: a $3.4 trillion tax hike over a decade. Employers who don’t want to absorb the increase in payroll taxes will have to hire fewer workers or keep wages lower. A significant burden would be placed on small-business owners who operate as sole proprietors and pay self-employment taxes. The costs of the tax would fall entirely on working-age Americans. And while the tax increase would close much of the Social Security financing gap, the program would run surpluses for only three years before running deficits again, according to a model developed by the trustees. Why a Republican who knows anything about these issues would endorse this plan is beyond us, but we may have just answered our question.

◼ By a 7–1 majority, New York City’s euphemistically named Rent Guidelines Board approved freezing rents in both one- and two-year leases on Gotham’s million or so rent-stabilized apartments. It may work well for Mayor Zohran Mamdani politically. The mayor’s rise owes a great deal to high rents. For as long as he can persuade unhappy voters that the blame for their high rents rests with capitalist greed rather than municipal socialism, he will continue to reap a rich electoral return. Harsher rent controls, on top of New York City’s routinely oppressive tax and regulatory burden, are however an additional disincentive to construction. Buildings that should have been built will not be built, putting more upward pressure on those outside the rent-stabilized bubble. Solution: more rent control!

◼ California Governor Gavin Newsom spent the past year railing against a proposed wealth tax on billionaires’ assets in the Golden State, warning that it would drive away capital to other states. Now, he’s endorsing a nationwide wealth tax on fortunes above $100 million. California’s descent into class warfare may explain his change of heart. Despite the governor’s efforts, the billionaire tax will appear on the November ballot. Even if the measure fails, the damage is done: Several billionaires are fleeing the state to preemptively shield themselves, taking all their taxable income with them. A national wealth tax would level the playing field, Newsom figures, by preventing wealthy individuals from finding relief in other states, such as Texas or Florida. The upshot: Capital accumulation across America and the productive enterprises that fuel it would be punished.

—Finding Our Words: Words That Made America.

FINDING OUR WORDS: Words That Made America is available now in paperback, hardcover, Kindle, Audible, and in Spanish translation on Amazon.com, and on MountTitanoMedia.com. Read, listen, and be inspired by these great words all summer!

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◼ A JetBlue plane was struck by an untracked drone as it was landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Thankfully, there were no injuries. Nonetheless, the proliferation of commercial and recreational drones should force a reevaluation of air safety practices. America’s air navigation agency, run by the federal government, prohibits the use of drones around airports but still encounters dozens of them every month. The agency and its partner airports badly need new technological platforms—such as those pioneered by private operators in Europe and Canada—to manage drone pilots. Until our air navigation systems are freed from bureaucratic inertia, to picture such full-scale modernization requires a head in the clouds.

◼ Trump’s challenge to the status quo on birthright citizenship for the children of birth tourists and illegal aliens was always a long shot. The view that birthright citizenship is nearly universal and subject only to very limited exceptions has been deeply entrenched since United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). In Trump v. Barbara, Chief Justice John Roberts and the four justices who joined him in the majority declined to stray from that decision’s logic. The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment provides: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The Court took the traditional view of this broad language: Most people in the country are “subject to the jurisdiction” of American law so long as they are covered by its protections and punishments. The resulting difficulty: The children of illegal immigrants born here, and of birth tourists, are automatically citizens. Yet even after Barbara, Congress and the president are not powerless. Stricter rules could be applied to discourage and deter birth tourism. And the Trump administration could and should step up workplace enforcement of immigration laws. Given the fact that only two justices explicitly claimed that the Constitution excludes any children of illegal immigrants from automatic citizenship, the strength of the argument for the traditional view, and the improbability of an amendment, it would be best to take the positive steps that remain possible.

◼ It was no surprise that the Supreme Court ruled 6–3, in West Virginia v. B.P.J., that states may ban boys and men from girls’ and women’s sports—even if the would-be participants consider themselves female or have taken puberty blockers since childhood. Some immutable characteristics are still immutable, and the Court would have to abandon its half-century-old framework for evaluating sex discrimination if it didn’t recognize that there are real differences between men and women. We should be encouraged by how far the law and the culture have come from just a few years ago, when the Department of Justice was crusading for transgender ideology. Today, the NCAA and the International Olympic Committee ban men from women’s sports: In his opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh leaned heavily on the fact that those institutions have evaded progressive capture and acknowledged the obvious. The liberal dissenters, while refraining from reaching a judgment on whether the Constitution allows the states’ laws, agreed that Title IX allows states to distinguish males from females.

—Finding Our Words: Words That Made America.

FINDING OUR WORDS: Words That Made America is available now in paperback, hardcover, Kindle, Audible, and in Spanish translation on Amazon.com, and on MountTitanoMedia.com. Read, listen, and be inspired by these great words all summer!

Learn more

◼ The Supreme Court also decided two cases on the president’s power to remove executive branch officials. Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote both decisions, got them only half right. In Trump v. Slaughter, the Court rightly concluded that the Constitution puts the president alone in charge of the executive branch, and therefore the president must be able to fire anyone who runs an agency with executive powers. In Slaughter, that meant the head of the Federal Trade Commission. (The pity is that we have a Federal Trade Commission.) In Trump v. Cook, the Court blocked Trump from removing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and created a special rule just for the Fed: Congress can restrict the president from removing the governors. Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh, who joined the Court’s three liberals to make a 5–4 majority in Cook, emphasized that the Fed is essential. But the Constitution contains no “too big to be illegal” clause. The Founders may have concluded that a central bank free of political pressure was necessary—and Alexander Hamilton may have won the argument with James Madison that the Constitution empowers Congress to create a central bank—but we know very well that they typically preferred to strike the separation-of-powers balance in favor of democratically accountable branches that were checked by other branches. When they wanted to create a truly independent branch, as they did with the judiciary, they did so explicitly. They could have put an independent central bank in the Constitution; if we want to secure one, we still could.

◼ The Supreme Court’s decisions on other hot-button issues may get more headlines, but few rulings this term are apt to have effects as far-reaching as National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission. The decision struck down—on First Amendment grounds—the decades-old campaign finance laws that limited the amount political parties could spend in coordination with campaigns. The 6–3 opinion, written by Justice Kavanaugh, could not come at a better time, when the parties have been systematically weakened relative to outside groups. It also frees parties from the obligation of pretending not to know what their candidates are doing. The law should discourage that sort of society-wide fraud as much as it should refrain from throttling political speech about campaigns, which is fundamental to democracy.

◼ Earlier this year, Spain’s leftist government, acting by decree, changed the law to allow illegal immigrants who had been living in the country for five months prior to January 1 and who had no criminal record to apply to “regularize” their status. Some 1,200,000 have applied. The number of successful applicants will be smaller, but perhaps not by much. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has dubbed the amnesty an act of justice (for whom?). Seemingly unaware of automation, he is also plugging the scheme as a way to boost Spain’s economy and pension system. But trailing in the polls and with an election due next year, Sánchez may well be calculating that increasing political polarization will help him. Or perhaps he just wants to force through an irreversible change before he is turfed out, as he deserves to be.

◼ The transatlantic divide over air-conditioning widened when Audrey Pulvar, one of the many deputy mayors of Paris, blamed last week’s heat wave partly on America. As “the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world,” the U.S. and its “90 percent air-conditioned cities” bear “a significant responsibility for global warming,” she declared. At least Pulvar acknowledged that the U.S. was only the second-worst climate criminal. China, because of its growing wealth, its sweatier location, and its population, has more AC units than any other country. The Chinese, unlike the Europeans, are adapting, as humans have always done, to a changing climate. The resistance of Europe’s leaders to AC is based not on “The Science” but on bossiness and immense self-regard—and it costs lives.

◼ This Fourth of July marks America’s 250th year of independence: an anniversary worthy of celebration. The United States remains the freest, most prosperous, and most powerful nation on earth. Millions of people around the world dream of becoming Americans, our universities attract the world’s brightest minds, and America leads global innovation. Because of its people, and because of its creed, America has always been greater than the doubts of the current moment. That “the great cause of mankind” has weathered 250 years of turmoil, division, and uncertainty gives us much to celebrate—and much to look forward to.