◼ The Supreme Court dismissed a federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s construction of a new ballroom and underground complex on the site of the White House East Wing, which he demolished last fall. While Article I of the Constitution gives Congress power over federal property, the legislative branch has long permitted presidents to put their own stamp on the building. Not content to let interbranch dynamics play out, the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States challenged the project. One of its members, Alison Hoagland, claimed that the finished ballroom would inflict “injuries” on her “aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests.” In the majority opinion, the Court declared that it does not wish to live in “a world where virtually every citizen had standing to challenge virtually every government action that they do not like.” Neither do we. The Court exists to protect individual rights and prevent overweening assertions of government power. It is not responsible for policing quarrels over decor.

◼ This summer has been especially tough for Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R., La.). He’s operating with 218 House Republicans, one Republican-aligned independent (Kevin Kiley of California), and 214 House Democrats. Moreover, federal funding was set to lapse on September 30, and the last thing Republicans needed was another government shutdown fight right before the midterm elections. Back in August, the Senate passed a stopgap bill that would keep the government funded until December 11. But several House conservatives, including Chip Roy of Texas, opposed the Senate’s continuing resolution. They objected to its short-term delay on banning certain hemp products and its failure to extend a one-year ban on funding for Planned Parenthood. In the end, the resolution passed, 370–48, with 19 Republicans and 29 Democrats voting against it. Congress will have a full workload to tackle after the midterms.

◼ Trump has long struggled to distinguish between what is illegal and what he does not personally like. That confusion was on display when he called out Meet the Press host Kristen Welker for offering the accurate observation that Trump’s endorsements in this election cycle have produced “mixed results.” The president disagreed. “How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves?” he fulminated. “Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment.” The Federal Communications Commission has yet to weigh in, but the agency and its chairman, Brendan Carr, have blurred the distinction between prohibited conduct on the broadcast spectrum and protected speech that offends Trump and the GOP. Carr has launched investigations into ABC and NBC, citing the political content they broadcast. Statutorily, there is little the FCC can do to either NBC News or Welker other than complicate their lives or intimidate them. Maybe that’s all that Trump is after.

◼ “Polling isn’t necessarily great on data centers,” one White House official recently conceded. And yet despite the obvious temptation to pander to the public’s hostility toward these ubiquitous features of modern life—as so many Democrats and even Republicans such as Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers have—Trump continues to argue in favor of the ongoing national data center build-out. The facts are on his side, but the president’s frustration is showing. The communities that reject these facilities “want to end up being backwards and poor,” he wrote on Truth Social. Critics on the left and right feigned great offense. But Trump is betting that good policy will prove to be good politics. Data centers are reindustrializing the country and providing blue-collar workers with lucrative jobs. And they are flooding localities with funds that are being used to reduce tax rates and build new public facilities like schools and hospitals. It’s not often that Trump stands athwart the populist tide. Perhaps that’s a testament to the virtues of the data center boom.

◼ Ken Paxton is struggling in Texas. Recent polling uniformly shows that he is trailing James Talarico in a state where Trump won by nearly 14 points just two years ago, and where John Cornyn had won by double digits for decades. Polls show that Paxton is running roughly six points behind Texas Governor Greg Abbott—and not because Talarico is some great campaigner. Nobody is surprised by this, but Paxton’s supporters are preemptively blaming any loss on Cornyn and other “establishment” Republicans who supposedly aren’t doing enough to raise money for Paxton. (The president, sitting on a sizable war chest, gets no blame from these supporters.) Insurgent campaigns are supposed to be viable without the help of their vanquished opponents. The money will be there for Paxton, but it will have to come out of other races—a cost to Republicans that is entirely self-inflicted. We do not wish to see Talarico in the Senate. It would be nice if Paxton and his backers cared as much about that as they do about blaming Cornyn.

◼ Yields on 30-year Treasuries recently reached 5.33 percent, their highest level since 2001. In response, the Treasury announced that it would be buying longer bonds with short-term maturities. This had little effect, which led the Treasury to announce that it would double the size of the proposed buyback to make a somewhat more lasting dent. The yield on the 30-year Treasuries is now around 5.19 percent. Some experts, including Stanley Druckenmiller, a billionaire investor who was once a mentor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, accused the Treasury of playing games in order to nudge long-term rates down. What’s clear, however, is that the low interest rates of the previous decade are gone for the foreseeable future. As long as the national debt continues to grow, there is only so much that clever maneuvers can do to ease the costs and vulnerabilities it creates.

Learn more and volunteer at PeopleofHope.us. 

◼ A G-20 meeting of finance ministers isn’t usually all that exciting. But this year’s gathering in Asheville, N.C., generated two controversies: the Trump administration’s decisions to bar South Africa from attending and to invite the Russian government for the first time in four years. “Receiving the Russian finance minister”—Anton Siluanov, who is on the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons—“sends a signal I find troubling,” said Germany’s vice chancellor and finance minister, Lars Klingbeil. Trump has repeatedly argued that Russia should not just be invited to the G-20 but have its invitation to the G-7 summits restored as well, and even maintained that the Ukraine war would not have taken place if it had been included. The good news is that Treasury Secretary Bessent reportedly told Siluanov that no sanctions relief or new agreements are possible as long as the war in Ukraine continues. But extending the invitation feels like another step toward normalizing relations with Russia at a time when its actions, particularly toward our European NATO allies, are anything but normal.

◼ After a nearly nine-month deployment to the Middle East in support of Operation Epic Fury, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is pulling into its first port: Pattaya, Thailand. The visit comes after mounting pressure from military families, the public, and foreign influencers made the ship’s extended combat deployment a political liability for the Trump administration. The ship’s plumbing, its food stores, and the health of its crew were all causes for concern. While the American public is right to expect the best for its forces afloat, combat deployments involve a degree of privation: war is unkind to the individual. The result of the Lincoln’s efforts was more than 10,000 sorties and the delivery of 1.5 million pounds of ordnance without a single American fatality. The carrier and the ships and subs that make up its strike group should be proud of what they accomplished, and their countrymen should be grateful for that sacrifice. May the crew’s time in Thailand be memorable and the ship’s return to California the happiest of homecomings. Bravo Zulu.

◼ Iceland has the world’s oldest parliament, the Althing, which was founded more than a millennium ago. Despite some 800 years of foreign rule, it never lost its sense of self. Icelanders would never give away the independence they secured in the 20th century, nor would they relinquish control of the fishing industry—which accounts for a good part of their economy and perhaps a greater part of their national identity. They wanted to be close to the European Union but not a part of it, and so, decades ago, they joined the European Economic Area (an alternative that allowed Iceland to retain much of its sovereignty and, yes, control of its fish). It’s a good arrangement. In a recent referendum, Icelanders rightly rejected the idea of talking to the EU about full membership. The EU’s body of laws and obligations are not negotiable: Nervousness over Trump’s Greenland fiasco or, more broadly, over the future of NATO, is no reason for Iceland to surrender to Brussels.

◼ One permanent feature of EU policy is jealousy of American tech companies. A second is the willingness to do anything, even abuse law or regulation, to loot them. A third is a distrust of the free flow of online information. The European Commission has now designated ChatGPT as a “Very Large Online Search Engine” and Reddit and Roblox as “Very Large Online Platforms” under the EU’s Digital Services Act. This means that any content the trio produces and makes available within the EU will face the highest level of regulatory scrutiny. Breach of the rules could trigger huge fines. ChatGPT’s programmers will therefore have to minimize systemic risk according to a loosely defined range of ill effects. This could undermine its reliability and (given the nature of regulatory review) its confidentiality. If OpenAI goes along with this, that’s something for American users to reckon with—and a good reason to ban its use in U.S. government agencies.

◼ Life expectancy in the United States is projected to reach a record high this year. The principal reason for the improvement is a stark decline in overdose deaths as the opioid crisis recedes at last. Vaccinations and herd immunity have reduced the threat of Covid-19; the virus has fallen out of the top ten causes of mortality. Death rates from ailments such as cancer and heart disease are also trending downward, thanks in large part to medical innovation. Americans, it turns out, can get healthier without government supervision.

◼ Wendell Berry sought a simple life. Born, raised, and educated in Kentucky, he earned a fellowship to Stanford University and a teaching position at New York University before his 30th birthday. Yet his heart never left the Bluegrass State, and he soon returned there to build a home at Lane’s Landing, a farm on which he grew crops, tended animals, and wrote exclusively by pen and pencil. One of the most prolific authors in modern American letters, he produced more than 50 books, including novels, essay collections, and poetry compendiums. He extolled agrarianism, criticized industrialization, and refused to embrace television or the internet. His writings won him a fan base that included many social and religious conservatives who either overlooked or were unaware of his opposition to any restrictions on abortion. A passionate activist, his advocacy of sustainable farming and environmental causes occasionally brought him to protests in Washington, D.C. But Kentucky remained his home, and Lane’s Landing will remain a monument to his resolutely individual spirit. Dead at 92. R.I.P.