Some odds and ends I thought worth considering together.
Trump’s beef import deal: Small Hoosier farm sales boom; Indiana commercial sellers take hit (Fox 59)
However, the anticipated impact across all suppliers, big and small, is more complicated than a quick boost in sales.
Indiana is home to roughly 20,000 individual beef producers. That includes both commercial and local sellers, like RK Cattle Company in Danville – watching its freshly-fed, farm-to-fork flanks, steaks and more – fly off freezer shelves.
“There is a demand and a need and a want for quality, American-raised beef,” said Karissa Wyeth, owner of RK Cattle Company. “I think that’s just very important to people right now. You might not want to go out to a restaurant and eat because it’s expensive, but you’re willing to put good meat on your table for your family.”
Wyeth tracked a 44% spike in sales last week after Trump’s temporary tariff pause announcement. Since then, she suspects consumers are losing trust in grocery store meats.
'Starship Troopers' director confirms Donald Trump's space uniforms are Nazi-inspired (Euronews). Of course they are; Trump does like a man in a good-looking uniform.
John Roberts’ role model shows everything wrong with the Supreme Court.
Reconstruction’s opponents drew a different lesson. They insisted that the president needed a court powerful enough to protect him from “the meshes” of Congress. As the nation abandoned Reconstruction, a generation of politicians and historians recast Johnson as a martyr to congressional tyranny. Their remedy was to articulate and entrench a new doctrine: that the Constitution makes the court supreme over Congress. They encouraged the court to void any statute that hems in presidential power.
It took 50 years for that doctrine to triumph. It arrived carrying a grudge. In 1926, Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote that studying “the injustice that the radical Republicans did to Andrew Johnson” left him “humiliated as a Republican.” He then used a case before him, Myers v. United States, to condemn the Tenure of Office Act and strike down a Reconstruction-era regulation of the presidency. Admirers cheered that the court had at last vindicated Andrew Johnson.
Today’s court has resurrected that project. Just this term in Trump v. Slaughter, the court invoked Myers to shred century-old statutory protections that kept public servants from being replaced with loyalists. Afterward, on Substack, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote admiringly that Taft’s leadership not only protected the president from Congress, but also helped to fend off congressional efforts to rein in the court.
When I was younger, so much younger, the conservatives were complaining about the liberality of the Warren Couurt. That the unelected court had too much power. Over the years, I have been convinced by the sonceratives that what they really wanted was not a more democratic court but a court that was under their power. This article is just more proof that a strong court is just fine if it is run by conservatives. Where are you now, Alexander Bickel?
Today my mother's mother would have 128 years old.
sch 9/17
