Juneteenth Celebration – Four years after President Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law, there is concern anti-DEI President Trump could rescind it. [Photo: Band performing for Emancipation Day in Texas, June 19, 1900, from federalholidays.net.]
Newsom Loses National Guard – For now: A three-judge panel, two appointed by President Trump and the third by President Biden, has indefinitely blocked California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) effort to regain control of National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles to quell deportation protests, per Politico.
The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a 3-0 ruling said that Trump appeared to be acting within his authority when he took control of 4,000 California National Guard troops during the L.A. protests. The Trump administration cited a law that has never been invoked without a state governor’s consent. The court found that the law gives the president wide latitude to determine the protests and associated violence were interfering with execution of federal law.
The ruling overturns US District Judge Charles Breyer’s issuance last week of a temporary restraining order against Trump’s National Guard deployment. Breyer has another hearing scheduled for Friday to consider Newsom’s request for a long-term blockage of Guard deployment, and subsequent deployment of 700 US Marines.
Newsom could ask an 11-judge appeals court panel to consider the issue, or seek emergency relief from the US Supreme Court, Politico reports. –TL
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Wait For It
THURSDAY 6/19/25
Trump Gives Himself Two Weeks -- President Trump said Thursday he will decide "within the next two weeks" whether the US will attack Iran over its nuclear weapon development, in what The New York Times reports appears to give him breathing room to consider lower-risk options. The president added in his statement that "there's substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place in the near future."
White House Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said that Steve Witkoff, special envoy for the Middle East has maintained correspondence with Iranian officials. But it will not be an easy two weeks for Tehran: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel can achieve all its goals alone.
[Be sure to read Pundit-at-Large Stephen Macaulay's commentary, "Will He? Won't He? Does He Know?" in the right column -- which he wrote prior to Trump's latest comments on Iran.]
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Fed of Confusion – Acknowledging economic uncertainty over President Trump’s tariff policy, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell Wednesday signaled no hint of an interest rate cut in July, with September the earliest likely for such relief, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Fed’s rate thus remains steady at 4.25% to 4.5%.
“We haven’t been through a situation like this, and I think we have to be humble about our ability to forecast it,” Powell said at the conclusion Wednesday of the Federal Reserve Open Market (FOMC) meeting. Fed policymakers are split on future rate cuts for the rest of the year, according to the WSJ, while Trump certainly is not.
“We have a stupid person, frankly, at the Fed,” Trump said ahead of Powell’s press conference Wednesday. “He probably won’t cut today. Europe had 10 cuts and we had none.”
Fed policymakers are split, Powell said, on future rate cuts this year, as inflation has eased in recent months (though still above the Fed’s 2% Consumer Price Index target), and unemployment remains low, at 4.2%, though with “hints of softness” as the WSJ put it.
Economists expect the lag between “Liberation Day,” Trump’s up-and-down tariffs, to show up in the form of higher prices beginning in July.
“Someone has to pay the tariffs,” Powell said (per The Hill). “Between the manufacturer, the exporter, the importer, the retailer, ultimately somebody putting it into a good of some kind – or just the consumer buying it.”
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Minority Dissent on Affirmative Care Ban – Justice Sonia Sotomayor read “with sadness” her dissent on a 6-3 case in which the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors, The Hill reports.
“The majority subjects a law that plainly discriminates on the basis of sex to mere rational-basis review,” Sotomayor said, in dissent joined by fellow liberal justices Elena Kagen and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
SCOTUS’ ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, brought to the court by the Biden administration, opens the rest of the country to banning gender-affirming care.
–Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa