Yesterday, RFK, Jr. was confirmed to be Secretary of HHS. This was accompanied by the signing of a "MAHA" EO, creating the President"s "Make America Healthy Again Commission".

Yes, a President's Commission is usually where ideas go to die, but we already thought this about DOGE and look what happened. Given the importance of MAHA to the new Republican coalition and given the political weight of RFK, we're going to be paying attention to this one.

The EO sets out several high level goals, and we will cite the most important ones:

"executive departments and agencies (agencies) that address health or healthcare must focus on reversing chronic disease."

"all federally funded health research should empower Americans through transparency and open-source data, and should avoid or eliminate conflicts of interest that skew outcomes and perpetuate distrust"

"agencies shall work with farmers to ensure that United States food is the healthiest, most abundant, and most affordable in the world"

"agencies shall ensure the availability of expanded treatment options and the flexibility for health insurance coverage to provide benefits that support beneficial lifestyle changes and disease prevention"

"The initial mission of the Commission shall be to advise and assist the President on how best to exercise his authority to address the childhood chronic disease crisis." The MAHA Commission will, within a hundred days, submit a report to the President on tackling chronic disease in children.

Policy News You Need To Know

#RealignmentBaby — RealClearPolitics has a good mini-profile of Sen. Hawley, one of the most interesting policy innovators in Congress, and his increased appeals to unions. "His framework for pro-union legislation amounts to something of a downpayment. It is a set of proposals to reform the way businesses interact with organized labor, from requiring worker rights to be displayed on a job site to prohibiting 'unsafe work speed quotas.' And soon Hawley will introduce legislation mandating accelerated negotiations between unions and employers."

#DOGE — DOGE is moving hard and fast, but sometimes maybe too hard and fast. It suspended a slew of payments coming out of Ed. We are sure most of these were good cuts, but it also ended a lot of important studies. As Stuart Buck writes, "They have unwittingly canceled some of the best education research out there, along with major national surveys and tests that are crucial to tracking America’s educational performance."

#Nicotine — Nicotine is one of your correspondent's interests, and MAHA should have a more balanced view of the benefits nicotine can provide, so we welcomed this piece from R Street's Jeffrey S. Smith pointing out that capping nicotine in combustibles is bad policy.

#Tax — Tax Foundation with a constructive proposal: a destination-based cashflow tax (a kind of modified VAT) as an alternative to tariffs.

#TheEconomy — CEI's analysis of the latest CPI numbers.

#Reg — Interesting op-ed making the case for a bipartisan, pro-abundance push on deregulation.

Friday Essays

In the past couple of weeks, the very brainy Vice President of the United States launched not one, but two, high-minded philosophical debates into the Discourse: the first one on the notion, in Christian ethics, of "ordo amoris", or how Christians should prioritize when deciding where to direct their acts of charity; the second on whether, and to what extent, and under what conditions, the executive branch may ignore judicial decisions. These debates, in turns, launched a thousand essays.

On the legal question, strangely enough, we were able to find many tweets, but not many actual essays arguing against Vance's position. The main response seems to be scoffing. Vance seems to at least have half a point: if any Federal judge can at any moment stop any executive action, no matter how niggling or discretionary, it seems that it would be impossible for any President to govern, which is surely not what the Founders intended; Vance's example of a general's decision in the field is a good one. The question, of course, is how far this prudential principle extends.

Here we have Andrew McCarthy at National Review taking Vance's side arguing that judicial restraints on executive power do have limits. At UnHerd, Josh Hammer gives us an overview of the Founders' views, as well as Lincoln's, on the limits of judicial power, as well as an argument that judges' powers to issue nationwide injunctions, as opposed to limited rulings, are an open question in current law. Finally, at The New Digest, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, whose thinking is influential on Vance's, makes a much more limited, but therefore very interesting argument: Vance was not trying to trigger a "constitutional crisis" (as many detractors on X put it) or make some sweeping argument about the executive having a discretionary power to just ignore judicial decisions it doesn't like, but rather "those comments referred to ordinary legal doctrines of justiciability, reviewability, standing, and the so-called 'political question doctrine,' which are themselves legal principles that courts apply to restrain their own jurisdiction to review executive action. All these principles are ultimately rooted in the constitutional separation of powers, or in statutes embodying and implementing separation of powers considerations."

Finally, the Vice President's comments on the ordo amoris triggered no less an authority than the Holy Father himself, the Pope of Rome, who, in an open letter to American bishops, stated that he is following very closely immigration-related news in the US, calling them "a major crisis." (He did not seem to be following as closely Biden Administration-era developments in areas such as, say, abortion, and transgenderism.) Attacking Vance directly, referring to an interview he gave, the Pope wrote: "Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups." As the great Michael Brendan Dougherty points out in an article at NR, "Vance did everything that one would want in such a short space to articulate the Christian idea. Jesus condemned those who love only their own. Christian love goes beyond loving your family. Vance ruled out “hate” altogether. The duties of love toward one’s own community do not oblige antisocial behavior or doing evil to anyone. But the Christian grace does not reject natural virtues, either; it builds on them." Dougherty goes on to quote Saint Augustine of Hippo, much-cited on both sides of this controversy: "Now he is a man of just and holy life who forms an unprejudiced estimate of things, and keeps his affections also under strict control, so that he neither loves what he ought not to love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that more which ought to be loved less, nor loves that equally which ought to be loved either less or more, nor loves that less or more which ought to be loved equally."