Thank you to the subscribers who sent us kind words after our tribute to Charlie Kirk.

Senate Republicans Punch The Nuke Button

After eight months of unprecedented obstruction, Senate Republicans finally pulled the trigger yesterday on the infamous "nuclear option." The move, which passed on a 53-45 party-line vote, allows the Senate to confirm multiple lower-level executive branch nominees in batches rather than forcing individual votes on each appointment.

The procedure Republicans employed yesterday allows them to change Senate rules with a simple majority rather than the typical 67-vote threshold required for rules changes. By raising a point of order and then voting to overturn the parliamentarian's ruling, the majority can establish new precedent. The specific change permits the Senate to consider executive branch nominees (excluding Cabinet secretaries and judicial appointments) en bloc, meaning groups of nominees receive a single up-or-down vote rather than requiring individual consideration.

Leader Thune declared during the vote, accurately, the Senate has become something like a “personnel department,” spending huge chunks of time just processing nominees rather than debating major legislation. As of the vote, there was a backlog of nearly 150 executive-branch nominees awaiting floor action.

The initial package of 48 nominees set to be confirmed next week under the new rules includes appointments like Kimberly Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece and Callista Gingrich as ambassador to Switzerland. Former Representative Brandon Williams' nomination as undersecretary for nuclear security is also up soon, the kind of important job that shouldn't be a political football.

As we know, the rate of civilian nominations that have required roll call votes has been increasing with every administration. In earlier Congresses, many confirmations of executive (civilian) nominations happened under unanimous consent or via voice vote, but over time more have required roll call.

The scale of the current nomination backlog reveals just how effectively Democrats have weaponized Senate procedure. 146 civilian nominees are currently awaiting floor action, and Trump's nominees face the longest average confirmation delay on record at 94 days. That's nearly four times longer than during the Reagan administration (25 days) and 74% longer than Trump's nominees faced in his first term (54 days). As everyone knows, the administration faces an unprecedented staffing crisis. While Trump made more nominations (401) in the first 200 days than any modern president, this historically fast pace of nominations has been met with historically slow confirmations. After 200 days, Trump's second term had 98 confirmations compared with 89 at the same point in his first term, but this modest improvement pales in comparison to previous administrations: George W. Bush had 240 confirmations at the 200-day mark, while Obama had 238. The procedural obstruction is total: Only seven nominees were confirmed without cloture being invoked, and every nominee has required a final recorded vote, consuming precious Senate floor time. To put this in perspective, by this point in his administration, President Biden had 76 nominees confirmed by unanimous consent or voice vote, while Trump has had zero. Processing the current backlog through regular order would require more than 600 individual votes, effectively paralyzing the Senate's ability to conduct any other business. Which, of course, is exactly what Democrats intended.

Good news, and long overdue.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Justice — The FBI has apprehended the murderer of Charlie Kirk. He is Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah resident, whose parents seem to be "normie" Americans, his dad a cop. Family members told investigators he had become more political in recent years. Authorities confirmed that he had left inscriptions on the casings of the bullets he used, including "Hey fascist, catch", three downward-pointing arrows, and the lyrics to the song "Bella Ciao." The latter two are classic communist motifs. So now we know the motivation. We hope that Federal law enforcement will do everything they can to find if this person was connected to any networks of the radical left, and then roll up those networks.

#MAHA #Food — Ag has launched a Farm to School Grant program, allocating $18 million to connect local farmers with school nutrition programs through streamlined application processes and enhanced support for small family farms. While the program itself is not new, this is the largest amount of money that's been dedicated to the program. This is very MAHA, and a fascinating evolution in conservative food policy, moving beyond traditional deregulatory approaches to embrace localism and food system reform—themes once dominated by the left but now reframed through a populist-conservative lens that emphasizes family farms, children's health, and agricultural heritage. The right's embrace of "crunchy" food politics, from RFK Jr.'s appointment to initiatives like this, signals a potential realignment where conservatives champion food sovereignty and local production networks not as progressive causes but as expressions of traditional values, self-sufficiency, and skepticism of corporate agriculture's dominance—a shift that could fundamentally reshape both agricultural policy debates and the GOP's appeal to suburban and rural constituencies concerned about food quality and provenance.

#Healthcare #AI — Derek Thompson has a thoughtful essay on the future "age of diagnosis"; he points out that AI tools are now much better than humans at detecting and diagnosing illnesses. While this is obviously excellent news, there is also a downside, he points out: our vastly improved ability to detect and diagnose medical problems will intersect with "the over-medicalization of everything," which also comes with a host of problems and does not make us healthy. There doesn't seem to be a great solution.

#HigherEd #DEI — The Trump administration has announced the termination of discretionary funding for so-called Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) grant programs, ie mainly so-called HBCUs, with Education Secretary Linda McMahon stating that the $350 million in funding violated federal law by restricting eligibility based on "government-mandated racial quotas." The administration indicated it would work with Congress to redesign programs supporting underprepared and under-resourced students without relying on racial criteria.

#ESG #DEI #EU — SEC Chair Paul Atkins delivered more-than-pointed criticism of the EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) (they really love those alphabet soups over there, don't they?) at an OECD event in Paris this week, warning that these prescriptive regulations would impose significant compliance costs on American companies that would ultimately be passed on to US investors and consumers. His intervention represents another signal from the Trump administration that it will resist European attempts to export their regulatory framework to American firms operating internationally, particularly requirements that companies monitor their supply chains for forced labor and environmental violations while mandating extensive ESG disclosures. This stance aligns with the administration's broader deregulatory agenda and skepticism toward ESG mandates, which Republican state financial officers have been actively challenging through coordinated pressure campaigns on Wall Street firms to abandon climate commitments and net-zero pledges. The timing is notable given that several major US banks have already withdrawn from the UN-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance under Republican pressure, and the EU itself has begun scaling back these directives through its Omnibus 1 deregulatory package. Indeed, in recent months even the EU has been making deregulatory noises. So perhaps, as in many cases in Trump's world, after angry reciprocal bashing, a DEAL can be struck.

#Energy #Nukes — DoE just announced $134 million in funding to nuclear fusion projects, specifically $128 million for seven Fusion Innovation Research Engine (FIRE) collaborative teams and $6.1 million for 20 Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) projects, which are partnerships between private fusion companies, national labs, and universities. This is part of the Trump administration's broader agenda to encourage nuclear, and in particular new forms of nuclear. Good stuff.

#LawAndOrder #Constitution #Immigration — At NR, Jason Richwine has a good article on the Supreme Court's recent decision allowing federal agents to make stops based on certain demographic characteristics.

#LawAndOrder — President Trump has singled out Memphis as the next target in his Federal crime crackdown. And rightly so, it's a hellhole and one of the highest crime cities in the US.

Friday Essays

In the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, the author of the "Tree of Woe" newsletter on Substack wrote a very striking and sobering article about the chilling effect of political violence. He details his time as CEO of "MILO, Inc.", the company that ran Milo Yiannopoulos's college speaking tour in 2017. Insurance plus security cost them a million dollars per year. A million dollars per year. Read on for the details.

Robert Bluey, who founded The Daily Signal more than 15 years ago as Heritage's media arm, and still helps the now-independent company, has written a long essay recounting the rise and rise of conservative media. There is still much left to be done; but also much to celebrate.

"From the beginning, Christianity has always defended the goodness of the body, marriage, and procreation, but the grounds for that defense have not always been clear or consistent," argues philosopher Nathan Schlueter in The Public Discourse, in an article revisiting Love and Responsibility, Pope Saint John Paul II's magisterial (on both senses) book on human sexuality. "There is great need for a sound and persuasive account of sex and sexual ethics, and Love and Responsibility is one of the best resources for supplying that need. But in light of all that has happened in the almost seventy years since it was first published, it is time to revisit, and even revise, Love and Responsibility so that its full value shines even brighter." indeed.

This is the contrarian hot take your correspondent has been waiting for all these years: actually, the Great Books are "enemies of wisdom," writes Frederick D. Wilhelmsen. The canon is not an end in itself, he writes, and it is very difficult to get the right insights out of it without sufficient prior grounding in philosophy. (And we agree.)

Mike Solana, the founder of the influential Silicon Valley newsletter The Pirate Wires, and a notable figure on the online right, was invited by The Atlantic to write an essay on the Abundance agenda. His thoughts mirror those of this correspondent: the Abundance movement is doomed to fail because the Democratic Party is gatekept by socialists who want to murder CEOs.