New York Democrats certainly made a rank choice.
• President Trump pulled the trigger on long-advertised strikes against Iran’s atomic-weapons facilities. With Operation Midnight Hammer—a complex operation involving hundreds of aircraft and naval vessels, several dozen Tomahawk missiles, and 14 Massive Ordnance Penetrators—America joined Israel’s campaign against Iran’s nuclear program. The targets included hardened facilities like the Natanz Complex and the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center. The hardest of those targets, the deeply buried and reinforced Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, has been the subject of controversy since the strikes. A “low confidence” Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of the damage there suggested the strikes had failed to knock the plant out of commission. Critics of the strikes jumped at the opportunity to call the operation a failure, but the DIA’s product—one of many analyses from America’s 18 intelligence agencies—should not be taken as the last word on these strikes. The CIA’s battle damage assessment, for example, aligns with the conclusions reached by the Israelis, the Iranians, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and private firms like the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, all of whom have said that the damage at Fordow and other Iranian facilities is severe. Iran showed us its own practical assessment: It sued for peace shortly after the American strikes. In a display even more impotent than the show of defiance Iran mounted after the 2020 strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, Iran meekly warned the U.S. and Qatar before launching a face-saving volley of missiles at a sparely populated nearby American air base. Trump saw that as an opportunity to de-escalate. He swiftly negotiated a cease-fire between Israel and Iran. The Middle East has undergone a rapid strategic revolution that favors Israeli and American interests, and it appears to have just made another big advance.
• Before the American bombing, the most strident anti-interventionist voices on the right and left argued—often in strikingly similar terms—against American support or involvement in Israel’s strikes on Iran. Tucker Carlson and his allies claimed that America would be subordinating its own interests to those of Israel, that any air campaign would inevitably devolve into a yearslong commitment of ground forces for regime change and nation-building in Iran, and that Iranian reprisals would amount to the opening of World War III. It is already clear that Trump was not swayed by these arguments, that American boots on the ground were never on the table, that air power had a significant effect on Iranian capability and incentives, and that Iran’s capacity for immediate retaliation was quite limited. This was a sufficiently humiliating outcome that many of these same voices, at least on the right, are now furiously trying to rewrite history to say that they were fine all along with a limited air strike. Others, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), fume that “I don’t know anyone in America who has been the victim of a crime or killed by Iran”—a short memory indeed. There will always be a need for thoughtful skepticism about war and foreign entanglements, but score this one as a loss for one-size-fits-all anti-war rhetoric, isolationist demagogy, and reflexive Israel-bashing.
• Zohran Mamdani smashed Andrew Cuomo in the first round of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, taking 44 percent of first place votes to Cuomo’s 36 percent, and making the tally of ranked choice alternate ballots all but needless. Cuomo conceded. Mamdani won for a very old political reason: He asked for people’s votes, shaking hands and appearing on social media, the modern street fair. Cuomo’s big-bucks TV ad blitz, by contrast, hid him like the Wizard of Oz’s curtain. Mamdani also won because he, and his crucial white outer borough supporters, are, intellectually and experientially, twelve years old. They think rent freezes, free buses, and government-run grocery stores are desirable, and payable by the top-hatted guy on Monopoly cards. Mamdani won, finally, because for a vocal slice of them, hating Israel is cool. The tent people of the Columbia quad are coming to Gracie Mansion, crying urbanize the intifada. Cuomo still has a ballot line, insurance in case of a primary loss, though no one contemplated a loss so devastating. Mayor Eric Adams, the incumbent, is running as an independent, too. For all his laziness and sleaze, he is the only occasionally sensible option. Curtis Sliwa, Republican perennial, is a sturdy local media personality, but no one’s idea of a serious mayor, or even a serious candidate. New Yorkers may be about to learn some hard and unnecessary lessons.
• In its haste to make good on Trump’s campaign commitment to carry out massive deportations, the administration continues to press, and occasionally exceed, the limits of executive removal authority. Its latest gambit is to deport criminal aliens (those who have committed serious offenses beyond those attendant to entering, living, and working illegally in the U.S.) to “third countries”—i.e., countries to which they have no prior ties of citizenship, birthright, residence, or travel. This has included such strife-torn countries as South Sudan. Offended by this practice, Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee in a Boston federal district court, ordered that the administration provide removable aliens with 15 days’ notice of the country to which they were to be deported, giving them time to claim fear of persecution. The Supreme Court has nullified this injunction because, as the administration correctly pointed out, it is lawless: Immigration law divests the district courts of jurisdiction over removal issues, and Congress has authorized deportation to third countries. The administration says it has assurances that the aliens won’t be persecuted or tortured by the governments of the receiving countries, and under Supreme Court precedent, courts may not second-guess that political determination.
• When President Trump federalized the California National Guard against rioters in Los Angeles, Governor Gavin Newsom (D.) sued him. Charles Breyer, a federal judge in San Francisco (and the brother of fellow Clinton appointee Stephen Breyer, the retired justice), ruled against Trump. Breyer selectively mined dictionary definitions of the statutory word “rebellion” and faulted Trump for not issuing his federalization order “through” Newsom. Now an appeals panel including three judges, one of them a Biden appointee, has unanimously reversed Breyer. While rejecting Trump’s maximalist position that his deployment of the armed forces to quell violence was judicially unreviewable, the circuit observed that Supreme Court precedent, going back to Martin v. Mott (1827), obliged courts to pay some deference to the commander in chief’s judgment. Moreover, regardless of whether the rioting was extensive enough to qualify as a rebellion, the president has undoubted authority to protect the enforcement of federal immigration law, as well as federal personnel and facilities, all of which the rioters were threatening.
• Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) has contributed to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act a provision that would require the Bureau of Land Management to sell between 0.25 and 0.5 percent of its land. This is a scaled-back version of his original proposal to sell closer to 1 percent of that land, which the Senate parliamentarian stripped from the reconciliation bill. The federal government owns more than one-quarter of the territory in the United States, which is far too high. Federal limits on the development of this land, much of it little more than empty desert, have contributed to housing shortages in the West. Some conservatives are outspokenly against selling any federal land, expressing concern that it would be sold to China or BlackRock. Progressives are also forthright in their opposition to the bill, saying that federal land is everyone’s land. The percentage of BLM land involved suggests that these worries are overblown.
• “Shawn and I share a basic view of how workers deserve to be treated,” Joe Biden wrote of UAW President Shawn Fain in the latter’s entry in Time’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2024. It turns out that the union boss and media darling doesn’t treat his own workers well. A report from the UAW’s court-appointed monitor (the federal government does not trust it to operate legally without one) found that Fain fabricated allegations of wrongdoing against the union’s secretary-treasurer, Margaret Mock, because she was following union financial rules that Fain would have preferred to ignore. Because Mock is black, Fain colluded with two black women on the UAW’s executive board to strip Mock of her authority over eleven union departments, taking nine for himself and giving one each to the black women. “I thought it would be better coming from her than me, a white guy,” Fain told the monitor. This is an organization that Democrats believe to be a model for representing workers, one that they want to force workers to join by repealing right-to-work laws. Republicans must never let that happen.
• A Dutch treat is one in which all parties pay their share. Even though the nations at this week’s NATO summit in the Netherlands delivered only commitments—to more than double their defense spending to a (loosely defined) 5 percent of GDP—it was enough for President Trump to declare that NATO was not a “rip-off.” That’s high praise from this president, who reiterated that the U.S. still regards itself as bound by NATO’s Article 5 self-defense provisions. That matters. The essence of deterrence is credibility. The best way to stop Russia from invading a NATO country, however small, is for Vladimir Putin to believe that he would invite major retaliation. Some of the pressure applied by Trump to “encourage” NATO’s European members to increase their defense spending fomented hopes and fears that the U.S. might not stand behind Article 5: a risky tactic that, reinforced by Putin’s war and his threats, worked. The Europeans are finally taking more responsibility for their own defense, and NATO’s American guarantee is intact. Good news for the West—and for Ukraine, even if Kyiv saw little direct return from this summit.
• Last spring, the College Board made the SAT digital, shorter, and easier. While test takers once had 1.3 minutes to answer each question, they now have 1.6. The Reading and Writing passages, which used to range from 500 to 750 words, now span only 25 to 150. Limiting passage length also limited the sources from which passages could be drawn. Passages from the U.S. founding documents were nixed from the new, digital test, “as passages from these historical documents typically require an extended length to make a cohesive argument.” Well, yes. Even worse, the College Board argued that “students’ ability to read and analyze these texts is not an essential prerequisite for college and career readiness.” Now, the ACT is following suit. It is currently undergoing a paper-to-screen remodel that will include a reduced number of questions, shortened test time, more time per question, and fewer multiple choice options. By this fall, all test takers will have the option to opt out of the Science section. Rather than calling students to a higher standard, these exams are capitulating to shortened attention spans and defunct reading comprehension. Why? The College Board’s mission helps provide an answer: dedication “to promoting equity in education.”
• Sometimes innovation involves scientific discovery or brand-new inventions. FedEx founder and longtime CEO Fred Smith didn’t invent the airplane or the delivery truck, but he made a different kind of innovation, equally important: He created a way for people to pay for a service that they wanted but couldn’t get. In a college paper in 1965, Smith saw a market opening for high-tech businesses that would pay for overnight delivery anywhere in the country. Rather than rely on passenger airlines and separate ground transportation companies, FedEx would transport the package for its entire journey, through a hub-and-spoke system centered in Memphis. Under Smith’s leadership, FedEx invented the tracking number, pushed the boundaries of technological advance, became the largest cargo airline in the world, and now makes, on average worldwide, 185 deliveries per second. Unlike other corporate executives who play footsie with big government, Smith was a consistent proponent of free markets, domestically and internationally, and one of the great practitioners of economic freedom that the world has ever seen. He died of natural causes in Memphis, the city he made the “Superhub,” at age 80. R.I.P.