Pun Salad

So I finally made it to the end of July's Reason magazine, where they resurrect pungent quotes from old issues in their Archives. Guess the date on this one. (I've elided a couple of clues):

Give up? It's the second paragraph in "Guts Check" by Carolyn Lochhead. And it is dated July 1, 1995.

Which makes it 30 years old.

The target date by which Republicans vowed to balance the budget? 2002. Actual budget deficit in FY2002: $157.8 billion, which was about 1.5% of GDP.

In comparison, the FY2024 deficit: $1833 billion, about 6.4% of GDP.

Sigh. And we're now looking at the course of 21st-century government.

Further down in the Archives is a 50-year-old interview with… guess who?

OK, that was probably a softball. The full interview with Ronald Reagan from Reason's July 1975 issue is here.

Also of note:

• Alternate: "So what are you gonna do about it?" Eric Boehm points out an inconvenient truth: Trump’s military attack on Iran clearly violates the War Powers Act.

  Hours after the U.S. bombed several sites in Iran, President Donald Trump called the operation a "spectacular military success."

  Whether or not that turns out to be true, the attack looks rather different as a legal matter. Trump appears to have significantly overstepped his authority, as the attack was not authorized by Congress and was not in response to an attack on American soil or American troops. The best the White House has been able to come up with so far is that Trump acted under the legal authority "afforded to him as Commander in Chief," as a White House official told Real Clear Politics on Saturday night.

  Sorry, but that simply isn't good enough.

  Um, Eric? "Good enough" for what?

  It's probably more politic than what Trump might have said himself: "Who's gonna stop me?"

• Fill in the blank: On            , Nancy Pelosi Is a Ridiculous Hack. Charles C.W. Cooke does it this way: On War Powers, Nancy Pelosi Is a Ridiculous Hack. (NR gifted link) Inspired by this bit of hackery:

  Tonight, the President ignored the Constitution by unilaterally engaging our military without Congressional authorization.
  
  I join my colleagues in demanding answers from the Administration on this operation which endangers American lives and risks further escalation and…

  — Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) June 22, 2025

  Charles responds:

  I wish that Pelosi wouldn’t do this. I, too, am of the view that President Trump needed congressional authorization for this strike. (For those interested, I wrote about it here, and debated Andy McCarthy on the topic here.) But my quarrel is not with Trump; it is with the entire post-WWII collection of precedents. In essence, my argument is a) that, per the terms of the Constitution — and the way in which they were understood at the time of the Founding — Congress must authorize changes in military policy; b) that Congress granted such authorizations as a matter of routine until 1950 (see: the First Barbary War, the War of 1812, the Second Barbary War, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II); and c) that, while it is now 75-years-old, the alternative arrangement that has obtained since then is illegal. My argument is not that President Trump has done something that no other recent president has done, or that he is a dictator, or that he ought to be impeached.

  You got my last NR gifted link for this month up there, so check it out.

• Virgil, quick come and see! There goes the Robert E. Lee! Jeff Jacoby is brutal on misguided symbolism: Trump makes treason great again, one Army base at a time.

  PRESIDENT TRUMP addressed the troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., earlier this month, delivering a speech so partisan, it was likened to a campaign rally. In addition to prompting uniformed troops and their families to jeer the press and boo the mention of former president Joe Biden, Trump derided Los Angeles as a "trash heap," labeled the governor of California "Gavin Newscum," and railed against undocumented immigrants as "the most heinous people."

  He also announced that he would restore the names of all Army bases that were named for Confederate generals during the Jim Crow era — names that Congress ordered changed in a law passed over Trump's veto in 2020.

  Among those bases was Fort Bragg. Originally named for the undistinguished Confederate general Braxton Bragg in 1918, it was redesignated Fort Liberty in 2023. Last year Trump vowed that if he returned to the White House, he would resurrect the former name. In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed an order changing the huge installation's name back to Fort Bragg.

  But to circumvent Congress's mandate that military facilities no longer evoke Confederate officers who fought against the United States in defense of slavery and the rupture of the Union, the name change came with a twist: The Pentagon now claims Fort Bragg honors a little-known World War II private named Roland L. Bragg — not the Confederate general.

  It's a long post, and Jeff also takes Robert E. Lee down more than a few pegs.

• "Mistake" is too mild a word, but… that's what on Andy Kessler's headline: Trump’s Golden-Share Mistake. (WSJ gifted link)

  Last week brought us the Golden Share. No, that isn’t a James Bond movie, or a detail from the Steele dossier, although the plot is as sinister. It’s the Trump administration’s first step to nationalize the steel industry.

  In exchange for approval of Nippon Steel’s merger with U.S. Steel, the government receives a single preferred share, which includes voting rights and all sorts of control over U.S. Steel’s ability to close factories, invest capital and relocate jobs outside the U.S. This “Golden Share” is a bad idea. Nationalization is a fool’s errand, a slippery slope to fascism’s “government controlling the means of production.” Don’t do it.

  Andy relates the long, sad, sordid history of US government nationalization. Worth pondering.