Plus: Dick Cheney, R.I.P.
• Just when you thought communists couldn’t find something else to ruin, they took the fun out of Andrew Cuomo’s downfall.
• It was hard to find any bright spot for Republicans in a near-comprehensive wipeout on Tuesday. This shouldn’t be overinterpreted, since in the normal course of things Republicans are hard-pressed to win statewide in Virginia and New Jersey—especially in off-year elections when the GOP holds power in Washington—and they have no chance in New York City. But it shouldn’t be ignored, either. Abigail Spanberger’s margin was large enough to pull Democratic attorney general candidate Jay Jones over the top, despite his history of fantasizing about political violence in texts that were revealed by NR’s own Audrey Fahlberg. It’s true that President Donald Trump wasn’t formally on the ballot—which was his explanation for why the elections went poorly. But Democrats worked ceaselessly to link every Republican to the president, and Trump’s low-40s approval rating in Virginia and New Jersey matched the vote share of the GOP’s gubernatorial candidates. These are bad signs for next year’s congressional midterms.
• Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani comfortably won a three-way race for New York City mayor. Mamdani is fresh, new, and left, which allowed him to vanquish the stale, unlikable, and less-left Cuomo in both the primary and general elections. But Mamdani’s ideas are radical and unworkable. His attitude seems to be that socialism has never failed; it just has never been tried by Zohran Mamdani. To adapt Mamdani’s predecessor Ed Koch, the voters have spoken . . . and now they will be punished.
• When Texas kicked off a mid-decade redistricting, mostly for barely concealed partisan motives, blue-state Democrats vowed to retaliate. That’s easier said than done, given how heavily gerrymandered those states already are. But the argument appealed to their voters. With a 43–9 Democratic delegation in a generally 60/40 Democratic state, California can’t squeeze many more seats for Democrats out of creative mapmaking. But Governor Gavin Newsom understood that the political symbolism of fighting back was more important to raising his national profile than the details. The Golden State’s voters rewarded him by passing his proposal for redistricting with 64 percent of the vote. Consider it the first vote of the 2028 Democratic primary season.
• Tuesday’s grim night for Republicans extended beyond blue states to the biggest swing state of all: Pennsylvania. The state’s elected Supreme Court, with a 6–3 Democratic majority, earned notoriety in 2020 for a series of mischievous election law rulings. The most infamous of these rewrote the state’s newly passed mail-in ballot law (a carefully calibrated bipartisan compromise) by throwing out its statutory deadline to allow the counting of ballots arriving after Election Day. If further proof were needed that voters have moved on from that election controversy, three of the Democratic justices faced the voters in a retention election, and all three won by more than 20 points. Two of the three will now serve an additional ten years (the third hits mandatory retirement age in 2027), locking in a blue majority on the court for the foreseeable future. Republicans were outspent in the race by a 4-to-1 margin, and no prominent Republicans even tried to counter Governor Josh Shapiro, who stumped for the trio. If the Keystone State is bedeviled by judicial efforts to bend election law and redistricting in Democrats’ favor for the next ten years, Republicans can blame themselves for not putting up a fight.
• For much of the last two weeks, the Heritage Foundation has been engulfed in a controversy of its own making. It all started when Tucker Carlson invited Nick Fuentes, the Nazi-sympathizing online “groyper,” onto his video podcast for a two-hour interview as confrontational as a pillow fight. In the interview, Carlson couldn’t be bothered to press Fuentes on his stated admiration for Stalin or his attacks on “organized Jewry.” (Carlson did offer tactical advice, telling Fuentes that “going on about the Jews helps the neocons.”) Heritage President Kevin Roberts responded with a woefully misbegotten social-media video in which he promised that Heritage would never cancel or abandon its friends on the right, including Carlson, and criticized the “venomous coalition” aligned against the podcaster. What followed was several days of cleanup statements and media interviews, including an instantly leaked all-staff town hall, in an escalating attempt to repair the damage. Many of Heritage’s friends have openly wondered why Roberts and his allies have been so keen to protect malignant pundits such as Carlson from conservative criticism. It can’t be a concern for unity: Carlson attacks other conservatives all the time, and Roberts himself has been known to throw an elbow. The Heritage Foundation is a venerable institution in our movement, one that has contributed much to its successes. But it is now suffering from self-inflicted wounds.
• The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard arguments in two cases challenging Trump’s “emergency” tariffs, which were imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA). Solicitor General John Sauer faced some deservedly hard questions. The Court should rule that the congressional power to tax—the very core of the Article I power of the legislature—cannot be delegated without clear and unambiguous statutory language and identifiable limiting principles. IEEPA has nothing of the sort. It never mentions tariffs, taxes, or any synonym for them. No prior president has argued that IEEPA authorizes tariffs. The most that IEEPA says is that the president may “regulate” the “importation or exportation” of foreign goods during a non-wartime emergency. Sauer conceded that presidents have no inherent power to impose tariffs. He also admitted to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson that, under Trump’s theory, if a future Democratic president declared a global climate emergency, this could unlock sweeping powers that could not be reviewed by the courts. The prospect of that sort of governance should be enough to horrify the justices. Their questions returned again and again to the core question: Is a tariff different from other trade sanctions (such as an embargo or an import quota) because it is a tax? Given the centrality of taxation to the powers of Congress, the answer should be decisive—and easy.
• With the death toll in the Caribbean now approaching 70, Trump has doubled down on the assertion that he does not need congressional authorization for military strikes against suspected narcotics-trafficking boats. Trump officials first informed lawmakers that U.S. forces are in an armed conflict against non-state actors (having backpedaled on their original rhetoric tying the drug cartels directly to Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuelan regime). But they now claim that the 15 or more attacks since September 2 are not really “hostilities”—which arguably require Congress’s approval after 60 days under the 1973 War Powers Resolution. Relying on the dubious precedent of President Obama’s unauthorized strikes against Libya in 2011, the administration argues that the hostilities would require the drug couriers to be able to fire back, and the U.S. is striking with unmanned drones directed remotely. In fact, the president has ordered an armada to the region, in part because retaliatory attacks are foreseeable. Meanwhile, with Trump threatening to expand the mission to include strikes against targets in Venezuela itself, alarmed lawmakers are preparing to consider, yet again, a resolution requiring the president to seek congressional authorization for his actions. Republicans have thus far succeeded in blocking the measure—prioritizing mollification of Trump over vindication of their own constitutional prerogatives.
• That stock markets have had a (slightly) choppier ride of late is hardly surprising. The S&P 500 stood at around 4,000 just three years ago. It is now at nearly 7,000, and views from a high altitude can be alarming. Adding to investor unease is the extent to which the market’s strength relies on expectations about the impact of AI. At the time of writing, Nvidia’s market capitalization is not so far short of $5 trillion. On top of that, there is growing unease about the state of the (opaque) private credit market and worries that the negative economic and political effects of the Trump tariffs have yet to be fully felt. This is especially true when it comes to high prices, which clearly played a role in the GOP’s poor election performance. With the midterms less than a year away, the administration might wish to consider all this as it continues to push the Fed to follow one mistaken rate cut with another. As voters and investors are well aware, inflation shows no signs of hitting the Fed’s supposed 2 percent target. Markets will do what they do and so will rising prices.
• Since his glory days—his brave service as a helicopter pilot during the Falklands war and his wedding to the then-popular Sarah Ferguson—the former Prince Andrew has seen a prolonged collapse in his reputation. His downfall has been brought about by constant reports of boorish behavior, questionable financial dealings, and his steady transformation from young Romeo to aging roué, an evolution that reached its conclusion with an association with Jeffrey Epstein. While Andrew has consistently denied the most serious Epstein-related allegations against him, a steady drip of revelations has undermined his credibility and cast a growing shadow over the monarchy. Even though he was reportedly the late queen’s favorite son and enjoyed some protection from her, Andrew was essentially forced out of public life some years ago. With Elizabeth gone, and fresh Epstein news now emerging, he has been stripped by King Charles of his collection of honors and titles, a process culminating in the loss of his royal title and grand house. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor will now live on the grounds of his elder brother’s Norfolk estate, far, Charles must hope, from the public eye or the crown.
• Last week, Japanese astronomer Daichi Fujii noticed something peculiar through his telescope. On the evening of Thursday, October 30, he detected a burst of light on the surface of the moon. Another followed on the evening of Saturday, November 1. These strange occurrences, it turns out, were asteroids colliding with the moon. The space rocks crashed into the lunar surface and unleashed the explosions that Fujii witnessed. By measuring these impacts, astronomers can determine how many other large asteroids might be out there in space and calculate the odds of them striking the earth. Fujii also told the New York Times that his work measuring such impacts on the moon “can be used to inform the design and operation of lunar bases.” If mankind does colonize the moon, he’d like us to be aware of all the risks.
• Richard “Dick” Cheney died on Monday night from complications stemming from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease. He was 84. Born in Lincoln, Neb., on January 30, 1941, and raised in Casper, Wyo., he joined the Nixon administration while still in his 20s. When George H. W. Bush became president, Cheney was tapped as secretary of defense. He became a household name in 1991 as a result of his steady briefings during the successful campaign to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War. To his fans and detractors, Cheney will be most known for the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. On that fateful day, as Bush zigzagged back from Florida on Air Force One, Cheney took charge from a bunker underneath the White House, having been given the authority to order the shooting down of civilian aircraft that posed a threat, though it never came to that. For the remainder of the administration, Cheney was a key architect of the strategy for combating terrorism that successfully weakened al-Qaeda and prevented another large-scale attack but that also included the launching of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both wars enjoyed popular support at the outset but gained critics as they dragged on and the costs in lives and treasure swelled. As Republican voters came to sour on the legacy of the Iraq War and they moved to embrace Donald Trump, Cheney fell out of favor with the party. In 2024, he endorsed Kamala Harris. Cheney lived a full life, serving the country for decades, and his legacy will be long debated. May he rest in peace.