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Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- The House narrowly passed its tax cut and spending bill by 215-214 early Thursday morning, after Republican leadership won over hardliners with last-minute changes. Only two Republicans voted with all Democrats against the measure. The package now heads to the upper chamber, where GOP senators are expected to make significant changes that must be approved by the House. Sen. Josh Hawley has already indicated that he would not support Medicaid cuts, while others have asked for greater reductions. “There is no time to waste,” President Donald Trump said in a post on Truth Social, with Republicans setting a July 4 deadline to pass the bill. The House’s package also increases the debt ceiling by $4 trillion, in keeping with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s request earlier this month for Congress to raise that ceiling by mid-July to prevent a default on U.S. debt.
- The FBI on Thursday searched the Chicago home of Elias Rodriguez—the man suspected of killing two Israeli Embassy workers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday—leaving with boxes of evidence. FBI director Kash Patel called the attack an “act of terror,” while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the Justice Department would be “prosecuting the perpetrator responsible for this to the fullest extent of the law.” President Trump spoke on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and expressed “deep sorrow” over the murders, according to the prime minister’s office. Rodriguez has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder, as well as other offenses, and could face the death penalty if convicted.
- The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked Oklahoma from creating the nation’s first taxpayer-funded religious charter school in a deadlocked decision, despite its recent history of supporting religious schools’ access to government funding offered to secular schools. The unsigned 4-4 ruling, which did not elaborate on the decision or divulge how each justice voted, came after Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case. It leaves in place the earlier ruling from the Oklahoma Supreme Court preventing the creation of a Catholic virtual charter school. Because of the split ruling, however, it only applies to Oklahoma, not the entire nation. The Supreme Court could still take up a future case to reconsider the issue at a later date.
- The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Thursday that the president can fire members of independent federal agencies without cause, in a case brought after President Trump removed members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board. But in the unsigned order, the justices suggested that the president’s power did not extend to dismissing members of the Federal Reserve board or officials on the central bank’s rate-setting committee, describing the Fed as a “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity.” The caveat came amid Trump’s threats to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whose term ends in May 2026.
- U.S. District Judge Myong Joun on Thursday blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department, ordering the administration to rehire more than 1,300 employees who were terminated. Under the order, the administration is prohibited from carrying out President Trump’s executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department,” and the department is not allowed to transfer its responsibilities to other agencies. A department without enough employees to complete its congressionally mandated tasks is “not a department at all,” Joun wrote in the preliminary injunction. The Trump administration plans to appeal the decision.
- The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Thursday blocked Harvard University from enrolling international students and directed existing international students to transfer or risk losing their legal status. In a letter to Harvard, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem informed the Ivy League that its Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification had been revoked, citing the school’s refusal to turn over the records of foreign students who had engaged in illegal or violent conduct. Nearly 6,800 international students attended Harvard this past academic year, comprising more than 27 percent of its student body. The university denounced the decision as “unlawful,” saying that it “threatens serious harm to the Harvard community and our country.”
- A private jet crashed into a military housing neighborhood in San Diego on Thursday, killing multiple people on the plane and forcing the evacuation of at least 100 people from their homes. The crash set nearby houses and vehicles on fire, destroying several residences. It is still unclear how many people were aboard the plane, but it had capacity to hold up to 10. The accident comes after multiple major plane crashes this year, including a helicopter collision with a commercial aircraft in Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people in January.
‘An Absolutely Shocking System Failure’
Nearly a third fewer flights will take off and land out of Newark Liberty International Airport, the 12th-busiest airport in the U.S., for the near future. On Tuesday, the Federal Aviation Authority ordered that “operating limitations” be imposed on Newark, following multiple outages of air-traffic control equipment.
The latest outage, at the Philadelphia facility that controls flights coming in and out of Newark, lasted two seconds. But it was the fourth such incident to take place since April 28, some of which were substantially longer: On May 9, the control center lost radio frequencies for a minute and a half. The incidents delayed thousands of passengers and created ripple effects across the entire American air travel system.
Federal regulators have concluded that the only solution is ...
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Today’s Must-Read
Forget standing upon a bully pulpit. President Donald Trump prefers to humiliate other leaders seated, in the Oval Office, before TV cameras. Consider the scene that unfolded this week with the visit of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. The White House press pool squeezed into the crowded Oval Wednesday as Trump and his counterpart exchanged pleasantries. The leaders were flanked on the couches by their respective government delegations. Trump pointed out the presence of two of South Africa’s legendary golfers, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, as Ramaphosa smiled, perhaps relieved that his gambit to appeal to the golf- and celebrity-attuned American president had worked. Unfortunately it had not, as Ramaphosa found out a few moments later, when members of the media began asking questions and the mood in the room shifted.
Toeing the Company Line
Looting the Palace
A big, beautiful symbol of American decline.
The States Have Concealed-Carry Reciprocity Well in Hand
Congressional action is both unnecessary and unlikely to worsen violent crime.
A Familiar Fight Over Spending
Trump and Johnson experienced the same headaches past Republican leaders have faced.
No Regrets
Senate Democrats won’t admit to missteps when they attacked Robert Hur in 2024.
The House GOP’s Medicaid Plan Won’t Fix Health Care
The plan is likely to leave millions without insurance while doing nothing to improve American health care.
Biden’s Big Beautiful Cover Up
Plus: A brief explainer of the House’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act.’
Worth Your Time
- For Tablet magazine, Armin Rosen reflected on his encounter with Israeli diplomat Yaron Lischinsky just 30 hours before Lischinsky’s murder outside the Capital Jewish Museum on Wednesday—and on the unique challenges of representing the Jewish state on the world stage. “In my experience the diplomats of the Jewish state are among the least Israeli of Israelis. They are restrained and secular and quiet and usually know how to dress themselves; they speak with every possible accent, and it’s hard to imagine them whacking at a matkot ball, fighting their way onto a bus, or davening during halftime of a basketball game. They are the normal and cosmopolitan faces of a rambunctious and inherently tribal country,” he wrote. “But it is the tension between the rigors of diplomacy and the character of their homeland that also makes them deeply Israeli: whatever their religious practice and whatever their politics, Israeli diplomats are inevitably Jews among the nations, a tiny sub-tribe that serves as the official foreign representation of the world’s only Jewish state, the first in 2,000 years and one of the most hated and lied-about countries in the entire history of humankind. To carry out this mission for fairly low pay on behalf of an often-dysfunctional foreign ministry, in places far from home where spies and activists and journalists and local Jews are circling you or even actively targeting you at any given moment, requires a typically Israeli mix of creativity, resourcefulness, and optimism.”
Presented Without Comment
NBC News: Trump’s Crypto Dinner Cost Over $1 Million per Seat on Average
More than 200 wealthy, mostly anonymous crypto buyers are coming to Washington on Thursday to have dinner with President Donald Trump. The price of admission: $55,000 to $37.7 million.
That’s how much the 220 winners of a contest to meet Trump spent on his volatile cryptocurrency token, $TRUMP, according to an analysis by the blockchain analytics company Nansen.
The top $TRUMP coin holders at a specific time — determined by the dinner’s organizers — secured a seat.
Also Presented Without Comment
CNN: Wealthy Foreigners Able To Register for Trump’s $5 Million ‘Gold Card’ Visa Within a Week, Said [Commerce Secretary Howard] Lutnick
In the Zeitgeist
Disney’s live-action remakes of their classic animated films have been a mixed bag, to say the least. But their newest movie, Lilo & Stitch, looks like a box office slam dunk. The National Research Group expects the film to rake in $165 million over Memorial Day weekend.
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