1/ There’s a strong chance the Supreme Court will release its IEEPA Tariff opinion this morning, so I want to go over why the case is so important and what I’ll be looking for in the opinion. TLDR: the Constitution’s separation of powers is at stake. 2/ Obviously, one reason the case matters is because Trump 47’s tariffs are substantively massive enough to reshape global trade patterns. The IEEPA tariffs at issue in the case accounted for about $133.5 billion out of $250 billion in revenue (through mid-December).

1/ First impressions from the decision holding the IEEPA tariffs impermissible:
p 30: When Congress wants to delegate tariff powers to the executive, it is good at being clear about that. It has done it many times! It did not do it here. 2/ p 31: "Regulate" and "tax" are legally distinct, with entirely different lineages, and there's no sense pretending they are one and the same.

I wanted to show how pervasive leadership dominance of the legislative process has gotten. After discovering the excellent data provided by @Libgober, I whipped up this graph—and, wow, it’s even more dramatic than I realized. 118th is still incomplete, so that last data point is in flux. But the takeaway here is clear: a vast majority of legislating in the House now happens through giant omnibuses. If you want your bill to move, you need to get it a ride—which means you need leadership’s help.

Congress is struggling: however you measure, the 118th is on pace to be the least productive in living memory. Instead of self-gov't, we get exec-driven gov't, with policies made up by White House lawyers and then bitterly fought out in court.
So what can we do to fix it?
🧵 I’ve been privileged to work w/ former members and staffers of the House, scholars of the institution, and people with deep knowledge of the chamber’s rules. Our @HooverInst @SunwaterInst Task Force report is out today with our recommendations.

1/ As we consider where House GOP goes next, consider some ancient history:
After McCarthy’s removal on 10/3, the GOP Conference met to pick his successor on Wed 10/11. Maj. Leader Steve Scalise defeated Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan in the conference vote, 113-99.

2/ That was very underwhelming, especially for the House GOP’s #2. (Scalise had, at best, lukewarm support from McCarthy.) But it was a decision, nevertheless, and the party might still have hoped to regain some kind of normal trajectory if it just made Scalise Speaker.

1/ It's taken me a little time to wrap my head around everything that's happened, but I think I now have a sense of the politics of this crisis. Some observations. 2/ It strikes me that we in the U.S. have had 3 main phases to date.
A) Denial - a sense that this virus was a bad thing happening in other places, and fundamentally didn't have anything to do with us.
B) Minimization - a sense that it just wasn't going to be that bad for us.