Quick Midterm Reactions: Casualties on the right flank; Jeffries' speakership starts with training wheels; Schumer's weird majority. joshhuder.substack.com/p/qui…

Why would you call something Mitch McConnell did the Schumer rule 😂. The unwillingness to grapple with the way two court seats were handled by McConnell by anyone on the right is going to lead to total SCOTUS calvinball for the foreseeable future. Cake was baked in 2020.

At Brookings last month, former Fed governor Dan Tarullo flagged a concern: even if the Supreme Court said the Fed was special because of monetary policy (in either the Cook and/or Slaughter cases), Slaughter's logic might still let a president reach a governor through the other hat they wear, on bank regulation. The worry there is that the court might leave an opening, by striking down Humphrey's, to fire a governor for their regulatory conduct, since "for cause" might only apply to monetary policy. Again, the fear would be that a carve-out for monetary policy ≠ a carve-out for the Fed. (The remedy for this could be drastic: pull bank regulation out of the Fed altogether.) Barrett hits on this in her dissent, noting how Slaughter and Cook are potentially contradictory—regulators are removable because they wield executive power, but Fed governors are not under the majority opinion in Cook. "Do all the Federal Reserve’s existing regulatory powers have the requisite connection to monetary policy? If not, are they grandfathered in?" It didn't get much attention this week, but Roberts gestures at this in footnote 6. Upholding the Fed "as currently structured and with its existing enforcement authorities," he adds that this doesn't mean Congress could hand the Fed new regulatory powers "attenuated from monetary policy" and expect the same shelter. The intriguing implication may be as follows: The court drew Tarullo's line for him at least conceptually by suggesting the monetary core is protected (with regulatory authority riding along only as far as it exists as of June 29, 2026). But how attenuated is too attenuated? Could Congress or a future Fed creating new regulatory authorities jeopardize this protection? Who decides when a Fed power has drifted far enough from monetary policy to lose the shelter?

Sen. Kennedy says he’s been told the votes aren’t there for ballroom funding, and that Rs are going “back to square one” “We're going with just the DHS funding, the votes, I'm told the votes are not there.”