◼ The president suggests his uncle was eaten by cannibals. Finally, a palatable Biden.

◼ Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is only the second cabinet member ever to be impeached, and the first since 1876. Rightly so. He has ignored federal statutes requiring that illegal immigrants be detained until they are removed, given asylum, or otherwise legally adjudicated. He has twisted the definitions of legal status, extended “temporary” protected status to 700,000 Venezuelan migrants in response to their home country’s long-running misgovernment, and handed out meaningless court dates, sometimes a decade in the future, as a substitute for enforcement today. The House charged him with “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” in disregard of seven enumerated statutory requirements, and with a “breach of the public trust” for false statements to Congress and obstruction of congressional oversight. The Framers did not intend mere “maladministration,” in the sense of bad policy or incompetence, to be impeachable, but this goes well beyond that: It is flagrant, deliberate nullification of Congress’s power to make law. Mayorkas took an oath to uphold the Constitution and discharge the duties of his office, and he has violated that oath. Yet every Senate Democrat voted to dismiss the charges without a trial. That will only embolden this administration’s view that laws are just suggestions to the executive branch.

◼ The jury has been selected in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial. We could be headed to opening statements next week in the first criminal trial ever against a former American president—in the so-called hush-money case prosecuted by elected Democratic district attorney Alvin Bragg. His required presence in the courtroom meant that Trump had to skip Thursday’s oral argument in the Supreme Court, at which the justices considered his claim of immunity from criminal prosecution in the election-interference case brought against him by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith. He is also missing the action in South Florida, where another team of Smith prosecutors recruited from the DOJ is sparring with Trump’s lawyers over the admissibility of classified information in their case against Trump for illegally retaining national-defense intelligence. (You may have heard that a different DOJ special counsel declined prosecution against Biden on that same offense even while finding that he’d willfully violated the law.) But it hasn’t stopped Trump from appealing an Atlanta judge’s failure to disqualify Fulton County’s elected Democratic district attorney, Fani Willis, from her RICO prosecution of Trump for trying to undo the 2020 election. Are there due-process concerns about forcing a defendant to confront four complex criminal trials on a calendar pegged to Election Day rather than to law-enforcement needs? If Trump were a detained enemy-combatant terrorist rather than the de facto Republican presidential nominee, we’d be hearing about the Fifth Amendment.

◼ Joe Biden is trying to have it both ways on tariffs. He criticizes Trump’s proposals, which include a 10 percent tariff on all imports, as tax hikes on the middle class, which they are. But then he gallivants to the headquarters of the United Steelworkers union and promises to triple tariffs on Chinese steel. The U.S. barely imports any Chinese steel right now, so the economic impact of a tariff would be negligible. That also means the benefits to the steel industry would be negligible. Biden has left in place most of the tariffs the Trump administration imposed, and he has done virtually nothing to reform the existing tariff schedule, which runs to more than 4,000 pages. It would be nice if voters had a choice on tariffs in November rather than two candidates echoing each other.

◼ The rate of inflation stopped falling in June 2023. Every month since then, the year-over-year change in the consumer-price index has stayed between 3 and 3.8 percent. It should be 2 percent, and really it should be lower than 2 percent for a while to compensate for the past two years. But getting down to 2 percent is a must. Core inflation (which excludes energy and food prices, which are volatile) is higher than overall inflation, so right now the inflation-target misses aren’t due to energy markets. But with more conflict in the Middle East, energy prices could increase again. It’s rare for inflation to spike once and return to a low, stable level. In the past, more than one spike or stagflation has been the norm. Before cutting interest rates, the Fed needs to see evidence that those last few percentage points of excess inflation are disappearing. One thing that would help: spending cuts. Fiscal policy is highly expansionary, working against monetary policy with a $2 trillion deficit. Congress must stop making the Fed’s job harder than it needs to be.