Fiercely debated the existence

Scientists have fiercely debated the existence of ‘Planet 9’ for a decade. Some say evidence is piling up

By Jacopo Prisco

Our solar system used to have nine planets. Astronomer Mike Brown, also known as “the man who killed Pluto,” said he got hate mail from kids and obscene calls at 3 a.m. for years after his most famous finding helped change that.

Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech, discovered another small world called Eris in the Kuiper Belt — a vast ring of icy objects beyond Neptune’s orbit that also happens to be the former ninth planet’s neighborhood. The 2005 revelation set off a chain of events that led to Pluto’s still-controversial demotion from planet status the following year.

But now, just as the Kuiper Belt effectively took a ninth planet away, Brown and other scientists believe it could give one back.

The belt, which astronomers believe is made of leftovers from the solar system’s formation, extends 50 times farther from the sun than Earth, with a secondary region that reaches beyond it for nearly 20 times that distance. Pluto, now classified as a dwarf planet along with Eris, is just one of the largest among the scores of icy bodies that exist there — and doesn’t dominate its own orbit and clear the orbit of other objects. That’s why it can’t have the same standing as the remaining eight planets, according to guidelines laid out by the International Astronomical Union.

Because objects in the Kuiper Belt are so far away from the sun, however, they are difficult to spot. For more than a decade, astronomers have been searching that area for a hidden planet that has never been observed, but its presence is inferred by the behavior of other nearby objects. It’s often called Planet X or Planet Nine.

“If we find another planet, that is a really big deal,” said Malena Rice, an assistant professor of astronomy at Yale University. “It could completely reshape our understanding of the solar system and of other planetary systems, and how we fit into that context. It’s really exciting — there is a lot of potential to learn a tremendous amount about the universe.”

The excitement comes with some controversy — different camps have competing theories about the planet itself while some researchers believe it doesn’t exist at all.

“There are definitely full-blown skeptics about Planet Nine — it’s kind of a contentious topic,” Rice said. “Some people feel very passionately that it exists. Some people feel very passionately that it doesn’t. There’s a lot of debate in trying to pin down what it is, and whether it’s there. But that’s the hallmark of a really interesting topic, because otherwise people wouldn’t have heated opinions about it.”

Soon, the debate could be settled, once a new telescope capable of surveying the entire available sky every few nights comes online in late 2025. Until then, a team of researchers believes it has found the most compelling evidence yet that the hidden planet is real.

A ‘smoking gun’

The search for Planet Nine has only recently kicked into gear, but the discussion about its existence dates back more than 175 years.

“Since Neptune was successfully discovered in 1846, at least 30 astronomers have proposed the existence of various types of trans-Neptunian planets — and they’ve always been wrong,” said Konstantin Batygin, a colleague of Brown’s who is also a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology. Any body orbiting the sun beyond the orbit of Neptune is defined as “trans-Neptunian” by astronomers.

“I never thought I would be talking about how there’s evidence for a trans-Neptunian planet, but I believe that unlike all of those previous times, in this case, we’re actually right,” he added.

Batygin and Brown are among the most vocal supporters of Planet Nine. The pair has been actively working on finding the hidden planet since 2014, inspired by a study by astronomers Scott Sheppard, staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, and Chadwick Trujillo, associate professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at Northern Arizona University.

Sheppard and Trujillo were the first to notice that the orbits of a handful of known trans-Neptunian objects were all strangely clustered together. The duo argued that an unseen planet — several times larger than Earth and more than 200 times our planet’s distance from the sun — could be “shepherding” these smaller objects.

“The most visually striking evidence remains the earliest: that the most distant object(s) beyond Neptune all have orbits (that) point in one direction,” Brown said in an email.

Batygin has since coauthored half a dozen studies on Planet Nine, offering several lines of evidence about its existence. The strongest, he said, is in his latest work, coauthored by Brown and two other researchers and published in April in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The study tracks icy bodies subject to some kind of perturbation that’s injecting them into the orbit of Neptune before they leave the solar system entirely. “If you look at these bodies, their lifetimes are tiny compared to the age of the solar system,” Batygin said. “That means something is putting them there. And so what can it be?”

One option could be something called galactic tide, a combination of forces exerted by distant stars in the Milky Way galaxy. But Batygin and his team ran computer simulations to test this scenario versus the presence of Planet Nine, and they found that a solar system without the hidden planet is “strongly refuted by the data.”

“That’s a really remarkable smoking gun. And it’s obvious in retrospect, so I feel a little embarrassed that it took us almost a decade to figure this out. Better late than never, I suppose,” Batygin said.

Planet Nine, according to Batygin, is a “super-Earth” object, about five to seven times the mass of our planet, and its orbital period is between 10,000 and 20,000 years. “What I cannot calculate from doing simulations is where it is on its orbit, as well as its composition,” Batygin said. “The most mundane explanation is that it’s kind of a smaller version of Uranus and Neptune, and probably one of the cores that participated in the formation process of those planets.”

The super-Earth hypothesis is perhaps the one that gets the most support among Planet Nine believers, but competing theories present alternative explanations.

Super-Pluto? Competing Kuiper Belt theories

A study published in August 2023 proposes the existence of a hidden planet that’s actually much smaller, with a mass between 1.5 and 3 times that of Earth. “It’s possible that it’s an icy, rocky Earth, or a super-Pluto,” said Patryk Sofia Lykawka, an associate professor of planetary sciences at Kindai University in Japan and coauthor of the study.

“Because of its large mass, it would have a high internal energy that could sustain, for example, subsurface oceans. Its orbit would be very distant, much beyond Neptune, and much more inclined if compared to the known planets — even more inclined than Pluto’s, whose inclination is about 17 degrees,” Lykawka said. (Astronomers refer to a planet’s orbit as inclined when it’s not on the same plane as Earth’s.)

The presence of the planet is derived from computational models meant to explain the strange behaviors of populations of trans-Neptunian objects, which suggests similarities with Batygin’s research. However, Lykawka pointed out, his model does not look at the same orbital alignments and is very different from Batygin’s. That’s why he doesn’t refer to the mystery object as Planet Nine but “Kuiper Belt planet” instead, to “make it clear that we are talking about different hypothetical planets,” he explained.

Other theories propose that the anomalies everyone’s trying to explain are due to something else entirely, such as a primordial black hole — created just after the big bang — that our solar system captured as it moved across the galaxy. Another idea suggests that there might be something wrong with science’s current understanding of gravity.

But according to Rice of Yale University, these theories would be very difficult to test. “There are lots of other ideas, but I usually try to go with Occam’s razor when it comes to deciding what to prioritize in terms of checking,” she said, citing a classic principle of philosophy that states that among competing ideas, the simplest is usually correct. “In terms of scientific viability, we know that there are eight planets already, so it’s not so crazy to have another planet within the same system.”

The most promising path forward, she added, is actually finding more of the trans-Neptunian objects that Batygin is basing his hypothesis on — and proving that it’s statistically significant that their orbits are clustered.

The push for more evidence

Some researchers believe that currently scientists have detected too few of these distant trans-Neptunian objects to draw any conclusions about their orbits.

“We have about roughly a dozen or so of these objects,” said Renu Malhotra, regents professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona, “but we observe only the brightest ones, and only a tiny fraction of even those, because we observe them when they are at their closest approach to the sun.”

The data suffers from observational bias, according to Malhotra, which is why researchers are skeptical about it. Among the skeptics is Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science, one of the coauthors of the 2014 study that inspired Batygin’s research.

“By now, we expected to have found many more of these extreme trans-Neptunian objects,” Sheppard said in an email. “Having several tens of them would allow us to reliably determine if they are truly clustered in space or not. But unfortunately we are still in the small-number statistics realm, because they are much rarer than first thought. Right now I would say it’s possible there is a super-Earth planet in the distant solar system, but we cannot say that with a lot of confidence.”

The controversy can get heated, according to Malhotra. “Scientists come in different personality types, just like everybody else. Some are more aggressive about their science, while others are more measured,” she said. “There is a perception that the idea of a Neptune-mass Planet Nine is being pushed more aggressively than the statistics justify.”

Malhotra coauthored an August 2017 paper suggesting the presence of a Mars-size planet in the Kuiper Belt, but she’s not ruling out the Planet Nine hypothesis entirely.

“It’s up in the air. It’s just at the edge of statistical significance,” she said. ”But there’s nothing in the physics we know and the observations we have that rules out the possibility of large planets at tens of times the distance of Neptune from the sun.”

Observing the planet directly would, of course, end all controversy, but every attempt so far has come up empty.

Batygin coauthored a March study that used data from the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS, observatory in Hawaii, allowing researchers to analyze 78% of the sky where Planet Nine supposedly could be — but they couldn’t find it.

“It’s been a real slog,” he said about the attempt, citing the difficulty of having to work with telescopes over just a few days of allotted time while fighting against equipment breakages and adverse weather.

Spotting such a distant object without knowing where to look is exceedingly hard, and akin to searching for a target with a sniper rifle instead of binoculars, according to Batygin.

“The sky is a really, really big place when you’re looking for something so painfully dim,” he said. “This thing is something like 100 million times less bright than Neptune — that’s really pushing towards the edge of what’s possible with the absolute largest telescopes in the world right now.”

Other searches, such as one performed for a December 2021 study using the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile, have also come up short. “I had to test tens of thousands of different orbits. In the end I didn’t spot anything,” said the study’s lead author Sigurd Naess, a researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics of the University of Oslo in Norway.

The instrument’s sensitivity, he added, was good enough that it should have been able to detect a planet in an area between 300 and 600 times the distance between Earth and the sun.

“That’s enough to be informative, but far from enough to disprove Planet Nine as a whole,” Naess said in an email.

A potential ‘new chapter’

Amid controversies and diverging opinions, all of the researchers agree on one thing. A new wide-angle telescope currently under construction could soon put the debate to rest, once the US National Science Foundation and Stanford University researchers start scientific operations in late 2025. Called the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, it has the largest digital camera ever built and sits atop an 8,800-foot mountain in northern Chile.

“This is a next-generation telescope that will search the entire available sky every few days,” Batygin said. “It might just find Planet Nine directly, which would be a fantastic conclusion to the search and open up a new chapter. At the very least, it will find a ton more Kuiper Belt objects. But even if it doesn’t discover a single new object, it will be enough to confirm the Planet Nine hypothesis, because it will test all of the statistics, all of the patterns that we see with an independent survey.”

Rice agrees that the telescope will go a long way to settling the debate, and clearly address the question of the statistical significance of the alignment of trans-Neptunian objects — the key point of evidence for Planet Nine.

If the Rubin telescope finds a super-Earth, Rice said, that would be exciting because these celestial bodies, between the sizes of Earth and Neptune, are a common type of exoplanet.

“We do not have one in the solar system, which seems really strange, and has kind of been an outstanding mystery because we find so many of them in systems around other stars — it would be incredible to actually study one up close, because exoplanets are so far away that it’s very difficult to get a real grasp on exactly what they physically look like,” Rice said.

Finding a smaller planet would also spark excitement, Rice added, because every solar system planet is immensely useful for extrapolating information about the thousands of comparable exoplanets that researchers are uncovering across the galaxy.

And what if nothing shows up at all? It would still be useful to know for sure how many planets there are, Rice said. “I think not even knowing the number of planets in our own solar system is very humbling.”

That means that even the facts that many people learned from textbooks as children can change, as scientists discover more about the universe.

“That’s actually a wonderful thing,” she added. “Human knowledge is continually moving — sometimes it’s huge shifts, sometimes it’s just a back-and-forth debate. It’s a fun, emblematic example of the scientific process.”

Why does this fucking little prick get to say?

Elon Musk wants to radically reshape who controls America’s money supply

By Elisabeth Buchwald

President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House already carried the potential for sweeping changes to the Federal Reserve. But now a growing question is not how the central bank will operate under Trump but if it’ll continue to operate at all.

Elon Musk, a key Trump backer who is expected to have considerable sway in helping shape Trump’s policies, included a “100” emoji while resharing Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah’s post on X calling for abolishing the Fed.

“The Executive Branch should be under the direction of the president,” Lee said Thursday in a post on X, hours after Fed Chair Jerome Powell told reporters he wouldn’t resign if Trump asked him to. “The Federal Reserve is one of many examples of how we’ve deviated from the Constitution in that regard,” Lee added. “Yet another reason why we should #EndTheFed.”

Asked where Trump stands on the matter, Trump-Vance transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told CNN: “Policy should only be deemed official if it comes from President Trump directly.”

Calls to abolish the Fed are hardly new. Former congressman Ron Paul, who ran for president once as a Libertarian and twice as a Republican, published a book in 2009 titled “End the Fed.”

Then in June, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Lee introduced corresponding bills aimed at uprooting the nation’s central bank and shifting its responsibilities to the Treasury Department.

But thus far, Trump has not publicly voiced his support for dismantling the Fed. On the campaign trail, he has, however, advocated for changing the central bank’s rulebook, to the dismay of many economists.

Challenging the Fed’s independence

“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver,” Leavitt said in an emailed statement to CNN.

Those promises include bringing interest rates “way down,” which Trump vowed to do if elected at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual conference in August. Presidents, however, don’t have any direct influence over the rates Americans pay to borrow money.

For over 70 years, it’s been the duty of the central bank to set rates at levels aimed at fulfilling its congressional mandate for price stability and maximum employment. And throughout that time, Congress has also guaranteed the Fed’s ability to act as an independent body, devoid of any political interference.

That’s empowered Fed officials to make interest rate decisions that aren’t necessarily popular but could help the nation’s economy in the long run.

For instance, central bankers resisted calls to lower rates, instead opting to keep rates at a two-decade high for a year to rein in stubborn inflation. It wasn’t until two months ago that they finally cut rates as inflation cooled to just shy of the Fed’s 2% target.

But on the campaign trail, Trump floated requiring Fed officials to consult with him on interest rate decisions. That could lead to pressure on Fed officials to keep rates lower to satisfy Trump’s wishes, which in turn could reignite inflation.

During his first term, Trump also threatened to remove or demote Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whom he has at times blamed for keeping interest rates too high.

It’s unclear if Trump has the legal authority to overhaul the Fed’s independence on his own, let alone at all, or remove a Fed appointee before their term expires. On the latter, Powell, a lawyer himself, made his view abundantly clear when asked by a reporter at last week’s press conference after the Fed’s two-day monetary policy meeting. “Not permitted under the law,” he briskly responded.

That’s because the head of America’s central bank can only be fired “for cause,” as specified in the Federal Reserve Act. The exact interpretation of what would constitute a for-cause firing has not been precisely defined, but it’s reasonable to assume that it would entail a lot more than just having policy differences with the president.

A spokesperson for the Fed declined to comment.

Testing the waters

If there’s any time for Trump to test the Fed’s ability to maintain its status quo, it would probably be in 2025. While the balance of power in the House hasn’t been determined, Republicans have majority control of the Senate. Additionally, six of the nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republican presidents and half of those six were appointed by Trump in his first term.

But anyone challenging the Fed in the nation’s highest court shouldn’t expect to necessarily come out victorious. In a 7-2 court ruling this year, the Supreme Court ruled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could continue to operate in its current form despite many Republican lawmakers’ arguments that its structure was unconstitutional.

And last month, the court declined to hear a case that threatened to dismantle the independent Consumer Product Safety Commission. Like officials sitting on the Fed’s Board of Governors, members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s board can only be removed by a president for cause.

When money is involved, congress will never give it up...

Trump wants to shut down the Department of Education. Here’s what that could mean

By Katie Lobosco

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to abolish the Department of Education.

On the campaign trail, he repeatedly pointed to the agency as a symbol of federal overreach into the everyday lives of American families.

“I say it all the time, I’m dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,” he said in September during a rally in Wisconsin.

“We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing,” Trump said.

In 1979, then-President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat from Georgia, signed legislation making the Department of Education a Cabinet-level agency – fulfilling a campaign pledge he made to one of the country’s largest teachers’ unions, the National Education Association.

Previously, federal education programs were housed in other agencies. Trump has not said exactly how he would want to shut the department down – which would require an act of Congress – or what would happen to federally funded education programs if he did.

Here’s what the Department of Education does and how eliminating it could play out:

Funneling money to states and schools

Some of the Department of Education’s biggest jobs are to administer federal funding appropriated by Congress to K-12 schools and manage the federal student loan and financial aid programs.

Two of the biggest funding programs for K-12 schools are the Title I program, which is meant to help educate children from low-income families, and the IDEA program, which provides schools with money to help meet the needs of children with disabilities.

These programs help fulfill the department’s congressionally declared purpose of “ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual.”

Together, these programs provide K-12 schools with about $28 billion a year. But federal funding typically accounts for roughly just 10% of all school funding because the rest comes from state and local taxes. That said, schools received additional federal funding over the past four years to help them recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Department of Education also distributes about $30 billion a year to low-income college students via the Pell grant program and manages the $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio.

Conducting oversight and making regulations

The Department of Education also has an oversight role and engages in federal rulemaking.

Its Office of Civil Rights, for example, is tasked with investigating alleged discrimination complaints at colleges and K-12 schools, which increased significantly after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel last October.

The department can also create federal regulations. Some of the agency’s rules have recently touched on issues at play in the culture wars that seeped into local politics during the Covid-19 pandemic.

President Joe Biden’s Department of Education strengthened protections for transgender students, and the agency is also involved in crafting the administration’s student loan forgiveness regulations. But both of those rules are currently tied up in court.

Separately, the first Trump administration rescinded Obama-era guidance that was meant to ensure minority students were not unfairly disciplined in schools.

But states and local school boards still hold power that can’t be superseded by the department. During the pandemic, for example, the Department of Education could not require schools to close or remain open for in-person learning. In fact, despite a threat from then-President Trump, the executive branch could not unilaterally cut federal funding for schools that did not reopen in fall 2020.

Federal money comes with strings attached

The federal money that schools receive through programs like Title I and IDEA comes with strings attached. Schools get the money contingent on meeting certain conditions and reporting requirements.

“For those of us concerned about the red tape the Department of Education creates, how we address those rules and conditions is the bigger question,” said Frederick Hess, a senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Abolishing the department is little more than a shorthand,” he said.

One way to address the bureaucratic red tape is to deliver federal funds through what is called a “block grant,” which comes with fewer requirements.

Ending the department may not eliminate federal education funding

Federal funding programs for K-12 schools that help support the education of students from low-income families and children with disabilities predated the creation of the Department of Education.

It’s possible some of these funding programs could be moved to other federal agencies if the Department of Education was abolished.

“I don’t think that schools would suddenly lose money,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab, a research center focused on education finance policy at Georgetown University.

The Title I program, for example, “has proven to be relatively popular on both sides of the aisle,” Roza said.

When presidents have proposed cuts to the Department of Education’s budget in the past, Congress has resisted and appropriated more funding than what the president asked for about 71% of the time, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institution.

Even when the first Trump administration proposed cutting the department’s budget, the Republican-controlled Congress ultimately increased funding.

Congress is unlikely to approve a full agency shutdown

It’s worth noting that shutting down a federal agency would require an act of Congress.

Calls to abolish the Department of Education or merge it with another federal agency are not new. Then-President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, called for eliminating the agency just one year after it started operating in 1980 – but backed off when there appeared to be little support in Congress.

During Trump’s first term as president, his administration proposed merging the Education and Labor departments into one federal agency. Even though Republicans controlled both the Senate and House of Representatives at the time, the proposal did not go anywhere.

Come January, Republicans are hoping to seize unified control in Washington; they will have the majority in the Senate but the balance of power in the House of Representatives is still undecided. Two new Republican members of the Senate – Bernie Moreno, who defeated Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Tim Sheehy, who defeated Jon Tester in Montana – have embraced the idea.

But even if the GOP takes the House, it remains unclear if there will be enough support for abolishing the department in Congress this time around.

Vacation

I am taking a needed vacation, out of the country which is full of fucking cunts, and will be back in a week.

Dictator on day one.......

Trump is demanding an important change to the Senate confirmation process

The change would be a major blow to the system of checks and balances.

by Ellen Ioanes

President-elect Donald Trump is pushing for the next Senate majority leader to allow recess appointments, which would allow him to install some officials without Senate confirmation.

Typically, the Senate must approve presidential nominations for high-level posts, including cabinet positions, ambassadorships, and inspector general jobs, in a process outlined in the US Constitution. This procedure is meant to be a check on presidential power — a way of ensuring officials directly elected by citizens can guard against the appointment of unqualified or corrupt personnel.

The Constitution, however, also allows for “recess appointments,” a provision that aims to prevent prolonged government vacancies by allowing the president to install officials without Senate approval while Congress is not in session.

Using such recess appointments, Trump would be able to appoint whoever he’d like without giving the Senate the opportunity to question or object to the pick. Critics of the practice note that it increases the risk of unqualified, corrupt, or ideological appointees filling government posts. It also significantly expands presidential power.

Though recess appointments have been used in the past by presidents of both parties, in recent years, the Senate has avoided going to extended recesses, blocking presidents from making any appointments in senators’ absence.

Reinstating recess appointments “would essentially negate one of the Senate’s main roles in governance, which is to vet presidential nominations for high-level positions,” Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri, told Vox. “It would, if the Republicans in the Senate were willing to go along with it, represent sort of an abdication; they would be simply giving up the power that’s afforded them.”

Trump injected his demand into the fierce race to replace Sen. Mitch McConnell as the leader of the Senate, which will be under GOP control next session thanks to the results of last week’s election. Trump largely stayed out of that contest while on the campaign trail, but he waded into it on Sunday, writing on X, “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!)”

The three candidates for the position — Sens. John Thune (South Dakota), John Cornyn (Texas), and Rick Scott (Florida) — quickly expressed support for Trump’s demand. Scott, the underdog in the race who is also the closest Trump ally of the three, was the most explicit in his endorsement of the plan, writing “100% agree. I will do whatever it takes to get your nominations through as quickly as possible,” on X.

What’s a recess appointment and how does it work?

In ordinary circumstances, nominees to many government posts including cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and federal judges must undergo a confirmation hearing, during which they are questioned by the Senate about their record, qualifications, and how they will perform their government duties. Confirmation in this process requires a simple majority voting to confirm.

Recess appointments work differently, and they don’t require a vote. The president simply appoints an official of their choice. The idea behind them was that there might arise times when the president needed to appoint someone to keep the government functioning, while Congress was out of session (in recess).

“At the time the Constitution was written, Congress met mainly nine out of 24 months, and there were long stretches where Congress wasn’t in session,” Squire told Vox. As such, the Constitution states the president has the “Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”

Congressional recesses aren’t as long as they once were. Now, recesses happen in between each congressional session and around holidays. Recess appointments still work the same way, however. And as the text notes, any appointment made during a recess isn’t permanent: Presidential appointments made during a recess last to the end of that second session, meaning for a period of no more than two years. A president can renominate their pick after that, or reappoint them during another recess.

How have they been used in the past?

With the exception of Trump and President Joe Biden, recent presidents have made use of recess appointments; according to the Congressional Research Service, former President Barack Obama made 32 recess appointments, Bill Clinton made 139 recess appointments, and George W. Bush made 171 recess appointments.

Though recess appointments were meant to be used in emergencies or in times when Congress met less often, over the past few decades, they’ve become seen as a way for presidents to get around congressional opposition. The process faced major scrutiny during the Obama administration, and was curtailed after a 2014 Supreme Court ruling that Obama had overstepped his power in utilizing recess nominations. (That’s why neither Trump nor Biden made any recess appointments.)

In an effort to block recess appointments, the chamber often employs what are known as “pro forma” sessions. These short meetings, in which no real business is conducted, mean the Senate is never in recess for more than 10 days — preventing the president from making any appointments without the body’s consent. A pro forma session can be as simple as one senator gavelling in, and then calling the session over.

If recess appointments are reinstated, there is little Democrats could do to stop the process, Squire said. But they could slow down legislative processes, which “wouldn’t necessarily prevent [recess appointments] from happening, but there would be a penalty — a cost attached to it.”

Burn the economy down!

Trump’s tariffs could tank the economy. Will the Supreme Court stop them?

President-elect Trump is his own worst enemy, unless his fellow Republicans on the Supreme Court intervene.

by Ian Millhiser

After winning the 2024 election in part due to high inflation early in President Joe Biden’s term, President-elect Donald Trump wants to enact policies that would lead to the very same kind of inflation that doomed Democrats.

Though Trump inherits a strong economy and low inflation, he’s proposed a 10 to 20 percent tariff on all imports, and a 60 percent tariff on all imports from China. The Budget Lab at Yale estimates that this policy alone could raise consumer prices by as much as 5.1 percent and could diminish US economic growth by up to 1.4 percent. An analysis by the think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics, finds that Trump’s tariffs, when combined with some of his other proposals such as mass deportation, would lead to inflation rising between 6 and 9.3 percent.

If Trump pushes through his proposed tariffs, they will undoubtedly be challenged in court — and, most likely, in the Supreme Court. There are no shortages of businesses that might be hurt financially by these tariffs, and any one of them could file a lawsuit.

That raises a difficult question: Will this Supreme Court permit Trump to enact policies that could sabotage his presidency, and with it, the Republican Party’s hopes of a political realignment that could doom Democrats to the wilderness?

The legal arguments in favor of allowing Trump to unilaterally impose high tariffs are surprisingly strong. Several federal laws give the president exceedingly broad power to impose tariffs, and the limits imposed by these statutes are quite vague.

A presidential proclamation imposing such tariffs wouldn’t be unprecedented. In 1971, President Richard Nixon imposed a 10 percent tariff on nearly all foreign goods, which a federal appeals court upheld. Congress has since amended some of the laws Nixon relied on, but a key provision allowing the president to regulate importation of “any property in which any foreign country or any national thereof has or has had any interest” remains on the books.

The judiciary does have one way it might constrain Trump’s tariffs: The Supreme Court’s Republican majority has given itself an unchecked veto power over any policy decision by the executive branch that those justices deem to be too ambitious. In Biden v. Nebraska (2023), for example, the Republican justices struck down the Biden administration’s primary student loans forgiveness program, despite the fact that the program is unambiguously authorized by a federal statute.

Nebraska suggests a Nixon-style tariff should be struck down — at least if the Republican justices want to use their self-given power to veto executive branch actions consistently. Nebraska claimed that the Court’s veto power is at an apex when the executive enacts a policy of “vast ‘economic and political significance.” A presidential proclamation that could bring back 2022 inflation levels certainly seem to fit within this framework.

The question is whether a Republican Supreme Court will value loyalty to a Republican administration, and thus uphold Trump’s tariffs; or whether they will prefer to prop up Trump’s presidency by vetoing a policy that could make him unpopular and potentially invite the Democratic Party back into power.

After the Court’s decision holding that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes, it is naive to think that this Court’s decisions are driven solely – or even primarily – by what the law and the Constitution actually have to say about legal questions. But that does not mean that this Court will necessarily strike down a Republican tariff policy that could do long term damage to the GOP.

Tariffs are often viewed as economic weapons that the United States can use to combat other nation’s activities that undermine US interests. For this reason, federal law gives the president significant power to impose new tariffs after an appropriate federal agency determines that deploying such a weapon is justified.

One striking thing about these laws, however, is that they focus far more on process than on substance. Federal tariff laws tend to lay out a procedure the federal government must follow before it can authorize a new tariff, but they place few explicit restrictions on the nature of those tariffs once the process is followed. The Trump administration must follow certain processes to create new tariffs, but so long as it follows that process it has broad latitude over tariff policy.

Consider, for example, Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. This law requires the US trade representative, a Cabinet-level official appointed by the president, to make certain findings before their power to issue new tariffs is triggered. But specific findings the trade representative must make before acting are quite vague. The power to issue tariffs can be triggered if the trade representative finds that a foreign country is engaged in activity that “is unjustifiable and burdens or restricts United States commerce,” or that is “unreasonable or discriminatory and burdens or restricts United States commerce.”

So that’s not much of an explicit limit on tariffs — the government’s power to issue them is triggered if a Cabinet official determines that a foreign nation’s behavior is “unreasonable.”

Once the trade representative makes this determination, their powers are quite broad. The government may “impose duties or other import restrictions on the goods of, and, notwithstanding any other provision of law, fees or restrictions on the services of, such foreign country for such time as the trade representative determines appropriate.”

As my colleague Dylan Matthews notes, “Trump used this power to impose sweeping tariffs against China. Biden has made liberal use of this power, too, expanding tariffs on steel, batteries, solar cells, and electric vehicles from China.”

Another statute gives the president similarly broad authority to impose tariffs after the commerce secretary conducts an investigation and determines that a foreign good “is being imported into the United States in such quantities or under such circumstances as to threaten to impair the national security.” In his first term, Trump used this to tax imports of steel and aluminum.

And then there’s the authority that Nixon used in 1971 to issue broad new tariffs on a variety of imports. In its current form, this law allows the president to act only after they declare a national emergency “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” But the law doesn’t define terms like “national emergency” or “unusual and extraordinary threat.” And, once such an emergency is declared, the president’s power is quite broad.

This is the law that also permits the president to regulate importation of “any property in which any foreign country or any national thereof has or has had any interest.”

It’s important to emphasize that, while these laws impose few substantive limits on tariffs, they do require Trump to jump through certain procedural hoops — and his administration struggled with such procedural barriers in his first term. In 2020, for example, a 5-4 Supreme Court rejected the administration’s attempt to eliminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows hundreds of thousands of undocumented young immigrants to live and work in the US, due to a paperwork error.

Still, assuming the second Trump administration is staffed with competent lawyers who can navigate procedural hurdles more deftly this time, federal law places few explicit limits on the president’s power to issue tariffs.

How the Court could veto Trump’s tariffs, if a majority of the justices want to do so

The strongest legal argument against Trump’s proposed tariff policy involves something called the “major questions doctrine,” a power that the Supreme Court gave itself in recent years, which has only ever been used to block policies handed down by the Biden administration. The Court has never explained where this major questions doctrine comes from, and has never attempted to ground it in any statute or constitutional provision — although some individual justices have written concurring opinions that attempt to do so.

When summarizing this fabricated legal doctrine, the Court often quotes a line from Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA (2014), which states that “we expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” But the justices have only provided vague guidance on just how “clearly” Congress must write a statute if it wants to give broad policymaking authority to an agency, so it is unclear if this Court would follow a statute permitting the president to tax “any property” that “any foreign country” has “any interest” in.

The major questions doctrine is a new legal concept, which is poorly defined and which has never been used to block any policy by a Republican president — or, indeed, any president not named “Joe Biden” (some scholars argue that the Court applied an early version of the doctrine in FDA v. Brown & Williamson (2000) to block a Clinton administration policy, but the Court’s reasoning in that case bears only a passing resemblance to its reasoning in its Biden-era decisions). Because this doctrine is so ill-defined, a lawyer can only guess at whether this Court will apply it to the Trump administration at all, or specifically to Trump’s tariff policies.

Still, there is both a principled argument for why it might apply to Trump, and a cynical one.

The principled one is that the law should be the same regardless of which party controls the White House. So, if the Republican justices insisted on vetoing Biden administration policies they deemed too ambitious, they should also veto similarly ambitious Trump administration policies. Under this argument, the major questions doctrine may still be bad law that the Republican justices pulled out of thin air, but the least they can do is apply it equally harshly to presidents of both parties.

The cynical argument, meanwhile, is that Democrats got crushed at the polls, despite low inflation and a strong economy, seemingly in part because they held power during a period of high inflation. If Trump gets to implement his tariffs, that would also likely trigger a period of similarly high inflation, and that would be bad for the political party that controls the Supreme Court.

So what should the Supreme Court do?

Trump has proposed many policies that violate the Constitution. If he follows through on his threats to have his political enemies arrested, that would violate the First Amendment and may violate the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that law enforcement must have “probable cause” to make an arrest. Depending on how Trump conducts his deportation policies, they may violate constitutional due process guarantees. His anti-transgender policies could violate constitutional protections against discrimination, and some of his policies targeting incarcerated transgender people could violate the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments.”

But there’s nothing in the Constitution that prohibits tariffs. Tariffs are a common part of US economic and foreign policy. Federal laws that long predate the Trump administration give the president broad authority over tariffs. And there’s even a precedent, from the Nixon administration, for the kind of sweeping tariffs that Trump says he wants to implement.

The coming legal fight over tariffs presents a dilemma. A decision against the tariffs would consolidate more power in an unelected Supreme Court, and breathe more life into a legal doctrine that has no basis in law. A decision for the tariffs, however, would cause needless misery to millions of Americans.

The Constitution itself is pretty clear about what should happen in this case. When a duly elected president violates the Constitution or a federal law, it’s the Supreme Court’s job to step in. But when the president merely enacts an unwise economic policy, the Court is supposed to play no role whatsoever — even if this policy is likely to hurt the nation or the political party that controls the Court. Trump’s tariffs are unwise, but assuming that he implements them in compliance with federal law, they are not unconstitutional.

In any event, it’s far from clear what these justices will do. But, if Trump does try to implement the kinds of tariffs he touted on the campaign trail, a legal showdown over whether he can actually do what federal law says he can do is almost certainly inevitable.

It’s not normal

It’s not normal for the East Coast to be on fire

Why New York’s November wildfires are so alarming.

by Paige Vega

Over the weekend, a very small wildfire broke out in a hilly and densely vegetated area of Prospect Park, a swath of green space in Brooklyn. The 2-acre blaze drew about 100 firefighters as residents were warned to stay out of the park. Meanwhile, on the New York-New Jersey border, another blaze, the Jennings Creek wildfire, has burned thousands of acres, sending smoke drifting across much of New York City and killing an 18-year-old New York state forest ranger volunteer who died while responding to the fire.

Is this typical? Not exactly. But the Northeast has been under severe drought conditions for weeks. These fires, and the dozens of others currently burning in the Northeast and across the Ohio River Valley, as well as the scores more in the Western US, are the consequence of months of unseasonably hot and dry weather across large swaths of the country.

Okay, pause: What is a drought? Simply put, a drought is a dry period — that is, a long stretch of time without any rain or snow — that leads to a water shortage. Droughts can (and do) happen all over the world; they are not just a characteristic of a desert or a regional problem. Extreme drought can stress landscapes and water tables, regardless of whether a city is built on top of them or not. If a drought lasts long enough, people in that place can lose access to water.

While the Western United States is associated with aridity, it is remarkable to see this extent of drought spread across the Northeast. And current forecasts show that the conditions will persist for weeks or even months. “It’s problematic to see drought in all parts of the country. It’s not just a regional issue,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center. “Regardless of where you’re at, drought can and will impact you.”

Firefighters extinguished the Prospect Park fire. Rain mercifully moved into New York on Sunday night and snuffed much of the smoke drifting across the East Coast, obscuring the fact that a cluster of fires in New Jersey continued to burn.

As the smoke fades, attention shouldn’t: Millions of people in the Northeast remain under red flag wildfire warnings, which signal conditions where anything that can generate a spark could likely lead to a fire. But we all live with drought, extreme heat, and fire now — and our relationship to water is connected to just how bad things could get.

Why is the drought so severe?

For much of the country, October was an extremely hot and dry month. We are currently on pace for 2024 to become the hottest year ever recorded, a declaration that forecasters from the World Meteorological Organization are making with confidence even with more than a month left.

According to the US Drought Monitor, the long periods of hot and dry conditions have left every state in the country facing drought — an unprecedented statistic.

There isn’t a single driver responsible for the scope of the current drought conditions. Even as our global average temperatures are rising thanks to climate change, our short-term weather patterns will shift all of the time. For example, despite Hurricane Helene bringing heaps of moisture to places like North Carolina a little more than a month ago, even western North Carolina is now abnormally dry. How can that be? Because it’s been that hot and dry in the weeks since — enough to erase any sign of a so-called thousand-year event.

“When I started looking at data over the past six months, you see that places like New Jersey, the Ohio River Valley, much of the plains have 12 to 15 inches below normal precipitation for this time of the year,” Fuchs said. “New York has a deficit of 10 inches. That’s very extreme for this part of the country.”

And then there are these warmer temperatures later in the year that end up amplifying the ongoing drought’s worst effects. Temperatures usually fall significantly by November. Trees will drop their leaves and go dormant. Certain critters hibernate or go into low-power mode. Snow begins accumulating in the higher elevations, banking moisture that will melt out — gradually — during the warmer periods.

But when it’s 80 degrees in New York in November, trees and vegetation are still consuming water. There’s an extra period of demand on the overall water system, and that taxes water sources — lakes and streams begin to draw down and the ground holds onto less moisture. Vegetation that grew earlier in the year begins to dry out — and fuel wildfires.

“It really doesn’t take much time to transition to a hot and dry environment and you all of a sudden have all of this extra fuel for wildfires,” Fuchs said. “This is the perfect mix for fires to blossom.”

Should we expect more wildfires?

Drought is a normal part of our climate, but it’s not normal to see this much drought across so much of the country.

This extreme period of dry weather is a part of the larger picture that scientists have come to expect: that our weather will become more extreme and unpredictable and that we will collectively experience more pronounced swings from incredibly dry periods to incredibly wet periods.

Those dry periods, Fuchs says, are connected to warmer temperatures persisting into what should be the colder parts of the year and ramping up the demand on our water systems.

That demand, by the way, includes water consumption by you and me and everyone else. Just multiply our daily showers, drawing from the tap, running our dishwashers and washing machines, washing our cars, watering our house plants (and so on) by the millions of people who live in a watershed, the area that shares a single water source for a particular region.

If there’s too much demand on an already stressed landscape, the wildfire risk increases as water levels in streams and in our water table drop.

To better navigate the conditions we see today and the climate we should expect in the future, we need to understand that no place is immune to drought conditions, Fuchs said. “Even if you think you’ve not been impacted by drought in the past, it’s increasingly important for people to know where their water comes from and conserve it the best you can at any time,” he said.

“We’re actively experiencing severe climate change impacts,” said Aradhna Tripati, a climate scientist from UCLA who helped author the latest national climate assessment. Climate change “is no longer theoretical or a distant threat, an abstract one. It is not something that happens in the future here. It is not something only happening in places far away from where we live. All weather is now being affected.”

Yes — even in New York City.

Only the fucking worst!!!!!!!

The new (and familiar) faces staffing the second Trump administration

Trump’s picks send a clear message on immigration, foreign policy, and climate.

by Li Zhou

President-elect Donald Trump has begun naming members of his White House team, offering an early signal to the direction he’ll take on issues, including foreign policy and immigration.

Thus far, Trump has announced a handful of policy staffers, nominating House GOP Conference chair Elise Stefanik as United Nations ambassador, and former Rep. Lee Zeldin as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator. Trump has also named former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Tom Homan as his choice for “border czar” and is set to announce longstanding policy adviser Stephen Miller as a deputy chief of staff. Stefanik has been a staunch Israel supporter, and Zeldin has emphasized his desire to roll back environmental regulations. Homan and Miller, meanwhile, are known for their hard-line stances on immigration, including overseeing family separations during Trump’s first administration.

Many other nominations — including for powerful Cabinet positions like secretaries of state and defense — are still to come.

Why Ukraine thinks it can still win over Donald Trump

Trump described a range of priorities while on the campaign trail, including promises of mass deportations, expansive tariffs, and cuts to protections for LGBTQ people. It will be up to his secretaries and staff to execute these plans, with his picks thus far underscoring just how serious he is about pursuing many of these goals, particularly on immigration.

During his first administration, many of Trump’s Cabinet members oversaw significant changes to the executive branch, including Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who were critical to curtailing worker protections and attempting massive cuts to education spending, respectively. Trump has indicated he wants to go further and move faster this time around and that he wants to ensure he’s surrounded by like-minded staff.

Below is a rundown of the people Trump has named and the roles these appointees could play.

Who she is: Once a moderate, Stefanik — currently part of Republican House leadership — has become a vocal Trump loyalist in recent years as her New York district shifted right.

Stefanik first burst onto the national stage as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, grilling witnesses as part of Trump’s first impeachment proceeding in the lower chamber in 2019. More recently, she went viral for her questioning of college presidents during a hearing on antisemitism and their handling of student protests over Gaza.

As a top House Republican, Stefanik has amplified Trump’s 2020 election denials and hewed so close to the president-elect that she was once on the shortlist for the vice presidency. Stefanik is also known for her efforts to recruit and support more Republican women for House seats.

She’s taken a pretty standard conservative stance on foreign policy: Stefanik has been a prominent supporter of aid to Israel while balking at continuing support for Ukraine. She backed early tranches of Ukraine aid but joined other Republicans in arguing that more recent aid could be better applied domestically. Stefanik has previously questioned aid to the United Nations, including to its Relief and Works Agency, which has been vital to providing humanitarian aid to Gaza.

“Elise is an incredibly strong, tough and smart America First fighter,” Trump said in a statement about the role.

What we know about the role: The UN ambassador serves as a vital envoy for US interests; given the country’s financial support for the body and its role on the UN Security Council, the ambassador has major influence regarding how the organization utilizes its resources and who serves in its leadership.

In the last year, UN officials have been increasingly critical of Israel’s attacks on Gaza as thousands have died, health care systems have been assaulted, and famine has struck. As ambassador, Stefanik could criticize these positions and call for defunding UN relief programs.

This role requires Senate confirmation.

What message this sends: The pick suggests that the Trump administration could once again ramp up its disagreements with the United Nations, after attempting to curb funding for certain UN initiatives in Trump’s first term. At that time, the administration also pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council, citing its criticisms of Israel.

Stefanik’s naming could also underscore the president-elect’s skepticism of additional aid to Ukraine.

Who he is: Homan was acting ICE director during the first Trump administration and oversaw the implementation of the family separation policy during his tenure from 2017 to 2018. He’s also long backed Trump’s desire to deport unauthorized immigrants, previously noting that if invited to join the administration, he intended to “run the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”

Homan worked for ICE during former President Barack Obama’s administration as well, and has also served as a police officer and Border Patrol agent. He’s been in lockstep with Trump on implementing punitive immigration policies and called for ICE to deport a wide range of unauthorized immigrants, including those who don’t have criminal histories.

“Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “There is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders.”

What we know about the role: The “border czar” is not an official role that requires Senate confirmation; the secretary of homeland security is the actual Cabinet official overseeing the border. However, Homan appears poised to have a major say over policy and will weigh in on proposals at both the northern and southern borders, according to Trump.

What message this sends: Homan’s efforts in the first Trump administration and his commitment to sweeping deportations this term indicate that the president-elect is fully focused on his promise to remove a large number of unauthorized immigrants from the US.

Who he is: Zeldin is a former Republican House lawmaker who ran a failed campaign for the New York governor’s seat in 2022.

Zeldin did not previously sit on committees focused on environmental policy in the House, and focused on crime and inflation during his gubernatorial run. That year, he came within a notably close margin of Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul as a Republican running in a traditionally blue state.

Zeldin has said some of his first priorities will be to “roll back regulations that are forcing businesses to be able to struggle,” and to work on US “energy dominance.”

What we know about the role: The EPA is responsible for crafting policies that protect clean water and air, and also plays a major role in approving regulations to combat climate change. The administrator position is a Senate-confirmed role.

What message this sends: Trump promised to take a very different approach to the environment than the Biden administration, including by exiting international climate agreements and focusing on expanding fossil fuel production. Zeldin’s nomination suggests those promises will be a priority, as will rescinding Biden-era environmental protections that curbed carbon emissions for businesses.

Trump policy aide Stephen Miller expected to be named deputy chief of staff and policy adviser

Who he is: Miller is a staunch Trump loyalist and policy adviser who pushed many of the harshest immigration policies during the president-elect’s first term. He has advocated for a travel ban and family separations in the past, and he’s a chief architect and booster for the idea of the mass deportations Trump has promised this term as well.

“They begin on Inauguration Day, as soon as he takes the oath of office,” Miller has said of deportations.

Trump has not yet formally announced the appointment, though Vice President-elect JD Vance has already posted his congratulations to Miller.

What we know about the role: This position is another political appointment that doesn’t require Senate confirmation, but the role is set to focus heavily on providing Trump with policy guidance — likely focused on immigration, given Miller’s expertise.

What message this sends: Between this appointment and Homan’s, Trump has made clear that his promised mass deportations will be one of his top policy goals when he retakes office.

Trump campaign adviser Susie Wiles has been named chief of staff

Who she is: Wiles, a longtime Florida campaign operative, helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign in the state and was a Trump senior national adviser in 2024. She’s heavily credited for the success he had during the Republican primary in 2024 and had previously aided Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during his gubernatorial run in 2018 prior to a falling out between the two.

Wiles has also been a corporate lobbyist and worked with a spectrum of Republicans in the past, including former Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and Florida Sen. Rick Scott.

“Susie is tough, smart, innovative … universally admired and respected,” Trump said in a statement.

What we know about the role: The chief of staff is effectively a gatekeeper who helps shape the president’s priorities and offers policy counsel. The position is the most prominent political appointee in the White House and is not Senate confirmed.

Notably, Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly has been a major Trump critic, describing him as a “fascist” who favors a “dictator approach.”

What message this sends: Wiles has been credited with professionalizing Trump’s campaign operations and reining in some of the chaos that has marked his past operations. That said, his campaign was still rife with racist remarks that echoed authoritarians as well as frequent lies about former Vice President Kamala Harris’s policies and identity. Kelly has said he attempted to restrain the president during his first term, though it was still plagued by in-fighting and tumultuous policies on everything from climate to immigration.

Neptune and Triton

Ice giant Neptune is faint in Earth's night sky. Some 30 times farther from the Sun than our fair planet, telescopes are needed to catch a glimpse of the dim and distant world. This dramatic view of Neptune's night just isn't possible for telescopes in the vicinity of planet Earth though. Peering out from the inner Solar System they can only bring Neptune's day side into view. In fact this night side image with Neptune's slender crescent next to the crescent of its large moon Triton was captured by Voyager 2. Launched from planet Earth in 1977 the Voyager 2 spacecraft made a close fly by of the Solar System's outermost planet in 1989, looking back on Neptune at night as the robotic spacecraft continued its voyage to interstellar space.

Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas

What created an unusual dark streak in Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas's tail? Some images of the bright comet during mid-October not only caught its impressively long tail and its thin anti-tail, but a rather unexpected feature: a dark streak in the long tail. The reason for the dark streak is currently unclear and a topic of some debate. Possible reasons include a plume of dark dust, different parts of the bright tail being unusually superposed, and a shadow of a dense part of the coma on smaller dust particles. The streak is visible in the featured image taken on October 14 from Texas, USA. To help future analyses, if you have taken a good image of the comet that clearly shows this dark streak, please send it in to APOD. Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS has now faded considerably and is returning to the outer Solar System.