⚓ US Warships Force Hormuz Transit Under Fire — CENTCOM Strikes Iranian Launch Sites

Three US Navy guided-missile destroyers — USS Truxtun, USS Rafael Peralta, and USS Mason — transited the Strait of Hormuz to the Gulf of Oman on May 7 under sustained Iranian attack, with Iranian forces launching missiles, drones, and small boats at the warships in what CENTCOM called “unprovoked attacks.” No US assets were struck. US forces responded with self-defense strikes destroying Iranian missile and drone launch sites, command and control nodes, and intelligence and surveillance facilities, according to the official CENTCOM press release.

The transit represented the first time US warships have actively fought their way through the Strait of Hormuz since the Iran hostage crisis era — a historic military moment that CENTCOM described carefully, saying “CENTCOM does not seek escalation but remains positioned and ready to protect American forces.” Gas prices now average $4.48 a gallon nationally, oil futures are pricing in sustained disruption, and the ceasefire that was supposed to have ended this conflict nearly a month ago has effectively collapsed, Fox News reported.

The Founders who gave Congress the power to declare war did so because they understood that a single executive, however bold, can escalate a conflict faster than a democracy can process its implications. The United States is now in active combat with Iran in one of the world’s most strategically critical waterways. Congress has not declared war. The republic deserves a full accounting of how we got here and where we are going.

⚖️ Federal Court Strikes Down Trump’s Second Global Tariff — Trade Court Says It’s “Unauthorized by Law”

A split 2-1 panel of the US Court of International Trade in New York ruled Thursday that the 10% universal global tariff President Trump imposed after the Supreme Court struck down his original tariff regime is also illegal — finding that he misapplied Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a statute designed to address currency and “balance-of-payments” crises, not trade deficits — with the majority writing that the tariffs are “invalid” and “unauthorized by law,” in a ruling that puts Trump 0-for-2 in his effort to impose comprehensive global tariffs, according to the New York Times and Washington Times.

The administration is expected to appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and ultimately to the Supreme Court — meaning the tariffs may remain in effect temporarily while the appeal proceeds — as the single dissenting judge found the law gives the president broader authority on tariffs, and the Trump administration argued that Section 122 can properly apply to trade imbalances, The Columbian/AP reported.

The Founders who gave Congress — not the president — the explicit constitutional power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations” and “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” would have found this outcome unsurprising. The question of where presidential trade authority ends and Congress’s begins is not a new dispute. The courts are now answering it twice in the same administration, and twice coming up with the same answer.

👽 Pastors Warn Trump’s UFO File Release Could “Destroy Christianity” — Intelligence Officials Briefed Churches

A group of prominent evangelical pastors, led by Tennessee-based televangelist Perry Stone, says US intelligence officials have been quietly briefing church leaders to prepare congregations for imminent disclosure of Trump’s “alien files” — warning that the release of government UFO records could trigger a crisis of Christian faith by suggesting that Genesis is “a myth” if extraterrestrial life is confirmed, with Stone telling his congregation: “You’re going to have people who are going to apostatize and turn from the Christian faith because they have no answer for what they’re about to hear,” according to International Business Times and Greek Reporter.

Bishop Alan DiDio of Revival Nation Church went further, arguing that the disclosures are part of a deliberate scheme to draw people away from Christianity — while Trump’s own vice president, JD Vance, has publicly declared he doesn’t believe in aliens at all: “I don’t think they’re aliens. I think they’re demons,” Vance said in March. Trump, meanwhile, has continued teasing the files without releasing them, saying “We’re going to be releasing a lot of things that we haven’t. I think some of it’s going to be very interesting to people,” The Irish Star reported.

The Founders who argued most passionately for religious liberty — Madison, Jefferson, and particularly the Baptists of Virginia — understood that faith cannot be protected by suppressing inconvenient information. The strength of Christian truth is not its compatibility with government secrecy. It is its compatibility with reality. Whatever the alien files contain, a faith that cannot withstand honest inquiry is not the faith of the Apostles — nor the faith of the republic’s founders, most of whom believed in a God who authored the universe, not just the planet.

🗺️ Tennessee Gerrymanders Memphis’s Majority-Black District — Ninth State to Redraw Maps Post-VRA Ruling

The Tennessee Republican-controlled legislature passed a new congressional map in a special session Wednesday that carves up the Memphis-based majority-Black district held by longtime Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen into three Republican-leaning districts stretching hundreds of miles east — with the vote taken amid protesters chanting in the gallery, Democrats walking out, and one senator standing on a desk holding a bedsheet reading “No Jim Crow 2.0,” making Tennessee the ninth state to redraw congressional maps ahead of the midterms and potentially enabling Republicans to pick up one additional House seat, according to NBC News.

Republican Sen. John Stevens, who sponsored the bill, said the maps were drawn using Census data “to elect more Republicans” — a statement Democrats noted was an odd argument given that the Census contains no partisan data — as the Supreme Court’s recent VRA ruling has also set off redistricting activity in Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina, where majority-minority districts held by Democrats are now legally vulnerable, Fox News reported.

The Founders who designed a republic of proportional representation in the House understood that the legitimacy of the body depends on the fairness of the process that selects it. Whatever the legal merits of the VRA ruling, a legislator standing up to say maps were drawn specifically to elect more of his party is describing a process the Founders would have recognized as exactly what they were trying to prevent — regardless of which party is doing it.

🇬🇧 Reform UK Makes Historic Gains as Labour Haemorrhages Seats Across England

Early results from England’s May 7 local elections show Reform UK winning hundreds of council seats across England in what Nigel Farage declared proved “left-right politics is FINISHED” — with the party projected to take full control of county councils in Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk for the first time in those councils’ histories, while Labour is losing councillors in traditional northern heartlands including Wigan, Sunderland, and Barnsley, in what analysts are calling one of the most significant local election results in a generation, according to The Guardian and GB News.

Labour is defending seats it won during the 2022 “Partygate” Conservative collapse and polling around 20% nationally — down 15 points from its 2024 general election landslide — as ITV reported the party is “haemorrhaging seats” in its northern heartlands while being simultaneously challenged by Reform in working-class wards, Liberal Democrats in wealthy commuter suburbs, and Greens in urban areas. Full council-by-council results will continue rolling through Friday morning, ITV News reported.

The lesson writing itself in English town halls overnight is one American conservatives have been watching with interest for years: a governing party that promised transformation, won by a landslide, and then governed pragmatically in ways that left both its left flank and its working-class base feeling betrayed. That is not a uniquely British political problem.

🌵 New Mexico GOP Governor Candidate Was Under Court Protection Order After Sexual Harassment Claim

Duke Rodriguez, 68, the Republican front-runner for New Mexico governor and founder of the state’s largest cannabis dispensary chain Ultra Health, was the subject of a court-issued order of protection in Scottsdale, Arizona in 2020 after a female subordinate filed for protection against him — presenting documented text messages showing he contacted her repeatedly while a temporary restraining order was already in effect, showed up at her condominium “unannounced and uninvited,” and phoned her twice after she had blocked him — with the judge denying Rodriguez’s counter-request for protection against the woman after finding he had provided “no evidence” of any threat, according to The Santa Fe New Mexican.

The woman, who was employed as Rodriguez’s chief strategy officer and reported directly to him, also filed a civil rights complaint with the Arizona Attorney General’s office alleging she was told by Rodriguez that receiving her salary and Christmas bonus was conditional on providing him sex — a complaint that went to mediation but was not settled. Rodriguez did not respond to the New Mexican’s requests for comment; an attorney who works with him forwarded the request to him personally without result. Rodriguez’s primary opponent is former Bernalillo County Sheriff Manny Gonzales, Fox News reported.

The Founders who wrote the republic’s basic framework of law understood that character matters in those who seek to govern — and that voters in a free republic have both the right and the responsibility to weigh what they know about a candidate’s personal conduct before entrusting them with public power. This information is now public. New Mexico Republican primary voters have a primary to decide.