In one of its most consequential rulings of the year, just before breaking for the holidays the Supreme Court held that President Donald Trump acted improperly in federalizing the National Guard in Illinois and in activating troops across the state. Although the case centered on the administration’s deployments in Chicago, the court’s ruling suggests that Trump’s actions in Los Angeles and Portland were likewise illegal.

Trump has said that his deployments of troops to these metro areas were just the beginning and that his administration planned to use military force in more cities across the country. The specter of U.S. troops being deployed against its citizens is inconsistent with a long history of not mobilizing the military for purposes of domestic law enforcement. Images of troops patrolling city streets are more often seen under authoritarian regimes, not in the United States. The Supreme Court’s ruling will immediately put a stop to this.

In coming to this conclusion, the Supreme Court interpreted two federal statutes: The first, 10 U. S. C. §12406(3), empowers the president to federalize members of a state’s National Guard only if he is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.” The Trump administration claimed that it needed to federalize the Illinois National Guard, and similarly troops in California and Oregon, because local police were unable to adequately protect U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, especially during protests and other demonstrations.

Whether this level of protection was actually called for is still much disputed, and in three separate rulings this year federal courts found that there was no such need in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland. However, the Supreme Court avoided that issue by explaining that the statutory provision means a president can federalize a state’s guard only if it can be shown that U.S. armed forces cannot provide adequate protection for the activities of the federal government.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court concluded that “the term ‘regular forces’ in §12406(3) likely refers to the regular forces of the U.S. military. This interpretation means that to call the Guard into active federal service under §12406(3), the President must be ‘unable’ with the regular military ‘to execute the laws of the United States.’”

This, in itself, is obviously a major limit on the ability of the president to federalize a state’s National Guard.

But the Supreme Court went even further, adding that to federalize a state’s guard would first require the state to be in a situation where the U.S. military could legally be deployed against its citizens, but that its use would be insufficient. Here, a second federal statute is critical. The Posse Comitatus Act, 18 U. S. C. §1385, adopted in 1868, prohibits the U.S. military from being deployed for use in domestic law enforcement except in very limited circumstances, such as when there is an insurrection in a state. Adopted soon after the end of Reconstruction, the act makes it a federal crime to deploy the military within U.S. borders except as expressly authorized by the Constitution or by a federal statute.

In plain English, the Supreme Court ruled that a president can federalize a state’s National Guard only in the rare circumstances where the Posse Comitatus Act allows the military to be used for domestic law enforcement, and then only if the U.S. military would be deemed inadequate to quell the unrest. The Court ultimately declared that “before the President can federalize the Guard under §12406(3), he likely must have statutory or constitutional authority to execute the laws with the regular military and must be ‘unable’ with those forces to perform that function.”

It is hard to imagine, except in the most dire of circumstances, how these requirements could be met. This is exactly as it should be. The U.S. military is not trained to police its citizens and it is not instructed as to the use of force to protect civil liberties. And removing policing from the control of state and local governments would dramatically expand the president’s power. The Supreme Court’s approach is precisely what Congress had in mind in 1878 in prohibiting the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

I, and many others, have criticized the Supreme Court for seeming to operate as a rubber stamp approving the Trump administration’s actions. But here the court served its essential role of enforcing the law and of enforcing checks on presidential power. And it did so in a way that will matter enormously in the months and years ahead in keeping this president from using the military to serve his political agenda within the United States.

Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the UC Berkeley Law School. He wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

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The sound of bagpipes still makes Butch Inks feel sick to his stomach.

It brings him back to seven funerals of active-duty firefighters when he was St. Paul’s assistant fire chief and then fire chief.

Those were the worst days of his career, said Inks, who retired Tuesday after 31 years as a St. Paul firefighter.

Firefighters are impacted at higher rates than the general population for cardiac disease, cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder. As chief, Inks focused on the health of St. Paul firefighters. He brought about comprehensive cardiac and cancer screenings, reestablished a full-time health and wellness coordinator, and started a peer support team.

Most people think of firefighters as running into burning buildings to save lives and extinguish flames — “and we do that a lot,” Inks said — but more than 80 percent of the work of St. Paul firefighters is emergency medical responses. The city’s firefighters are all emergency medical technicians and many are also paramedics.

“The EMS calls, day-to-day, wear and tear on the mental capacity and emotions of a human being,” said Inks, who recalled as a fire captain when he delivered a baby one morning and, later the same day, responded to a call a block away of a baby not breathing; the child had been beaten.

‘It’s OK to not be OK’

Butch Inks, second from right, as a St. Paul firefighter when he was assigned to Squad 1, where he worked from 1996 to 2001. He rose through the ranks to become St. Paul’s fire chief and retired on Dec. 30, 2025. He and other firefighters were pictured after a kitchen fire. From left to right: Randy Villarreal, Dan Berger, who was Inks’ first captain at the fire department and Floyd Jones, who went on to be the best man in Inks’ wedding. (Courtesy of St. Paul Fire Department)

Inks, 57, said he was “from an era where you didn’t speak up” about your feelings. Even five years ago, Inks said he would still tell people, “I’m fine.”

“It was the wrong approach,” he said. “I think we’ve shifted the culture to, ‘It’s OK to not be OK.’”

He now tells fellow firefighters that he talks to a therapist about the traumas he witnessed up close as a first responder. He spoke to recruit classes and firefighters at stations about the importance of not keeping their memories and emotions bottled up. By being open about his own experiences, he wants to help others.

“I can be very intentional because on my very first day on the street after I finished the fire academy, we went to a call of a woman who was having a heart attack,” said Inks, who remembered that she died as he gave her CPR.

Back at the station, where firefighters in St. Paul prepare meals during their 24-hour shifts, “someone was like, ‘pass the ketchup,’” Inks said. As a young man, Inks thought, “What is going on here? Somebody just died.”

“You can’t hold this in because I’ll tell you what’s going to happen: You’re going to drink excessively, you’re going to get divorced — if you get married at all — you’re going to have relationship problems,” Inks said. “The job will disrupt your life if you don’t recognize that what you’re seeing and experiencing was not normal. You have to have a way to process that.”

Inks will be the next executive director of the Minnesota Fire Service Certification Board, and he plans to bring his message of physical and mental wellness for new firefighters into that role.

Started working for city at age 15

Butch Inks was sworn in as St. Paul fire chief Nov. 13, 2019, during a St. Paul City Council meeting. His wife, Erica, held the Bible for the ceremony. (Jean Pieri / Pioneer Press)

Being fire chief was challenging: “It’s managing people, feelings, expectations; it’s holding employees accountable,” said Inks, adding that his wife, Erica, was the only other person who understood how much time went into each of his decisions.

“You have to be able to talk through every decision you make, and we all benefit from another point of view,” Erica Inks said. “We’ve joked about this before — I am probably the person in his life who can tell him most honestly if I don’t agree with him.”

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Inks said he didn’t expect that being chief would also be tough on his wife and four children, two of whom are now teenagers and two in their 30s. He slept with his cellphone next to him, at the ready to respond if there was a major fire or large-scale incident in St. Paul.

Still, Inks said it was an honor “to be a public servant for so long, and in the city I grew up in, in the city I love.”

Inks was raised on Stinson Street across from the Front Recreation Center in the North End.

He played hockey at the outdoor ice rink across the street from his house and was a right wing on the Como Park High School hockey team, along with playing football and baseball.

His first job was at the Front Rec Center when he was 15. By 16, he had a key to the building and became a recreation aide. He never stopped working for the city of St. Paul.

‘Aggressive but cautious’ firefighter rose through the ranks

When Inks joined the fire department in 1994, Dan Berger was his first captain on Rescue Squad 1 at Station 4 on Payne Avenue near East Seventh Street.

“He was very dependable right away and reliable,” said Berger, who is now retired. “He was aggressive but cautious — good traits to have in the fire business.”

Berger saw Inks’ motivation and said “he pursued endless training” both through the fire department and the Air Force Reserve, where Inks served for 26 years, most of the time as a firefighter. Berger said he expected Inks would get promoted through the ranks.

Being physical as a firefighter took its toll on Inks, as it does on many firefighters. Shoulder, back and knee problems are common. When firefighters get called to an emergency, they might go from a conversation at their station to suddenly “doing manual labor,” said Inks, who needed various medical procedures for his knees throughout his career.

Butch Inks when he became a St. Paul fire captain in 2004. (Courtesy of St. Paul Fire Department)

In 2011, there was a large apartment complex fire on Cushing Circle near Energy Park Drive and Lexington Parkway.

As a captain, Inks and other firefighters forced open apartment doors to make sure people were out and to get them to safety if they weren’t. An estimated 42 units were damaged, with no residents reporting injuries.

But he tore a muscle in his shoulder and received cortisone injections to relieve inflammation and pain over the years and his shoulder condition worsened.

He had shoulder replacement surgery in November. As he was recovering, Inks — who became fire chief in 2019, after serving as interim chief since 2018 — told Mayor Melvin Carter and then-Mayor-elect Kaohly Her that he would need to retire at the end of the year.

Inks is a licensed firefighter, which requires ongoing training, and he said he determined his shoulder could not withstand continued training without the risk of further injury.

Though Inks is no longer putting out fires, he said he believes St. Paul’s fire chief should be able to carry out all the duties of a firefighter.

“I ask them to put their life on the line and to do extraordinary things,” he said. “… As a leader, I don’t think I should be expecting them to do something I can’t do.”

Assistant Fire Chief Greg Duren was tapped to serve as interim fire chief and began on Wednesday.

Mayor Her “is committed to a fair and transparent process for determining the next fire chief,” a spokesperson said.

More staff, more calls

Before Inks told the fire department he was retiring, he pondered over how best to express “how appreciative I am of the work they have done.”

“Where this department was in 2018 to where it is now is an incredible shift,” Inks said. “We’ve asked a lot, we’ve changed a lot, and they’re the people that feel the change the most.”

Staffing is at its highest level in department history, Inks created new career and EMS pathways to get young people in the door, and he managed a 56 percent increase in calls for service over the last decade, the city council wrote in a resolution declaring Dec. 30 to be Chief Barton “Butch” Inks Day.

Inks said the biggest changes he oversaw also included:

Starting the Basic Life Support division. Before, Advanced Life Support was sent to every emergency medical call. Adding Basic Life Support resulted in speeding up emergency medical response times by almost one minute, Inks said, and created another entryway for people to become St. Paul firefighters.
Beginning CARES (Community Alternative Response Emergency Services), a two-person EMT alternative emergency response to nonviolent mental health crises and behavioral emergencies.
Overseeing the building of a new station to replace the old Station 7 in Dayton’s Bluff and reopening a shuttered station on West Seventh Street near downtown, bringing the stations in the city to 16. That’s allowed for more space for fire ladders, ambulances and engines — including the first electric engine in the state — to keep up with increasing call volume.
Securing grant funding for enhanced annual physicals for firefighters. “We used to get a general physical every year, and now he have a head-to-toe assessment,” Inks said. “They’ve identified some potential life-ending illnesses for folks who were able to catch it early and get treatment.”

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Inks moved his office from fire department headquarters to the city’s Emergency Operations Center.

“I went from running the fire department to running a city-wide pandemic response,” Inks said. At the EOC, they coordinated finding food for kids and delivering meals, and processed St. Paul Bridge Fund applications for emergency relief for families and small businesses.

He also ran fire department operations from the EOC when civil unrest and fires erupted in St. Paul after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. He stayed at the center around the clock for three days.

The damage was bad, but Inks said it could have been worse. “We made sure it wasn’t by responding to every fire, every single time,” including smaller-scale fires like dumpsters.

Another sad goodbye

On Dec. 17, Inks gave the oath of office to the department’s 21 newest firefighters at their academy graduation.

Before Inks’ last time handing out St. Paul Fire Department badges, as he spoke to the audience of new firefighters’ family and friends, he looked at his wife sitting in the front. He saw Erica Inks was teary and he grew emotional as he spoke.

“While you begin your journey, I’m preparing to conclude mine,” he told the new firefighters. “I was once in those seats right there, 31 years ago. … I challenge you, that you don’t forget, that it is a job … but it’s bigger than that. It’s bigger than that to the people we serve. … You save people’s lives.”

Three days later, one of the new graduates, Timothy Bertz, had a sudden and major medical event at home. Bertz died at the hospital on Dec. 22. He was 52, and had been a firefighter in Harris in Chisago County and Lino Lakes.

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On Inks’ second-to-last day of work, he found himself again feeling sick over the sound of bagpipes at a funeral because Bertz was another firefighter who lost his life too soon, Inks said.

The funerals he took part in as chief for several other firefighters were also medical emergencies. Two were firefighters who battled cancer and two were situations of suicide.

After wearing the department’s formal dress uniform at Bertz’s service Monday, Inks also donned it for his last day of work at the department on Tuesday. It was something he did throughout his tenure, at events that didn’t require him to dress up.

“In my mind, if I don’t, the only time I wear that uniform is when someone dies,” Inks said. “It has to mean more than only wearing it to that. I’m representing the people of our department, our city.”

St. Paul fire chiefs through the years

The list, based on the department’s 2010 yearbook, does not include interim or acting chiefs.

Butch Inks, 2019-2025
Tim Butler, 2007-2017
Douglas Holton, 2003-2007
Tim Fuller, 1991-2003
Steve Conroy, 1966-1991
Levi Shortridge, 1964-1966
Frank Oberg, 1958-1964
John Barry, 1957-1958
William Mattocks, 1949-1957
Ed Novak, 1948-1949
William Sudeith, 1934-1948
Owen Dunn, 1924-1934
Randall Niles, 1920-1924
Henry Devlin, 1914-1920
Randall Niles, 1913-1914
Jeremiah Strapp, 1905-1913
John Jackson, 1901-1905
Hart Cook, 1898-1901
John Jackson, 1889-1898
John Black, 1883-1889
R.O. Strong, 1876-1883
J.R. Prendergast, 1870
J.H. Hullsick, 1869
Frank Brewer, 1867-1868
Bartley Presley, 1866
Charles Williams, 1864-1865
Luther Eddy, 1863
B. Rodick, 1863
John Pickett, 1863
J.E. Missen, 1862
W.T. Donaldson, 1861
J.B. Irvine, a few months
Charles Williams, 1859-1860

American sports leagues treated global expansion as an aspiration for decades, but it was something to pursue only when convenient — and often without much strategic forethought.

The calculus changed in 2025, as evidenced by the organizations that signaled that going global is now a permanent feature of doing business as an American sports league, and the National Football League has provided the clearest example of how far a U.S. league is willing to go.

Over the last 12 months, it expanded its overseas schedule from five to seven games — and even scheduled the Minnesota Vikings to play in Dublin and London on consecutive weekends. It was the league’s first-ever back-to-back overseas road trip, boosted by a global marketing program that involves all of the NFL’s teams. In some ways, it’s a prototype for what could be coming as the ambitious organization pushes for a 16-game international schedule.

Meanwhile, the National Basketball Association revealed it was seriously exploring the formation of a European competitive association. Those plans happened against the backdrop of its own expanding international schedule, which includes games in Mexico, Abu Dhabi and across Europe.

In soccer, the National Women’s Soccer League announced a clutch of new global streaming and broadcast agreements, and Major League Soccer shifted its calendar to align with global associations. Even golf pivoted. The Masters, the sport’s most prestigious American tournament, changed its rules to invite more foreign champions to the event. And we can’t forget about the National Hockey League, which opened a permanent European office.

These initiatives represent a shift away from business focused on American audiences to globalized entertainment available to everyone (There are exceptions, of course. Major League Baseball has long had a thriving fan base and business across Latin America.). Even a decade ago, this evolution seemed unlikely. The domestic opportunities with media rights deals — the largest source of income for major professional sports associations — and legalized sports betting were then compelling enough to keep leagues focused at home. Plus, the returns from global expansion have been limited and tenuous. For example, the NFL’s lauded annual series of games in London lost money as recently as 2016, despite consistent sellouts. The NBA, among the most aggressive organizations when it comes to expanding overseas, still loses money on its international games. And the NHL recently acknowledged that it would probably make more money playing overseas games at home.

What, then, has motivated the sports industry to seemingly ignore past and present challenges and keep investing abroad? Leagues are more financially resilient than they’ve been in years, thanks to the post-pandemic recovery — spurred by fans returning to stadiums and live entertainment — and a surge in private equity and other investments. And those gains coexist with growing uncertainty about the viewership habits in the domestic market. While American fans still love sports, younger ones are drifting away from watching full games to consume highlights on social media, so there are reasons to doubt that an old business model based on media rights growth will remain as lucrative.

Overseas fans offer another option to convert a wave of new investment into long-term returns, and two key factors ensure that the globalization boom has momentum going into 2026 and beyond.

First, American professional sports have become increasingly savvy at scouting, developing, and — above all — showcasing international talent. Foreign-born players are marketing hooks for overseas fans.

Second, the emergence of streaming has enabled leagues to deliver their content directly to consumers. For example, the NFL doesn’t have to rely upon individual broadcasters with different schedules and priorities to show its games in overseas markets.

Instead, since 2023, the organization has distributed games globally through DAZN, a single platform accessible to almost anyone with internet. Matchups can be watched both live and on demand and supplemented with additional content like NFL RedZone and NFL Network. Most importantly, fans can just pay for the NFL — they don’t need to buy into an expensive local cable or streaming package to get their football.

The arrangement seems to be working. Though viewership numbers aren’t available, in February, DAZN announced that paid subscribers to the NFL service grew 23% year-over-year. And it’s not just DAZN offering this kind of friction-free global streaming platform. Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Apple+ are acquiring and offering sports to countries beyond U.S. borders, too.

Of course, global expansion isn’t without possible downsides. As leagues shift their attention abroad, they could alienate fans at home who are accustomed to games being scheduled around their calendars. Not every American fan or season ticket holder is happy to see afternoon home games moved to London and broadcast early on Sunday morning.

More serious are the potential political and reputational consequences of doing business in authoritarian countries. In 2019, the NBA learned this the hard way when a tweet from then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey regarding Hong Kong led Chinese businesses to freeze out the association for years. The incident likely cost the NBA hundreds of millions of dollars.

But for now, the leagues are committing to an opportunity years in the making. Whatever the risks, 2025 is the year that American sports fully embraced business beyond its borders.

Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports. He is the author, most recently, of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale.”

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It was hard to know what to believe this past year. In the old days, there were conspiracies about the moon landing. These days, it feels like there’s a conspiracy about everything — that the truth is up for grabs, alongside crusty government datasets.

Some people chose to verify what they heard with multiple sources, including legacy media. Others followed a podcaster or Substack writer who they thought had the corner on truth. And some just asked ChatGPT.

One of the rallying cries of our conspiratorial age is “do your own research.” But that’s not easy at the best of times. Some data require expertise and context to interpret. And this year, some reliable government datasets disappeared altogether. Others are incomplete thanks to 2025’s Democrat-led government shutdown, the nation’s longest.

Yes, long-delayed numbers from that shutdown are now emerging — like high GDP growth and lower-than-expected inflation. But this new information is only adding to the confusion. The data is incomplete and partially being drawn from other sources, making comparisons difficult. It shows how damaging even temporary losses in government data can be.

It’s true that not all government statistics are perfect. Take the Census Bureau’s poverty math, as my friend and former AEI colleague Andrew Biggs has warned. Figures from 2023-2024 report that the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) for seniors increased from 9.7% to 9.9%. This is not so far off from the poverty rate of working-age adults, until you remember that seniors are getting monthly Social Security checks and free healthcare.

But Biggs points out that the Census OPM inexplicably doesn’t include ‘irregular income,’ such as withdrawals from 401(k)s. Accounting for this, the real poverty rate of seniors drops to 5.9%. The Census knows this and reports a new, supplementary way of calculating the poverty rate called “the NEWS,” but headlines of rising elderly poverty steal the show.

Or take maternal mortality rates. It’s long been said that the U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the developed world. But as I wrote in National Affairs, the U.S. also changed its measure of how to calculate maternal mortality. In 2003, the CDC began including a pregnancy check-box on death certificates even if the cause of death was not necessarily pregnancy-related.

This is widely recognized to have inflated the numbers. (In 2013, the pregnancy checkbox was used 187 times in deaths of people over age 85, according to economist Emily Oster.) Tighter definitions of maternal mortality rates strictly related to childbirth show U.S. rates to be elevated, but roughly on par with peer countries such as Canada and the UK, though maternal mortality rates for Black American mothers remain significantly higher.

What to make of these differences in government calculations? Some people might allege conspiracy — that someone inside the agency is massaging numbers. The books are cooked!

But the boring truth is that some things are harder to measure than they’d seem. And there are trade-offs in what and how we count. (For example, the “pregnancy box” was added because we were likely undercounting pregnancy-related deaths before.) Even in cases where we’ve come up with a more accurate way to measure something, there can be benefits to keeping consistent standards — they help us see trends over time.

This year, the Trump Administration often stoked the former approach. President Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after a lackluster jobs report in August. “We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. He similarly accused Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell of slowballing rate cuts to make him look bad and misreading inflation data: “There is no Inflation, and every sign is pointing to a major Rate Cut.”

Other data simply disappeared on his watch, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration no longer tracking billion-dollar weather disasters (which seem to be increasing) and delayed data rollouts from the Department of Education (which slows sliding student scores).

This mentality essentially means it’s all up for grabs. If you don’t like the data, you can fire the accountant, ignore the spreadsheet, delete the database. And you better believe that the next accountant will keep your happiness in mind when crunching the numbers.

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But then how will we know what’s true? And if we lose our ability to tell, then what?

As Thomas Sowell wrote in Knowledge and Decisions: “The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.” This surely includes our embrace of and advancements in science: the relentless search for objective truth outside ourselves.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t improvements to be made in data collection. It is the responsibility of data collectors not to lock blindly into the old ways of doing things, but to constantly seek to make the data more holistic and transparent. Where there are alternative measures that can be used — for the poverty rate, or maternal mortality, or jobs numbers — they should publish them alongside the traditional metrics. The Congressional Budget Office, for example, releases multiple projection scenarios with each of its reports based on different assumptions that are spelled out.

And for us, it’s our responsibility to wrestle with numbers that challenge our assumptions, whether we’re journalists, policymakers or news consumers. But we must resist the belief that the entire federal data infrastructure is corrupt. While I don’t doubt that there are bad actors now and again in government, or that incentives within bureaucracies can become bloated and misguided, we should be slow to throw out data systems and older ways of tracking things, not quick.

Turning our back on data would remove any outside accountability, leave policymakers driving a car without map or road, and lead the country to a place where the titillation of conspiracy and cherry-picked numbers become the only barometer of what’s real.

This year, we came closer to that point than any time I can remember.

Abby McCloskey is a columnist, podcast host, and consultant. She directed domestic policy on two presidential campaigns and was director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute.