SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: President Trump’s Reverse-Merryman. “Trump is telling the courts, loudly and truthfully, this is what I intend to do to secure the country in what I and half the country believe to be an emergency of an existential kind. If the courts constrain my hands, the President will not share political responsibility for the consequences with the courts. Trump is saying that if you (the courts) constrain the presidency, and afterwards, should harmful consequences follow, then you (the courts) will have to own all the consequences. In doing this, Trump has not broken any rules relating to the conduct of litigation. He is not threatening to burn the Court down or stop the Justices’ salaries. But he is doing his very best to make them decide, and if that inconveniences them or makes them squirm, he does not care. This is what Taney did to Lincoln, and this is what Trump is doing to the Court.”

THE MIDWAY CAMPAIGN: It’s the 75th anniversary (June 4-7, 1942).

RELATED: Remembering Midway. A column I wrote on the 70th anniversary.

MICHAEL LEDEEN DUSTS OFF HIS OUIJA BOARD, interviews the late CIA head of counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton once again, this time on all the spy stories in orbit around the Trump administration.

CORN, POPPED: Trump May Live Tweet ‘If He Feels the Need’ During Comey’s Testimony.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Median Pay For New Associates Has Not Budged In Two Years.

GOOD: Trump Budget Plan Cuts Staffing for Campus Sex Police.

When Donald Trump won the presidential election on an in-your-face anti-PC platform, we speculated about dramatic steps his administration might take to curb the Office for Civil Rights in Education—the federal agency that under President Obama came to be closely associated with campus social justice causes. Possible steps included moving the OCR from the Department of Education to the more institutionally conservative Department of Justice, or even eliminating the OCR altogether.

The administration has so far not attempted this kind of radical shakeup. However, its new budget does put some pressure on the OCR, holding funding constant while cutting back on staffing. Inside Higher Education has a one-sided piece airing criticisms of the proposal from campus sexual assault activists.

The truth, however, is that the OCR is in need of pruning. It has had a major hand in many of the most corrosive trends in higher education since 2011, including due process violations, restrictive speech codes, and bloated administrative staffs—related phenomena that the Harvard Law professors Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk approximate with the term “bureaucratic sex creep.” The OCR has has stretched the limits of its authority to make campus bureaucracies more coercive and punitive, leaning on them to erect biased “courts” and discipline more students. It’s unclear whether this approach has reduced the rate of campus sexual misconduct, and if so, whether this was worth the harm to civil liberties and academic freedom.

A productive agenda for addressing the campus sex wars would involve legislation clearly delineating the OCR’s authority and requiring (to the extent possible) that police, rather than amateur campus bureaucrats, take the lead in addressing the crime of sexual assault. It would also involve nominating a competent and experienced director to lead the agency responsibly so that it fulfills its mandate to investigate instances of misconduct without infringing on protected free speech or due process rights.

The best thing to do with OCR is to have it issue regulations requiring that sexual assault complaints go to law enforcement, then abolish it.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Why Not Try ‘Medicare for All’? Glad You Asked: Because costs will spiral out of control. Because hospital care will suffer. Because the stakes are too high for a mass experiment.

For one thing, as Obamacare has shown, “people will be paying for it, not the government, so what’s the problem?” is not quite as simple as it sounded when you were saying it in front of a room of cheering supporters. For whom is it likely to be a good deal? Sick people. Medicare can adjust the buy-in premium to take account of this, but then next year, folks are going to be looking at the new higher premiums, and who is likely to opt in at that high price? The sickest folks in the insurance pool. Better adjust those premiums again …

Yes, it’s our old friend, adverse selection, which pops up whenever you build an insurance market without underwriting. Medicare is a government program, so it can’t death spiral out of existence. However, there will be considerable political pressure to set the premiums well below the expected actuarial expenditure on care for beneficiaries. So instead of a death spiral, you get a fiscal crisis in Medicare.

Yet here’s a measure of how badly thought out this idea of expanded Medicare is: Adverse selection isn’t even its biggest problem. A far bigger problem is what this might do to hospital budgets. Why? Because Medicare doesn’t necessarily pay enough to keep those hospitals running.

Deep in the weeds of health wonkdom, a long battle has been going on over whether — and to what extent — Medicare controls its costs by offloading them onto private insurers, a phenomenon called cost shifting.

An alternative: The Bill To Permanently Fix Health Care For All. I especially like this: “All customers must be billed for actual charges at the same price on a direct basis at the time the service or product is rendered to them.”

Related: The Healthcare Confusopoly.

WHAT’S FASTER THAN AN SR-71? Skunk Works Hints At SR-72 Demonstrator Progress.

Four years after revealing plans to develop a Mach 6 strike and reconnaissance aircraft, Lockheed Martin says hypersonic technologies are now sufficiently mature to enable progress towards a flight demonstrator.

The company’s secretive Skunk Works unit has been working since at least the early 2000s on the basic building blocks for an operational hypersonic vehicle and in 2013 revealed to Aviation Week it was developing a scaled demonstrator for the SR-72, a proposed successor to the U.S. Air Force’s long-retired Mach 3 SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. However, details on any subsequent progress have been scarce since this initial plan was unveiled.

I’d expect them to stay scarce, even after the SR-72 takes to the skies.

JILL FILIPOVIC: The GOP wants to distract you with Reality Winner.

Maybe in this one case the period should go after “Reality.”

SPEECH: Learn How To Love Talking In Public (And Stop Saying “Um” and “Like”) With This New App.

AT AMAZON, fresh New Releases, updated hourly.

Plus, today’s new Kindle Daily Deals.

And shop the Digital Deals of the Day.

CAREFUL AND FORCEFUL IN SINGAPORE: The east Asian littoral is a 21st century powder keg.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Exclusive Test Data: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills: Results of a standardized measure of reasoning ability show many students fail to improve over four years—even at some flagship schools, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of nonpublic results.

Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a little-known test every year to measure how much better they get at learning to think. The results are discouraging.

At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table, The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of public colleges and universities that gave the exam between 2013 and 2016. (See full results.)

At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years. . . .

Some academic experts, education researchers and employers say the Journal’s findings are a sign of the failure of America’s higher-education system to arm graduates with analytical reasoning and problem-solving skills needed to thrive in a fast-changing, increasingly global job market. In addition, rising tuition, student debt and loan defaults are putting colleges and universities under pressure to prove their value.

A survey by PayScale Inc., an online pay and benefits researcher, showed 50% of employers complain that college graduates they hire aren’t ready for the workplace. Their No. 1 complaint? Poor critical-reasoning skills.

“At most schools in this country, students basically spend four years in college, and they don’t necessarily become better thinkers and problem solvers,” said Josipa Roksa, a University of Virginia sociology professor who co-wrote a book in 2011 about the CLA+ test. “Employers are going to hire the best they can get, and if we don’t have that, then what is at stake in the long run is our ability to compete.”

International rankings show U.S. college graduates are in the middle of the pack when it comes to numeracy and literacy and near the bottom when it comes to problem solving.

Even a pretty cheap state school can run into six figures by the time you graduate; these private schools are typically much, much more expensive. But if there’s no value for the money, what happens?

SECRET DOTS IN PRINTOUTS: The case of the tell-tale microdots.

On 3 June, FBI agents arrived at the house of government contractor Reality Leigh Winner in Augusta, Georgia. They had spent the last two days investigating a top secret classified document that had allegedly been leaked to the press. In order to track down Winner, agents claim they had carefully studied copies of the document provided by online news site The Intercept and noticed creases suggesting that the pages had been printed and “hand-carried out of a secured space”.

In an affidavit, the FBI alleges that Winner admitted printing the National Security Agency (NSA) report and sending it to The Intercept. Shortly after a story about the leak was published, charges against Winner were made public.

At that point, experts began taking a closer look at the document, now publicly available on the web. They discovered something else of interest: yellow dots in a roughly rectangular pattern repeated throughout the page.

Read the whole thing.

PENSION REFORM: Michigan GOPs Propose Blocking New Teachers From Pensions; Union Leaders Outraged.

MAYBE SOMEONE SHOULD ASK HIM ABOUT THIS TOMORROW TODAY: Ex-intel contractor sues Comey, alleging FBI covered up mass civil liberties violations. “A former U.S. intelligence contractor tells Circa he walked out with more than 600 million highly classified documents on 47 hard drives from the National Security Agency’s archives. It was a breach potentially larger than Edward Snowden’s, and now he is suing fired FBI Director James Comey and other current and ex-government officials, alleging the bureau has covered up evidence he claims he provided them showing widespread illegal spying on Americans. . . . Montgomery divulged to the FBI a ‘pattern and practice of conducting illegal, unconstitutional surveillance against millions of Americans, including prominent Americans such as the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen, and others such as Donald J. Trump, as well as Plaintiffs themselves,’ Montgomery and Klayman alleged in their suit.”

Flashback: Maxine Waters: ‘Obama Has Put In Place’ Secret Database With ‘Everything On Everyone.’ (Bumped).

ASHE SCHOW: Tense Days for Union Time on the Taxpayer Dime. “Although no one in government even keeps track, thousands of such federal employees do not do their stated jobs. The IRS alone was reported to have more than 200 such employees, according to documents. That is not to say they aren’t busy. Many spend long days, and even weekends, performing union-related work: filing grievances, bargaining, negotiating contracts and the like – all on the public’s dime.”

WHICH IS MORE THAN FAKE-BLACK SHAUN KING CAN SAY: Shaun King Says He’ll Boycott NFL Because It’s Anti-Black. 70% Of All Players Are Black. I’m sure the owners are trembling at the thought of a boycott by Talcum X.

ONE OF TRUMP’S GREAT ACCOMPLISHMENTS HAS BEEN REVEALING HOW CRAZED, PARTISAN, AND UNSERIOUS OUR BEST AND BRIGHTEST ARE: Trump Derangement Syndrome Spirals Out of Control with Sick Performance of Trumpian Julius Caesar.

ANALYSIS: The Media Have Been Played by Trump’s Tweets.

GOOD: House Obamacare repeal bill meets Senate rules for simple majority vote.

The American Health Care Act, which the House narrowly passed last month, meets the rules that allow the Senate to pass it with only 51 votes, according to the Senate parliamentarian.

The Senate Budget Committee said Tuesday that the legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare complies with the rules for reconciliation set by the Senate parliamentarian.

Republicans have sought to use the pathway, which lets a bill be approved in the Senate by only 51 votes instead of the 60 needed to break a filibuster.

Or they could just deploy the “Reid Option” and go nuclear.

MYANMAR PLANE GOES MISSING, with more than 100 on board.

TERROR ATTACKS IN TEHRAN: Iran’s parliament building and the Mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini were the targets. The Islamic State claimed it conducted the attacks, so it’s Sunni terrorists attacking the kingpins off Shia terrorism.