Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on March 12.

One More Thing—Congressional Republicans remain none too thrilled about the proposed tariffs, as many of them told my colleague Haley Byrd Tuesday. And a TWS editorial this morning highlights a particularly worrisome facet of the plan: a case-by-case “exemption procedure” for when “we need to have exemptions so that business can move forward,” which has the potential to become a lobbyist bonanza. From the editorial:

The administration has not elaborated on what such an “exemption procedure” might look like. But the general idea seems to be this: Under the new tariff, manufacturing companies that use steel would be able to apply for exemptions to the tariff if they can demonstrate that doing so is crucial to their business.

Navarro’s comments implicitly acknowledge that tariffs hurt some businesses and could stall job creation. Otherwise why would manufacturers need to apply for relief from them? In fact, we’ve already seen this kind of market retardation happen in just the last several days: On Saturday, Swedish appliance maker Electrolux announced it was freezing its plans for a $250 million plant expansion in Tennessee. The company said the new tariffs will give foreign manufacturers “a cost advantage that is hard to compete against.” And the tariffs haven’t even gone into effect yet.

Leave aside the negative economic effects, though, and consider the political consequence of allowing companies to apply for exemptions to a tariff. Expect a frenzy of lobbying for special favors by corporations eager to prove their critical need for duty-free metals. This sort of rent-seeking has long been commonplace at the state and local level—think of the innumerable tax carve-outs and subsidies granted to specific companies by your local council and state legislature. Granted, the feds have been guilty of this sort of thing, too (remember Solyndra?), but Washington isn’t the capital most corporations look to for special tax favors. Until now.

Must-Read of the Day—Alice B. Lloyd heads up the new magazine this week with a great feature on the historical significance of the #MeToo movement. She writes:

Our most insightful tourist may have seen it coming. Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated American women’s worldliness as a youthful humor that evolves into a matronly reserve. In Democracy in America, he described the daughters of our young republic and predicted “that the social changes which bring nearer to the same level the father and son, the master and servant, and superiors and inferiors generally speaking, will raise woman and make her more and more the equal of man.” Between cloistered superiority—for America owes its “singular prosperity and growing strength . . . to the superiority of their women”—and free lives lived fully in the world, American women will choose as Americans must.

The cruel irony of the American female condition seems to be that despite all they learn of the world as it is, women can never transmit these lessons to their daughters. Everyone has to learn them for herself. It was Leonore Tiefer who showed me this generational barrier when she told me about her mother: a music teacher and opera lover who might have been a composer or a famous critic. But, being a woman, she taught music and history at the local high school all her life—never even promoted to department head.

Here We Go Again—Looks like we’re in for another round of coverage of President Trump’s alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, who is now suing the president in an attempt to void a nondisclosure agreement she signed about their relationship. CNN reports:

The porn star, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, claims in the lawsuit to have had an affair with Trump several years prior to his presidency. However, the lawsuit claims that when he was running for office and multiple women were coming forward to share stories of their own alleged encounters with the then-Republican presidential candidate, Cohen intervened in an attempt to keep Clifford from coming forward as well.

"Despite Mr. Trump's failure to sign the Hush Agreement, Mr. Cohen proceeded to cause $130,000.00 to be wired to the trust account of Ms. Clifford's attorney. He did so even though there was no legal agreement and thus no written nondisclosure agreement whereby Ms. Clifford was restricted from disclosing the truth about Mr. Trump," the document states.