Brent crude closed the week at $109.26, up 7.84 percent. WTI closed at $105.42, up 10.48 percent. [1] Both are the largest weekly oil gains since the Iran war began, and both arrived in a week the Trump-Xi summit was sold as the diplomatic solution to the Hormuz disruption.

The paper's Friday major on the federal gas-tax fix as a domestic admission of the Hormuz premium argued that the proposed 18.4-cent-per-gallon holiday described what the government thought the pain was, who should absorb it, and whether the cause could be named. Saturday's price tape gives the proposal a sharper denominator. [1]

Eighteen-point-four cents against pump prices the administration has put at $4.53 a gallon means the Treasury would absorb roughly four percent of the cost while drivers continue paying the other ninety-six. [2] That is not relief. It is a political instrument that lets the government name the symptom and decline to name the cause. The cause is in a shipping lane the United States insists must remain open while Iran's permission regime, toll language, and Saturday seizures keep pricing risk into the contract.

The war-powers ledger has not moved. The Senate failed a war-powers resolution 49-50. The House failed 212-212. Barrett's AUMF still sits at two Republican names. [3] The household ledger is being asked to carry the policy outcome the institutional ledger declined to authorize.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington