Your editorial “The Triumph of the Roberts Court” (Oct. 4) celebrates the “constitutional revitalization” the justices have wrought. But absent from your list are the decisions over the past eight months on Trump-related emergency applications. In the words of Justice Elena Kagan, those rulings have cleared the way for President Trump to “transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.”
Across two dozen unsigned and usually unexplained grants of requests for emergency relief, the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice John Roberts almost always in the majority, has approved Mr. Trump’s refusal to spend billions of dollars Congress has appropriated—an executive impoundment power constitutional conservatives, including then-White House lawyer John Roberts, have long rejected.
The court has allowed the president to terminate government contracts for spurious and often retaliatory reasons. It has greenlit the decimation of agencies and cabinet departments that Congress created and structured. And it has done so while, at the same time, calling into question the power and propriety of individual federal district judges blocking federal policies—a power constitutional conservatives regularly invoked, to great success, during the Biden administration.
You laud the Roberts Court for reducing “the prospects of lawfare” against political opponents and limiting “the arbitrary power of the administrative state.” But one need only read your fine editorial pages to see how much the court’s recent misadventures have had the opposite effect.
The Roberts Court may have achieved a “constitutional revitalization,” but it’s more troubling than the one you describe. Its rulings reflect a vision of the Constitution in which the executive is dominant, the legislature all-but irrelevant, and the Supreme Court there to protect the executive from pesky lower courts that insist it must follow the law. As you note elsewhere, that isn’t what originalist judges should do—or what the Founders wanted.
American consumers, too, are paying the price. KPMG finds that nearly half of American companies have already raised prices because of tariffs; two-thirds have passed at least part of those costs on to shoppers; and nearly 40% have paused hiring, with a third cutting jobs.
CEOs overwhelmingly expect tariffs to weigh on business for years. Goldman Sachs estimates U.S. consumers are now footing 55% of the total tariff bill, while foreign exporters bear only a sliver of the costs.
Sometimes, though, the cost we pay isn’t higher prices — it’s no product at all. One of Europe’s largest farm-equipment manufacturers, Krone, has halted U.S. sales after a new wave of “steel derivative” tariffs required exporters to document the origin, weight and value of every screw, nut and bolt in their machinery. This bureaucratic tangle is so extreme that many European manufacturers are simply giving up. For American farmers waiting on harvesting equipment, that means delays, shortages and higher costs down the line.
The chaos doesn’t stop there. UPS has been drowning in a customs backlog since the administration scrapped the longstanding rule that allows imports costing less than $800 to enter the U.S. duty-free. Thousands of packages, from Japanese tea to engagement rings, are stuck or even “disposed of” because of missing tariff paperwork. It’s a vivid reminder that protectionism jams everyday commerce.
No product is too small. Italian pasta makers warn that Trump’s new duties, some nearing 92%, could double the price of a $4 box of rigatoni. Italian newspapers have dubbed it “Trump’s war against pasta.” Rome and Brussels accuse Washington of strong-arming companies like Barilla and Garofalo into producing in the U.S. Either way, the result is Americans paying more for our dinners.
Get ready for your kids’ lunches to get more expensive too. Peanut butter could be swept into expanding steel and aluminum tariffs, with petitions asking the Commerce Department to treat food products packaged in metal as “derivatives” (subject to a 50% percent national-security tariff) under consideration.
Arnold Kling reminds us of the important dynamic efficiencies generated by free trade. A slice:
The usual case for free trade is not the best case for free trade. The usual case is based on static efficiency, meaning making better use of a fixed set of resources. Economists use the term comparative advantage to describe how, if humans choose to specialize and trade with one another, each can end up better off than if they produce everything for themselves.
But trade has an even more important role to play in what economists have come to call dynamic efficiency, which is the ability of an economy to exploit innovation and increase living standards over time.
“The Defense Department routinely acquires items and materials from foreign sources indispensable to meet defense needs that are not readily available or produced in sufficient quantities within the United States,” wrote John Tanaglia, director of pricing, contracting, and acquisitions for the Pentagon, in a memo dated August 25.
The memo instructs other officials at the Pentagon to provide “duty-free entry certificates” to military purchases that would otherwise be subject to tariffs. Doing so, the memo explains, will “maximize the Department’s budget to meet warfighter needs.”
First and foremost, that’s yet more proof that tariffs are raising costs for American purchasers of foreign goods. And it is true, of course, that Trump’s tariffs are straining budgets everywhere. Being able to ignore those costs must be nice—many, many businesses across the United States surely wish they had the power to simply wave away those costs as easily as the Pentagon apparently can.
Wow! “Even Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Trump’s immigration and trade policies go too far.”
Jimmy Alfonso Licon writes interestingly about politics.
A defense of big-tent liberalism that attracts the beleaguered band of liberals on both the right and left, therefore, would be most welcome. That is what Cass Sunstein, the distinguished professor of law at Harvard University, promises in his introduction to On Liberalism: A Defense of Freedom. He does one crucial thing right: although he is himself a left-liberal, he emphatically counts right-liberals, like Hayek, Friedman, and Mises, as fellow liberals.
Unfortunately, the book ultimately fails as a case for encompassing liberalism for three reasons. First, despite his respect for some right-liberals, it is sometimes an unnecessarily parochial defense of left-liberalism, even suggesting wrongly that originalism—the favored form of constitutional interpretation of most right-liberals—is inconsistent with liberalism. Second, he folds an extensive list of social “goods,” including democracy and even laughter, into liberalism without sufficiently detailing the precise nature of their connection to liberty—liberalism’s lodestar. Finally, the book, while consistently engaging and well-written, is disjointed. Chapters range over a variety of subjects, including Hayek’s views on John Stuart Mill’s marriage and the folk singer Connie Converse’s failure to become famous in her lifetime. It is more a collection of disparate essays than a focused defense of liberalism. Sunstein is a brilliant public intellectual, but the rate of his production (over thirty books and counting) may harm the coherence and power of some of them.
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Indeed, democracy and liberty exist in some tension. Liberty is about empowering individuals to make their own decisions. Democracy is about empowering the community or its representatives to make decisions on its behalf. To be sure, there may be an empirical connection between the concepts. Frequent elections in a democracy may diffuse power and thus make it harder for any one group to dominate individuals: for liberalism, democracy could be, as Winston Churchill once said, “the worst form of government except for all the others.” But the connection remains empirical and contingent. Whether democracy actually advances liberty depends again on institutional design, including appropriate limitations on government.
