The MAGA crowd likes to dismiss Ronald Reagan as irrelevant today, but apparently he still matters to President Trump. How else to explain Mr. Trump’s tantrum against Canada after the province of Ontario invoked the Gipper on trade in a television ad?
The Ontario government had the temerity to buy ad time to run clips of Reagan’s 1987 remarks warning about the dangers of protectionism. Mr. Trump pitched a social-media fit in response late Thursday, claiming Ontario “fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs.”
The President said the ad was intended to interfere with the Supreme Court as it considers the legality of his claim that he can levy tariffs on anything he wants, for any amount he wants, whenever he wants. He immediately declared an end to trade talks with Canada.
Ontario then said it would pull the ad, but when it still ran during sporting events on the weekend, Mr. Trump escalated with an additional 10% tariff on Canadian goods on top of the taxes he has already imposed.
The Supreme Court isn’t likely to be influenced by anything other than the law, but Mr. Trump’s Canada eruption is a good argument for the Justices to rein in his tariff power. The President gets angry at a TV ad and imposes on a whim a 10% tax on Americans who buy goods from their northern neighbor. Mr. Trump claims he’s not “a king,” but on tariffs he is acting like one, and without a proper delegation from Congress as the Constitution requires.
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Mr. Trump has been fortunate that his tariffs haven’t triggered much retaliation, which has spared us from a global trade war. But the tariffs are doing economic damage by raising costs for consumers and businesses and by dampening animal spirits that should be soaring with his tax bill and deregulation. He can boast about tariffs all he wants, but he shouldn’t get away with taking Reagan’s trade beliefs in vain.
Katherine Mangu-Ward reports on the Trump administration’s abuse of “emergency powers.” Two slices:
But the intense acceleration of the quest to aggregate power in the White House is now unambiguously the more immediate threat to liberty. It’s visible every day on my commute to work, as National Guardsmen linger in my D.C. Metro stop. It’s visible in the September gathering of the nation’s top military officials for something between a pep rally and a company retreat. It’s visible everywhere Immigration and Customs Enforcement is staging raids and setting up warrantless checkpoints. It’s visible in the administration’s moves to take a stake in Intel and broker a TikTok sale.
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The emergency is now the default. Most of the knobs and levers a modern president uses to bully companies, police speech, or move bodies around aren’t new laws—they’re standby powers that switch on with a magic word: emergency. Congress littered the U.S. Code with these shortcuts; the Brennan Center for Justice has cataloged 137 statutory powers that spring to life the moment a president declares one. (Many never fully turn off.) As of mid-2025, there were roughly 50 simultaneous national emergencies still in force; they are renewed annually, spanning everything from sanctions to tariffs. That architecture lets the White House reach for trade controls, financial blockades, and tech blacklists without returning to Congress. If you like your powers separated, this is the opposite.
McConnell is bookish and not at all bombastic. He is one of the leading originalist scholars in the United States, especially on executive power and its limits. His 2020 book, “The President Who Would Not Be King,” was cited multiple times in Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s dissent (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.) in a related separation of powers case last term.
McConnell might not be a fan of Trump’s tariff approach, but he also is not reflexively opposed to the president politically. He strongly criticized the criminal cases against then-candidate Trump during the 2024 election season and rebuked at length the efforts to have him removed from the ballot for “insurrection.”
At 70, McConnell is the same age as the chief justice — the most likely hinge vote in the tariff case. They came up together in conservative legal circles; both held legal roles under President Ronald Reagan, and McConnell was also considered for a Supreme Court seat during the George W. Bush administration. (He served on the same appeals court as Gorsuch from 2006 to 2009.)
In short, McConnell speaks the conservative and originalist language of the court’s majority more fluently than Katyal. That matters. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in her recent book defending her originalist philosophy: “Occasionally, argument has changed my mind even when I had a relatively strong view before entering the courtroom. And even when it doesn’t change my bottom line, argument has prompted me to rethink certain aspects of a case or reframe the path of decision.”
Nathalie Janson and GMU Econ alum Nikolai Wenzel ponder “Argentina’s midterm moment.”
Also writing about the Argentine election is Ian Vásquez.
“Milei Wins Mandate for Free-Market Revolution in Argentina’s Election.” A slice:
With nearly 99% of votes counted, Milei’s Freedom Advances party won almost 41% of the national vote, more than doubling its representation in Congress. That means his party and allies secured at least one-third of the seats in both chambers—the critical threshold that allows Milei to preserve his veto power and defend his sweeping decrees.
The result, stronger than most polls had predicted, gives Milei fresh political momentum after months of unrest over deep spending cuts and a grinding recession last year. It also shores up his standing with Washington and the International Monetary Fund, which have tied future financial support to the survival of his austerity experiment. Market analysts expect Argentine bonds and the peso to rally when trading opens Monday, reflecting relief that Milei still has political traction after taking office two years ago.
