Feb
4
2025

I'm Feeling a Tad Anarchistic Today

Jeff Maurer reflects on the (apparently) latest news; we're postponing our trade war with Mexico and Canada, in exchange for … most people are saying nothing. So: That Tariff Shit Sure Was Pointless.

He makes an eminently serious proposal:

Also: None of this is legal. The law that Trump claims empowers him to levy tariffs without Congress is a 1977 law that lets the president impose financial sanctions in response to a national emergency. Trump is interpreting that to mean that he can do whatever he wants as long as he mumbles “something something fentanyl” while he does it. It’s likely that the courts would rule against him, but it’s more likely that everything will play out before the courts can weigh in, and in fact, that’s what just happened. Justice is just blind, and she’s also slower than a Sting orgasm, which is a problem.

At this point, nobody should fool themselves into thinking that Trump is playing eight-dimensional chess on tariffs. Or, if he is playing eight-dimensional chess, he really sucks at it: He’s lost most of his pieces, he’s bleeding from the ears, and he has a bishop stuck up his nose. The clear reality is that he’s a very dumb man who thinks that running a trade deficit means you’re losing, and he’s sowing chaos that’s having small negative effects now and might have large negative effects later. He’s a toddler running around waving a gun, and — hot take ahead! — I think we should take the gun out of his hand.

Congress can do that by making the president get congressional approval to implement tariffs. This would affirm the power that Congress already has according to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, but since Trump is interpreting the 1977 law as a blank check, we need a new law that says “nice try, but no”. That bill exists, and Congress should pass it, partly to keep Trump from doing something crazy, and partly as a retro throwback to a time when Congress passed laws and mattered. The tariffs against Canada and Mexico were completely pointless, and that’s good news: That was the best possible outcome of this ridiculous mess. Next time, we might not be so lucky.

I would guess that the bill will go nowhere, for the usual reasons. It's a partisan Democrat proposal; somehow they just now realized that delegating the President such powers was probably a bad idea.

You might see Rand Paul voting for it, but otherwise…

Also of note:

  • The nothingburger was revealed. Eric Boehm gets a little highfalutin' by calling it a "theory", but otherwise he's on target: Trump's theory of tariffs makes no sense.

    For weeks, President Donald Trump has been telling Americans that his plan to impose high tariffs on the country's top trading partners would usher in an era of prosperity not seen in well over 100 years.

    "The tariffs are going to make us very rich and very strong," Trump said Friday. "They don't cause inflation. They cause success." The president has been using variations on this same argument for months (for years, actually). They are "going to make us rich," he said in December. "In the 1890s, our country was probably the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs," he said last year on the campaign trail.

    This is bullshit, by the way. The high tariffs that America imposed during the late 19th century did not make America rich and did not make American manufacturing strong. It's also absurd to claim that the country was at its wealthiest in an era when most people did not have access to indoor plumbing, electricity, or modern medical care—and when the average person was, objectively, much poorer.

    But, Eric notes, if tariffs are so great in themselves, how does Trump justify their "postponement"? Trump fans: trying to explain this will only make your head hurt. Do not attempt.

  • Strange indeed. Kevin D. Williamson remarks on the Strange Bedfellows united by, I guess, their general wackiness.

    Ask a Trump guy where the Republicans went wrong, and he’ll tell you that the party was too long dominated by war-mongering neocons in foreign policy and by greed-mongering libertarians in everything else: too many foreign adventures, too enthusiastic about capitalism. One funny thing, beyond the fact that that analysis is utter baloney: The second Trump administration is now living out the political fantasy of one of the crankiest of all the 20th-century libertarian ideologues—Murray Rothbard.

    Rothbard was a brilliant weirdo who could have been a character in a Woody Allen movie—a neurotic Jewish intellectual in New York, his life was largely confined to the first four floors of Manhattan by his paralyzing terror of bridges, tunnels, and escalators. But he was like many dissidents on the right over the years in that he hated the Republican Party with the special hatred the true believers reserve for heretics (as opposed to the simple infidels on the left) and generally despised the Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan-era conservative movement as weak-kneed and compromising. Your normal cranky midcentury libertarian wanted to see the reinstatement of the gold standard; Rothbard demanded the reinstatement of the Articles of Confederation and bitterly denounced “Generalissimo” Washington for presiding over the conspiracy of usurpers who called themselves a constitutional convention in Philadelphia all those years ago. He was bananas, but also a serious economic and political thinker as well as a top-shelf writer.

    One of Rothbard’s big ideas—and let me emphasize here again that I am writing about a New Yorker who was the son of Jewish immigrants—was to reach out to the right-wing populist movement coalescing around Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in the 1980s and convince its adherents to link up with the remnants of the anti-Vietnam War movement to build a grand redneck-hippie alliance, uniting the political extremes against the center in a popular front that was anti-war, anti-welfare, and anti-state. It didn’t work.

    At the time.

    But Anno Domini 2025 is a different story. In the Senate, Tom Cotton and John Cornyn are going to bat for Tulsi Gabbard, a former vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee with approximately Noam Chomsky’s views on the American intelligence community, which she has been nominated to oversee as director of national intelligence, presumably taking a sabbatical from her tireless efforts on behalf of Bashar al-Assad. Elsewhere in the Senate, Ted Cruz is pumped up about the prospects of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a left-wing trial lawyer, environmental activist, and “radical left lunatic” (in the words of … Donald Trump) who has advocated imprisoning people for expressing skeptical views of climate change. Kash Patel, who is to lead the FBI, sounds like a talking head in a Eugene Jarecki propaganda film. J.D. Vance increasingly talks like an antihero from 1970s conspiracy-thriller cinema, while Tucker Carlson is running out of red string with which to connect the dots on the murder wall in his basement. Poor Michael Brendan Dougherty over at National Review cannot decide if he is now a Code Pink lady or whether he is a beady-eyed defender of coalitional realpolitik.

    I was a Rothbard fan in the 1970s. He lost me in the 1980s.

  • Another attempt to alter reality. Jacob Sullum notes: Florida drug deaths surged under Trump A.G. Pam Bondi's watch.

    When President Donald Trump announced his nomination of Pam Bondi as attorney general, he extolled her "incredible job" in "work[ing] to stop the trafficking of deadly drugs and reduc[ing] the tragedy of Fentanyl Overdose Deaths." Yet those deaths exploded on Bondi's watch as Florida's attorney general.

    According to data from the Florida Department of Health, the age-adjusted rate of "deaths from drug poisoning" did fall a bit after Bondi took office, from 13.7 per 100,000 residents in 2011 to 12.1 in 2013. But then it resumed its upward trajectory, reaching 25.1—nearly double the 2011 rate—by the time Bondi left office in 2019. The death rate rose sharply in 2020 (as it did across the country), rose again in 2021, and declined in 2022 and 2023, when it was 30.8 per 100,000.

    In 2019, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Florida ranked 20th on the list of states with the highest drug death rates, down from 15th in 2011. But despite that relative improvement, Florida's rate as reported by the CDC rose by 66 percent during that period. In absolute terms, the annual number of drug deaths rose by more than 80 percent.

    Granite Staters: that link in the last paragraph has us in a solid 21st place in Drug Overdose Death Rate for 2022. One spot "ahead" of Florida, in a competition that you don't really want to win. Slightly above the national average.

  • Lefties gotta leftie. Jeff Jacoby describes What MAGA really hated about Bishop Budde's homily.

    In her homily, the Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, spoke mostly about the need for unity in our polarized society and for resisting the temptation to "mock, discount, or demonize those with whom we differ." Just before concluding, she addressed Trump directly. Acknowledging that millions of Americans have put their trust in the president, she implored him "to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now." She spoke in particular of undocumented migrants facing deportation. Most "immigrants are not criminals," she added. "They pay taxes and are good neighbors."

    Budde's tone was respectful, even deferential, but the implied criticism, however brief and gently worded, was more than Trump could abide. He took to social media late that night to slam Budde as a "Radical Left hard line Trump hater" who was "nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart." For good measure he insulted the entire two-and-a-half-hour service, calling it "very boring and uninspiring" and said both Budde and the church "owe the public an apology."

    As they always do, Trump's loyalists rushed to amplify his abuse.

    Todd Starnes, a host on Newsmax, called Budde a "blasphemous bishop" and the National Cathedral a "sanctuary of Satan" that should be stripped of its tax-exempt status. Representative Mike Collins, a Georgia Republican, recommended that Budde (who was born and raised in New Jersey) be "added to the deportation list." Another Republican, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, accused her of spewing hate. In the New York Post, columnist Miranda Devine fumed that "an egomaniacal female Episcopal bishop sabotaged the Inaugural Prayer Service with a left-wing rant from the pulpit." Robert Jeffress, the right-wing pastor of a Dallas megachurch, accused Budde of having "insulted rather than encouraged our great president" and provoked "palpable disgust."

    Classy stuff. And, as Jeff points out: totally hypocritical.

  • My political homelessness will apparently continue. We're heavy on the Trump criticism today. But Jonathan Turley notes that the Democrats are not interested in appealing to the Trump-appalled: After Polls Find the Party Out-of-Touch With Voters, the DNC Doubles Down.

    The DNC then elected a chair in Ken Martin, the longtime leader of Minnesota’s far left Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, who demanded for Trump to be tried for treason after the Russian bounty controversy (which was contested by the Trump Administration).

    They then added David Hogg, 24, as Vice Chair, a far left advocate who previously called on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be abolished and for the defunding of police. Hogg’s selection is particularly curious after an election where immigration proved a major issue favoring the GOP. Hogg has also called the NRA a “terrorist organization.” His reason for the NRA designation? January 6th: “The NRA needs to be designated a terrorist organization for the role their supporters played in staging an insurrectionist coup.”

    The Democratic Party has become a ship of fools. I previously worked Democratic campaigns from Ted Kennedy to Mo Udall to many Illinois candidates. The party was truly a party of the middle class with centrist values, including support for free speech. It cannot seem to break from identity politics as its primary focus and reason for being. Worse yet, it is “reimagining” the 2024 election in a way to keep reality within a comfort zone.

    Unlike Jonathan, I'm pretty sure I've never, ever, voted for a Democrat. Sounds as if that will not change.

Recently on the book blog: