I'm sure you will have no problem finding dozens of entrail-reading analyses of yesterday's SCOTUS decision, but I'll just stick with the National Review editorial staff's: The Supreme Court Keeps the Taxing Power with Congress.
Donald Trump is the duly elected president, and whatever one thinks of the wisdom of his views of trade and tariff policy, he is entitled to exercise the full powers of the presidency. What he is not entitled to do is exercise the full powers of Congress — and certainly not core congressional powers that no statute clearly handed over to him. If he wants more power than he has, he should ask Congress to give it to him.
That, and only that, is the rebuke a 6–3 Supreme Court delivered to the president Friday morning. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s dissent observed, Congress has already given presidents a great many tools to impose tariffs, and the Court neither suggested that those tools were unconstitutional nor limited what Trump could do with them. Like Joe Biden after the Court struck down his student-loan amnesty, Trump has sent his lawyers to comb through the statute books to get him, piecemeal, many of the objectives he has been seeking — this time, by complying with the law.
But he can’t keep imposing tariffs under the “emergency” powers granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA). The Court, like the majority of the judges on the Federal Circuit, concluded that IEEPA’s vague, general references to a power to “regulate” trade through “licenses” does not create an emergency presidential tariff power — let alone one that extends to every product imported from every country on earth, with no maximum limit on the size of the tariffs and no endpoint to how long the “emergency” can last. An emergency that is permanent and worldwide is a power so unlimited, it is hard with a straight face to believe any Congress would grant it — least of all the 1977 post-Watergate Congress that wrote IEEPA with an eye toward limiting the powers claimed by the Nixon White House.
Okay, I lied, here's one more note, a sad trombone, from John R. Puri: Alas, There Will Be More Tariffs to Come (NR gifted link):
To truly rein in Trump’s taxing by executive fiat, the Court should have looked beyond the statutory question of whether Congress meant to delegate tariff power in the 1977 IEEPA law — which it most certainly did not, so kudos for making the right call there. It should have hit on the deeper constitutional question at issue and revived the long-dormant nondelegation doctrine, ruling that Congress cannot surrender its enumerated taxing power to the president even when it wants to.
Sadly, Justice Neil Gorsuch is alone among the justices in wanting to resurrect nondelegation, which undergirds enormous swaths of U.S. administrative law. The rest seem content to uphold the long-standing delegation standard that has effectively hollowed out the doctrine. It is that Congress can delegate legislative power to the executive branch so long as it attaches an “intelligent principle” in the statute to guide the exercise of that power. This principle has allowed Congress to pass several laws over the last 95 years or so that expressly authorize the president to impose tariffs on endlessly elastic grounds, which presidents like Trump are keen to exploit.
To truly rein in Trump’s taxing by executive fiat, the Court should have looked beyond the statutory question of whether Congress meant to delegate tariff power in the 1977 IEEPA law — which it most certainly did not, so kudos for making the right call there. It should have hit on the deeper constitutional question at issue and revived the long-dormant nondelegation doctrine, ruling that Congress cannot surrender its enumerated taxing power to the president even when it wants to.
Never thought I would be a fan of court-packing but it would be nice if we had eight Gorsuch clones on SCOTUS.
Also of note:
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Another reminder that the FCC should be abolished. Ars Technica describes the latest brainfart from FCC boss Brendan Carr: FCC asks stations for "pro-America" programming, like daily Pledge of Allegiance.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr today urged broadcasters to join a “Pledge America Campaign” that Carr established to support President Trump’s “Salute to America 250” project.
Carr said in a press release that “I am inviting broadcasters to pledge to air programming in their local markets in support of this historic national, non-partisan celebration.” The press release said Carr is asking broadcasters to “air patriotic, pro-America programming in support of America’s 250th birthday.”
Carr gave what he called examples of content that broadcasters can run if they take the pledge. His examples include “starting each broadcast day with the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ or Pledge of Allegiance”; airing “PSAs, short segments, or full specials specifically promoting civic education, inspiring local stories, and American history”; running “segments during regular news programming that highlight local sites that are significant to American and regional history, such as National Park Service sites”; airing “music by America’s greatest composers, such as John Philip Sousa, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin”; and providing daily “Today in American History” announcements highlighting significant events from US history.
Not only does this shit on the First Amendment, it does so by advocating the broadcast of the creepy, socialist-written Pledge of Allegiance. Brendan Carr should be fired. Out of a cannon.
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Jesse Jackson was a mixed bag. Kevin D. Williamson offers A Footnote on Jesse Jackson.
The Rev. Jackson might have been a valuable voice confronting the rising tide of antisemitism. But he was busy with other things. In 1982 he was busy organizing a boycott of Anheuser-Busch, complaining that there were not enough racial minorities in the beer business; by 1998, a group led by two of Jackson’s sons took ownership of a lucrative Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Chicago. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, the terms of the sale were not disclosed, but Anheuser-Busch stock went down 75 cents. Another Jackson son, Jesse Jackson Jr., went from Congress to federal prison after diverting some $750,000 in campaign funds for personal consumption, including the purchase of a $43,350 (in 2007 dollars!) gold Rolex. (What is it with cheap politicians and expensive watches?) Jackson, a pastor without a church, grew wealthy enough for people to notice. The comedian Chris Rock opened an interview with Jackson asking archly: “What do you do?”
“I am a public servant, not a perfect servant,” was Jackson’s favorite reply when pressed about his shortcomings. No one demanded perfection of the Rev. Jesse Jackson–he could have been forgiven an ordinary politician’s opportunism, vanity, petty venality, or other imperfections. What the times demanded of him was to forgo undermining the important—and historic—work to which he dedicated the early part of his career, staining it with his philandering, grifting, and bigotry. Perhaps it would have been better if he had gone to law school or started selling real estate after his critical work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Instead, Jesse Jackson was a twice-haunted man: haunted by the ghost of his canonized mentor and by the ghost of the man he himself might have been.
But lest we forget:
So, a mixed bag indeed.
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Republicans should pray that Democrats don't take Noah Smith's advice. He's making a lot of sense here, advocating Democratic economic policy in the age of AI.
A friend called me up the other day and asked me what I thought Democrats could offer Americans in terms of economic policy in this day and age. We discussed the limitations of the progressive economic program that coalesced in the late 2010s and was implemented during the Biden years. We then talked about possibilities for how AI might affect the economy, and what Democrats could offer in various scenarios. I promised my friend I would write a post outlining my thoughts, so here you go.
My basic argument is that the next Democratic policy offering should be robust to uncertainty. AI technology is changing very fast, and it will probably end up changing other technologies very quickly as well — robotics, energy, software, and so on. That rapid technological progress creates great uncertainty. Looking even just 10 years into the future, we basically don’t know:
What kind of jobs humans will be doing (and which will pay well)
What the macroeconomy — inflation, growth, and employment — is going to look like
How the distributions of income and wealth will change
Those are essentially all of the biggest questions in economics, and we don’t really know any of them. So what do you do when you can’t predict the future? You come up with ideas that will be likely to work no matter what the future ends up looking like. In other words, you try to be robust. AI is like a storm that’s buffeting the whole economy; Democrats need to be the rock in that storm.
The interesting point for me here is that Noah's advice could be taken by either party. It's up for grabs!
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Credit where due. Nellie Bowles' TGIF columns are pretty good. Yesterday's was Bad for Business Class. Cherry-picking an excerpt:
→ Inflation cooling: Ah, inflation is cooling. In fact, it’s at its lowest level in nine months. We’ve escaped the crisis. We won’t need suitcases of cash to pay for groceries. And I knew this would happen. So it turns out, I am smarter than 16 Nobel economists. Yes, me.
I cannot believe CNN Business and these 16 Nobel economists would lead me astray. (This CNN headline was highlighted by Daniel Baldwin.) You only go to CNN for business news if you want to know what the left wants to happen. It’s useful for that, since communists are actually sometimes powerful in America (see: Chicago). But if you actually want business news, you will need to look elsewhere. And economists, what, you think they’re so special? It’s the fakest social science. Economics is for boys who couldn’t do real math classes. Sorry.
For extra credit: Cato's Ryan Bourne and Jai Kedia looked closely and discovered Nobel Laureates' Letter Is Partisanship not Economics
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Waymo? I'd be clenching muscles I didn't know I had. But Dave Barry's more daring than I am, and I assume he can deduct the fee as a business expense, because he wrote about it: My Waymo Adventure.
You can call me a daring and courageous and visionary “high-tech” pioneering trailblazer with nerves of steel if you want, but recently I took a solo trip on the roads of Miami in a Waymo self-driving car.
I will reveal later whether or not I survived, but first let me give you a technical explanation of how these amazing futuristic machines work.
Each Waymo vehicle is equipped with 29 cameras as well as an array of laser, radar and audio sensors, which collect literally millions of data points per second and feed them to a sophisticated AI-controlled onboard computer, which is in constant, instantaneous contact via satellite with a 14-year-old boy somewhere in Asia — he goes by “Kevin” — who steers your car remotely with a joystick.
No, that’s probably not how it works. I have no idea how it works. I do not fully understand how toasters work. But however Waymo does it, it has to be a better system for operating vehicles than the one we currently employ in Miami, which involves using Miami drivers.
It is, of course, hilarious.
![[The Blogger]](/ps/images/barred.jpg)
