Issue: Economy

What would it mean if President Trump’s tariffs went pouf?  

It’s perilous to read much into oral arguments before the Supreme Court, but it’s generally conceded that President Trump’s tariffs had a “tough day” yesterday:

President Trump’s global tariffs ran headlong into a skeptical Supreme Court on Wednesday, with justices across the spectrum expressing doubt that a 1970s emergency-powers law could be read to provide the president unilateral authority to remake the international economy and collect billions of dollars in import taxes without explicit congressional approval.

But even if the court strikes down the tariffs Trump initiated on his self-declared Liberation Day last April, the justices gave little indication how they might unwind the president’s signature economic policy and favorite diplomatic tool. That left unclear whether previously paid duties would be refunded or whether Congress could be invited to step in, perhaps by ratifying the levies retroactively.

“The president needs five votes to win. The math looks challenging,” is the lead-in to the Wall Street Journal’s helpful Justice-by-Justice breakdown based on yesterday’s arguments. Harvard Law Professor and American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Jack Goldsmith gave an enlightening interview on tariffs and the Supreme Court to the New York Times. A tidbit from the interview:

I think that it is fair to say that the justices the government needs to win the case — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — asked the government very hard questions that did express skepticism about important elements of its case. But they also asked the other side very hard questions. I do not think any of these three tipped off their hands definitively. I did not find anything terribly surprising in the questions.

“Trump May Lose Supreme Court Case but Tariffs Will Endure,” is the headline on a Michael Lind piece at Unherd. Lind writes that if the administration loses, it will impose tariffs based on other laws. Justice Amy Coney Barrett received attention for a question she posed:

“Would it be a complete mess?” she asked Katyal, referring to whether businesses might seek refunds for the roughly $90 billion in tariffs already collected, as reported by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Maybe messes is the theme of the day. Air travel is such a mess that the Department of Transportation has cut air travel at 40 airports because of the government shutdown. The New York Times stresses that it is Trump officials who did this; that’s because we have a Trump administration. This will cut air traffic by 10 percent. It was essential to avoid unnecessary risks to American lives. As for the shutdown, Democrats, emboldened by Tuesday’s election results, are hitting the brakes on ending the longest shutdown in history, according to Axios:

Victory is emboldening the party’s hardliners. Centrist Democrats seem stuck.

“I think it would be very strange if on the heels of the American people having rewarded Democrats for standing up and fighting, we surrendered without getting anything for the people we’ve been fighting for,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told Axios today.

At least nine Senate Democrats, including Murphy, are privately urging their colleagues to hold out on the shutdown even longer, sources told Axios.

What a mess.

Republicans had reason to regard Tuesday’s election results as more of a trainwreck than a mere mess. Karl Rove’s politics column today in the Wall Street Journal argues that “voters are frustrated with Trump, but they aren’t about to embrace Mamdani.” Rove writes:

[T]he GOP has to learn that screaming “communist” and “socialist” at run-of-the-mill Democrats doesn’t move even die-hard MAGA voters. Explaining why a Democrat’s policies will raise costs or hurt jobs and offering a constructive, forward-looking agenda is a much better approach. Americans want to know Republicans are making life more affordable, communities safer and the economy stronger….

To turn this around, the White House will need to focus on the economy and the cost of living, speak candidly about challenges, lower expectations, temper the rhetoric, underpromise, overdeliver and stop going too far, like with Immigration and Customs Enforcement roundups at Home Depot.

Fox’s Bret Baier asked President Trump last night in an exclusive interview about a voter who’d voted for him three times but was worried about her cost of living. Charmingly, the President thanked her but then went on to brag about how he had brought down prices. In other words, he ignored her plea that he, “Please do something.”  (I loathe quoting this source, but it is the only one I can find,)

President Trump said the blue wave occurred because he wasn’t on the ballot. “Trump Really Was on the Ballot” counters an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. The “magnitude of the route” was a “bad omen” for the GOP holding Congress next year, the editors argue. But there’s something else brutal. A colleague of mine took note of the women’s vote from an NBC exit poll. The Gender Gap is back with a vengeance.  

Unsurprise of the Week. Mr. Congeniality—aka Zohran Mamdani—doffed the smile long enough to deliver “a graceless, sore” victory speech after wining his race to become Mayor of New York. New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin responds:

Rather than any expression of appreciation, his relentless criticism of his political predecessors and successful New Yorkers sounded like a battle cry coming from the interior of the Trojan Horse.

Without doubt, he was declaring war against President Trump and, by extension, anyone else who has the nerve to oppose our newly crowned ruler.

Especially striking was the fact that Mamdani offered only the back of his hand to the more than 1 million New Yorkers who voted for his opponents.

His dark heart came through loud and clear in his depiction of New York City as something of a modern slave state where a ruling class of landlords, bankers and even neighborhood merchants sucks the life out of everyone else.

New York business leaders will be further dismayed (frightened?) by Mamdani’s naming former FTC Chair Lina Khan as co-chair of his transition team, signaling a progressive agenda. Parents of school-aged kids wasted no time in reaching out for advice about moving.  The people who will have Mamdani’s ear include Women’s March co-founder, Linda Sarsour, who once said, “One cannot be a feminist and a Zionist at the same time,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and Patrick Gaspard, former head of a Soros organization.

How did Mamdani rise to such eminence? Spiked Online’s Brendan O’Neill dismisses the fond notion that working class people brought Mamdani to power in a post headlined “Zohran Mamdani’s Ivy League intifada:”

The most galling thing about the Mamdani phenomenon is its claim to be a working-class uprising. Mamdani himself says he’ll fight for the working classes, though surely he’ll have to meet some of them first. The global left is gushing over his win as if it were New York’s equivalent of the Paris Commune. What we have here is the staggeringly dishonest co-option of class politics by an over-credentialled emergent elite who will in truth be pursuing their own Bushwick bullshit, not the improvement of the lot of New York’s workers. They cosplay as class warriors because that’s sexier than the reality – that they’re privileged members of an activist class that will cancel you if you say lesbians don’t have penises but love you if you say ‘Destroy Israel’.

This morning’s final mess is The Mess at the Heritage Foundation. This concerns Heritage head Kevin Roberts’ initial response to a question about Tucker Carlson and Roberts’ attempt to clarify. Eliana Johnson of the Free Beacon has a leaked video of the tempestuous staff meeting at the think tank in response to the situation: “EXCLUSIVE: ‘I Made a Mistake’: Heritage Foundation President Apologizes to Staff for Video Refusal to Cancel Tucker Carlson and Throws Shade at Former Chief of Staff.” Meanwhile, Johnson Pere penned an extensive and fascinating treatise on the Heritage Mess at Powerline.