The Guardrail Holds!
Thanks to the SCOTUS for showing up and doing their job
Yesterday, I had lunch with a friend of mine, a Trump supporter. He started our conversation by complaining about the Supreme Court’s decision to declare most of Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs unconstitutional—although he admitted in a grumbling aside that “They are actually right about it.”
I told him that reasonable people can have a policy debate about whether the tariffs are a good idea, but the key issue is a procedural debate over who has the constitutional authority to levy tariffs (it’s Congress, by the way). I’m often tempted to disagree with Trump about everything he does, but I make an effort to distinguish between my policy concerns and my procedural concerns.
Justice Roberts made a similar argument in his decision. Roberts wrote that “[w]e claim no special competence in matters of economics or foreign affairs. We claim only, as we must, the limited role assigned to us by Article III of the Constitution. Fulfilling that role, we hold that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.”
It is nice to see the Supreme Court of the United States fulfilling its role, providing a check and balance on the Executive Branch. It’s even nicer to see the Chief Executive acknowledge the authority of the Court. Regardless of what Trump said in his public tirade in the wake of the ruling, his angry criticism of the Court only demonstrates that he recognized he’d been overruled. He hit a guardrail at the boundary of his authority, and the guardrail held.
Our Republic is more resilient than I often give it credit for. We may just be able to keep it, after all.
Corridor Rabbit is meant to serve as a casual guide for how to start and grow an informal resistance (persistence) group. It is not authoritative; it is a live journal documenting our efforts. It is a call to action. It’s an invitation to connect and share what you are doing to resist authoritarianism. Read more about the goals of Corridor Rabbit.