What Took Them So Long?
A few random thoughts (not all of them mine) regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Donald Trump’s global reign of economic terror by means of his “signature policy initiative,” namely his tariffs-by-mood-ring-and-mean-girl-whim fanaticism.
First, from former Republican congressman Justin Amash on X:
I’m not sure there’s ever been a president more distant from the ideals of the Founders of the United States and the Framers of the Constitution—and more detached from the core American culture of liberty, individualism, and self-determination—than President Trump.
That supremely moderate statement is what must count as a diplomatic and tactful assessment in the Trump era. To paraphrase Amash’s excellent summary of the facts: There may perhaps have been one man among the other forty-four American presidents who was more anti-American in his opinions, instincts, and presidential actions than Donald Trump, but I cannot name any such man with any confidence. Pithy understatement of the day, that.
It has been almost fourteen years since I wrote a popular article at American Thinker attacking Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ fateful decision on Obamacare’s individual mandate, in which I argued that his choice to side with the progressive justices in that case amounted to an abandonment of a core principle of what used to be called constitutional conservatism. It seems to me that fourteen years is a long time for a supreme court justice to wait to restore his honor in the eyes of the American Founders. However, with his choice to lead the majority in overturning Trump’s bogus and tyrannical application of an “emergency powers” law to circumvent the Constitution’s definitive separation of powers in a very obvious non-emergency situation — non-emergency in both the underlying conditions at issue and in the long-term and ever-malleable nature of the action itself — Roberts has at least taken a significant step towards redeeming himself as any sort of constitutionalist judge.
Of course Trump’s apologists in the Supreme Court and elsewhere will call this decision an outrage, an attack on proper presidential authority, and of course evidence of their ever-handy but non-existent diagnosis, Trump Derangement Syndrome. Unlike those apologists, however, who have proven to possess the most conveniently selective memories in the history of spiritual senility, I remember very well when fake conservatives like Mark Levin used to warn publicly about the dangerous potential for despotic abuse lurking in the old emergency powers laws of the 1970s — while Barack Obama was president — but who have now taken a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn in favor of defending precisely the kind of abuses they were imagining and hyperventilating about in Obama’s case, when the (real, not imagined) abuser of those laws happens to be a man who invites them to parties at his luxury mansion in Florida and grants them the privilege of shining his fool’s gold belt buckles. What would these people — I speak not only of the famous and profiteering ones, but the millions more who get nothing at all from the deal but the thrill of belonging to a rich cretin’s fan club — not sell themselves and their country out for at this point? Truly, try to persuade me that there is something they would not sell out in Trump’s name. Anything at all. I’m not picky. They can keep the defense of a notorious sex trafficker’s best friend, the random threats to invade NATO allies, the open and continual apologias for a serial critic-poisoning KGB dictator, the flagrant and repeatedly proven lies about a supposedly stolen election (proven by investigators who were working on Trump’s behalf!), the infinitely exploding national debt, the masked nationalized secret police force assaults on, and unaccountable murders of, non-violent American citizens, and all the rest of the well-known cases. Just give me one small thing, the pettiest little thing, that they would not defend and support merely to remain pure and ungainsayable in their absolute sycophancy to Trump. I’ll wait as long as you like.
