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Boston Globe.

What Explains the Sadism of Trump World?

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The Trump administration’s battle to withhold food aid, especially with so many going without a paycheck during the government shutdown, made for yet another ugly display of a theme that runs throughout his presidency: cruelty. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had”, Trump says, but he sees no further than corporate America and the booming stock market and dismisses the difficulties people have in paying their bills. “I don’t know that they are saying that. I think polls are fake”.

Some 42 million families rely on financial assistance provided by SNAP (Supplemental Food Assistance Program, formerly referred to as food stamps) to pay for food, yet during the shutdown, the Trump administration refused to draw upon $5.6 billion set aside for just such emergencies. That was deliberate cruelty.

Two federal judges ordered the administration to tap the contingency fund, but the Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP, claimed the funds were not “legally available” even though Congress had created the fund specifically for SNAP and just such emergencies as the shutdown. The $5.6 billion wasn’t enough to fully fund the $8 billion outlay needed for November was the next excuse, despite the White House showing little difficulty shuffling funds around for other purposes, such as paychecks for the military and the agencies conducting mass deportation.

To the end, the Trump administration defied the district court’s order to fund food stamps in full for November, taking their insistence on only partial funding to the appeals court. And in an action that betrays this supposedly populist regime as a fraud, the Trump scrooges even went to the extreme of demanding that states ‘undo’ any full-funding of their own, threatening them with harsh financial penalties should they disobey.

The administration fought the courts to take food off the dinner table of 42 million families and their children, using them as hostages for the political purpose of trying to force Democrats to vote for a funding bill that rolled back Obamacare subsidies for an expected 14 million families, many undoubtedly the same as those going without food. Trump tweeted:

“I do NOT want Americans to go hungry just because the Radical Democrats refuse to do the right thing and REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT”

But he did so. He would have let Americans go hungry had the Democrats not relented.

the chainsaw massacre

As a policy of deliberate cruelty, the sudden spending freeze and evisceration of USAID has no equal. An agency that employed more than 10,000, two-thirds on foreign shores, the U.S. Agency for International Development was cut to less than 300 in March, even leaving workers stranded abroad. Money ran out, contracts were summarily cancelled, supply shipments halted. Food was left to rot on docks and in ships, medicines left to expire. At the hands of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and “special employee” Elon Musk, it was brutal chaos that gave no thought whatever to its consequences.

Musk seemed to revel in cruelty. Millions around the world have benefited from U.S. aid but for him he was gleefully feeding USAID “into the wood chipper”. At a conservative gathering in February he wielded a chain-saw, emblematic of his working to reduce government by taking away the jobs and livelihoods of thousands of federal workers. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”, he said on Joe Rogan’s show. Bill Gates, with his long record of humanitarian work around the world, said about Musk in The Financial Times

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one”.

The suspension of foreign aid grants, funds allocated by Congress that the administration is not free to withhold (impound), was ruled unlawful and with “catastrophic effect on the humanitarian missions” by D.C. District Court Judge Amir H. Ali. The Supreme Court agreed, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the court’s three liberal justices to order that the funding freeze be lifted.

Rather than attempt to restore humanitarian aid, the Trump administration in July pushed $9 billion back to Congress that was intended for USAID, National Public Radio, and the Public Broadcasting System. Then, as the end of the fiscal year approached when unused funding would expire, the administration went so far as to keep another $4.9 billion unspent and even go to the Supreme Court in defiance of Judge Ali’s demand that the congressionally allocated foreign aid monies be put to use as Congress intended.

This time the Court ruled in Trump’s favor, allowing the funding to expire, maintaining in just two paragraphs that the harm to the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy by ruling in Ali’s favor would “outweigh the potential harm” to the groups being denied funding. By halting $5 billion in food aid and life-saving medicines because our president must have his way to inflict harm, the Court signed on to the Trump cruelty agenda.

the killing fields

The effects of the abrupt and total cancellation of aid to poor countries were immediate. Nicolas Kristof, who seems to have spent several lifetimes traveling back and forth to the world’s most devastatingly poor regions, writes at The New York Times. He relates that since the disappearance of USAID…

”I’ve made three trips to Africa to report on children dying as a result of President Trump slashing humanitarian aid programs — his most lethal policy.
Gone – the pride we took in seeing photos like this with America’s gift modestly stated.

In village after village I’ve found children perishing for want of $2 anti-malaria mosquito nets or 12-cent-a-day AIDS medicines.”

Kristof recounts by name the deaths of children he has witnessed for lack of these simple preventives. About one child,

“’It was aid cuts’, her mom told me — without bitterness or any sense of entitlement, simply stating a fact that is obvious on the ground here. ‘People are dying every day and night.’”

Marco Rubio says aid cuts have not killed anyone.

Public health programs have collapsed from the interrupted flow of vaccines, medicines, vitamin A and other supplements, de-worming drugs, and the low cost of local healthcare workers to administer them but who have been forced to find work elsewhere. Without mosquito nets villagers contract malaria. Without malaria drugs, the death count soars.

Diphtheria, a highly contagious bacterial killer of children defeated by a five-in-one vaccine combination, is on the rise, once again because of the end of American aid. A hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia, reports a twenty-fold increase this year over last, for example.

Huge stockpiles of a miraculous cure of malnourishment have sat all this year in warehouses in Georgia and Rhode Island. It’s a peanut paste with added micronutrients known as RUTF that in foil packets costing only 50 cents each has save millions of children’s lives by immediately halting body wasting. Yet in an unfathomable act of cruelty, there they are left – over 485,000 cases costing $10,000 a day just to store, over $600,000 so far — an utter waste apart from Rubio and his State Department allowing children to die rather than bringing them back from the brink of death.

There’s more. The Trump administration is trying to force incineration of $9.7 million in contraceptives sitting in a warehouse in Belgium. This is at cross-purpose inexplicably with the reduction of aid needed were women in African nations to give birth to fewer children. Before the USAID shutdown, the U.S. helped more than 47 million women every year prevent 8.1 million unintended pregnancies.

Most extraordinary, considering it was a program begun by fellow Republican President George W. Bush, was the Trump administration choking off the flow of HIV drugs that prevent AIDS and are credited with saving some 26 million lives in developing nations since the program began. In July, Congress voted to restore $400 million in funding for the program – the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief referred to as PEPFAR – but at the same time the State Department was evolving plans to shut it down altogether in coming years. People in the millions will be left to die. Beyond cruel to evil.

They already are dying, and in staggering numbers, from the Trump cut-off of PEPFAR, vaccines, food supplements, medicines. Estimates range from 330,000 children and 160,000 adults so far — children being more susceptible — to a recent study published in Great Britain’s authoritative medical journal The Lancet that says the cuts will cost the lives of about 690,000 children under the age of 5 in 2025, another 829,000 next year, and some 3.1 million children under age 5 during Trump’s second term as the result of his elimination of humanitarian assistance.

The ICE Men Cometh

Squads of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been given free rein to exercise their cruel practices by an administration that simply denies any claims of brutality. The citizenry knows otherwise, of course, with a

steady flow of cellphone video submitted to the media showing the ICE standard practice of snatching people off the streets, forcing them to the ground, punching them, zip-tying their wrists behind their back, then shackling them to the seats of the detention vans.. Minimally vetting and paying $50,000 signing bonuses, ICE is attracting too many who enjoy inflicting cruelty, and yet an appeals court has just reversed a lower court’s prohibition of ICE’s excessive force.

We have as president a sociopath who cares nothing for humanity and cannot speak of migrants without reminding us that they are criminals, rapists, released convicts, mental defectives, “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” with only some of them good people. He demanded deportations of a million migrants this year, which henchman Stephen Miller was only too happy to enforce. It equates to 3,000 a day and has caused ICE to sweep up people indiscriminately – day laborers looking for work in Home Depot parking lots, car washers, landscapers, restaurant cooks, anyone with brown skin or speaking Spanish, even American citizens. To fill Miller’s quota, the administration long ago had to drop its supposed intention only to arrest “the worst of the worst”. ICE now detains and deports even undocumented families who have lived in the U.S. for decades, raising kids, and living useful, productive lives.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem showboats before captives at the El Salvador prison.


Not content with simple deportation, Trump shipped to El Salvador 252 Venezuelans where they were incarcerated in that country’s most notoriously inhumane prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. Months later, all were released in a prisoner swap and sent to Venezuela where they returned to their homes. The Times located 40 of them who said they had been trampled, kicked, hit on the ribs, on the legs; forced to perform oral sex on hooded guards; their heads forced into buckets of water to simulate drowning; made to kneel for hours with their hands cuffed behind their backs in a “crane” posture and then lifted by the arms; and subjected to bright lighting never turned off 24 hours a day. Told by guards they would spend the rest of their lives there, they began cutting themselves to write protest messages in blood on their bed sheets.

This was the horrifically cruel treatment Trump thought fitting for the Venezuelans who, in the alternate reality world he creates, were decreed to be members of a notorious gang for which he had no proof, nor proof of crimes committed even if gang members. But he sent them to a torture prison anyway.

Are the prisoners telling the truth? The Times found their stories and wounds consistent and persuasive, bolstered by their dispersal across Venezuela inhibiting collaboration of stories. The newspaper even engaged a forensic group that confirmed those findings, its doctors corroborating that the wounds and accounts of nightmares, insomnia, blurred vision, recurring migraines, trouble breathing, bodily pain perhaps brought about by the “crane” position, all amounting to “compelling evidence” in support of claims of torture.

As for Trump’s rapists and criminals? Only about 13 percent of the 252 “seemed to have a serious criminal accusation or conviction in some part of the world”.

With ICE and Border Patrol pressed to arrest faster than immigrants can be deported, detention centers are packed beyond capacity. To handle the overflow ICE is using private prisons, local jails, hotels, hospitals, airports, and military bases.

These facilities are not uniformly equipped. Those released report sleeping on a concrete floor in head-by-toe formation with aluminum blankets to cover them, spending their days in cramped spaces with one toilet for 35 to 40 men (and no privacy in its use), and going a week without a shower. Some report violence, medical neglect, poor food in tiny portions. Medications for diabetes, high blood pressure and other chronic health matters are not logistically distributed across the chaos of private prisons, local jails, hotels, hospitals, airports, and military bases ICE has had to enlist to handle the overflow. Lawyers and family have difficulty finding where family members have been taken.

Here again the Supreme Court brushed aside the Constitution’s banning of “cruel and unusual punishments” to agree with Trump’s argument that cruelty is the point. The six conservative justices permitted deportation to countries such as South Sudan, so endangered by civil war and famine that the State Department has issued a “do not travel” warning, and where the expelled do not know the language and have no ability to sustain themselves.

This is cruelty of indifference, of plucking a policy out of the air (Trump’s one million deportee quota) and then paying no attention to the effect on humans. And in the case of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, not giving a damn if conditions are intolerable. Noem shamelessly goes to El Salvador to pose in front of her captives. What sort of mentality does that? Her Department of Homeland Security dismisses counterclaims saying all detainees “are provided with proper meals, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.”

As columnist David French says, “If someone is here illegally they are still entitled to be treated with dignity and humanity”. Not in Trump world, where he and his fake Christian cohort are energized by pervasive hate others.

With Time’s Passage Can We Now Speak Openly About Charlie Kirk?

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The months since Charlie Kirk’s assassinations have seen opposite effects, a surge in growth as more school groups apply to form chapters and more young people join, while critics finally feel free to expose Kirk’s bigotry and homophobia without fear of losing their jobs in the great anti-free speech pogrom that followed his death.

Andrew Kolvet, who has taken Kirk’s place as the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” a national radio program and podcast followed by some two million listeners every week, says
Turning Point has received some 140,000 inquiries from high schools and colleges about stating affiliates, and among the individuals joining the existing 2,100 chapters, some 200,000 have signed up to work in the coming elections. Kirk, who dropped out of college to start Turning Point USA and died at 31, has in those 13 years founded a formidable organization to promulgate right-wing views.

No matter one’s politics or ideology, his killing was a horrific shock — that it had come to this in America. Objections to his mission and his personal ideology were set aside for a time. Kirk had targeted college campuses to counter the pronounced leftward ideology prevalent in the academic ranks, but had set about his own indoctrination of America’s youth.

martyrs have their flaws

But opprobrium for his caustic intolerance could not be contained forever.

Kirk has made derogatory comments about Blacks. For starters, he was irked that Biden let 10% of Haiti’s population, so he says, into the U.S. Particularly racist was his saying,

“If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists…They’re coming out and they’re saying, ‘I’m only here because of affirmative action.’ We know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

It’s muddled, but let’s allow that he is attributing someone else saying that but he continued with “Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us.”

Blacks, they are dangerous: “Happening all the time in urban America,” he said, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact.”

He said, “The Civil Rights Act, though, let’s be clear, created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon”.

He was intolerant of anything to do with race or gender. He was homophobic, for example remarking on the radio show in paraphrase of the Bible, “Thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death. Just saying.” His transphobia is reportedly behind the motive of Tyler Robinson’s murdering him. Kirk was a misogynist, relegating women to the role of raising children and tending house (but not his own wife, Erika). When Taylor Swift announced her engagement, he advised, “Reject feminism. You’re not in charge.” Elizabeth Spiers, writing for The Nation bluntly summed it up:

“He was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses”…

to give it the appearance of morality. He notoriously remarked — and the irony is haunting — when asked about mass shootings that…

“I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.”

And that would include children as expendable.

Christian or not welcome?

Kirk then and Turning Point now unabashedly espouse a Christianity message. Kirk ad as ally purported close friend J.D. Vance, who even sat in as host on the radio program in the days immediately after Kirk’s death. Vance acted as Kirk’s substitute at a Turning Point rally at the end of October at the University of Mississippi. There was even an “inappropriate”
non-perfunctory hug of Erika Kirk that got viral attention.

In the debate phase that Kirk typically held with his audience, Vance adopted the same technique as Kirk of advancing a Christian nationalist view while affecting seeming forbearance of other views, as when a student asked:

” Requiring Christianity in public schools goes against the founding fathers’ wish of freedom of religion. What do you think about that?”

Vance answered:

“I make no apologies for believing that Christianity is the pathway to God. I make no apologies for thinking that Christian values are an important foundation of this country, but I’m not going to force you to believe in anything, because that’s not what God wants and that’s not what I want either.”

Spiers had no part of that pretense. She says,

“Turning Point did not work to bring people together; it worked to bring about a country where anyone who wasn’t a white Christian nationalist wasn’t welcome.”

You could see that in what Ole Miss student Mary Cate Doughty had to say:

”Before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I wasn’t in Turning Point USA. Now, like, I have joined as a member. And, I mean, I think it really puts things into perspective about how divisive things have become in our country.”

It is not apparent that joining an ideological organization is more divisive.

make me wrong

Kirk was praised for being open to debate. Shortly after his death California’s Democratic Gernor Gavin Newsom would call such discussion a healthy democratic exercise, saying:

“The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate.”

But they were not debates, they were arguments. Debates are orderly, with each speaker presenting his or her case in turn, uninterrupted. Not so with Kirk, who interrupted constantly and had perfected techniques that a near two-page analysis in the printed edition of The New York Times analyzed, showing that he would change the subject to throw his opponent off kilter, ask a question that his questioner would likely not know the answer to, generally try to confuse his adversary. He confronted one and all with the challenge “Make me wrong”, which itself bespeaks a belligerence of thinking that he was always right.

Kirk comes to his “debates” with fully formed stock arguments he has embedded like brain implants that he delivered at speed to “win”. It’s not the quality of his arguments that won so much as the intimidation that flustered his opponents. Student Calvin Wood, vice president of Ole Miss College Democrats, got it perfectly in a PBS NewsHour interview:

“Arguing over our issues, especially when it’s this big figure, Charlie Kirk, and some random 18-year-old student who’s shaking with their mic and all that, like, it never struck me as a fair landscape or environment for people to actually find common ground on issues.”

Here’s a small example, an excerpt from a “debate” at Cambridge Union in the U.K. where Kirk is engaging with a professor or “don” arguing that Ukraine is “bad”.

Don: So why is Ukraine bad?

Kirk: Well, there’s a lot wrong with Ukraine. They’re not a democracy. Zelenskyy refuses to hold an election.

Don: Well, no, he can’t hold an election.

Kirk: Oh, wait, did Churchill hold an election during the war?

Don: His constitution…

Kirk: Hold on. Lincoln held an election during the war. He can call an election. He can call a snap election. He’s a full dictator of the country.

How many times has Kirk, fully rehearsed, made this argument about Zelenskyy before, whereas the professor is caught without instant answers, unaware in advance that election would become a crux of the Ukraine argument. Otherwise he could have been ready with (1) the Churchill government did not hold an election during the war and (2) Lincoln could hold an election because in 1864 nothing flew. People could queue in outdoor lines to vote because there were no bombers or drones in the sky to kill them.

We’ll leave you with this link to that clash where at least we hear top-quality students getting the best of some of Mr. Kirk’s arrogance. You will be left wondering just what he needed to prove by such confrontations.

Trump’s Tariffs in Trouble after Supreme Court Hearing

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Addicted to hyperbole, President Trump calls it…

“One of the most important, maybe the most, but one of the most important cases in the history of our country”

It may prove to be the most important for him. The question the Supreme Court examined Wednesday is whether Trump had the right to impose tariffs around the world, a power the Constitution gives to Congress. The word that occurred to seemingly everyone in the media about what the questioning by the justices revealed was “skeptical”. If the Court rules that Trump’s usurpation of the tariff power was unconstitutional, “That’s undoing some of the key and critical achievements of this administration” was the reaction of the U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.

finally pushing back?

The Court has been notoriously deferential to Mr. Trump, giving him immunity from prosecution for illegal official acts, allowing mass layoffs of federal workers, impoundment and recision of congressionally allocated funds, the firing of heads of independent agencies, halting nationwide injunctions that blocked his agendas. Maybe they’ll get around to looking at these more closely someday.

But this time the Court is up against it and cannot duck. At issue is the very structure of the Constitution, whether the separation of powers it prescribes is to be reinforced or allowed to further deteriorate. Is it to be a furtherance of the conservatives’ new fondness for the unitary executive, in which all power is vested in the president, or a restitution of the powers of Congress, should Congress ever decide to cease giving them away by inaction?

Carried live on the left and right cable news channels, the question led to a testy session running almost three hours of riveting debate which we hope to have captured for you here.

acting on his own

To accrue power to himself, such as bypassing a governor’s legally-stipulated permission to commandeer a state’s National Guard for example, the president has declared a series of highly dubious “emergencies”. In the case of tariffs, he has relied on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 — more conveniently referred to as IEEPA (eye-ee-pah) — which authorizes the president to regulate commerce during an emergency. Post Nixon abuse, the law was passed to limit presidential power, not expand it. Trump has flipped that.

Arguing for the government, U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer, yet another Trump personal lawyer elevated to a top administrative position, first tried to make the case that tariffs are foreign policy and therefore the preserve of the president. In a gravelly RFK Jr-like voice that does not prevent him from rapidly speaking avalanches of words, Sauer then had the difficult task of trying to prove that IEEPA provides for tariffs. But Chief Justice John Roberts reminded him that “the statute doesn’t use the word tariffs”. The word appears nowhere in IEEPA. Justice Neil Gorsuch probed what the president believes he can do:

”Could the president impose a 50% tariff on gas-powered cars and auto parts to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat from abroad of climate change.”

Sauer answered,

”It’s very likely that that could be done.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed equally incredulous:

”Why would a rational Congress say, yeah, we’re going to give the president power to shut down trade? I mean, think about the effects, but you’re admitting that power’s in there.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson piled on:

”Congress enacted this legislation with the intent of preventing the president from having unlimited powers in this area, and you’re asking us to now interpret that…Congress wanted to allow the president to do pretty much whatever he wanted in this area?”

Sauer was laboring to maintain that inasmuch as IEEPA’s provision for “regulate importation” can take the form of presidents deciding to invoke quotas or embargos or licensing, surely it must include tariffs as well.

the revenue tripwire

But tariffs are different was the counter-argument because, unlike those other IEEPA empowerments, tariffs collect revenue, and do so not by taxing foreign entities but by
taxing Americans. The government’s case grew ever weaker with Sauer saying:

“There certainly is incidental and collateral effect of the tariffs that they do raise revenue, but it’s very important that they are regulatory tariffs not revenue raising tariffs. The fact that they raise revenue is only incidental.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor jumped on that:

I just don’t understand this argument…It’s a congressional power, not a presidential power, to tax, and you want to say tariffs are not taxes, but that’s exactly what they are. They’re generating money from American citizens, revenue.”

It was near comedy that almost at the same time Sauer was trying to minimize tariff revenue as incidental, Trump was bragging in a speech in Florida about the “hundreds of billions of dollars” the tariffs has so far raised (in fact, $195 billion in fiscal 2025).

for the prosecution

The tariffs’ economic pain is felt “across the country, from warehouse workers and truckers to retailers and restaurateurs”, lead plaintiff Victor Schwartz said to reporters on the steps of the Supreme Court afterward. A small wine importer, he said he was disappointed that larger companies with more resources had not spoken up, but “when I was given the chance to speak up for small American businesses, I took it.”

Presenting their case was Neal Katyal, acting solicitor general under Obama who has argued more than 50 cases before the Supreme Court. His first words were “Tariffs are taxes” which went disputed by no one. Indeed just moments later, Roberts concurred: “Yes, sure, the tariffs are a tax and that’s a core power of Congress”. Katyal continued:

“[Tariffs] take dollars from Americans’ pockets and deposit them in the U.S. Treasury. Our founders gave that taxing power to Congress alone. Yet, here, the president bypassed Congress and imposed one of the largest tax increases in our lifetimes.”

Contradicting Sauer’s claim that “regulate” in IEEPA included tariffs, Katyal said…

“Congress uses the term 1,499 times. We got about that number of hits when we looked at it, and maybe there’s some double-counting. But it’s never used even once to impose taxes or revenue-raising.”

Expressing exasperation, Katyal’s case to the justices was:

“It comes down to common sense. It’s simply implausible that in enacting IEEPA, Congress handed the President the power to overhaul the entire tariff system, and the American economy in the process, allowing him to set and reset tariffs on any and every product from any and every country at any and all times.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett was on a similar track of abuse asking Sauer:

“And so is it your contention that every country needed to be tariffed because of threats to the defense and industrial base? I mean Spain, France? I could see it with some countries, but explain to me why as many countries needed to be subjected to the reciprocal tariff policy.”

Justice Sotomayor made plain that on the face of it Trump taxing the public with tariffs on his own should not be allowed:

”I think what we’re forgetting here is a very fundamental point, which is the Constitution is structured so that if I’m going to be asked to pay for something as a citizen, that it’s through a bill that is generated through Congress and the president has the power to veto it or not. But I’m not going to be taxed unless both houses, the executive and the legislature, have made that choice, correct?”

going, going, gone

Article I of the Constitution says, “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises“ which is further emphasized by “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” The justices not only have to confront whether that power should be shared or even transferred as Trump would have it, but must deal with this conundrum, voiced by Gorsuch:

”Congress as a practical matter can’t get this power back once it’s handed over to the president. It’s a one-way ratchet toward the gradual but continual accretion of power in the executive branch and away from the people’s elected representatives.”

If the Court were to accept Trump’s argument that, as a matter of foreign policy or trade “emergency” or whatever, the president should be given the power to set tariffs, it need be recognized that presidents are not in the habit of relinquishing power and would veto any law passed by Congress someday that tries to take it back. Once gone, gone for good.

David Frum at The Atlantic says that even George III, whose taxes helped trigger the Revolution, had to go to Parliament to get them approved, and the last king to tax without Parliament’s approval “was Charles I in the 1640s and the English cut his head off for that.”

refund

As this publication covered in “Will Trump Have to Refund the Tariffs?” in August, the government might have to refund the tariffs to all who had been illegally charged. Having claimed
Nate Beeler, Columbus-Dispatch

above it was “hundreds of billions of dollars”, Trump on Thursday went full delusional:

“You know, we have to pay back trillions of dollars. We’ve taken in trillions. We haven’t taken in billions, we’ve taken in trillions of dollars.”

Justice Barrett asked Katyal, ”If you win, tell me how the reimbursement process would work. Would it be a complete mess?” Katyal acknowledged “We don’t deny that it’s difficult”. Would that mess cause a split decision by the Court? Sol Wisenberg, former deputy independent counsel and a guest on Fox’s “Will Cain Show” thinks not:

“The Supreme Court typically doesn’t ask or care about the kind of question that Justice Barrett asked. It’s, here’s our opinion, you guys pick up the mess.”

Cain asked:

”How would that work? If the tariffs are struck down, the United States has collected all this revenue, we’re gonna write checks back to other countries?”

Not even Fox hosts have been de-programmed from the claim Trump unceasingly uses to bamboozle his supporters. Just today, as this is written, he was at it again. A reporter asked “Do you agree then that Americans are paying those tariffs?” Trump answered, “I think, no, I don’t agree, I think that they might be paying something.”