The Vindication They Don’t Deserve

On what the tariff ruling means, and what it doesn’t

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This morning, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs are illegal. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion. The holding is clean: IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. Congress never said so. No president ever read it that way before. The extraordinary power Trump claimed — to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope on any country, any product, at any time — finds no authorization in the statute, and the statute cannot bear the weight he placed on it.

The government owes $175 billion back.

I want to say something about what this means. And then I want to say something about the people who are, at this moment, writing the newsletter about what this means. Because those are two different things, and the distance between them is the subject of this essay.

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The constitutional architecture held.

I wrote, in The Plot Against America, One Year Later, that I believed the MAGA regime would not survive to the 2026 midterms in any form recognizable as a governing coalition. I argued that the coalition was not a coalition — that it was a collection of factions with fundamentally incompatible interests, held together by a single figure and by mutual complicity, and that governing exposes contradictions that spectacle conceals. I argued that the economics were fatal. I argued that even the faith was being counterfeited, and that counterfeits have a way of being recognized.

The Roberts Court today offered one data point in that argument. I will take it as such — one data point, not the conclusion.

What I will not do is mistake the mechanism for the movement. The constitutional constraint system did what it was designed to do. Article III exercised its limited role, as Roberts said plainly: we claim no special competence in matters of economics or foreign affairs, but we claim only, as we must, the limited role assigned to us by the Constitution. The courts held a line. That is not nothing. In a period of institutional erosion, it is, in fact, significant.

But the courts holding a line on executive overreach does not mean that the conditions which produced the executive overreach have changed. The $175 billion in refunds will go to importers. Not to Youngstown. Not to the counties that voted for the man who, whatever his other qualities, at least looked at the wreckage of the post-war trade consensus and said: I see you.

The wound is still there. The ruling dressed it. It did not close it.

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I would like to introduce you to the people who are going to get this wrong.

They are already writing. By the time you read this, the piece will have appeared at Reason, or on the Cato Podcast, or in one of the several newsletters produced by people who describe themselves as classical liberals, or libertarians, or heterodox conservatives, or simply as people who believe in free markets and the rule of law and the demonstrated wisdom of comparative advantage.

They are not wrong about the ruling. The tariffs were unconstitutional. IEEPA was being stretched beyond recognition. Executive overreach is real and the non-delegation doctrine matters. On these narrow procedural questions, they are correct, and have been correct, and they deserve credit for saying so at a time when much of the conservative movement had decided that constitutional limits were for suckers.

But watch what they do next. Because what they do next will tell you everything about why they have been, and will continue to be, wrong about the larger question.

They will write that the system worked. They will note, with some satisfaction, that the institutions held — that the courts, in the end, did their job. They will suggest that this vindicates a certain kind of politics: the politics of procedural fidelity, of constitutional constraint, of the kind of restrained governance that can be discussed seriously at a Cato forum without anyone raising their voice. And from this, they will draw an electoral conclusion.

They will begin to talk about 2028.

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We do not have to imagine what this sounds like. We have the original vinyl.

On February 9th, Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor in chief of Reason, published an op-ed in the New York Times. The headline was: “Libertarians: We Told You So.”

It is worth reading carefully, because it is a remarkable document — not for what it gets wrong, but for what it gets right, and for the vast territory it leaves unexamined in between.

Mangu-Ward is correct that the growth of executive power was bipartisan. She is correct that ICE developed its constitutional habits over decades, long before Trump arrived to exploit them. She is correct that the tariffs were a legally dubious abuse of emergency powers, and that IEEPA was being stretched far beyond its intended scope. She is correct, in other words, about the mechanism — the constitutional and administrative architecture by which a president could claim the extraordinary powers Trump claimed.

What she does not ask is why.

Why did Congress abdicate? Why did Americans repeatedly vote for administrations, of both parties, that grew the executive power she now decries? Why did the libertarian coalition — the one she is calling back together, the one that had the right analysis all along — keep shrinking, getting primaried out, going quiet in the halls of the capital, as she herself describes?

Her answer, implicit throughout, is failure of nerve. If only people had listened. If only the major parties hadn’t pulled away from their libertarian elements. If only conservatives hadn’t embraced the politics of emergency. If only.

But there is another answer. The people did listen. They evaluated the libertarian prescription — devolve power, cut spending, trust the market, the gains from free trade will materialize, the creative destruction will eventually create something — against their actual experience of what that prescription produced. And they found it wanting. Not because they failed to understand it. Because they understood it perfectly, and watched what it built, and voted accordingly.

Mangu-Ward ends her piece with an invitation: if more Americans are now ready to limit power before it is abused again, they are welcome to join us.

The record player is ready. The vinyl is clean.

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The argument will go something like this.

The American electorate, they will say, is fundamentally center-right. It believes in economic freedom, low taxes, deregulation, and national sovereignty — the durable commitments of the Reagan coalition. What it does not believe in, what it never believed in, is the chaos. The norm violations. The embarrassment. The daily assault on the dignity of institutions it has been taught, correctly, to respect.

What the electorate wanted, they will say — and here is where the Milton Friedman lecture gets cued up on the original vinyl — was the policy without the pathology. It wanted the deregulation without the coup attempt. The tax cuts without the Capitol. The border enforcement without the deportation flights.

And the vehicle for delivering this corrected version, this MAGA with the rough edges sanded down and the syntax restored, will be Marco Rubio. Or someone like him. Someone who can speak to the grievance without embodying the grotesque. Someone Georgetown can live with. Someone the donor class can fund without having to take out extra liability insurance on their reputations.

They will be fantastically wrong.

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Here is what they are missing, and have been missing, and will continue to miss until the evidence accumulates to a weight that even their analytical framework cannot ignore.

The voters who produced the Trump coalition were not expressing a preference for center-right economic policy. They were expressing a verdict on center-right economic policy. They were saying, with a clarity that forty years of free market advocacy somehow never managed to produce in the other direction: this system has not worked for us, and we are willing to vote for someone who at least acknowledges the wreckage, even if his tools are useless.

The tariffs were not a policy. They were a message. A communication, sent in the only language available to people who have spent three decades being told that the gains from free trade would trickle down, that the retraining programs would materialize, that the creative destruction would eventually create something in the places it destroyed. The message was: we have been waiting, and nothing came, and we do not believe you anymore.

Striking down the tariffs on constitutional grounds does not address the message. It addresses the medium. The wound that produced the message — the deindustrialization, the wage stagnation, the sense that the economy is organized for the benefit of people who summer in different places than you work — that wound is not addressed by a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling, however correct on the merits.

The Cato Institute‘s answer to Youngstown is the same as it was in 1989. Labor market flexibility. Retraining programs. The long-run benefits of comparative advantage. The demonstrated wisdom of open trade. They have been giving this answer for thirty-five years. They have found, and will find, little purchase — not because the argument is wholly wrong on its own terms, but because the people they are trying to reach have stopped believing that the people making the argument have any intention of sharing the gains.

This is the thing about intellectual capture: it is invisible from the inside. The Reason writer genuinely believes he is applying economic principles objectively. The Cato scholar genuinely believes he is above tribal loyalty. They have convinced themselves that because they criticized Trump, they cannot be part of the problem. They watched Georgetown and called it heterodoxy. They measured respectability and called it rigor.

But there is a tribe here too. It is the tribe of people for whom the post-war liberal economic consensus delivered — the tribe of people whose career prospects improved with globalization, whose neighborhoods were not hollowed out by it, whose children did not die of despair in the interim. They are applying the lessons of their experience to people whose experience was entirely different. And they are doing it with the serenity of people who have never been wrong in a way that cost them anything.

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Marco Rubio is what you get when you run this logic to its conclusion.

He is the MAGA economic grievance, laundered. The nationalist resentment, conjugated correctly. The sense that the system is rigged, delivered without the syntax errors. He can say America First in a way that sounds like a foreign policy doctrine rather than a threat. He can invoke the dignity of the working class without suggesting, even inadvertently, that he has ever spent time in the working class or intends to do so.

The donor class will fund him. The Cato scholars will find him acceptable. The Reason writers will note, carefully, that while his immigration positions leave something to be desired, his commitment to economic liberty is broadly sound. They will write that he represents a return to normalcy, to serious governance, to the kind of politics that can be discussed without the whole thing descending into a content house run by men who mistake disruption for statecraft.

The electorate will look at him and see the same answer in a better suit.

Because the question was never whether the answer could be delivered more fluently. The question was whether the answer addressed the problem. And it doesn’t. It didn’t in 1989 and it doesn’t now. The constitutional architecture that the Reason crowd is celebrating today — correctly, on its own terms — is the same architecture that permitted the trade deals, the financialization, the regulatory capture by the very industries the libertarians were supposed to be liberating markets from. The free market they are defending was never especially free for the people whose labor it ran on.

This is the knife. Not that they were wrong about the tariffs. They were right about the tariffs. The knife is that being right about the tariffs and wrong about everything that produced the tariffs is not a vindication. It is a narrower version of the same error. They are taking a bow for catching the trapeze artist who fell, while declining to notice that the tent is on fire, and that they sold the matches.

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I wrote in January that this class was watching Georgetown while America was watching something else. I gave them credit for the sincerity of the error — they were not lying, exactly, they were simply measuring the wrong things, with instruments calibrated for a world that had already moved on.

I am less charitable now.

Because the information is available. The lesson is not obscure. You do not need a sociology degree to understand that a political movement which draws its energy from economic abandonment will not be neutralized by a Supreme Court ruling that gives the importers their money back. You do not need to have read a great deal of history to understand that the conditions which produce authoritarians persist after the authoritarians are removed, if the conditions are not addressed.

They know this. Some of them, the more honest ones, will even say it in the next paragraph after the victory lap. And then they will write about Milton Friedman.

The record player is ready. The vinyl is clean. The sound will be excellent.

They will find little purchase.

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Go Deeper into the Circus