February 23, 2026
Supreme Court; Potpourri
Supreme Court
Potpourri
Supreme Court
The Supreme Court issued a significant tariff decision this past week, and I have struggled to find an article about it worth citing. The tl;dr is the Supreme Court overturned the IEEPA tariffs, Trump had another toddler meltdown, and there will be a biblical flood of lawsuits over refunds. Consumers who paid inflated prices are probably screwed, although retailers might rename a sale they were planning to do all along as a “Tariff Rebate Sale!”. But that doesn’t take into account the possible longer-term effects.
I still haven’t found an article worth citing, but here’s a fascinating podcast that I found well worth listening to. Starting at around 29:20 Andrew Weissmann speculates about the possible implications of the ruling beyond tariffs, and how he hears echoes in Roberts’ majority opinion of the famous 1952 Youngstown case. As with Youngstown, the majority here sees in this case the long-term perils of granting the executive branch unwarranted power; Weissmann speculates it’s in part a reaction to the abuses we’ve seen that the Trump immunity decision encouraged. (Or is he simply wishcasting?) Also of note is Gorsuch, who in so many words expresses the desire that the legislative branch does some, well, how shall I put this, legislating.
Another worthwhile moment starts at 47:50, when Sarah Longwell relates her recent visit to the Minneapolis Whipple ICE detention facility, and describes the activities of the protestors outside of it. Weissmann’s reaction: “That is such a contrast between infinite cruelty and unyielding humanity – it’s sort of the best and worst of America in one spot.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNFLuPrq0rw
The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s sweeping tariffs in a 6–3 decision—including votes from two of his own appointees. Sarah Longwell and Andrew Weissmann explain why the Court said Congress, not the president, controls the power to tax, what the “major questions” fight was really about, and why Chief Justice Roberts appeared to take direct aim at Kavanaugh’s dissent.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/343/579/
The Executive, except for recommendation and veto, has no legislative power. The executive action we have here originates in the individual will of the President, and represents an exercise of authority without law. No one, perhaps not even the President, knows the limits of the power he may seek to exert in this instance, and the parties affected cannot learn the limit of their rights. We do not know today what powers over labor or property would be claimed to flow from Government possession if we should legalize it, what rights to compensation would be claimed or recognized, or on what contingency it would end. With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations.
Such institutions may be destined to pass away. But it is the duty of the Court to be last, not first, to give them up.
This is a portion of Justice Robert Jackson’s concurring opinion in the 1952 Youngstown case that Weissmann and others find extraordinarily powerful.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/supreme-court-tariffs-partisanship/686117/
What the Roberts Court Is Actually Trying to Accomplish
It’s not about Trump.
Potpourri
https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/how-did-we-wind-up-with-this-dunce
How Did We Wind up With This Dunce?
I have a theory.
Although Harding has the dubious distinction of being smarter than Trump—pretty much the dictionary definition of faint praise—both belong to a tradition that we Americans shouldn’t be proud of: our habit of installing dim bulbs in the White House. There’s a long history of anti-intellectualism in American life, a point that the historian Richard Hofstadter seemed to be making in his 1963 book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. It wasn’t a good sign when the eloquent abolitionist John Quincy Adams lost the 1828 presidential election to the homicidal maniac Andrew Jackson. (“Old Hickory,” who was neither stable nor a genius, challenged more than a hundred men to duels. He killed only one, but still.) …
Hofstadter didn’t live to see how TV, tag-teaming with its demented henchman the Internet, could boost candidates who were geniuses about those media and dopes about everything else. What happens when you combine ignorance with performing talent? A president who tells the country to inject bleach.
https://thedispatch.com/article/why-new-atheism-crumbled-revival/
Davis told me he reverted to the faith of his childhood because of unexplainable, mystic experiences with God. For my part, my return to religion is totally mundane. At some point in college, I realized that one could construct an entirely rational view of the universe that still had God at the center; for now, it is the only way to answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” that doesn’t resort to pseudoscientific babble like the multiverse theory. The Christian interpretation also didn’t summon up the immense anger that New Atheism seemed to use as its main fuel. Why did religion make Christopher Hitchens so heated? These supposed titans of capital-L Logic got moody, snide, and annoyed whenever they made their arguments about religion. Why do I feel like the level-headed one now, when I’m on the side of the supposed “sky daddy” worshippers?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/opinion/toxic-empathy-christianity-trump.html
[I]f you look at 2024 exit polling, you’ll see that Trump won white evangelical and born-again voters by a 65-point margin, 82 percent to 17 percent. He lost everyone else by 18 points, 58 percent to 40 percent.
Given the sharp differences between Trump and every other Republican president of the modern era, in my experience evangelicals are desperate to to rationalize their support for a man who gratuitously and intentionally inflicts unnecessary suffering on his opponents.
That’s exactly how empathy becomes a sin. …
Are you concerned about children who might die because we gratuitously and needlessly cut billions of dollars of foreign aid? That’s toxic empathy. Are you worried about the conditions in detention facilities where migrants are held by the thousands? That’s more toxic empathy. Are you shocked and appalled at ICE’s aggression in the streets? Well, then, you’re losing your moorings. Mass deportation was always going to be tough to watch. Stay strong. Don’t let empathy seep into your soul.
But this problem extends well beyond public policy into the fundamental cruelty and callousness of the culture of the new right. It is no coincidence that the attack on empathy correlates with an extraordinary rise in blatant racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia on the right.