In 1981, and while trying to get the tax cuts he favored passed by Congress, Ronald Reagan joked about getting shot again to move public opinion in his direction, and by extension, congressional votes. Presidents thankfully can’t decree tax hikes or tax cuts, rather they can sign into law tax cuts first introduced in Congress, and voted on by members of Congress. Basic stuff, or so it once seemed.
That it’s no longer basic stuff means that Joe Biden was right about term limiting judges. Which is not an endorsement of Biden or his presidency, rather it’s a comment that it’s no longer serious to say that we need lifetime judicial appointments to “ensure judicial independence and insulate justices from political pressure, popular passion, and electoral repercussions.”
About this, Republicans have always criticized Democratically appointed judges as being of the view that the Constitution is a “living, breathing” document. That being the case, elect Republican presidents who will appoint “originalists” to the Supreme Court. Republican-appointed nominees will “strictly interpret” the Constitution while voting on issues that come before the Supreme Court. Ok, but no longer. If ever.
For evidence, see how Justices Alito, Kavanaugh and Thomas found a taxing power of the “trillions” variety in the Constitution, and that presidents can impose without a congressional vote. For being nakedly political, the vote betrayed the primary reason so many Republican partisans have long said the right-leaning should vote Republican in the first place: getting so-called “strict constructionists” onto the bench who would be slaves to the law, not their political benefactors.
It doesn’t take a constitutional scholar to know that Congress, and Congress only, has power over the purse and by extension the power to tax. If this weren’t true, presidents would be rulers and Reagan wouldn’t have had to make funny jokes about how to pass his tax cuts. Conversely, congresswomen like Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky wouldn’t have had to walk the plank for President Clinton’s tax increases in 1993.
About this, some will say tariffs are paid for by others, hence they’re not a tax on the American people. Which is just silly, and not just because the New York Fed penned a study stating the obvious about who pays for tariffs. We didn’t need a study when it’s remembered that the Tariff Man himself has always desired his taxes as a way of making foreign goods less attractive to American buyers. The latter being the case, the way to reduce American purchases of foreign goods is to place a tax on foreign goods to either raise “trillions” from American buyers, or alternatively convince the would-be buyers to go American. Get it?
What’s almost as sad as the Supreme Court justices politicizing their votes is watching wannabe Trump judicial nominees going to embarrassing lengths to defend the indefensible votes of Alito, Kavanaugh and Thomas. One formerly libertarian legal scholar described decreed tariffs as “good economics and good foreign policy” if presidents rely on “specific national-security findings and sector-by-sector adjustments” as justification for unilateral tariff imposition that leads “to a more disciplined and defensible trade strategy.” Oh dear…
Whether it’s the Republican appointed judges at the Supreme Court, or the would-be judges vying for Trump’s favor with oleaginous opinion pieces, it’s evident that both kinds seek judgeships not out of fealty to the Constitution, but to the Republican Party. Democrats are surely the same as GOP apologists will surely point out, which is why we should term limit what is no longer free of political pressure, and almost certainly never was.
Originally published on Real Clear Markets.
