Did Senate Democrats REALLY Just Give Trump Broad New Tariff Power?

Michael: A recent poll by Marquette Law School found that SCOTUS approval rating it 47%.

I think court packing is an absolute non-starter until that number falls much lower. If it were done, with SCOTUS at 47% approval or anything close to that, the Dems would get crushed in the next election.

I am guessing that you stongly disagree, and I’d like to know why.

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Here’s the poll, for those who haven’t seen it. There’s interesting stuff throughout, much of which points to the fact that while Supreme Court politics are quite salient among high-information voters, they’re not salient overall. That’s important.

I’d also note that the partisan breakdown is actually quite favorable to Dems, because support for the Supreme Court is mostly concentrated within the Republican Party. Democrats already have independents on their side, but among Democrats approval isn’t nearly as low as it could or should be.

I interpret this as an artifact of liberal risk aversion and leader-following—like how support for impeaching Trump was somewhere in the 30s, until the moment Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry, at which point it shot up over 50 percent.

So I don’t really share the view that the polling is preclusive, or suggests Dems have tons of persuasion to do. But it does suggest they aren’t doing persuasion at all.

If we woke up tomorrow, and Democrats controlled the whole government, and Democratic leaders announced fast-track legislation to expand the Supreme Court, with near-unanimous backing from their caucuses, I suspect survey data would polarize in a similar way. Dems would unify. GOP support for the current court would climb (I suspect it’s “only” in the 70s now because a quarter of Republicans think the court should be more solicitous of Trump, while the majority of Republicans express support tribally). Public opinion would settle around 50-50.

Even if that’s wrong, though, some things just have to be done. This in particular would need to be done in lightning strike fashion, or, yes, it’d get dragged into thermostatic politics and Dems would slowly cook themselves. But if they did it in January 2029, then quickly seated new justices? Would the following midterms 22 months later be a referendum on that? I kind of doubt it—or at least, I doubt they’d be about the expansion per se.

Which brings me to my last point: It’d be a mistake for Democrats to expand the court and then assume that’d be the end of the fight. It is and would remain a high-salience issue for partisan Republicans. Reminding partisan Democrats that this was an essential accomplishment, akin to the Voting Rights Act, would be essential. That’d be necessary to insure against backlash both at the polls and in civic spaces. Right-wing backlash to court packing would be very likely to overreach—think nullification of law, violent resistance, etc. Democrats would both have to overcome the civic resistance—insist the law is the law, and enforce it—and capitalize on the fanaticism.

If Dems get bored or intimidated and try to move on, as at the end of Reconstruction, it could be a real disaster.

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Sara Frischer: Hi Brian, The Bill to Add Additional Sanctions on Russia, just passed by the Senate, it apparently also gives trump some new horrendous powers, which added with Blanche as the AG give me strong discomfort about the even sharper turn to hell the US can take. My question, taking out Blanche. When this bill goes to the Democrats in the House of Representatives, do they have enough ability to dissect this bill and turn it into an advantage. Sanctioning Russia and not giving trump more power?

I want to stipulate that the aspect of the bill you cite is, in fact, bad on the merits—but only because we live in a time when we have to expect Republicans and Donald Trump to abuse power in bad faith.

My initial inclination was to be pretty upset at Senate Democrats for going along with this, but I’ve mostly been talked off ledge. We actually discussed it on the podcast this week, and the rub is that law authorizes tariffs on countries (primarily India) that skirt Russian oil sanctions. That’s why, for all the bullshit they’ve been through with Trump, European Union countries support the bill.

There is apparently some concern that the statutory language delineating sanctions violations isn’t tight enough, such that Trump might flout the intent of the bill and start tariffing imports from countries that aren’t in any real sense flaunting Russian oil sanctions. And then, because the Supreme Court is in his pocket, he’ll get away with it for months or a year or more, before either getting slapped down, or, worse, seeing his abuses affirmed.

Democrats’ basic idea here seems to be: This is a win for Ukraine, a loss for Russia, and a small political asset (insofar as enforcing oil sanctions tends to push gas prices up). From there, if Trump chooses to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by exploiting vague legislative text to make a bunch of imports