Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a hilarious insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man idiosyncratic party-line Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Playing (and nerd-analyzing) a fair bit about the fictional war game MENACE, which I actually mentioned I'd be off line a fair bit more when I gave it an endorsement a month ago. Basically my most-anticipated tactical strategy game in some time, and it's been a loooong time since I had a game scratch the itch so good that it actually makes me want to spend more time with it than on the Motte.
I know, I know. Hard to believe. Also not the first time this has produced a funny gap, since I typically don't post my gaming hobbies much here. The curse of having different accounts for different hobby spaces.
Plus, when I saw the initial top-level Iran War threads, by the time I had the time to post they were typically in a state where there wasn't much productive surface vector I could touch upon that wouldn't have easily been toxiplasma culture warring. Fog of war, heated emotions, and various efforts to shove everything into paradigms I often find badly fitting at best.
As much of a dodge as it may seem, I am trying to get into fewer internet arguments this year.
I am taking notes and do have a few effort posts lined up for the que. One of which is a long-desired post on the idea of the Cult of the Offense, and some of the nuances / distinctions that this conflict highlights or contrasts.
Also @hdroacetylene
Dean
Flairless
23d ago
So the US Supreme Court struck down most (all?) of Trump's tariffs in a 6-3 ruling, ruling that its use exceeded the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This appears to have largely been done under the major questions doctrine, the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly. The majority ruling is that Trump's attempt to claim and leverage emergency powers overstepped this, plus doubtless other nuances I'm not noting. The Court also opened an entirely different set of worms, as it did not adjudicate if the tariff revenue that had been collected has to be refunded, or even who a refund would go to. I predict great long !lawyer bills~ debates over how, if tariffs are taxes on Americans, which Americans are owed the tax refunds.
(Do I predict the Trump administration will try to use this as a basis to give money to the electorate in a totally-not-buying-votes-before-mid-terms scheme? No, but I think it would be funny if political bedfellows put Democrats on the side of big business importers who will make claims on the refunds even if they passed on costs to American consumers.)
Trump will reportedly make comments soon. While this will be a major policy loss for the Trump administration, and promises to make the next many months 'interesting,' part of my curiosity is what this ruling might hold (or have held) for other court cases in the dockets, there will also be significant geopolitical reflections on this for months and years to come. This ruling wasn't entirely a surprise, and various countries (and the European trade block) had been hedging in part to let the court case play out. We'll see where things go from here, particularly since not all Trump tariff threats were derived from the IEEPA, and so there will probably be some conflation/confusion/ambiguity over various issues.
While I will defer to others for the legalese analysis, I am also interested in what sorts of quid-pro-quos the internal court politics might have had for Roberts to have led the majority here. There are a host of cases on the docket this term, with politically-relevant issues ranging from mail-in ballots to redistricting. While I think the tariffs case was outside any typical 'we accept this case in exchange for accepting that case' deal over which cases get heard, I will be interested if the administration gets any 'surprise' wins.
For longer commentary from Amy Howe of the SCOTUS Blog-
In a major ruling on presidential power, the Supreme Court on Friday struck down the sweeping tariffs that President Donald Trump imposed in a series of executive orders. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the tariffs exceed the powers given to the president by Congress under a 1977 law providing him the authority to regulate commerce during national emergencies created by foreign threats.
The court did not weigh in, however, on whether or how the federal government should provide refunds to the importers who have paid the tariffs, estimated in 2025 at more than $200 billion.
The law at the center of the case is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, known as IEEPA, which authorizes the president to use the law “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the president declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.” A separate provision of the law provides that when there is a national emergency, the president may “regulate … importation or exportation” of “property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.”
The dispute at the center of Friday’s opinion began last year, when Trump issued a series of executive orders imposing the tariffs. Lawsuits filed by small businesses and a group of states, all of which say that they are affected by the increased tariffs, were filed in the lower courts, which agreed with the challengers that IEEPA did not authorize Trump’s tariffs. But those rulings were put on hold, allowing the government to continue to collect the tariffs while the Supreme Court proceedings moved forward.
In a splintered decision on Friday, the Supreme Court agreed with the challengers that IEEPA did not give Trump the power to impose the tariffs. “Based on two words separated by 16 others in … IEEPA—‘regulate’ and ‘importation’—the President asserts the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “Those words,” he continued, “cannot bear such weight.” “IEEPA,” Roberts added, “contains no reference to tariffs or duties.” Moreover, “until now no President has read IEEPA to confer such power.”
In a part of the opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts said that Trump’s reliance on IEEPA to impose the tariffs violated the “major questions” doctrine – the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly. “When Congress has delegated its tariff powers,” Roberts said, “it has done so in explicit terms, and subject to strict limits,” a test that Trump’s tariffs failed here.
The court’s three Democratic appointees – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – joined another part of the Roberts opinion, holding that Trump’s tariffs were also not supported by the text of IEEPA. “The U.S. Code,” Roberts noted, “is replete with statutes granting the Executive the authority to ‘regulate’ someone or something. Yet the Government cannot identify any statute in which the power to regulate includes the power to tax.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the main dissent, which was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. In his view, Trump had the authority under IEEPA to impose the tariffs because they “are a traditional and common tool to regulate importation.” Moreover, he suggested, although “I firmly disagree with the Court’s holding today, the decision might not substantially constrain a President’s ability to order tariffs going forward … because numerous other federal statutes authorize the President to impose tariffs and might justify most (if not all) of the tariffs at issue in this case.”
Kavanaugh also warned that “[i]n the meantime, however, the interim effects of the Court’s decision could be substantial. The United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others.”
(And apologies to @Gillitrut, who posted while I was drafting this.)
Dean
Flairless
26d ago
And you, dear reader, just spent two minutes reading about the completely unimportant opinions of a stranger on the internet.
My dear strange German, if I didn't want to read about your opinion, I would not be on the Motte. Not only am I on the Motte, but you are one of the posters I enjoy. Keep sharing your opinions, my southern kraut who is north of me.
My sense of snark obliges me to note that transgender affirmation surgery of minors was the policy of the government medical establishment barely more than a year ago, and the administration before that had to knowingly lie about its own healthcare proposals to get them past the public at which point many of the promised benefits that weren't deliberate lies still failed.
'Incredibly stupid and incorrect beliefs on medical care' has been more or less the public health policy of the United States for longer than many Mottizans have been cognizant of US politics.
The mid-2000s successes of their proxies that they trained/equipped/advised in frustrating / stonewalling the Israeli's in Lebanon and the US in Iraq. These were cases where the larger conventional force made deliberate efforts to win a decisive battle, and failed to reach any sort of conclusive victory. This translated into prestige for the groups that won-by-not-losing against world-leading professional militaries, and prestige-by-proxy for the IRGC.
The best example was the 2006 Lebanon War, which started when Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers and the Israeli's launched a conventional invasion into southern Lebanon. In the month-long war that followed, Hezbollah fought with guerilla tactics the entire time and was not cleared by IDF forces, launched over 4000 rockets with the IDF being unable to stop it, and kept the war goal of the captives away from the Israeli reclamation efforts. It's debatable how well / long Hezbollah would have lasted had the war not been brought to a quick close after a month, but the war did conclude and Israel certainly did not achieve its objectives in that time. Hezbollah went toe to toe with one of the more respected militaries in the world, won the war it set out to do, and almost certainly would not have without IRGC efforts.
A later but still IRGC-coded example was the Huthis in Yemen. While the Huthis are their own entity who are more partners than pawns, cultivating that relationship was an IRGC effort, and it provided major frustrations to Iran's adversaries. The Saudi war in Yemen for one, the later closure of the red sea shipping, and the US inability to stop that as well. It provided the durability of a missile force focused on area denial, which is what the
The IRGC reputation has never rested on the ability to protect people and infrastructure, so its failures in that respect don't really work against their reputation. The Iranians have pursued a proxy-war-abroad strategy for decades, basically since their foundational experience in the Iran-Iraq War, and that has generally worked from a premise of having other people bomb militants and infrastructure anywhere but Iran.
The strategic wisdom / competence of the IRGC strategy is an entirely different question, one where I have a dim view that boils down to 'they lost the plot on how a proxy strategy works,' but the IRGC's current (recent) reputation derives mostly from its proxy warfare capacities abroad, which are significant.
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