The Supreme Court ruling, that President Trump’s tariffs of 2025 are not authorized by the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, defines a limit to executive branch power. The ruling proves that the Constitution does in fact pose hard limits on Presidential power, and the White House’s apparent acceptance means that the Constitution holds definitive sway, at the bottom line. This is not trivial. Law and Constitution are subject to interpretation, and politicians will go to extreme lengths to show that the Constitution actually allows them to do whatever they wish. It has become normal in our politics, to dispute any case to infinity, to contest Supreme Court nominations as a matter of politics unconstrained by principle or nominees’ personal probity, and to find ways around the letter of the law. The Court’s tariff ruling reassures us that, at some point, there are no more arguments or dodges, and the nation is in fact a nation of laws, not men.
As much of the chatter around the ruling also shows, though, the boundaries to politics remain very wide. We have used the space within them to battle, dividing into hostile political cultures that have alienated each other to the point where shared national identity, common norms of morality or principle or “sense” or decency, and common ground for deliberation, no longer exist. The alienation has been building for decades. And while no one likes it, the two “sides” will, rather than defuse it, blame each other for starting it.
In this deepening bipolar alienation, any shared norms, any national comity, have been declining – and now, in Donald Trump’s exceptionally energetic partisanship, the decline has reached perhaps its logical end. Note that he did not start this degrading of norms – the “woke” left’s suppression of speech it found disagreeable was itself a next-level accelerant, just a few years ago. But, at what now looks like a culmination point, the culminator – a term Trump might use to describe himself – becomes the focus.
Left and right, on top of their long-running partisan trench warfare, have made defeating, or winning with, Trump their highest objective, almost a definition of political victory. In the process, all the arguments over economic regulation or unfettered business conduct, for or against the rule of might in international affairs, all are reduced to rallying cries for or against him. Making Trump the issue has renewed the partisans’ claim on people’s political energy.
This reduction of discourse would have happened with or without Trump. But the average voter has been growing weary of the bipolar kabuki – both Democrats and Republicans now stand at or near historic lows of popular approval. Young people were already dropping out of political discourse. Cynicism abounds, apparently justified by the universal corruption confirmed by the Epstein files. Once Trump himself is gone, the bipolar politics will continue, but with even less – vanishingly little – passion about anything political, on either side.
And yet America will need government, and there will be differences of opinion, genuinely concerned with what courses it should follow. With no respected arena for deliberative discourse, can the nation have any cogent government? If not, will other ambitious politicians mount more forceful attacks on the Constitutional boundaries?
In addition to a structure like the Constitution’s, a working society has to have workable norms for public discourse, social order, and principles to guide decision making. Today Americans may be getting a sense that those will have be built, from ground zero.
Ground zero starts with what America is, at bottom, for all Americans. The only statement of who we are comes in the nation’s self-conception in the Declaration of Independence. That Declaration announced a new “People,” and only identified that People as “We” who hold certain Truths to be self evident. Those are, of course, that all humans are equally endowed with unalienable rights to live as they choose, and that governments exist to secure those rights, by consent of the governed. Unfortunately, the bare words have long been dissected into hostile interpretations to feed the partisan battles. The question is whether each American will start to look at the actual tenets as a common national creed, connecting as well as liberating each and all, transcending the bipolar divide. Perhaps, if indeed that game of division has exhausted the energy behind the division, if the last gasp of passion has blown out over one pathological catalyst, Americans as a body might step back and realize who we really are.
Common Conviction 