At the Washington Post George Will urges the Congress to pass the bill imposing sanctions on Russia’s biggest trading partners:

The Senate, recently passive regarding its prerogatives and deferential regarding presidential assertiveness, might insert itself into policymaking concerning Ukraine. And the Senate — hopefully with the House concurring — might do so where presidents are most protective of their ability to act unilaterally: foreign affairs. The Senate’s contemplated action has been “coordinated” with the current president, who is a notably aggressive assertor of executive prerogatives.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has introduced legislation that, having attracted 82 supporters (counting Graham), proves two things: the possibility of bipartisanship about large questions and Congress’s relevance in making foreign policy.

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Graham writes that he has “coordinated” with the White House concerning his legislation, which he jointly introduced with Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. The legislation would impose a 500 percent tariff on goods sent to the United States from “any country that buys Moscow’s energy products” (e.g., oil, gas, uranium). The countries that matter most are China and India.

A good deal of his column is devoted to wondering why the bill does not have unanimous support in the Senate (rather than the presumably 82% support it has). What I wondered about was why it only pertained to goods imports. Why not to services?

The United States goods imports from India are estimated at around $124 billion per year. Oddly, we don’t actually know how large our services trade with India is but there’s little question it dwarfs our goods trade with the country. How so? When you tally up the annual revenues of the a largest Indian consultancy companies it’s well over that figure and most of those services are performed for U. S. companies. To understand the scale of our consumption of offshore outsourcing 90% of large companies offshore their IT, HR, and/or finance departments wholly or in part and that doesn’t include call centers which is what many people think of when they refer to offshore outsourcing. And even small U. S. companies are able to outsource those services offshore. We can’t be certain what the total volume is because there is no legal reporting requirement expressly governing offshore outsourcing. The figure of $35 billion sometimes cited is obviously a tremendous understatement.

If we really want to incentivize India to stop trading with Russia, we should hit them where it really hurts and that’s services.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are delighted that the U.S. Court of International Trade enjoined Trump’s tariffs:

In a ruling heard ’round the world, the U.S. Court of International Trade on Wednesday blocked President Trump’s sweeping tariffs. This is an important moment for the rule of law as much as for the economy, proving again that America doesn’t have a king who can rule by decree.

The Trump tariffs have created enormous costs and uncertainty, but now we know they’re illegal. As the three-judge panel explains in its detailed 52-page ruling, the President exceeded his emergency powers and bypassed discrete tariff authorities delegated to him by Congress. The ruling erases his April 2 tariffs as well as those on Canada and Mexico.

but their joy was short-lived. Kevin Breuninger reports at CNBC:

A federal appeals court on Thursday granted the Trump administration’s request to temporarily pause a lower-court ruling that struck down most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The Trump administration had earlier told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that it would seek “emergency relief” from the Supreme Court as soon as Friday if the tariff ruling was not quickly put on pause.

The judgment issued Wednesday night by the U.S. Court of International Trade is “temporarily stayed until further notice while this court considers the motions papers,” the appeals court said in its order.

The pause gives the Trump administration some breathing room as it prepares to argue that the trade court’s ruling should be halted for the duration of the appeals process.

So, now what? I haven’t heard any reports yet of a case being filed with the Supreme Court.

On the dark side this presents even more uncertainty. On the bright side this is the way our process is supposed to work. I’d like to see the Congress get into this act.

Maybe it’s naive of me but I find the U. S. Court of International Trade’s ruling that President Trump’s imposition of tariffs by executive order was illegal reassuring. Lindsay Whitehurst and Josh Boak report at the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal court on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs on imports under an emergency-powers law, swiftly throwing into doubt Trump’s signature set of economic policies that have rattled global financial markets, frustrated trade partners and raised broader fears about inflation intensifying and the economy slumping.

The ruling from a three-judge panel at the New York-based U.S. Court of International Trade came after several lawsuits arguing Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs exceeded his authority and left the country’s trade policy dependent on his whims.

I doubt that’s the last we’ll hear of the matter. What I think should happen is that the Trump Administration should encourage (if that’s the right word) the Congress to enact the tariffs he’s called for or some version thereof.

I’ve said it before that although I agree with steep tariffs on Chinese imports on a host of grounds not the least being all of the officially supported Chinese hacking going on I don’t agree with the broad tariffs President Trump has called for. So, what’s the administration’s next step? I think you’d be surprised at how many Democratic votes tariffs on China would get in the Senate.

I wish I could remember where I read it but the best reaction I’ve seen to Jake Tapper’s book on the cover-up of President Biden’s decline in health, Original Sin, was that it’s All the President’s Men if it didn’t name any names and were written by H. R. Haldeman.

I think that the best one-liner of the day belongs to Matt Taibbi in his piece on who started the “culture war”:

I agree Democrats need to stop getting their political ideas from Davos and Ezra Klein, but I’m not sure the urgency is in “swinging disillusioned voters away from the authoritarian right.”

I think that by far the greater likelihood is that they’ll increasingly get their ideas from the populist left. Whether that is more or less authoritarian than the “authoritarian right” (by which he means the MAGA crowd or populist right) remains to be seen.

I found the (perhaps unintentionally) funniest piece of the day this one at the Wall Street Journal. In the piece James J. Heckman and Hanming Fang. Here’s the core of their piece:

Few academic papers have been as influential—or as misunderstood—as those by David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson. Politicians and pundits often use these authors’ papers to claim that China’s rise has cost the U.S. up to 2.4 million jobs due to surging Chinese imports between 1999 and 2011. But these studies focus narrowly on what happened to manufacturing employment in local labor markets, not the U.S. as a whole.

It’s true that communities exposed to heavy Chinese import competition saw steep drops in manufacturing jobs and a rise in local unemployment. Crucially, the displaced workers mostly stayed put rather than moved for new work. It’s no wonder these academic papers resonated because they highlighted real pain in America’s industrial heartland. But treating the China shock as a verdict on national employment is a mistake.

There is growing evidence that, while Chinese imports did hammer certain regions, they didn’t cause large net job losses across the entire U.S. Recent research from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that job losses locally were mostly balanced by job gains in other regions. Manufacturing-heavy areas in the Midwest and South saw employment declines, but services jobs sprouted in coastal and high-tech hubs like the West Coast and Northeast. Import competition shifted jobs rather than eliminated them.

and here’s the piece’s slug: “The jobs harm was largely local and temporary, while overall jobs and consumer welfare increased”, a pretty good summary of the piece.

Let’s stipulate that the effects were temporary. Ira Gershwin said it well:

In time the Rockies may crumble
Gibraltar may tumble
They’re only made of clay

The Grand Canyon is temporary. The pyramids of Egypt are temporary. Everything is temporary. In human terms the reality is somewhat different. That is that the majority of those who lost their jobs as a consequence of the “China shock” have never recovered financially.

The authors’ argument, that trade with China benefited consumers, is true in part. Those in the lowest income quintile, those who devote the largest percentage of their income to necessities, benefited most along with those in the topmost percentage of income earners benefited the most from trade with China. Those in the third and fourth income quintiles benefited least. That returns to the point I’ve made previously about the “hollowing out” of the middle class.

Possibly the funniest part of the piece is their dismissal of the losses of income as “local”. Recently, there’s been an enormous furor over the loss of jobs in the Washington, DC region as a consequence of layoffs of federal employees. Those are local and temporary, too, but that doesn’t end the outrage over them. What I think the authors are actually saying is that nobody they care about was hurt so where’s the harm?

Let’s try a little thought experiment. I wonder what the authors’ reaction would be were the Congress to prohibit Americans from being paid to teach economics. Shocking as it may be that’s within the Congress’s authority, at least it has been since Wickard v. Filburn. I suspect they would consider the damage enormous.

Nowhere in the article do the authors demonstrate that the jobs that have been added since the “China shock” paid as much or more in real terms than those lost. In my view that’s the critical question and they sidestep it.

I have a number of questions about the missile defense system President Trump has been calling for, recently termed “Golden Dome”. I’ll just bullet my questions. The parallel with Israel’s “Iron Dome” is obvious (that’s what the system is called in the original executive order).

• My understanding is that Israel’s Iron Dome system cost roughly $500 million in 2011 dollars with an operating cost of $150,000 per interception. That was for 10 stations (the ultimate objective was 15 stations). If 15 stations are required for a country the size of New Jersey, what would the cost of a system that would protect the United States? That’s, what, four orders of magnitude larger? It wouldn’t be linear increase but a geometric one.
• How effective would such a system be and need to be? The Israeli system is said to be 90% effective. To put that in context you could protect 90% of Illinois without protecting the City of Chicago at all.
• Is it technically possible to defend the U. S. with such a system without also protecting Canada? And a good chunk of Mexico? Whether either country participates in the system or not?
• The system sounds much like the “Star Wars” system proposed during the Reagan Administration. Is that strategy fighting the last war? Or, more precisely, is it fighting today’s war with yesterday’s weapons systems?
• Are the Chinese right? Would such a system be a violation of existing treaties? It sounds like it to me (we’ll leave aside the question of whether China and Russia are already violating those treaties).

The editors of the Washington Post leap to the defense of the practice of district judges issuing nationwide injunctions. After what I think is a pretty comprehensive review of the shortcomings of district judges’ injunctions only applying to their districts, e.g.

Imagine if a federal judge could grant relief from Trump’s order only to those involved in the lawsuits or in that judge’s district. It would mean that plaintiffs across all 94 district courts would have to battle for their constitutional rights as the president aggressively seeks to deport people. In other words, Americans’ constitutional protections could vary according to where in the country they live.

Yes, that’s exactly how our system of government is supposed to work. Otherwise the most conservative district judge in the country could impose his (or her) will on the entire country or the most progressive district judge in the country could impose her (or his) will on the the entire country mutatis mutandis. And that is precisely what has been happening with increasing regularity since the 1960s. I do not believe that is a course for good or even democratic government.

I agree with this assessment:

The purpose of the federal courts, of course, is not to set federal policy; it is to arbitrate disputes about the law. That the courts have become staging grounds for some of the country’s most contentious political battles is a symptom of deeper government dysfunction, stemming largely from Congress’s failure to address those difficult issues, and the executive branch’s increasing eagerness to bend laws to suit its own purposes.

but then they go a step too far, concluding:

Judges, as interpreters of the laws, must have the authority to stop the government from going too far — whether that is President Joe Biden wiping away billions of dollars in student loans or Trump invoking a centuries-old law to deport people without due process.

Justice Clarence Thomas noted during oral arguments, “We survived until the 1960s without universal injunctions.” This is correct, but America also survived for decades with this tool available to the federal court system. As the presidency becomes the ever-more-dominant branch of government, it’s one the country needs to retain.

The emphasis is mine. There is an obvious remedy and it is not to make district courts national tyrants. Restrain the power of the imperial presidency and the executive branch more generally. In my opinion the federal government should be one of limited, enumerated powers, restricted to the actual language of the Constitution.

There’s something else they’re ignoring. The Supreme Court does not hear enough cases and decides them too slowly. They are functioning largely as they did 200 years ago. The needs of a country of 330 million people and the accumulated laws and precedents of hundreds of years are not the same as those of a country of 6 million people and a relative handful of laws and precedents.

I would suggest that with the proper training a large language model computer program would be an excellent tool for judges, not excepting the judges of the Supreme Court.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal approve of President Trump’s apparent change of heart on the acquisition of U. S. Steel by Nippon Steel and try to explain it:

U.S. Steel warned that it might have to close its Indiana and Pennsylvania factories if the Nippon Steel deal failed. Mr. Trump opposed the deal during last year’s campaign as he vied with Mr. Biden to become protectionist-in-chief. But he has reconsidered and now appears inclined to take Nippon up on the deal that Mr. Biden refused.

Nippon has pledged to honor its collective-bargaining agreement with the union and not reduce production capacity for 10 years at U.S. Steel mills without government approval. It also committed to appoint U.S. citizens to top management jobs and to a majority of board seats, plus a “full-time board observer” to ensure compliance with its promises.

The Japanese steelmaker recently sweetened its offer by pledging to invest some $14 billion in U.S. Steel operations, including $4 billion for a new mill. While it would be better if the Administration weren’t trying to play deal-maker, Nippon’s concessions appear to have given Mr. Trump the political cover he wants to bless what he calls the “partnership.”

but ultimately appear to be as puzzled by it as the rest of us. They fall back on what I’m told is a wisecrack being used on Wall Street: “Trump Always Chickens Out”—TACO). It’s an example of why I disapprove of the sort of bluster that is habitual with Mr. Trump. Nearly the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Talk softly and carry a big stick”. I don’t think American presidents should make threats at all but on the rare occasions that they do they must carry through with them. Strategic ambiguity has not worked well for us, at least not lately cf. 9/11.