Free Republic

President Donald Trump remade the Republican Party in his own MAGA image. Will he now do the same to the conservative legal movement? During his first term, Trump benefited immeasurably from his association with Leonard Leo, the former Federalist Society official whose advice on judicial nominations helped Trump to transform the U.S. Supreme Court into a conservative legal juggernaut that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, overturned affirmative action in higher education, and expanded the right to keep and bear arms. Such rulings will likely be remembered as Trump's most far-reaching accomplishments as president. Yet now, Trump is denouncing both...

During the Biden administration, conservative challengers won Supreme Court victories that limited the president’s power to craft policy in matters from student-debt relief to air pollution. Now, those precedents are returning to haunt one of their greatest champions: President Trump. On Wednesday, a specialized federal court in New York invalidated the worldwide tariffs Trump imposed to address a range of issues on his agenda, from international trade imbalances to cross-border trafficking of fentanyl. The unanimous decision by the U.S. Court of International Trade relied in part on the “major questions” doctrine, which the Supreme Court adopted in 2022 to bar...

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...

President Donald Trump's approval rating has dropped to 40 percent, lower than all other presidents at this point in their terms, new polling released by Pew Research Center on Wednesday shows. Americans want Trump to govern less by executive order, listen to the courts, and don't like tariffs. Trump is losing ground with people on the fence. From February to April, his approval rating fell from 88 percent to 75 percent among people who supported him in the 2024 election but "not strongly," and from 44 percent to 31 percent among nonvoters. Of course, partisans will be partisans, and Trump...

... In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Garcia to America from El Salvador so that his claims can be adjudicated. (He currently sits there under an agreement negotiated by the Trump administration with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele for the use of his notoriously brutal mega-prisons to house potential deportees.) This weekend the Trump administration refused, claiming, on stunningly disingenuous logic, that because Garcia had been dumped quickly into El Salvador he was now beyond American jurisdiction. (“He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.”) Why not...

President Trump says trade wars are easy to win. Investors think otherwise, and on Wednesday Mr. Trump decided maybe investors are right. After a flight from U.S. assets and a rout in the bond market, Mr. Trump announced a pause for 90 days on the worst of his “liberation” tariffs on most countries, China excepted. Markets celebrated with a stock-market rally on hope that perhaps Mr. Trump isn’t entirely oblivious to the damage he’s causing. The rout in dollar assets reversed, at least somewhat, and the rise in the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield eased. It would be hard to find...

Roofing-products manufacturer IKO North America has been on a factory-building spree in the U.S., with one plant completed and four more under construction. After President Trump launched a barrage of tariffs on U.S. trading partners, the math abruptly changed. Chief Executive David Koschitzky said IKO’s just-finished factory in Texas now faces higher prices on the steel it uses to fabricate metal shingles, while the plants that are still being built need machinery that isn’t made in the U.S. The company will continue with the projects, he said, but tariffs will make them much more expensive. “If we’re to be successful,...

Last Wednesday, standing at a podium in the White House Rose Garden, the president of the United States threw the world’s economy into turmoil. Having declared that America’s trade deficit represented a bona fide “emergency,” President Trump revealed a completely rewritten federal tariff regime. The result of these alterations was an increase in protectionist barriers that exceeded even the infamous Smoot-Hawley law in its scope. For two days, the stock market responded to this move by diving sharply downward. Monday morning, after a false report that the president was planning to endorse a 90-day pause in implementation, there was a...