Monthly Archives: July 2025

Shocked

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I’m shocked, shocked, to find that diplomacy is going on in here. The lede and a subsequent paragraph expose the matter.

President Trump’s threat for a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports expanded his use of punitive duties over matters that have nothing to do with trade, breaking with more than a half-century of global economic precedent.
…
It is one of the latest…example of Trump using tariffs as a cudgel for political priorities outside of trade.

And

The president is betting the threat of reducing access to the American consumer will force nations to capitulate on his political priorities.

Other examples:

  • tariffs on Colombia over repatriation flights for migrants back to that country
  • steep duties on Canada, Mexico, and China over their role in the fentanyl trade
  • tariffs on countries that buy oil from Venezuela
  • threat of tariffs to attempt to secure more military spending from Asian nations such as Japan and South Korea.

The news writers at the link noted this bit of history:

Although often controversial and sometimes volatile, such as when the Smoot-Hawley Act hiked U.S. tariffs in 1930, tariffs have generally been motivated by economic or domestic political goals.

There is no more important domestic goal than national security, which necessarily is centered on the global stage.

Ricardo was right as far as he went, in that nations should specialize in those goods and services they do best and import other goods and services from other nations that the importer does poorly. But that’s pure economics. It ignores the diplomacy aspects of international trade—using exports of those specialized goods and services and imports of other goods and services as tools with which to influence other nations’ behavior across a range of milieus.

That foreign policy influence centers on matters of national security, of which domestic economics is a critical, but not sole factor. Other, equally critical, factors include providing opportunities for domestic producers to do better in those weak areas. Specialization, after all, is not the same as producing only those items with no thought to expanding into other areas for specialization.

International trade as diplomacy also includes limiting enemy nations’ access to those goods and services that a nation Ricardo-specializes in that are important to enemy nations’ own foreign adventurism, as well as limiting domestic market access by enemy nations as a means of weakening their economies and so their ability to mount those foreign adventures.

The WSJ‘s editors tacitly understand this, though they don’t seem to have made their understanding overt, even to themselves.

The US will need to mount a united front with allies to confront Beijing’s predatory practices and ensure the world isn’t dependent on China. One idea is a critical minerals alliance.

This is explicitly the use of international trade in its foreign policy/national security role and as a way to counter the People’s Republic of China’s own use of international trade to further its own foreign policy aspirations.

The news writers appear surprised find that an American President understands that international trade, and all of its tools, have very little to do with economics and very much to do with foreign policy. Sadly, they’re not alone. It would behoove all guild members to review their high school economics class notes.

Still Another Reason

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This time, another reason to eliminate the Federal government’s Star Chamber that is its FISA Court. The reason is in the lede:

The nation’s spy court has quietly approved a Justice Department request to review information tied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants that targeted former Trump campaign associate Carter Page as FBI Director Kash Patel seeks to hand over more Russiagate evidence to Congress.

The timeline of this…approval:

  • 6 June: DoJ filed its request with the FISA court
  • 17 June: FISA approved the request
  • 7 July: FISA made its approval public

That’s entirely too slow. DoJ—and the FBI—had their own copies of what they’d filed with FISA (didn’t they?); they had their own approval authority for the documents they owned. Aside from that, FISA has had its own copies of those filings, along with records of its deliberations of the related matters being considered with those filings for all these years. The judges on that court must have known that this day would come; of course, responsible and rational persons that they are, they’d already worked out at least the outlines of how they would respond. Taking 11 days to review that outline and to act on it is sloth. Taking an additional three weeks to make public their decision is irresponsible secrecy for the sake of secrecy.

That’s secondary, though. Coming ahead of that, and so obviating any need to consider any of that, is this: this court, as long as it’s going to operate entirely in secret, should have no say about the progress of an FBI or a DoJ investigation or about those agencies’ dispositions of materials associated with those investigations. To the extent our courts should be involved in such decisions, that should be the role, solely, of our public Article III courts, each of which is fully capable of handling classified information.

Another Thought on Birthright Citizenship

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I start from two premises. One is the clear distinction in meaning between subject to the jurisdiction and subject to the power of. I continue with the premise that illegal aliens, who have entered our country illegally and remain here illegally, are subject only to the power of our government.

Our government sits at the head of our social compact. More to the point, our government has exactly zero jurisdiction beyond the limits of our social compact; this is well understood both in our domestic law and in international law. Illegal aliens have illegally entered our nation, and they continue to stay without turning themselves to positively seek to get themselves right with our laws, especially with that subset that is our immigration laws. By their own conscious behavior, they are holding themselves outside of our social compact where our government has no jurisdiction, only raw power.

Within or without our social compact is a distinction that applies also to pregnant women who enter our nation, even legally, solely to have their babies on American soil, and who then depart for their home country. These women, never having given up their home country’s jurisdiction, have never submitted themselves to our jurisdiction. Indeed, by their intention of returning to their home country as soon as they’re able after birth, these women have never intended to submit themselves to our government’s jurisdiction. These women have held themselves outside our social compact for the duration of their stay here.

From that, babies born to illegal aliens and to birth-tourist mothers are not—cannot—be citizens of our United States: they’ve been born outside our government’s jurisdiction.

Looking at this from another direction, here is the relevant clause of the 14th Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The form of the clause’s logical construction is this: If A AND B, THEN C. Thus: If born or naturalized AND subject to our jurisdiction, THEN citizen.

Both A and B must be true for C to be true; that’s the meaning of the AND connector. Since the babies born to illegal aliens or to birth-tourist mothers do not meet the second condition, they cannot reach the THEN outcome.

There is a counterargument, and that one centers on the early 17th century British origins of the concept of citizenship by dint of place of birth, with further references to American court decisions on the matter prior to the 1868 ratification of our 14th Amendment. This argument also makes reference to long-standing policy as well as to that legal matter. The counterargument, though, fails for a number of reasons.

Last reason first: ‘long-standing policy” is irrelevant. Policy isn’t binding on anything outside the administrations that choose to maintain it; policy is not statute, it is too easily changed solely extra-legislatively, and it can be eliminated altogether by any subsequent administration.

British law and British legal history have value only for the logic and ideas contained in their derivation; they have nothing to contribute in terms of legally binding matters. They have no jurisdiction inside the United States; indeed, they have no jurisdiction outside the bounds of Great Britain. They’re wholly irrelevant.

Similarly, those American court rulings that predate ratification of the 14th Amendment are wholly irrelevant. With that ratification, those rulings’ vague descriptions of what an American citizen was were rendered entirely without effect by the clear definition of “citizen” that the 14th Amendment created and codified.

Even the counterargument’s references to court rulings subsequent to Amendment’s ratification are irrelevant: they merely expand on those prior irrelevancies; not affecting the Amendment’s dispositive definition, they do not render those decisions current and within the Amendment’s bounds.

Mistake

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In their piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, the editors wrote about President Donald Trump’s decision to continue sending weapons to Ukraine because [t]hey have to be able to defend themselves. They’re getting hit very hard.

Unfortunately, the editors wrote this near the end of their bit:

What matters is giving Ukraine enough firepower to change Mr Putin’s cost-benefit calculation about continuing the war.

This isn’t just wrong; it’s deeply immoral. Arming Ukraine enough to change the barbarian’s cost-benefit calculation is just a means to keep Ukrainian soldiers in the field fighting, being maimed, and dying and to keep Ukrainian women and children available as targets for the barbarian.

Putin has already made his cost-benefit calculation: he doesn’t care about the cost, even having decided that his soldiers are nothing more than consumables on a par with fuel and ammunition. No amount of continued Ukrainian resistance, no matter how effective and costly (in the editors’ eyes) the war continues to be for Putin, he sees the benefit—conquering and occupying Ukraine, erasing it from the list of sovereign nations—as well worth the expenditure, whatever its size.

It isn’t enough to arm Ukraine enough that it can continue the war. Ukraine must win the war outright. That requires sending it the offensive and defensive weapons systems the UA needs in the numbers and in the timing that the UA needs them. Naysayers in government and Timid Tesses like these editors and their brethren elsewhere in the news media gallery need to get out of the way of that.

Arrogance of an Activist Justice

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The Supreme Court recently lifted a district court judge’s injunction that blocked President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order requiring heads of agencies to work with the Department of Government Efficiency on hiring decisions and developing plans for layoffs. The Court also ruled that it had based its decision on the legality of Trump’s Executive Order, and didn’t rule on whether any reorganization plans broke the law. And

The Government is likely to succeed on its argument that the Executive Order and Memorandum are lawful[.]

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson piped up in her lone dissent.

This was the wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground[.]

This is her Preciousness, and the arrogance of her activism. The Court knows little of what’s actually happening on the ground? But Jackson does know? Or in her shared Court ignorance, she would leave intact an injunction that’s blocking no known ill effects? Of course, highly talented and educated woman that she is, she knows full well that “don’t know” means…”don’t know.”

What she does know, though, as do all of the Justices on the Court (the other eight of whom voted to lift the injunction), is that no hiring decisions or layoff plans have been developed yet, much less begun execution. There is, then, no reason for the injunction, the EO itself being entirely legal.

This is the sort of activism—ignorant, not just ideological—that we can expect to deprecate the Supreme Court under a Progressive-Democrat President and Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Senate.