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Monday Miscellany, 2/23/26

Monday Miscellany, 2/23/26

Last updated on: February 23, 2026 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Monday Miscellany, 2/23/26 2026-02-20T16:58:11-05:00 Gene Veith

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The Supreme Court vetoes Trump’s tariffs. Fun facts about billionaires. A religious liberty ruling with an illuminating frame of the issues.

The Supreme Court Vetoes Trump’s Tariffs

The Supreme Court voted 6-3 to strike down President Trump’s sweeping tariffs that he imposed on virtually all nations on the authority of a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

I know the president is furious, denouncing the judges as “very unpatriotic and disloyal to the Constitution.” But they may have saved his presidency.

First of all, this was clearly the right decision. The Constitution clearly reads, “The Congress shall have Power. . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations” (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3). Congress, not the Executive, whose powers are specified in Article II. This means it’s up to Congress to pass laws regulating international commerce.

Yes, Congress passed the IEEPA “authorizing the President to regulate commerce after declaring a national emergency in response to any unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States which has a foreign source.” But little countries like Ecuador and big countries like Canada and the UK are not posing an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States.” This law does not apply to most of the countries hit with big tariffs. It just doesn’t.

I’m sure there will be Trump supporters who rail against this ruling and the three conservative justices who ruled against him (Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett). But being a conservative judge means following the letter and the intent of the law. It’s the liberal judges who believe in ruling according to political agendas. Frankly, I can’t understand how the three judges who voted no (Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas) can justify their dissent without falling into liberal jurisprudence.

But those judges getting all the abuse have done Trump a favor. The tariffs have not reduced our trade deficit, which reached record heights in 2025. The tariffs did not increase U.S. manufacturing. The tariffs did not increase U.S. employment, but rather led to an increase in unemployment. The tariffs have increased inflation, disrupted supply chains, and hurt farmers.

I know that President Trump will try to pressure Congress to re-impose these tariffs by statute, but he had better hope that Congress will support him by not doing what he demands.

This is because the positive benefits of dropping the tariffs will lead to tangible improvement in the economy and in the well-being of voters, which will help President Trump and his party in November.

A Religious Liberty Ruling with an Illuminating Framing of the Issues

Is it religious discrimination if a religious institution chooses only to hire members of its religion and refuses to hire someone who isn’t?

That legal question has pretty much been resolved when it comes to ministers, thanks to an LCMS church and school taking the issue to the Supreme Court. But what if the potential employee is not a minister?

The Union Gospel Mission of Yakima, Washington, ministers to the poor and homeless with food, shelter, and evangelism. This mission has a policy that all of its employees need to subscribe to its statement of faith, which includes the Christian sexual ethic of no sex outside of heterosexual marriage. Two positions opened up, one in IT and the other in operations, but two of the applicants didn’t go along with the mission’s Christian commitment and sued on the grounds of religious discrimination.

The Ninth Circuit Court, which covers the western states including California, ruled unanimously in the mission’s favor. I was struck by the clarity of the way the court framed the issue, as written by Judge Patrick Bumatay :

If a religious institution sincerely believes that its nonministerial employees must adhere to and live according to its religious principles to accomplish its religious mission, the only way a court could adjudicate a dispute for a plaintiff would be to rule that the religious institution cannot seek that “mission” or that the hiring policy isn’t necessary to that “mission”—inherently religious questions.

For the full ruling, see Union Gospel Mission of Yakima v. Brown. See also Frank DeVito’s discussion of this case in his article for Public Discourse entitled The Ninth Circuit’s Religious Freedom Coup, from which this quote was taken.

DeVito also makes an important point about the larger context of Jefferson’s concept of “the wall of separation” between church and state.”

Jefferson prefaces his famous phrase with a discussion of the limits of government intrusion into religion, not religious intrusion into government. Given the plentiful evidence during the founding era of government-funded religious programs, prayer at government functions and events, and even established state churches, it seems the founders were much more concerned with government interfering with religion than with religion interfering with public life.

Fun Facts about Billionaires

In thinking about billionaires, we must take care not to break the Tenth Commandment.

But an article in the Wall Street Journal–not exactly a bastion of economic populism–has printed an article by Carol Ryan entitled Billionaires’ Low Taxes Are Becoming a Problem for the Economy. with the deck, “Tax avoidance by the superwealthy is an economic issue as well as a political one.”

Its occasion is California’s proposal to slap a tax not only on billionaire’s income but also on the value of their assets, which seems to me problematic. But that’s not the topic of this post. What interested me in the article is just the facts that it includes about this rare company.

For one thing, there aren’t very many of them. California has 255, the most in any state, which Ryan says is one-fifth of the total number. That would come to just 1,275. You could fit them all into a high school gymnasium. In an NFL stadium they would just take up two or three sections. Of course, they’d rather sit in the luxury boxes, but they probably wouldn’t fill them all. In our nation of 330 million people, this amounts to less than 1 in 250,000, about 0.00038% of the population.

While the top 1% by wealth own 32% of the economy and pay 40% of the taxes, the much smaller subset of billionaires own 14%. So that is a lot. Ryan doesn’t say what percentage of the nation’s taxes they pay, but AI said that the 400 wealthiest paid 2.3%.

Here is the most interesting factoid: Billionaires tend to keep their income taxes super low because they don’t take salaries! They own companies that might pay them just $1 a year. Their compensation mostly comes in the form of stock.

To get the cash to live on and to buy their luxury goods, they borrow money, using stock as collateral! Ryan explains:

Billionaires prefer to be paid in shares, which are subject to capital-gains taxes when sold. But they don’t need to sell to fund their lifestyles. Billionaires use borrowed money for living expenses, pledging their shares or other assets as collateral. The interest on the debt is much lower than a capital-gains tax bill would be, and their stock portfolios can continue accumulating paper gains.

So billionaires are in debt, just like ordinary Americans are! That should be consoling.

Furthermore, a third of our billionaires have inherited wealth. They can use trust funds to keep that from estate taxes, and they can pass down those stocks and other assets for generations.

Comments Ryan, “Amassing assets like stocks, borrowing against them rather than selling during the owner’s lifetime, and passing them to the next generation after death is sometimes called the ‘buy borrow die’ tax-avoidance strategy.”

If you ever become a billionaire, now you’ll know what to do.

separation of church and state

Supreme Court's tariff ruling

Trump's tariffs

Union Gospel Mission of Yakima v. Brown.

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