Round-up: Trump v. filibuster. Supreme Court v. Trump tariffs. Trump v. Boko Haram.

Analysis of the week's events

Trump v. the filibuster

Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has been incessantly hitting Senate Republicans with demands to end the filibuster.

The filibuster, in case you’ve forgotten, is a procedural rule in the Senate which means that most types of legislation cannot be passed without at least 60 votes. It’s fairly rare for one of the two parties to have a Senate majority that large - the last time was when Democrats had one after the Obama landslide of 2008. This means that it’s extremely hard to get most things done in the Senate without bipartisan cooperation.

This is supposed to make the Senate more cooperative and conciliatory than the House. By forcing bipartisan cooperation, the logic goes, you end up with decisions that better serve the whole nation.

But this logic has completely broken down in today’s hyper-polarized era. The parties are so far apart that bipartisan cooperation is generally not possible. As a result, the Senate often does… not that much.

As a result, it has become common for hardened partisans to demand that the Senate abandon the filibuster. If that were to happen, legislation could pass with only 50 votes - a threshold that Democrats would have been able to cross during the Biden presidency, and which Republicans could cross now.

The kicker is that Senate rules can already be changed with only 50 votes. So if they wanted to, the Republican Senate majority could turn up tomorrow, overturn the filibuster, the vote to end the government shutdown and do all sorts of other things. In fact, Trump has some specific suggestions for them:

So far, the response from Senate Republicans has not been positive. Even for a group which has gone along with most things Trump has asked of them this year, nuking the filibuster is a step too far - and is likely to remain so.

If asked on the record, Senate Republicans will say that they want to keep the filibuster because it is a cherished norm which makes the Senate a blessed site of mature deliberation. This is a little too cute. As you may have noticed, Senate Republicans are not exactly uniformly committed to either cherished norms or mature deliberation. The truth is that they fear the consequences of ending the filibuster for the hard business of power politics.

Being able to pass whatever legislation you want without reference to the minority party sounds great - but only for as long as you’re not the minority party. Power inevitably changes hands, and when that happens, the filibuster starts to look a lot more attractive.

Republicans have long feared what Democrats might do if they take power in a post-filibuster era. Strangely, Trump’s tweets above have the situation exactly the wrong way around. He’s telling Senate Republicans to end the filibuster so that Democrats cannot make Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. states (“no two state addition”) and reform the Supreme Court (“packing”). But these are actually things they can’t do now - and could do without the filibuster. Senate Republicans know it, and they’re not going to make that world a reality.

There is, however, a much more sinister way to interpret Trump’s demands. You only need to worry about the other party taking control of the Senate again if future elections are actually going to be free and fair. Trump’s calls for a post-filibuster Senate to pass “voter reform” sounds like a blueprint to ensure that they won’t be.

He’s likely to ramp up his pressure to take this step as defeat looms in 2026 and 2028, and unfortunately we have to rely on Senate Republicans to stick to their guns all the while.

Why Trump’s tariffs might lose at the Supreme Court

During oral arguments at the Supreme Court this week, at least six justices seemed very skeptical of Trump’s constitutional authority to impose massive blanket tariffs on imports. That’s enough to strike the tariffs down.

We shouldn’t get carried away yet. Supreme Court decisions don’t always come out in simple, black and white ways, meaning that hostility will not necessarily equate to a complete shutting down of Trump’s authority. And even if these tariffs are struck down, Trump can probably resurrect many of them under different legal authorities, even if that might take a long time and be vulnerable to future court challenges.

But it is worth dwelling on why the court is so hostile to Trump on this one, because it reveals an interesting split in conservative legal thought.

The hostility that the justices voiced earlier this week was based on two key points of constitutional law. The first is the “major questions doctrine”, which says that any policy decision with “vast” economic consequences has to be clearly authorized by Congress. The second is the fact that the constitution make it clear that only Congress has the power to tax the American public, and these tariffs clearly amount to a tax.

But these legal points, important as they are, are not the whole story. This court has proven willing to twist legal points to get to its desired outcome before, and it will doubtless do so again. And conservative jurists tend to also highly value something else which is implicated in this case: presidential power.

Time and again, the conservative Supreme Court majority has taken decisions which bolster presidential power. It is a long-standing principle in conservative legal thought that the presidency ought to have vast powers to determine what is in the American “national interest” and to act accordingly. And that is exactly what Trump is asking them to do again here. So why don’t they do it?

The answer is that not all subjects of presidential power are created equal. The Supreme Court has bolstered Trump’s power against all sorts of people and institutions, especially immigrants and government workers. But in this case, they’re being asked to give the president authority which can be wielded to harm business interests. And that makes a big difference.

The plaintiffs suing to have Trump’s tariffs overturned are not a collection of civil liberties groups, but non-partisan libertarian organizations who see tariffs as a threat to right-wing laissez faire economics. They oppose tariffs as an unlawful imposition on business freedom - another guiding star of conservative jurisprudence.

That’s why it’s comparatively easier for the court to give Trump’s opponents a win here, and why we shouldn’t expect opposition to the president on this issue to mean opposition on others.

Trump v. Boko Haram

Not content with floating military intervention against Venezuela, Trump now has his gaze set on another possible invasion - this time of Nigeria.

The situation in Nigeria is a terrible tragedy. A decades-long insurgency has led to countless civilian deaths, destabilized the region, and been met with a government crackdown which has also involved numerous rights violations. Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province, the two main insurgent groups, have indiscriminately massacred civilians of different ethnic and religious backgrounds.

Some of those victims have been Christians. And Trump now says he is considering sending the U.S. military to protect them.