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By Tuck Chimes | Senior Correspondent, Business & Economy
Let me be clear about something from the outset, because I think clarity is important, and clarity is something they teach you at Yale, which is where I went: I have always believed in the rule of law.
Always.
If you've read my work — and I assume you have, because this magazine has a subscriber base and most of those subscribers are, frankly, people like me — you know that I have consistently argued for institutional restraint, judicial independence, and the kind of tempered governance that Edmund Burke would have recognized as the natural inheritance of Western civilization. I wrote my senior thesis at Yale on Burkean conservatism. I mention this not to impress you, but because it is relevant context.
So when the Court of International Trade struck down the Trump administration's tariffs last week — declaring them an unlawful executive seizure of congressional trade authority — I felt, as I imagine most conservatives did, a deep, clarifying satisfaction. This is what we have been saying. This is the argument. The President of the United States does not have the unilateral power to restructure the global trading order on a whim, and it took nine robes and a reading of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to make that plain to everyone.
Conservatism won this week. You're welcome.
Now, I know some of you — the less careful readers, let's say, those who perhaps didn't have access to the kind of rigorous intellectual formation one receives at Yale — may be scratching your heads. You may recall that during the tariff debates of 2018 and 2019, I wrote a series of columns in this very magazine in which I argued, and I'm quoting myself here, that "protective tariffs represent a Burkean commitment to the organic institutions of domestic industry, a legitimate expression of national will against the homogenizing tides of globalist finance." I stand by the spirit of that argument. I stand by the spirit of it completely, which is why I'm so gratified that its spirit has now been vindicated by the court's ruling in the opposite direction.
Some people cannot hold two ideas in their heads at once. I hold them effortlessly. It's a Yale thing.
The deeper point — the real conservative point — is that no president, regardless of party, should have the power to impose sweeping economic penalties without legislative authorization. This was true in 2018. It was true in 2019. It was true when I wrote columns arguing the reverse. Conservatism has never been about outcomes; it's been about process. And the process here, as any Yale-educated thinker would tell you, is what matters. The tariffs themselves were, in retrospect, an interesting experiment. The court ruling against them is the Constitution working exactly as designed. Both things can be celebrated. I choose to celebrate both. Sequentially.
The free market, I have long argued — and I did argue this, in a 2020 piece that I invite you to look up — abhors arbitrary government intervention. Tariffs are arbitrary government intervention. I made this case forcefully, before and after I made the other case, and the continuity of that argument is what distinguishes a genuine conservative intellectual from a mere pundit. Pundits pick a side and stick to it. A Yale man follows the argument wherever it leads, even when it leads somewhere he has already been, from the opposite direction.
I want to take a moment here to acknowledge the critics. There are always critics. These are typically people who read my columns without the benefit of a grounding in Western political philosophy, and who therefore mistake evolution for inconsistency. They are wrong. What they're witnessing is not a reversal. It is dialectical thinking. Thesis, antithesis, and then, when the antithesis wins in federal court, a very confident op-ed reframing the antithesis as the thesis.
That's Burke. Look it up.
What I hope this ruling signals — and what I believe any true conservative must now embrace — is that the global trading system, built on multilateral institutions, rules-based order, and the principle of comparative advantage, must be protected from nationalist impulsivity. Free trade, strong alliances, international cooperation, and robust regulatory frameworks are, at bottom, the conservative position. They always have been. They were when I wrote the columns defending tariffs, and they remain so now that the courts have made the tariff columns moot.
This is a victory for small government, limited executive power, and the invisible hand — which, as I argued extensively at Yale in a seminar I found genuinely stimulating, works best when the government actively supports the conditions for its operation.
Conservatism, properly understood, is really just good governance.
And good governance, properly understood, is really just what I've been saying all along.
Tuck Chimes is IRREVERENT Magazine's Senior Correspondent for Business and Economy. He attended Yale University.