Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s concurring opinion released on Friday after the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s tariffs concluded with a paean to Congress that read like a requiem for a bygone era of legislative power.
“Yes, legislating can be hard and take time,” wrote Justice Gorsuch, a Trump appointee who is part of the court’s conservative majority. “And yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man.”
It was a description of governing completely at odds with what is currently underway across the street from the Supreme Court at the Capitol, where Republicans controlling the House and the Senate have ceded their power to one man — Mr. Trump — on a variety of issues. In essence, they are acting as if they have no wisdom to tap, or no business doing so.
Most of Mr. Trump’s G.O.P. allies condemned the ruling, firmly rejecting the idea of insisting on their own branch of government’s constitutional role. Of the few Republican senators who cheered it as a triumph for checks and balances, some had repeatedly voted against blocking some of the sweeping duties Mr. Trump unilaterally imposed, wary of crossing him. And in the House, G.O.P. leaders used a procedural move for nearly a year to prevent lawmakers from even having to take such a vote.
Asked at a news conference at the White House on Friday whether he now planned to work with Congress to impose the kinds of sweeping tariffs he prefers, Mr. Trump said he had no intention of doing so.
“I don’t have to,” he said. “I have the right to do tariffs.”
That has been a position that Republican leaders have largely preferred not to question.
“The tariffs have been a tool that the president has used very effectively to level the playing field and put America back on top, and I think it’s wrong for Congress to step in the middle of that,” Speaker Mike Johnson said in an interview on Fox Business last week, before six Republicans joined nearly all Democrats in a vote to end tariffs on Canada.
It was hard not to detect a note of reproach for the current dysfunctional state of affairs in Congress in Justice Gorsuch’s reflections about the virtues of legislating, in which, he wrote, “deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions.”
“For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent,” he added. “For others, it may not seem so obvious.”
Most Republicans in Congress appear to fall into the latter category. They have sought to give Mr. Trump broad latitude on nearly every issue of significance, including powers normally jealously guarded by legislators, such as the authority to impose taxes and tariffs, to allocate federal spending and to use military force.
Most of the major elements of his agenda have been accomplished via executive action, with the exception of the tax and spending cut legislation Republicans pushed through last year using the partisan reconciliation process — hardly the “broad support to survive the legislative process” that Justice Gorsuch wrote was vital to enacting enduring policies. The argument among many conservatives is that urgent action is needed to bring a vast federal bureaucracy to heel.
They have not made any major moves to exercise oversight over Mr. Trump’s legally questionable military moves off the coast of South America, including the raid on Venezuela’s capital that ended in the seizure of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, or the continued military campaign against people it accuses of drug smuggling in the Pacific and the Caribbean that has killed more than 100. As the president teases an impending military strike against Iran, there is little indication that he has consulted with Congress.
Lawmakers sat idly by after the White House informed them it planned to use a rare maneuver to skirt a vote and cancel nearly $5 billion in foreign aid funding that they had already approved.
“Not my lane” has become the go-to reply among Republicans asked questions about any number of Mr. Trump’s actions. Mr. Johnson has used some iteration of the phrase to respond to questions about whether it was appropriate for Mr. Trump to accept the gift of a jet from Qatari leaders; whether he supported the ouster of the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and whether he would support Mr. Trump pardoning the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, though he added such a move would give him “great pause.”
The few expressions of pushback that have emerged have largely been futile, and instigated by Republicans who are set to retire at the end of this congressional session or cut rare maverick streaks, such as Senator Rand Paul and Representative Thomas Massie, both Kentucky libertarians who posted Justice Gorsuch’s words admiringly on social media.
Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, one of the few Republicans in the House who has forced votes to overturn Mr. Trump’s tariffs and is set to retire next year, said in an interview on CNN on Friday that one of the arguments G.O.P. leaders had used to keep their members from breaking was that “the president will just veto this if it does pass, so it’s only symbolic.”
“I think it persuaded some, but we have this ruling now that so clearly puts the power back in Congress’s hands, the House’s hands,” Mr. Bacon said. “We have to stand up on our own two feet and use these authorities, because that’s what the founders intended.”
He, too, posted a screenshot of Justice Gorsuch’s conclusion on social media on Friday, calling his homage to the role of the legislative branch “perfect words.”
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
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