Constraints on Presidential War Power

Many posts have discussed war powers and the US military.

Matt Glassman:

My view, as discussed last week, is that presidential warmaking is an almost wholly political issue, rather than a legal one. No court is going to stop a war.

That said, I think may people hear "wholly political" and just assume that the president has a free hand to do whatever he/she wants. I completely disagree. In fact, presidents are incredibly constrained by politics when it comes to war.

Take Trump and Iran. What are some of the major political constraints:

1. Military capacity
2. Cooperation of allies
3. Reaction of foreign adversaries
4. Reaction of markets
5. Congressional opinion
6. American public opinion
7. Partisan/base opinion

The first two---military capacity and ally cooperation---are straightforward; they are essentially supply-side constraints. Presidents can only go to war with the military Congress provides. Ditto with allies; absent the ability to use airspace and foreign bases, some operations become impossible. And it's always better to have a coalition of nations fighting the war than going it alone.

The third and fourth items on the list---foreign and market reactions---are constraints because they create immediate negative feedback, political and economic. Trump can't just nuke Tehran because that could easily trigger an escalation to global war, and WW3 with China is a bad outcome. Similarly, now that Iran has closed the strait and oil prices are spiking, the economic costs of the war may soon exceed the benefits, encouraging the president to seek a diplomatic off-ramp.

The final three items---opinions in Congress, the public, and the president's party---are the most purely political. These matter because the president has goals other than the objectives of the war, and negative opinions about the war will inevitably spill over to future political goals, whether they are policy, electoral, or egoist.

Gutting the Diplomatlic Corps

Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

Abigail Williams at NBC

The State Department declined to provide exact numbers. According to the American Foreign Service Association, around 2,000 U.S. diplomats have left the Foreign Service over the last year, either through layoffs or forced retirements, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, experience in crisis response and highly specialized language skills paid for by the U.S. government.

Their departure from a workforce that was estimated to be more than 13,000 in 2024 leaves the U.S. at a critical disadvantage, current and former State Department officials say, at a time when the nation is facing an escalating number of foreign policy crises.

...

The leadership vacuum is large. The ambassadorship in Moldova is still vacant, along with more than half of ambassadorships around the globe, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where a worsening Ebola outbreak began. There is no ambassador to Ukraine, and seasoned diplomat Julie Davis, who has been leading the embassy in Kyiv while simultaneously serving as ambassador to Cyprus, is stepping down next month to join others in retirement.

...

In the Middle East, where the U.S. continues to navigate a war with Iran and the fallout with regional allies, half of the U.S. missions, including four Persian Gulf countries, are without formal U.S. ambassadors. Pakistan and Qatar, where officials have taken on critical mediating roles in negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, are without ambassadors.

The absences contributed to the frantic effort to evacuate thousands of Americans who became stranded, and withdraw personnel when Iran began retaliating across the region in March, current and former diplomats say.

Not good pic.twitter.com/yvodGttLpV

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) June 4, 2026

250

Many posts have discussed patriotism.

 Josephine Walker at Axios:

Dueling events for America's 250th birthday are creating confusion as celebrations ramp up across the U.S.

Why it matters: The disconnect made headlines last week when a group of performers withdrew from on the National Mall, prompting President Trump to step in.

Those concerts were organized by Freedom 250, a White House-established initiative. America 250, a separate, Congress-approved missive, has planned events nationwide in the run-up to Independence Day.

The intrigue: Several of the performers who canceled cited being misled about the event.Country singer Martina McBride said on Instagram that she "was assured this was a nonpartisan event that was meant to celebrate ALL 50 states. ...Yesterday things started changing and what we were told is, in fact, not what is happening."

...

Freedom 250 is planning events that reflect Trump's flair for spectacle.

That includes a UFC fight on the White House South Lawn, an IndyCar race through downtown Washington, D.C., a FIFA World Cup fan zone and the Great American State Fair — both to be held on the National Mall.

Jemar Tisby at The Bulwark:

The issue is not hosting a sporting event, it’s the one they chose and what it says.

If the White House wanted to host a sporting event commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary, they could have chosen “America’s Pastime”—baseball.

And they could have held it at a stadium dedicated to the purpose, not spent tens of millions constructing a temporary arena that may leave scars on the landscape for a long time to come.

Instead they chose cage fighting, the most visceral expression of violence for sport.

What does it mean to normalize blood sport at that address?

Whatever your personal opinion of MMA as a sport, this is a deliberate choice about what power looks like, what celebration looks like, and what America is supposed to mean.

Yet it’s not a departure from this regime’s ethos; it’s right in line with their performance of masculinity.

The Streets of Los Angeles

Many posts have discussed failures of governance in California.

Constance Sommer at LA Reported:

Following this winter’s heavy rains, L.A. motorists reported 6,700 potholes in January, a 49% jump from the previous month. In the past, L.A.’s Bureau of Street Services, also known as StreetsLA, used to try to “repair every pothole within the next business day,” according to a former version of the bureau’s “How Do We Fix Potholes?” page. The current page doesn’t mention repair times at all.

L.A.’s streets are falling apart. At public hearings city workers complain that they can barely keep up with even the most basic street services. Hundreds of street staff were laid off last year. Trucks remain parked at city lots because there aren’t enough people to use them to perform major repairs. Since last July, the city has made do with stopgap measures like plugging potholes and laying down rectangular asphalt patches that stop short of a full resurfacing of the road.

According to the city’s own measurements, 60% of its streets were in good condition a year ago. Now it’s 53%.

Religion and Education

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.

 

The richest and most highly educated religious traditions?

Jews
Hindus
Mainline Protestants

Those in the bottom left?
It's lots of churches in the charismatic and/or Black Church traditions. pic.twitter.com/EUkQqAaALe

— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) May 30, 2026

Faculty Ideology and Campaign Contributions

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

A release from FIRE:

A new study commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression indicates that donations from faculty at top universities have become increasingly one-sided, with the range of opinion becoming concentrated on the left.

“Free speech is not just the right to speak, it is the condition that lets universities test ideas through real disagreement,” FIRE Vice President of Research Angela Erickson said. “Our findings suggest politically active faculty are clustered within a narrow ideological band, which raises serious concerns about whether students and scholars are getting the full benefit of the open inquiry universities promise.”

FIRE provided University of Rochester Professor David Primo with a list of more than 100,000 faculty members at 55 universities that was first compiled for use in the 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report. Primo then analyzed a dataset created by cross-referencing those names with a database of over 850 million state and federal campaign contributions compiled by a Stanford University professor. Faculty members who could be matched with donations were assigned a “CFscore,” a measure used by researchers to estimate a person’s political ideology based on who they donate to.

“Studying faculty campaign contributors provides a unique window into the views of politically active professors,” Primo said. “These data allow us to systematically measure viewpoint diversity at top universities and lay a foundation for strengthening discourse, teaching, and research on college campuses.”

By relying on contribution data rather than voter registration data, Primo was able to measure professors’ ideology instead of just their party affiliation. A Republican professor who gives exclusively to Maine Sen. Susan Collins (CFscore: 0.70) would score differently than a Republican professor giving exclusively to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (CFscore: 1.52), for example.

The average ideology score of faculty donors in the 55-school sample was -1.02. That’s only slightly less left-leaning than some of the most left-wing members of the U.S. Senate, such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who are tied with CFscores of -1.14. Notably, there was no equivalent critical mass of donations on the Republican side.

Tariffs Are Taxes

 Many posts have dealt with tariffs and trade. 

 Kyle Pomerleau at EconoFact:

Tariffs are a tax on imported goods. Tariffs are collected when the tariffed goods enter the United States. Tariffs can be levied either as a fixed percent of the value of an import, a fixed dollar value per imported good, or as a tariff-rate quota, which applies tax when the value of certain imports exceeds a certain threshold (Pomerleau and York 2025).

Like all taxes, tariffs affect the price and quantity of goods on which they are levied. An excise tax increases the price paid by consumers and decreases the price received by sellers of the product. An important issue with any tax is its incidence – by how much do consumer prices rise and by how much does the price received by producers fall? In the case of tariffs, the consumers are domestic residents while the producers are foreign, which has implications for whether the costs of tariffs are borne by American consumers or foreign sellers. The extent to which a tariff is paid by domestic residents is called its pass-through – for example if a 10% tariff results in an increase in the price of domestic goods by 6% then the pass-through is 60%. Research suggests that tariffs are primarily passed through to U.S. importers as higher import prices (Amiti et al 2019) and the extent of price pass-through rises over time. Evidence on the latest round of tariffs suggests that the pass-through is almost 100%, that is, United States consumers are bearing the full costs of tariffs (Gopinath and Neiman 2026). Between March 2025 and May 2026, The price of imported goods rose by 6.8 percent relative to a pre-tariff price trend between March 2025 and May 2026, as measured by a study that tracks the online prices of over 350,000 products sold at five large U.S. retailers. The largest price increases observed were in carpets and other floor coverings (54 percent), other articles of clothing and clothing accessories (24 percent) coffee, tea, and cocoa (16 percent), and fish and seafood (16 percent) (Cavallo, Llamas, and Vazquez, 2025b).

Tariffs that raise the price of imported goods can also result in rising prices of domestically produced goods that compete with those imports. When the price of an imported good rises due to a tariff (or for other reasons), domestic producers who sell goods that compete with those imports raise the price of their goods as well since they have less competitive price pressure from foreign goods (Cavallo, Llamas, and Vazquez, 2025a). Experience from President Trump’s first term suggests that even untaxed complimentary goods can face price increases due to tariffs. For example, the price of clothes dryers rose after tariffs were applied to imported washing machines in 2019. Importantly, the increase in the price of domestically-produced goods generates no tariff revenue for the government.

The burden of tariffs is shared broadly. Research shows that while tariffs burden households of all income levels, they tend to be regressive taxes – that is, they fall proportionally more heavily on lower-income households, who devote a larger share of their income to consumption of goods that are either subject to tariffs or that compete with tariffed imports (Tax Policy Center 2024). As an example, the Tax Policy Center estimated that if the tariffs in place as of December 2025 stayed in place during 2026, they would reduce household after-tax income by 2 percent for the bottom 95 percent of households. At the same time, this tax would reduce after-tax income for the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent by 1.7 and 1.5 percent, respectively.