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The newly passed North American trade deal has some serious flaws, but the agreement’s passage through Congress is a welcome sign that there will be greater stability for companies doing business across the continent.

At least until President Donald Trump lashes out again.

In approving the new United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) last week, Congress missed an opportunity to put some much-needed limits on the president’s unilateral authority to issue tariffs for specious “national security” reasons. That’s despite the fact that prominent Senate Republicans repeatedly signaled their intention to use the USMCA as an opportunity to attach provisions that would prevent presidents from taking brash actions to raise trade barriers, as Trump did in March 2018 when he suddenly slapped new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum.

Those tariffs were imposed by invoking Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which grants presidential authority to quickly impose tariffs on national security grounds. Pretty much everyone besides Ron Vara agrees that imported aluminum and steel are not threats to American national security, so Trump’s actions served mostly to highlight the vast powers presidents have to dictate the terms of trade.

“I’m certainly not confident that the USMCA prevents the president from taking other actions that could undermine the trading relationship with our two largest trading partners,” says Inu Manak, a research fellow for trade policy at the Cato Institute.

Start with what’s missing from the deal itself, Manak says in a recent episode of the Cato Daily Podcast. The deal does not grant Canada and Mexico an exemption from future Section 232 tariffs—though it did grant a partial exemption to the existing steel and aluminum tariffs. But Trump has repeatedly talked about imposing similar “national security” taxes on cars imported from Europe or Mexico, bringing the idea up again just this week while meeting with world leaders in Davos, Switzerland.

“So the president could technically still impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico on other issues that he thinks are a concern for national security,” Manak says. “At the end of the day, there’s still a lot of uncertainty left over, and a lot of leeway for the president to do what he wants.”

This issue goes beyond Trump. In the first 54 years that Section 232 was on the books, presidents had invoked its powers only six times. Trump’s repeated use of it to reshape global trade is effectively redefining the law’s powers away from concerns about national security and turning Section 232 into just another tool for presidents to make policy.

That’s one reason some members of Congress—mostly Republicans, but some Democrats too—have been wary about Trump’s unilateral tariffs. Even the ones who don’t disagree with what he’s doing worry about what might happen when someone else is in the White House.

For a long time, it looked like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) was willing to play hardball with Trump to limit presidential tariff power. Grassley chairs the Senate Finance Committee, which handles trade issues, and he threatened to block Trump’s USMCA deal unless the White House lifted the tariffs on steel and aluminum from Mexico and Canada. Trump backed down.

Grassley also said repeatedly that he was considering legislation to stop Trump’s abuse of Section 232. “Congress has delegated too much authority to the president of the United States,” Grassley told reporters in June. “This is not about Trump. It’s about the balancing of power.”

By late August, Grassley was saying the Senate Finance Committee would soon consider two bills to limit Trump’s Section 232 powers: the Bicameral Congressional Trade Authority Act, sponsored by Sens. Pat Toomey (R–Penn.) and Mark Warner (D–Va.), and the Trade Security Act, sponsored by Sens. Rob Portman (R–Ohio) and Doug Jones (D–Ala.).

The Toomey-Warner bill is the better of the two. It would give Congress the ability to block future tariffs imposed under Section 232, limit the the definition of “national security” in the law, and require the Pentagon to sign off on the tariff declaration—as opposed to the Commerce Department, which handles it now. Congress would have 60 days to review and vote on any proposed Section 232 tariffs.

The Portman-Jones bill would require Congress to pass a resolution disapproving of a tariff in order to revoke it, while Toomey-Warner would require congressional assent before tariffs could be imposed. This would essential force Congress to be part of the discussion, removing the possibility that a do-nothing legislature would allow a president to act unilaterally.

By November, it was becoming clear that Trump’s USMCA would pass through Congress without reforms to Section 232. Grassely, in remarks given on the Senate floor, said the reforms had been delayed by “stakeholders who are profiting from tariff protection” and colleagues who don’t want to upset Trump.

Earlier this month, Politico reported that Grassley still sees Section 232 reforms as a top priority for 2020. But in passing the USMCA without adding limits to Section 232, Congress may have given away its best leverage to force changes. After all, Trump can veto whatever bill might eventually pass—and if Grassley is having this much difficulty simply getting some reforms out of his committee, it’s unlikely there is enough support to override a presidential veto.

That is how presidential power expands. Congress delegates poorly. Presidents gradually ignore limits on how their power can be used. Then they pass along an aggrandized executive branch to the next guy (or girl) in line.

Congressional Republicans may regret their passive response to Trump’s Section 232 abuses when a President Sanders or Warren imposes tariffs for his or her own protectionist reasons—or to fight emissions, as some on the left are already suggesting. But they’ll only have themselves to blame.

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Michelle Carter was released from prison yesterday for good behavior, several months ahead of the scheduled end of her 15-month sentence. I previously blogged about the case, in which Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging her boyfriend to commit suicide, here, here, and here.

Last week, the Supreme Court (unfortunately, in my view) denied cert in the case.

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“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth,” said climate activist and Time magazine person-of-the-year Greta Thunberg before the United Nations in the summer of 2019. “How dare you!”

Some praised Thunberg’s performance as a stinging rebuke to the rich and powerful for failing to put the survival of the planet above their own needs. Others saw the exploitation of a young woman with emotional problems for propagandistic ends.

There’s no question that Thunberg’s style of environmentalism—strident, urgent, and critical of global capitalism—has gained a strong foothold in contemporary politics.

A 2019 paper from the journal Bioscience, co-signed by more than 11,000 scientists, asserted that Earth’s population “must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced.” And some politicians have questioned the morality of having children at all.

Fears of overpopulation and ecological disaster are also beginning to manifest on the far right, mixed in with an anti-immigrant animus. This logic was expressed in its most dramatic and twisted form in the 2019 “ecofascist” manifestos of mass shooters in both New Zealand and Texas.

Whether contemporary proponents of these ideas know it or not, they are all the intellectual heirs of the misguided 18th-century thinker Robert Thomas Malthus, who believed that when human population increased, famine and environmental destruction would ensue.

Reason‘s science correspondent Ron Bailey, who is the author of the 2015 book The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century, says that Malthus failed to see that as human population increased, so too would livestock and crop populations with the help of ever-improving agricultural technology, which is why food availability steadily increased over the past two centuries, outpacing population growth.

“Basically, the Malthusian prescription turns out to be completely wrong,” says Bailey.

In the contemporary world, Malthusianism was most famously expressed through the work of ecologist Paul Ehrlich, especially in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, which predicted that through the 1970s and ’80s “hundreds of millions would starve to death.”

Ehrlich, who still holds an endowed professorship at Stanford, didn’t respond to our interview request. But his proposed solutions at the time included taxing diapers, subsidizing vasectomies, and even spiking food aid and water supplies with sterilizing drugs and then holding a lottery for access to the antidote.

Ehrlich compared humanity to cancer, writing, “We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer.”

Similarly, ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968 compared humanity to overbreeding cattle, writing, “The freedom to breed is intolerable.”

Ehrlich turned out to be as wrongheaded as Malthus. In the half-century after Ehrlich made his dire prediction, calories available per capita steadily increased in just about every region of the world thanks largely to improved agricultural techniques and technology.

“Humans are not only consumers—we’re also producers,” says Bailey. “We’re able to create new things to use resources in better and better ways over time.”

And yet world hunger has yet to be eradicated, with the United Nations reporting that about 10 percent of the global population is undernourished. And perhaps it’s true that past trends don’t predict the future.

Karen Pitts, who is a member of the Sierra Club and ran a Northern California sub-committee on population growth, is concerned that the world won’t be able to accommodate a population that’s expected to peak at 11 billion by 2100. She became interested in the topic after a trip to China in 1996.

“As you flew over the country, every space was taken up by housing,” says Pitts. “Whether or not they produce enough food is a big question and we really can’t take the risk of being wrong.”

Is it really possible that the world could run out of food?

While the International Food Policy Research Institute projects that farmers will have to produce 70 percent more food over the next 30 years to feed everyone on the planet, the technology already exists to accomplish that goal. Agronomist Paul Waggoner calculates that if all farmers became as efficient as today’s U.S. corn growers, the world could feed 10 billion people today on half as much land.

As humanity continues moving into cities, the efficiency of food production will also grow and new opportunities for ecological protection will emerge because this allows for the restoration of forests and other ecosystems on the land that migrants leave behind, Bailey points out.

Today’s Malthusians are most concerned about the disruptive effects of climate change. Citing global warming and habitat destruction, documentarian David Attenborough described humanity as a “plague upon the Earth.”

Meanwhile, the Bioscience paper signed by 11,000 scientists projects total societal collapse if population isn’t managed properly.

“I think that there’s a kind of a catastrophizing, apocalyptic undercurrent,” says Ted Nordhaus, founder of the Breakthrough Institute, which advocates technological solutions to environmental problems. He believes the environmental movement has long been hindered by its anti-growth paradigm.

“Conventional environmental ideology posits human development and environmental protection, oppositionally, and I have exactly the opposite view,” he says.

Nordhaus says that the most effective way to deal with climate change is by promoting policies that accelerate economic growth.

Most of today’s environmentalists don’t openly advocate for the draconian population-control measures pushed by Ehrlich and other Malthusians in the 1970s.

Karen Pitts says she just wants more sex education and greater access to birth control in the developing world, pointing to a project she participated in with Tanzania’s local population where the introduction of contraception drastically reduced unwanted pregnancies.

“And it was very easy to do, surprisingly easy,” she says. “Those women wanted family planning.”

Funding greater access to birth control and education for women in developing countries was also a recommendation of the Bioscience paper. It’s also a policy agenda of the U.N. and many leading NGOs like the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation.

Nordhaus says such measures can help at the margins but ultimately miss the big picture, which is that as wealth increases, fertility rates naturally fall as families invest more resources in fewer children.

“The real drivers of longterm fertility decline and population stabilization around the world are just kind of garden variety economic development, which a lot of the same people signing those documents are actually saying is the problem not the solution,” says Nordhaus.

The Biosciences paper argues that economic growth is driving overconsumption of resources and says “our goals need to shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems.”

“I don’t think we’re keeping up with population growth and increased consumption,” says Pitts. “As soon as we find new ways to do it, our consumption increases. That’s the problem.

Pitts is right that people in wealthier societies tend to consume resources and generate greenhouse gas at rates that are orders of magnitude higher than those in the third world.

But Nordhaus points out that when poor societies become wealthy there are more people positioned to help solve environmental problems in the only way that really works—with new technology.

“Wealthier, more developed societies are both better positioned to adapt to issues, to problems like climate change and climate impacts,” says Nordhaus. “They are also better positioned to develop and deploy new technology.”

And so Nordhaus advocates for greater reliance on clean, abundant energy like nuclear power to fuel advanced economies towards possibly innovating even lower impact alternatives.  But the third-world may still need to rely on traditional fossil fuels on its path to prosperity and population stabilization.

“When you get down to the bottom of it, it is just ultimately a question of how rapidly Africa develops economically,” says Nordhaus.

Malthus wasn’t completely wrong about the tendency of humans to deplete resources, says Bailey. But Malthus failed to see that new ways of organizing society would ameliorate the problem.

“The world understood the role of property rights, the rule of law,” says Bailey. “And this dramatically changed the incentive structures that people had prior to that.”

Bailey says environmentalists such as Naomi Klein, who argue that capitalism and the health of the planet are at war, have the formula backwards.

“[Klein] wants to replace it with some sort of communitarian socialism. I would suggest to you that doing that would exactly bring back the Malthusian conditions that we used to live in,” says Bailey.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by John Osterhoudt, James Lee Marsh, and Meredith Bragg.

Photo credits: Greta Thunberg in train station, Hansson Krister/ZUMA Press/Newscom; David Attenborough at conference, David Perry/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Greta Thunberg and others on stage at UN, Jacques Witt/SIPA/Newscom; Greta Thunberg speaking at UN, JEMAL COUNTESS/UPI/Newscom; Greta Thunberg smiling and listening at UN, Abaca Press/Roses Nicolas/Abaca/Sipa USA/Newscom; Starving baby, Nie Yunpeng Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Starving kids’ hands, Nie Yunpeng Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; 

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Does the impeachment and potential removal of President Trump threaten to punish routine political conduct due to partisan disagreement? My co-blogger Josh Blackman makes the case for this view in today’s New York Times. He makes some very important points that highlight how some advocates for the President’s impeachment and removal have oversold their claims and made careless arguments. His piece also makes a more careful and nuanced argument against impeachment than has been made by the President’s defenders. I think Josh’s piece underscores some of the practical consequences of the failure of House Democrats and their allies to more forthrightly attempt to engage those outside of their base in their effort as well. All that said, I strongly disagree with Josh’s bottom line. While the risk of using impeachment to advance partisan political goals is a real threat, the case that President Trump’s conduct justifies impeachment and removal remains standing.

The historical episodes Josh highlights make the point that Presidents routinely consider the political consequences of their decisions, including whether certain actions will benefit them politically, even when more weighty considerations are at hand. It is a mistake to resist these claims (or to pretend, as some Democratic partisans do, that weighty decisions made by recent Presidents were not influenced by political calculations). But in an effort to draw a parallel between such conduct by past Presidents and the conduct of President Trump, Josh and I part ways.

In his op-ed, Josh writes:

What separates an unconstitutional “abuse of power” from the valorized actions of Lincoln and Johnson? Not the president’s motives. In each case, a president acted with an eye toward “personal political benefit.” Rather, Congress’s judgment about what is a “legitimate policy purpose” separates the acclaimed from the criticized. Preserving a unified nation during the Civil War? Check. Creating a vacancy so the first African-American can be appointed to the Supreme Court? Check. But asking a foreign leader to investigate potential corruption? Impeach.

This framing, in my view, engages in a bit of bait-and-switch, and thus obscures what is actually at issue. The charge against President Trump is not that he wanted an actual investigation of corruption in Ukraine (however misguided such a request may have been), but that he did not care about whether there was an investigation at all. As virtually all of the evidence in the record shows, what he asked for was the announcement of an investigation, and that he had no interest in combating actual corruption of any kind. This difference may seem small, but it is key – and Josh’s argument only works if this distinction is obscured.

Central to the argument for impeachment and removal is that the President engaged in the sort of conduct that the founders identified as justifying including impeachment in the Constitution: Using the nation’s foreign policy as a tool for personal benefit, and thereby betraying the public trust.

The announcement of an investigation into Burisma and the Bidens could benefit President Trump’s personal political ambitions, yet there is no plausible argument – at least no plausible argument that I have seen or heard – that the mere announcement of an investigation could or would do anything to advance any legitimate anti-corruption agenda. Further, there is now ample evidence that those helping Trump push for the announcement of an investigation, such as Rudy Giuliani, were explicitly acting on behalf of Trump himself in his personal capacity, and not the office of the President, let alone the nation. If one disbelieves such evidence, and genuinely believes the President sought an actual investigation into actual corruption, that could be a reason to conclude that no impeachable offense occurred, but the evidence for this view is decidedly lacking.

If there is evidence that Trump was actually seeking a genuine investigation, and not merely an announcement, we have not seen it. Those who might be able to substantiate such a claim, such as Ambassador John Bolton or OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, have not been allowed to testify, and the Administration has resisted releasing documents or other materials that might support this characterization of events. The evidence we have, on the other hand, supports the claim that the President wanted a politically useful announcement, and did not care at all about corruption in Ukraine, actual or imagined. In other words, while one could argue that a request for an actual investigation would have been within the bounds of expected (if regrettable) behavior by an elected official, the evidence for such an interpretation is not in the record. And as the President has acknowledged, any as-yet-undisclosed evidence on this question is within the White House’s control, but they have refused to let it come to light. That, in itself, is telling.

As I have made clear, I do not believe the request for an announcement of an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma in exchange for aid and other assistance is the only impeachable offense the President has committed. Among other things, the President’s request that White House Counsel create false records so as to mislead investigators is no less impeachable than President Clinton’s dishonest conduct of decades ago, yet the House did not highlight these other misdeeds. Insofar as one can argue that impeachment and removal should be based upon a pattern of conduct, and not a single event, this was an unforced error.

I also question many of the choices House Democrats have made throughout this process, from failing to openly acknowledge that early investigations were related to impeachment and submitting excessive and overbroad document requests, to overstating or exaggerating evidence of “Russian collusion” and other offenses and failing to build or present a cross-ideological argument for what constitutes impeachable conduct. (My co-blogger Keith Whittington would have made an excellent witness at that hearing.) These missteps may well matter politically and may unduly complicate what should be a rather straightforward argument. On that question, we’ll have to let history be the judge.

All that said, it is a mistake to suggest that the President’s conduct is business-as-usual or that impeachment represents an effort to criminalize political differences, and a mistake to suggest that all that’s at issue is a misguided and potentially politically motivated request for an investigation. If all that were true, I might well agree with Josh’s bottom line, but it’s not and so I don’t.

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