Opinion | Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy

I understand the desire of many Americans not to fund ideological projects that run counter to their values. But Christians are turning on the programs and groups that they helped create. That won’t solve our budget crisis. It won’t end the culture war. It will, however, harm the people Scripture commands us to care for.

There is nothing woke about medicine or food.

Some other things I did

Steve Bannon inspired my Sunday column. When my colleague Ross Douthat interviewed him a couple of weeks ago, Bannon said, “Trump came down in June of 2015, and for 10 years there’s been no real work done to even begin to understand populism, except that the deplorables are an exotic species like at the San Diego Zoo.” This made me laugh. Here’s why:

Ever since Trump began winning Republican primaries in 2016, there has been a desperate effort to understand populism. JD Vance is the vice president in part because of that effort. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which came out shortly after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, was a monumental best seller because so many Americans — including liberal Americans — wanted to understand the culture and ideas that brought us Trump.

If you consume political media, you’ve no doubt seen the countless focus groups of Trump voters, and you’re familiar with the man-on-the-street interviews with Trump supporters at Trump rallies. We’ve read books, watched documentaries and listened to podcasts.

And if you live in Trump country, as I do, you’ll find that Trump voters are very eager to explain themselves. This is not a quiet movement. They don’t exactly hide their interests and passions.

On Monday, we published my audio interview with Judge Jeffrey Sutton, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. I wanted to ask him to define originalism, the philosophy that guides a majority of the court. I also asked him to describe the court’s power to enforce its judgments:

French: Let’s talk about how judicial decisions are enforced. What are the tools at your disposal to enforce a decision? In my life, in my litigation career, I never really thought that through because once we got a decision from the court, everybody just did it. But what are the enforceability tools that reside with the judiciary? Do you have any real substantial tools?

Sutton: Well, not really. We famously do not have the power of the Treasury. We don’t have the power of the sword. We don’t have the military to enforce our decisions. We issue judgments, and those judgments are enforceable. We have U.S. marshals. So, for example, if someone is convicted of a crime, there’s a U.S. marshal to enforce the judgment.

But when you think about the court invalidating a state law, that’s a little trickier. All we can do is issue the judgment. And in fact, let’s just say it’s a provision in a state statute. We say it’s unconstitutional — it’s still there. There’s no power of erasure. We don’t take it off the books. It’s still sitting there. The question is whether someone relies on it.

I think the reason, at least historically, in the last 100 years people have relied on those things are twofold. One is trust and faith in the courts, which, of course, is really important. But the other is the self-interest problem that if you’re a government that refuses to follow a judgment, you’re going to get a lot of lawsuits.

You’re going to have to pay attorneys’ fees for all of those lawsuits. That gets very expensive very quickly. And then you might be sanctioned, which — contempt can mean going to jail if you’re an officer of a government, or sanction could be monetary.

So I think those are the reasons. But you’re right. And as a matter of American history, there have been times where individuals and even governments and president of the United States, in one case, are not willing to follow U.S. Supreme Court decisions. So it’s not something we want to have happen again.

Finally, I joined my friends and colleagues on “Matter of Opinion” to try to answer the question: Where is the resistance? I expressed optimism that the courts would remain independent, and as the injunctions against Trump’s actions accumulate, I remain optimistic:

But as a general matter, it’s just an empirical fact that the Supreme Court has rejected Trump and MAGA arguments just again and again and again. Even Democrats arguing in front of majority-Republican-nominated courts have done better than Trump did.

So I do think there is absolutely reason to think that the courts will uphold the basic constitutional structure. And in fact, there’s even more reason now to think so. Because some of the decisions that a lot of my friends to my left really don’t like, like the OSHA vaccine case or Loper Bright, which overruled the Chevron doctrine, actually had the effect of really restricting executive autonomy.

And so right now, we’re going into — Trump is exerting the most executive autonomy we’ve seen in the modern era. At the same time, as a matter of constitutional doctrine, our presidents have less executive autonomy, as a matter of law, than any time in the modern era. So we have a collision here.