Inside a conservative group’s ongoing battle with Trump

One of the right's most famous economists, the late Milton Friedman, was a scathing critic of something President Donald Trump passionately supports: tariffs. Many of Friedman's arguments, long after his death, are being used by right-wing tariffs opponents — including the Liberty Justice Center, which prevailed in a legal battle against Trump. But according to the Wall Street Journal, the conservative group has been the target of retaliation from MAGA.

WSJ's Lidia Wheeler notes that Liberty Justice Center, led by CEO Sara Albrecht, "spent $3.5 million challenging the legality of President Trump's global tariffs."

"Large companies stood to receive a windfall if the tariffs were struck down as a result of Liberty Justice Center's work," Wheeler reports in WSJ. "Albrecht reached out to some of the companies that had filed for refunds, including Costco, hoping they would pitch in on the legal fight by making a donation to her organization — to no avail. The reply from Costco came quickly. 'Our company's nonprofit donations are focused on education and health efforts, which would not include litigation matters of the type you are pursuing,' the company's general counsel wrote…. The Supreme Court ruled for Albrecht's organization three months later, striking a blow against unbridled presidential power and paving the way for businesses to seek the return of billions of dollars collected by the government."

Wheeler continues, "It was the biggest win in the Liberty Justice Center's 15-year history. The group also paid a price for it, highlighting the perils of taking on the Trump administration."

Although the Liberty Justice Center, according to Wheeler, "has a sterling conservative pedigree," that didn't save the group from MAGA's wrath.

"Until last year," the WSJ reporter observes, "it was best known for challenging public-sector unions, which largely support Democratic candidates. It won a landmark 2018 Supreme Court ruling that found it unconstitutional to force nonunion government employees to pay union fees…. But when it came to challenging Trump's tariffs, the group's most conservative donors started fleeing before the Supreme Court even got involved."

Albrecht told the Journal, "I couldn't convince them that this was the right thing to do."

According to Wheeler, the Liberty Justice Center "spent its typical annual budget on the tariff litigation and says it lost a little over 30 percent of its donors because of the case."

"In the short term," Wheeler reports, "it was able to make up what it lost in donations thanks to a boost in funding from existing benefactors and contributions from new donors, but Albrecht said some of those new donors only gave because of the tariffs case and 'probably won't come back.'"

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