The U.S. constitutional order has been miraculously successful. It has endured, it has adapted and it has been the foundation for unsurpassed prosperity and material advance. The world has found no better system and, as almost all Americans understand, setting it aside would be catastrophic. For these reasons, a certain reverence — entailing a degree of blindness to its defects — is prudent.

Lately, though, one such defect has become harder to ignore. Disagreements over policy are reflexively pitched as arguments about constitutional foundations. As a result, rhetoric escalates and polarization intensifies.

Commonsense compromise is harder when disagreements over tariffs, regulation or immigration policy, to name just a few, are less about practical trade-offs and more about regard for democracy and commitment to the rule of law. Paradoxically, dragging the Constitution into every political dispute also threatens the constitutional order — by framing the courts as unaccountable political players and lowering the electorate’s respect for their role.

Consider how rare it is to find politicians or expert observers who think last year’s Liberation Day tariffs were both stupid policy and constitutionally sound; or that creating powerful independent agencies is both necessary for good government and constitutionally wrong; or that birthright citizenship is constitutionally mandatory and at the same time absurd. In all these cases, the merits of policy and the constitutional limits to executive power are separate questions. At least, they should be.

As an unrepentant free trader, I was pleased that the Supreme Court ruled the Liberation Day tariffs unlawful — but far from persuaded by its constitutional rationale. This turned in part on whether tariffs are a way to “regulate” trade: They aren’t, according to the court, so the president was acting beyond the powers delegated to him by the relevant legislation. Odd, given that the whole point of tariffs is to regulate trade. But so be it.

The recent paired decisions on independent agencies and the Federal Reserve are even odder, because — released simultaneously as if to underline the point — they appear to contradict each other.

In the first, a majority of the justices acted on their guiding principle of the “unitary executive,” according to which the Constitution forbids the creation of a fourth branch of government without accountability to citizens. Presidential oversight is required to supply that accountability, the court maintained, which means the president can fire agency commissioners at will.

In the second regarding the Fed, the court — same author, Chief Justice John Roberts, different majority — described the long history of U.S. national-bank independence and the importance for the economy of preserving this tradition. Accordingly, it ruled that the president can’t fire Fed governors at will (a power which, by the way, the president wasn’t asserting). In other words, said the court, the Fed is in effect a fourth branch of government with no direct accountability to citizens — and, bearing in mind the treatment of the first national bank bearing little resemblance to a modern central bank, this is constitutionally correct.

Again, as a practical matter, the court was right to make that puzzling distinction and recognize the unique importance of central-bank independence in conducting monetary policy. But the cases’ competing rationales are still bewildering. The awkward truth, surely, is that Fed independence is both empirically essential and constitutionally incorrect. If that cannot be admitted, and if amending the Constitution to put things right is impossible, then agonized judicial contortions might be the best available option.

The ruling on birthright citizenship is the converse of the Fed decision — bad policy, correct on the law. The Fourteenth Amendment says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The court’s conservatives argued that “subject to the jurisdiction” is more complicated than it looks and, correctly understood, imposes further requirements regarding parents’ status and/or domicile. That’s a stretch. The plain meaning has been generally accepted for decades and seems clear enough.

Yet, as policy, awarding citizenship solely by place of birth is questionable at best. Most countries weigh other factors as well, or instead, including descent and/or parents’ legal status. That seems sensible — not least because pure birthright citizenship undeniably rewards illegal immigration, which is something most citizens want to discourage.

Less recognized is that by creating “accidental Americans” — those born here to mothers visiting however briefly — it imposes burdens as well as benefits. A baby whose parents never intended to stay might be raised abroad, a citizen not just of the U.S. but also of the country he sees as home, speaking a different language, never regarding himself as American or (hard as this is to imagine) wishing to be one. On the one hand, unlike many Americans actually living in America, this unwitting foreigner would be able to run for president; on the other, he’s broken U.S. laws by failing to file U.S. tax returns, report his foreign assets, or register for the draft. (Ask former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.)

I don’t doubt that immigrants are good for the U.S. (How could I? I’m one of them.) The country would be smart to admit more, not fewer — especially those with skills in short supply. But this doesn’t make me a supporter of birthright citizenship. On this point, the Constitution says one thing; common sense, alert to modern realities, says something else. As with tariffs, as with independent agencies and the Fed, why is this dissonance so hard to admit?

Well, as I mentioned at the outset, blindness to defects sometimes serves a purpose. The blurring of policy choices and constitutional analysis is certainly objectionable on intellectual grounds — motivated reasoning disguised as smart analysis is annoying — but so far as the Supreme Court is concerned, clarity could easily yield worse results.

In his concurrence in the independent-agencies case, Justice Neil Gorsuch — a proponent of clarity come what may — admits it. The ruling moves power from unelected bureaucrats to the White House, as the Constitution requires, he says, and this will be dangerous unless Congress and the courts balance the shift by playing their full part in the constitutional order.

This Congress? Is he serious? Compare that with the chief justice, who leans conservative but has made the tortured pragmatic compromise his specialty — hence his tentative dispensation for the Fed, from which Gorsuch dissented. Roberts’ reward is to be bitterly criticized by liberals and conservatives alike. But trapped between a willfully impotent Congress and a president intent on exerting maximum power, his court can often do no better than to blur the line between what’s lawful and what’s wise.

He and his colleagues lead the last branch of government attentive to its duties. They’re a special case. Politicians, lawyers, academics and commentators have no such excuse.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Clive Crook is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering economics. Previously, he was deputy editor of the Economist and chief Washington commentator for the Financial Times.

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