*edit
If the president doesn’t back down, we’ve crossed the rubicon.
Congress has the exclusive power to declare wars per the constitution.)
(Obviously, in practice that's about as relevant congress having the sole authority over taxes, including tariffs.)
(I agree that in practice, a war is a war, whether your nation's laws officially call it as such or not doesn't make much of a difference.)
At least the American public does recognize them as wars, so there's that at least.
I'm not sure this is accurate.
We have plenty of "wars" that aren't wars. Such as the annual "war on Christmas".
Do we recognize them as "wars"? Or do we just use the word?
I say '(mostly)' because while the 'war on Christmas' and WWII are clear cut cases, the war on drugs is an example that sometimes skirts closer to the border. Though it's still very much a metaphorical war.
Whatever they say always appears to be post-hoc rationalization to explain what would otherwise be illegal actions.
They seem to have mostly given up on caring to find such things ahead of time.
If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does it have?
To make it short, I agree with you.
If they followed the law congress could make the thing happen. But I don't think think independent thinking is allowed in the GOP, and it might force their hand if they had to actually put it to a vote ...
They ran through several rounds where they couldn't even pick a house majority leader among their own party.
The tariffs would be very difficult considering each of their local concerns.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_balanced_budget_amendme...
The American debt limit regularly shuts down the government, but debt still keeps piling up. The German debt brake doesn't seem to shut down the government, but actually lead to a substantial drop in the debt-to-gdp ratio.
Probably the shorts who get a text from Kushner or someone else in the inner circle ahead of Trumps next public rant. Take profit then go long for when Trump gets embarrassed at the days low and flips his position again.
Trump and Peter Navarro (along with his advisor "Ron Vara") really think tariffs are a windfall of government funding. They *really* want them.
Sneak in a massive regressive tax hike and just use bombast and cult-like rhetoric to pretend that if any of it hits consumers -- and 100% of it will -- it's really just evil Walmarts and other nefarious vendors who caused that.
The US federal balance sheet is a spectacular disaster, and Trump's Big Massive Deficit Bill is going to make it much worse. Americans need to settle in for the reality that higher taxes are going to be a near term reality.
I hope this judgement stands, however, trade actually works out really well for the US economy and its job market. Yes, we don't often manufacture the thing, but we have huge roles in designing those things and packing them with software. Even China is trying to get in on that while they offload manufacturing to robots and countries that are earlier on in their development.
They struggled to pick leaders among their own party members numerous times.
In chess you never capture the king. Similarly, the way to fight this is have arrested the lower rung players e.g. the tax collectors. (And ICE agents conducting illegal arrests.)
And in penultima, sometimes the king isn't the real target, and attempting to capturing it destroys random other pieces instead.
None of those deaths are in swing districts.
Fetterman was always a right of center politician, the only reason he isn't a Republican is that the Republicans simply do not do moderates anymore.
There has to be limits to this though, otherwise in (self-declared) wartime you have a dictator (cf Julius Caesar DICT PERP - all the power, all the time).
Do not pretend otherwise.
I'm disgusted with the executive branch's actions and congressional GOP's enablement. And, since the administration at times seems to want a fig leaf of legality, maybe the bill would make a difference after all by giving them more coverage. But, overall, I'm not sure that it's the "game over" step change that some commentary makes it sound like it is.
I could be misunderstanding - comments / counterarguments welcome.
Justice Alito and Justice Thomas in particular latch on to any fig leaf of legality to excuse the administration's out-of-court admissions of intent to break the law [1]:
> If courts pay more attention to out-of-court presidential and Administration statements, that will be another example of how the “presumption of regularity”—”the courts’ baseline assumption that government officials act lawfully and in good faith,” as Alan Rozenshtein puts it—is in serious jeopardy. Justice Alito’s dissent to the A.A.R.P. order, in which Justice Thomas joined, shows that those two justices remain content to rely on the Government’s representation’s in court—and vexed that their colleagues apparently feel differently.
> I'm not sure how much difference that bill's clause makes in practice.
There are at least three massive problems aside from undermining the role of courts in enforcing their interpretations of the law.
- The clause applies to both government-associated defendants and non-governmental defendants. [2]
- Federal Rule 65(c) does not apply to final injunctions, but the wording of the clause might apply to final injunctions. [2]
- The clause applies retroactively.
[1] https://blog.dividedargument.com/p/in-the-trump-20-era-the-c...
[2] https://blog.dividedargument.com/p/the-house-judiciary-commi...
Campaign finance
Trading on privileged information
Voting as a bloc and not in favor of their constituents
Being a useless and ignorable vocal opposition when their bloc is not in power, ignoring indiscretions when their bloc is in power
It seems like the parent is clearly asking for a concrete example.
Despite promises to "repeal Obamacare" they never did repeal it... or even change it much at all. It was just too popular / the consequences too much to consider.
The joke at the time being that the Republicans would repeal Obamacare and replace it with the Affordable Care Act ;)
FWIW, Nixoncare, totally blocked by Ted Kennedy because the dems didn't want Nixon's name on anything else that was nice (the Clean Air Act President kept claiming he'd end Johnson's war in Vietnam and then he had the gall to open relations with China!), was more like the single-payer health care Obama ran on but could not produce.
Also: Disclaimer, I'm absolutely not a conservative. I just don't like the liberal rewrites of actual history.
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/138787/obama-can-put-merrick...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland_Supreme_Court_...
As you said, McConnell and the Republican Senate refused to hold hearings on Obama's Supreme Court nominee, in March more than seven months before the election 2016 election - "Give the people a voice in the filling of this vacancy" said McConnell. [1]
The other half:
Four years later, they had no problem confirming Trump's nominee in late October, not two weeks before Trump's 2020 election - and McConnell said "The precedent only applies when different parties control the Senate and the White House." [2]
To me the inconsistency seems contrary to the spirit of democracy.
[1] https://www.republicanleader.senate.gov/newsroom/remarks/mcc...
[2] the precedent only applies when different parties control the Senate and the White House
The current administration is behaving exactly like they know this. They are also boosted by the fact that SCOTUS told essentially told POTUS that he can do whatevs without repercussions. He's even ignoring their direct orders, and still nothing.
You can call me pessimistic, but these are just the facts of the situation. You're optimism is based on what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_midterm_election...
Trump lost 41 seats in the house in his first term and the administration wasn't anywhere near as polarizing. The voting bloc for mid-terms is very different from presidential elections.
He won under the conditions the election was performed under. That’s clear.
I’m not sure I could call those fair after years of attacks on people’s voting rights.
Extensive post-election voter surveys showed that if everyone had voted, Trump would’ve won by 4.8 points: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202...
Gerrymandering doesn't affect the presidential election? Surveys show how everyone would have voted? Do you even hear yourself?
Which means it does :-) just not by much.
If either a) or b) impacts voter turnout then it could impact the presidential election even though the districts themselves don't matter.
I found some evidence both for and against voter turnout impacts from redistricting[2] or from gerrymandering[3] but it didn't seem conclusive.
[1] https://stateline.org/2022/05/20/check-your-polling-place-re...
[2] https://da.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/da/kernel/90008864/90008864.pdf
[3] https://electionlab.mit.edu/articles/gerrymandering-turnout-...
It is more tenuous than the others in the list, but I suspect it could be used.
And either way it had the psychological effect of people knowing their vote may not count because they vote for the wrong party in their district and have no chance of their candidate winning.
(I otherwise 100% agree that Republicans engage in various forms of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. Not sure what fantasy world GP lives in where they don't.)
The intense high quality polling that’s been done since Trump won in 2016 has completely dismantled the notion of “voter suppression.” It’s the left’s version of illegal immigrants voting.
For instance, how many Democrat supporters just don't show up to the polls in Texas because they feel that their vote doesn't matter due to gerrymandering in the state?
I think the issue here is that we are trying to apply logic when the American voter tends to be very emotional.
Also, Trump is the one who performs better among your supposedly “disenfranchised” voters. The folks who didn’t vote in the last 3 elections were more likely to vote for Trump in 2024: https://amac.us/newsline/elections/trump-victory-explained-n.... The only group Harris won were super voters (who voted in all four of the most recent elections).
Just because someone didn't vote doesn't immediately mean the reason was disenfranchisement.
Given you live in Maryland, how can you claim voting is easy in the the entire US? Are you familiar with voting laws in every state and how elections can be weaponized by the state governments against certain populations?
Easy voting would mean drive thru voting, mail in voting, automatic voter registration, not weaponizing polling locations, etc.
I think you are taking your lived experiences and applying it to everyone. Are you elderly, disabled, a single parent, or are you living in poverty? Do you have immediate access to your birth certificate or a passport? Do you have a government ID at all? Do you have access to transportation? All these factors play into how easy it is for someone to vote.
"Disenfranchisement" means legally or physically people from voting. Activists repurposed that term to attack any sort of rules and regulations around voting, with the specific purpose of making Voter ID seem akin to laws requiring a grandfather eligible to vote. The whole point is to muddle the facts rather than clarify them.
> Easy voting would mean drive thru voting, mail in voting, automatic voter registration, not weaponizing polling locations, etc.
No, voting is a civic ritual and should be treated with an appropriate level of solemnity to engender trust in the voting system. Look at how Taiwan counts votes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUZa7qIGAdo. What's the purpose of the ritual? Surely a machine could count all the votes easily. But that's not the point. The point is to have a public exercise that people can see and easily understand, to build civic trust.
Tangent: A new attack on voting rights just succeeded in the Eighth Circuit. An individual citizen or non-governmental group can no longer sue a state government for racial discrimination under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
> Until a few years ago, everyone agreed that private citizens and groups could bring Section 2 lawsuits.
...
> The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of voters in Section 2 cases numerous times, including just two years ago in Allen v. Milligan.
...
> However, some opponents of the Voting Rights Act have promoted a fringe notion that because Section 2 doesn’t say the words “private right of action” — the legal term for the ability of impacted individuals or groups to sue — such lawsuits cannot be filed. This is part of a pattern of attacking the procedures underlying Voting Rights Act litigation to make it virtually impossible to enforce the law’s important protections in court.
...
> The Department of Justice can still bring Section 2 cases, but that alone is not enough to prevent voting discrimination. Individuals and groups have brought nearly 93 percent of Section 2 cases over the last 40 years. Justice Department attorneys have explained that the department relies on citizen-led lawsuits because it doesn’t have the resources to handle all these cases on its own even if it wanted to.
> That desire is not present in the current administration’s Justice Department, which shed 70 percent of the Civil Rights Division staff and has already been ordered to dismiss almost all of its Section 2 cases.
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/appe...
I mean, we have two options here - one is that voters memory-holed the last eight years and had never even heard of Donald Trump until like a year ago and believed he was an honest an sincere man of character... or they voted for exactly the thing everyone said was going to happen to happen and are only disappointed because the consequences weren't what they expected. They didn't think the leopards would actually eat their faces.
And now they're pretending like they're shocked that Trump would do such terrible things, just like they were shocked that Trump would have anything to do with January 6th... after the consequences of that weren't what they expected, either.
Nobody is saying that the Republicans in congress cannot set tariffs. We're just saying the _president_ cannot singularly do it. If elected Republicans congress critters want to pass a law establishing the tariff rates and have the elected Republican president sign it; go ahead.
Because that's the law ratified by a majority of states which is much more than plurality of Americans.
The people want a king.
It's Democracy going exactly the way how Plato already described it.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/13/politics/china-tariffs-bi...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250101032222/https://www.white...
"[The Biden admin intends to use] executive authority"
The accusation was Biden significantly expanded tariffs using the same power Trump is claiming.
Simply maintaining an existing tariff is something different. Though it could certainly still be objectionable.
Not repealing an action isn’t the same as supporting it. It doesn’t make sense to arbitrarily repeal tariffs without a coordinated draw down of tbr other party.
[1] https://www.millercanfield.com/resources-Can-President-Impos...
[2] https://www.bhfs.com/insights/alerts-articles/2024/biden-ups...
[3] https://www.ntu.org/publications/detail/bidens-new-tariffs-h...
Here is one such report from 2018 that was the impetus for the steel tariffs: https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/232-steel
>Other tariffs imposed under different powers, like so-called Section 232 and Section 301 levies, are unaffected, and include the tariffs on steel, aluminum and automobiles.
It seems that Biden did not, at least in the instance you link to, do the thing that the courts have ruled against today.
The least interesting commentary you can imagine is of or from a country's closest friends. From many perspectives Europe is indistinguishable from America, except from being a little poorer.
Let's see America's (or Europe's!) earnest criticism of Kinshasa. C'mon, show us who you really are. I promise you it will only benefit humanity.
That isn’t the “point” of our government structure. The constitution deliberately mixes an electorally accountable deliberative body (Congress), an electorally accountable unitary executive (the President), and a judiciary insulated from elections.
As explained in Federalist 70, the executive is unitary and “vigorous,” by design: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. Federalist 70 even brings up the example of Roman Dictators to illustrate the need for a strong executive: “Every man the least conversant in Roman story, knows how often that republic was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of Dictator, as well against the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to the tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government, as against the invasions of external enemies who menaced the conquest and destruction of Rome.”
What the constitution seeks to avoid is consolidation of all the government’s powers under a single entity. The President is powerful and can act unilaterally, but must stick to exercising executive rather than legislative or judicial powers.
So the real question with tariffs is whether one sees them as more of a general policy or a tool of foreign relations. The former is a power within the deliberative consideration of Congress. The latter sphere of authority is assigned to a singular President.
Yes, wealthy inter-state individuals would be so much better. Right?
The typical complaint against billionaires is stuff like their yacht is too big or people don't like one policy they took advantage of. It isn't really to the same scale. At their worst, wealthy non-state actors lobby powerful figures in government to act.
America clearly forgot the workplace if this was the intent.
I would also stop holding your breath if you're expecting courts to start acting in our interest.
So far, "it" isn't actually anything though. Trump, and the Republicans working with him, have been completely ignoring courts telling them to do things since day 1. Time and time again, he's been told by a court "you cannot (or must) do this" and he does completely the opposite (and, by he does, I mean he orders other to do it, and the follow that order).
We are at the point where there is nothing lawful about his presidentship, but the Republicans just keep doing what he tells them to, anyways.
There is a preamble that describes the point of the constitution and kingship is no where mentioned.
Also, kings involve hereditary selection, which is orthogonal to despotic rule which is what you are thinking of.
The justification given by this administration to act independently is legally absurd.
So the Supreme Court at least puts limits on what/how congressional powers can be delegated.
The Trumpist era can be defined by someone pushing the limits of power to see just how far they can go. It can also be defined by the importance of the bottom line. In this case the former threatens the latter, so there are forces gathering to actually push back.
or illegally!
The catalyst for the American Revolution was the imposition of taxation (tariffs) without representation. The irony that the party of performative patriotism, with a conservative court, control of the presidency is so spineless that they are afraid to stand and vote for their policy is too afraid to attach their names to the policy.
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
...
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes"
I also wonder about the effects on the budget bill currently being worked on by Congress. Were they factoring in tariff revenue that now won't exist? And if so, will they respond with more spending cuts or less tax cuts?
If this ruling holds the best thing would have been to have never paid the tariffs.
Just like during covid they'll find excuses. Until a regulatory body investigates them for price fixing nothing will change. So nothing will change.
During covid, the soda companies kept raising prices. They claimed supply chain. Then, I think it was the SEC(probably wrong), stepped in and said "We're gonna investigate ya for price fixing" and suddenly soda prices went back down.
Actually, its not hard to believe, its totally Trumpian.
Separately, the “Federal Trade Commission sued PepsiCo on Friday, alleging that it has engaged in illegal price discrimination by giving unfair price advantages to one large retailer at the expense of other vendors and consumers.”
1. https://apnews.com/article/ftc-sues-pepsico-price-discrimina...
As long as tariff threats are being thrown around and this administration continues to act unpredictably, we are far from out of the woods.
"Whenever the President shall find as a fact that any foreign country places any burden or disadvantage upon the commerce of the United States by any of the unequal impositions or discriminations aforesaid, he shall, when he finds that the public interest will be served thereby, by proclamation specify and declare such new or additional rate or rates of duty as he shall determine will offset such burden or disadvantage, not to exceed 50 per centum ad valorem or its equivalent, on any products of, or on articles imported in a vessel of, such foreign country"
it does cap it at 50%, but I mean it seems like a much easier way to justify the tariff. is there something else about it that isn't as practical (other than being almost 100 years old)
Pretty sure you're answering your own question.
Age alone shouldn't disqualify a law. The law above all other laws, aka the Constitution, is more than 200 years old.
Comparing an unmodified law based on age is not the same as comparing a mutable documents original age
For goodness sake, the original law set specific tariffs for 20,000 different goods. Little of the original law still exists unmodified.
1. another statute that super-cedes the 1930 statute because it specifically limits Presidential emergency powers in the context of balance-of-trade issues. See around p. 35 of the slip opinion.
2. The Constitution itself, which limits Congress's ability to cede its own powers.
Until the early 20th century, tariffs were the primary mechanism for raising federal revenue. So Congress viewed tariffs as a tax, within Congress’s purview. But the 1930 Tariff Act also recognizes that tariffs are also a tool of foreign policy, which is within the President’s purview.
Because 50% maximum.
How would that work when you want a 145% tariff?
Most notably, only Congress can declare war, which has been a real sticking point in the last century and why, for example, the Korean War wasn't technically a war (it was a "police action") and why the Vietnam War wasn't either. The First and Second Gulf Wars and the War in Afghanistan at least had explicit war resolutions passed by Congress, however misguided.
Brown pelicans typically lay three eggs. Some bird species can employ "deferred incubation" such that even when eggs are born on separate days, the eggs will hatch at the same time. Brown pelicans don't do this so the chicks hatch 2-3 days apart each. The eldest gets fed more so there ends up being a size difference. What inevitably happens is the eldest two conspire to push the youngest out of the nest. If it falls out, the parents won't feed it and it will die. Then after awhile the oldest pushes and second out. 90%+ of the time only the eldest ever fledges.
Why did I tell this story? Because it basically mirros what's going on with our government. We have, at least theoretically, three branches of government that are meant to balance each other. There has been a conservative takeover of the executive and judicial branches such as to neuter the legislative branch. This Supreme Court has both stripped Congress of power (eg overturning Chevron) and empowered the presidency (eg the presidential immunity decision that had absolutely zero basis in anything; it was simply invented). They've invented doctrines to allow them to overturn basically anything Congress does (eg "major questions" and "historical tradition"). This is a coup d'etat and the end result of the 50+ year Republican Project.
What happens next, just like the pelicans, is the courts gets neutered. Conservatives now push the "unitary executive" philosophy, which is a fancy way of saying they want a dictator, not beholden to any courts or lawmkaing body. The second chick is getting pushed out of the nest. The administration is openly defying the courts on many matters (eg Kilmer Abrego Garcia) and this Supreme Court has given them the immunity to do that.
I, personally, think we are beyond the point of no return. Electoral politics cannot possibly fix this situation. At the same time, the American empire is decline. We are going to see firsthand waht a dying empire looks like and I guarantee you it won't be pretty.
[1]: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-foreign-policy-powers-co...
I keep seeing this brought up as some kind of "gotcha" point, but those wars involved conscription and billions of dollars of additonal military funding, all of which was presumably approved by congress. I find it hard to imagine a congress that is approving a draft would be averse to signing a war declaration.
If anything it demonstrates a more recent trend where the executive oversteps its authority to engage in military action and to bypass Congress.
As for conscription, this was enabled by Congress in WW2 by "selective service" [1]. The administration maintains the authority to draft male citizens of a certain age into the military without explicit Congressional approval.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_Sta...
Yeah. Not so much.
While the Korean conflict was not explicitly authorized by Congress, it was tacitly approved by Congress by passing several bills that both directly and indirectly appropriated funds to prosecute the Korean conflict.
That this wasn't followed up by a vote in Congress to make that official is definitely a constitutional issue, but one that SCOTUS did not address directly.
You're quite correct that Congress didn't declare war or provide explicit authorization for the use of military force. That said, it's not quite as cut and dried as you make it out to be.[0][1][2]
Congress gave the Executive branch explicit authorization for the use of military force in Vietnam with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution[3].
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C11-2...
[1] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/korea-war-powers-preced...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngstown_Sheet_%26_Tube_Co._...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Resolution
Edit: To clarify, I'm not arguing that Congress was correct in not providing explicit authorization for the Korean conflict, nor am I arguing that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations shouldn't have gone to Congress sooner to obtain authorization ala the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Rather, I'm pointing out that the situation was much more complicated than you make out WRT the Korean Conflict and that there was, in fact, explicit authorization from Congress for prosecuting the war in Vietnam.
The only solace one can take from that historical precedent is that the full collapse took centuries, far longer than our lifetimes.
Our grandchildren may live in a time of the New American Empire that is ruled by an Emperor Trump III. It'll have a strange tradition of emperors painting their faces orange in the same manner as Roman emperors had a tradition of wearing purple robes.
Sticking point? Where in the Constitution does it say a declaration of war is required to wage war?
We didn't have a literal declaration of war for the Quasi War (1798-1800), the First Barbary War (1801–1805), the Second Barbary War (1815), any of the many American Indian wars, etc. That clearly didn't seem to be a sticking point for George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson or James Madison.
The story of how it made it to the supreme court is a good one, about having to pay an inspector to ride on every fishing trip...
I don't see how this diminishes congressional power, unless you consider delegate count a sign of power.
The whole reason Chevron came into existence is because it's impossible for Congress to pass explicit regulations for every little thing as soon as it's needed. So agencies were instead given broad legislative mandates like "keep the water clean" or "manage fish stocks" because it was impossible to enumerate every circumstance.
So for 40 years through 7 presidents (4 Republican, 3 Democrat) with both parties controlling the House and the Senate at different times, Congress passed laws with Chevron in mind. Congress had the ability to roll back Chevron and declined to do so.
The backers of overturning Chevron know it's impossible. That's why they did it. It's just unadulterated greed to deregulate so companies can wantonly pollute the water and overfish without any sort or oversight, compliance and repercussions for slightly higher profits... temporarily. And when there's a mess that needs cleaning up, they'll get the taxpayers to pay for it.
This misunderstands Chevron and the effect of its abandonment. Chevron stood for the proposition that the executive branch could generally interpret laws without judicial review (subject to a minimal standard which was nearly always met). What this meant in practice was that any agency could change its view on what the law means (and therefore change what the law is because courts were generally required to accept the new interpretation) whenever it wanted and that new view was binding law. This undermines two core principles of the American system: separation of powers (the judiciary says what the law is) and the rule of law (laws should be applied equally and consistently).
Eliminating Chevron returns us to the proper state of the law: the executive branch proposes a reading of the law, the other side proposes another, and an independent court considers both and states what the law is. And that’s the law going forward. It cannot be changed absent legislation. Congress passes a law, the judiciary says what the law is, and the executive executes it. If the executive wants to enforce a different law then it must get the legislative branch to pass that different law.
This is not a conservative talking point, it’s a talking point for anyone that thinks the President is not a king. It just seems like a conservative talking point to you because it was overturned during the Biden administration. Recall that Chevron came to be because of a Reagan administration interpretation.
Consider what the state of reality would be if Chevron remained good law today under the Trump administration. Trump’s interpretation of a statute would be what the statute says.
For example, 8 USC 1401 provides that “The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth: (g) a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years: Provided, That any periods of honorable service in the Armed Forces of the United States, or periods of employment with the United States Government or with an international organization as that term is defined in section 288 of title 22 by such citizen parent, or any periods during which such citizen parent is physically present abroad as the dependent unmarried son or daughter and a member of the household of a person (A) honorably serving with the Armed Forces of the United States, or (B) employed by the United States Government or an international organization as defined in section 288 of title 22, may be included in order to satisfy the physical-presence requirement of this paragraph. This proviso shall be applicable to persons born on or after December 24, 1952, to the same extent as if it had become effective in its present form on that date;”
Do you really want the Trump administration to be able to what any of the ambiguous terms mean in this provision? What do you think Trump’s interpretation of the “geographical limits of the United States” is? What about what “honorable service” means?
But the real problem comes in because 40 years of laws were written both both parties with Chevron deference in mind. Not only did Congress not take action to overrule Chevron, consistently for 40 years, they intentionally wrote ambiguous statutes to give agency's the power to interpret those statutes, mostly because enumerating every possible circumstance was impossible.
Take managing fish stocks. What fish stocks? When should fishing seasons be? What's the inspection mechanism? How are licenses and quotas issues? How are they enforced? How should all this be reported to the public, Congress and the president? What about fish stocks that border international waters? How should they be managed?
Chevron acknowledged what was already happening: it was impossible to write legislation that way. Congress didn't have the bandwidth to initially write it, let alone maintain it as circumstances change.
The Supreme Court (rightly) recognized that without Chevron deference it would be impossible to an agency manage anything because any ambiguities or any simply unofreseen gaps would be used to neuter the agency in the courts. It made it impossible to have such agencies and that's the whole point of overturning Chevron. The very wealthy don't want Fedearl agencies. The whole thing is a libertarian wet dream and over the coming years we'll see the consequences as the same people poison the water supply and the food supply, overfish alal fishing stocks, crash the economy through unregulated financial markets and so on.
This is a misstatement of what the law was. Under Chevron, the agency’s interpretation MUST be deferred to, not should. This is an affront to the separation of powers.
Agencies are not neutered. Nor are they prevented from interpreting ambiguous statutes post-Chevron. They are prevented from being the final say on interpretation. This is good, just, and in line with America’s constitutional regime.
Congress is too incompetent to assert its power.
Likewise, it also strips Executive power. Executive agencies can no longer fill in the obvious gaps in what Congress passed.
Over the past several decades, Congress has been less and less able to pass legislation, less and less able to work with itself, eventually even unable to pass a budget (which is their most fundamental, basic duty). How many years of the last decade has Congress passed a budget? That would have been unthinkable 50 years ago.
Congress is broken, not because the President broke it, not because the courts broke it, but because party politics and the primary system broke it.
The President has ruled more and more by executive order, partly by overreach, and partly by necessity, because Congress can't or won't do their job.
I don't think that the courts stripped power from Congress by overturning Chevron. They stripped it from the executive branch.
The court here seems to have decided the executive has not done that.
Here's the complete text [0]. The act authorizes imposition of tariffs on any country that:
> Imposes, directly or indirectly, upon the disposition in or transportation in transit through or reexportation from such country of any article wholly or in part the growth or product of the United States any unreasonable charge, exaction, regulation, or limitation which is not equally enforced upon the like articles of every foreign country; or
> Discriminates in fact against the commerce of the United States, directly or indirectly, by law or administrative regulation or practice, by or in respect to any customs, tonnage, or port duty, fee, charge, exaction, classification, regulation, condition, restriction, or prohibition, in such manner as to place the commerce of the United States at a disadvantage compared with the commerce of any foreign country.
This is pretty specific. The tariffs/customs/dues/whatever don't even have to be unfair relative to what the US charges on that country's imports into the US, it's specifically targeting cases where a foreign country discriminates against US trade over and beyond the dues it charges on other countries' trade.
It'd be very difficult to prove that discriminatory treatment for each and every one of the 180+ countries caught up in Trump's tariffs.
To be frank they will need to do this to 20, maybe 30 countries to cover most of it (money wise).
However, MFN status is full of exceptions. For many countries, the US could plausibly argue that they are being discriminated against despite having MFN status due to one of the exceptions to it
And I haven’t been arguing that the Trump admin is going to win-only that people are underestimating their chances. And even if I’m right about that, they still might lose anyway, and that fact in itself wouldn’t prove that I was wrong.
The fact that the attempt to introduce tariffs using one statute was overturned by this court, doesn’t mean the same court is automatically going to overturn those tariffs under a different statute - different texts, different tests, both the same outcome and the opposite outcome are entirely plausible
And as I said, I don’t actually think these tariffs are a good idea from a policy viewpoint - but that’s largely orthogonal to the question of what courts are going to do to them
I doubt it is that simple.
I don’t know how exactly judges are going to define “reasonable” in this specific area of law-but “reasonable” normally means not just that you have a reason, but also that the judge concludes it is a valid or good enough reason-and different areas of law often have different tests for deciding what reasons are valid or good enough
Republican tariffs, they're complicit. Literally every single Republican in the House voted to shield Trump's "national emergency" [0] from being challenged as invalid.
[0] The National Emergency of... a relatively small amount of fentanyl seized at the Canadian border.
But alright, i guess people import it to the US to illegally traffic it back north. and somehow that makes a majority of the traffic! never stop learning, that's what i always say.
Yet it would be beyond stupid to claim that each person stopped at the border "saved" 20 Americans.
I think the administration would find it easier to prove this than you think. They just have to find some regulation which they claim disadvantages the US compared to other countries. Given most countries have thousands of pages of regulations, it likely isn’t hard to find something in there that they can argue puts the US at a disadvantage-especially since what really matters is not whether it actually does, rather whether they can convince a court that it does
Real example: the US claims Australia bans US beef, Australia insists it is allowed. I believe the real problem is this-Australian regulations say US beef is allowed if the cattle are born in the US, raised in the US, slaughtered in the US… and the problem is the US cattle industry has such poor record-keeping, they intermingle US-born cattle with live cattle imports from Canada and Mexico and can’t produce the necessary paperwork to prove a shipment of beef is purely US-grown and hasn’t been mixed with beef from non-US origin cattle
Now, there is no reason in principle why the US cattle industry couldn’t improve their record-keeping to the point that it meets Australian regulations. But that would cost money and be politically unpopular-so instead US politicians just spread the rather misleading claim that “Australia bans US beef”. What really matters legally, is not the reasonableness of the claim, it is whether they can get a US judge to accept it-and quite possibly they could
And there’s probably several other cases where US companies can’t export their products to Australia because they aren’t willing to comply with Australian regulations. And likely many similar stories for other countries too. And if DOJ lawyers try to argue these cases fit under the legislation you are citing, IANAL but I think they’d have decent odds of success
> it's specifically targeting cases where a foreign country discriminates against US trade over and beyond the dues it charges on other countries' trade.
But, in this Australia case, all they have to do is find another country which can export beef to Australia because it does comply with these regulations, and there is their argument that Australia discriminates against the US. Should it matter legally that these regulations are reasonable and not intentionally discriminatory and US inability to comply is due to US unwillingness to pay for the reforms necessary to do so? I think it should, but entirely plausible that a judge decides it shouldn’t
EDIT: to be clear, I think these tariffs are pretty stupid-but whether something is stupid is a separate question from whether courts will uphold it. Many courts will uphold a lot of things which you or I know to be stupid
We know how it happened: Heard and McDonald Islands is an uninhabited Australian territory off the coast of Antarctica. In the 19th century, it was inhabited by sealers for an extended period (mostly Americans, some Australians too)-but they left after hunting the seals to extinction. In the 20th century it became a nature reserve, although it saw multi-year occupation by scientific research bases. Since the 1990s, no humans have been there except for brief visits; apparently nobody has been there in person for over a decade. It is illegal to come ashore without permission from the Australian government, and their policy is to almost always refuse permission (with rare exceptions for scientific research).
Yet despite all this, ISO 3166-1 gave it a country code, HM. And US government databases ended up showing imports from it, almost certainly due to data entry errors, the imports having really come from somewhere else. But it appears nobody was paying attention, so it ended up as a tiny trade deficit in official US trade statistics. And then the Trump administration mindlessly applied the rule “IF official US trade statistics show a deficit THEN impose tariff”. And still nobody noticed. And then after they publicised it, somebody did, and they were widely mocked for the mistake, and I believe this specific tariff has since been rescinded.
Most likely HM was actually a typo for Hong Kong (HK) or Honduras (HN)-adjacent keys on the keyboard. Or maybe the M is correct and the H is the typo, in which case it could easily have been The Gambia (GM) or Bermuda (BM) or Jamaica (JM)-also adjacent keys
Australia has another uninhabited territory (Ashmore and Cartier Islands), and another near uninhabited (Coral Sea Islands, staffed by a tiny rotating crew of government employees)-but, for whatever reason, ISO never gave either its own country code, [0] so this couldn’t have happened to them. (Likewise, Australia claims a big chunk of Antarctica, a claim which most countries-US included-don’t recognise-so the Australian Antarctic Territory doesn’t get its own ISO code, it gets subsumed under Antarctica’s, AQ.)
[0] I guess the reason may be land area - Ashmore and Cartier Islands have a land area of slightly over a square kilometre, less than a square mile; Coral Sea Islands have a land area of 3 km^2, which is slightly over one square mile; by contrast, Heard Island is 368 km^2 (142 sq mi). ISO generally resists giving codes to uninhabited territories unless they contain significant land
That they don’t buy stuff is only half the story. The other half is they export a lot of primary produce - to the US, primarily frozen fish. The US imports a lot of food so they are interested in Falklands fish. US exports are much higher up the value chain, and Falklands having such a small population has rather limited demand for those high value exports-hence the inevitable trade imbalance.
Which isn’t saying US tariffs on Falklands is good policy-I think it is stupid.
Compare a country like Australia-like Falklands, Australia exports a lot of stuff the US wants to buy. Unlike Falklands, Australia has a decent sized relatively well-off population, who buy a lot of stuff from the US-as a result, the US actually has a trade surplus with Australia. Now, of course, Australia is on a completely different scale from the Falklands: but my point is, if Falklands had a ratio of primary production to population closer to Australia’s, the US would quite possibly have a trade surplus with it too, albeit obviously a smaller one-Australia has around 7800 as many people as Falklands, but only 750 times the primary exports - meaning on a per capita basis, Falklands has around 10 times the primary exports of Australia.
How is this not what I'm saying?
Go you.
If the administration put out all their executive orders in spelling-mistake-riddled crayon, it would also be “practically irrelevant”, but it would similarly show the level competence behind the tariffs’ implementation.
Well, sort of. The threshold is much lower than that; the law is explicit that no regulation is necessary:
>> by law or administrative regulation or practice
Eventually the courts have to agree/disagree if someone starts challenging it up the chain.
Whether that dairy tariff is particularly onerous on the US, worth antagonizing our closest ally for, that would be the political question, but certainly it's definitionally unequal.
Canada's Dairy Tariff is specifically designed to protect a specific local industry, which exists, is of national interest to keep, and which could come under threat from cheap alternatives imported from abroad. It's specific, targeted, and serves a valuable purpose. They have been in place a long time, and provide a stable trading environment making the future easier to predict.
Trumps tarrifs are the complete opposite. He could have done tarifs well, but he's lazy and so opted for "easy" instead. By tarrifing countries you mix all industries together.
For example coffee. The US imports 99% of their coffee. The local coffee industry is tiny, and limited to Hawaii. There's no national interest, no local jobs, nothing. Tariffing coffee just makes it more expensive.
No one is planting coffee trees. Partly because the US has the wrong climate, but also because growing new trees (or building a factory) takes years, and a lot of investment. That means confidence that the situation today will last long enough to get a return.
In truth the tarrifs seldom make it past the weekend, or a couple weeks, then they're suspended. The administration openly admits they're negotiating "trade deals". So, I can't invest anything based on current tarrifs because they're very impermanent.
This nonsense is not about whether tarifs are good or bad. This is about how they gave been done (which is epically badly, and stupidly.)
On the upside a generation of future kids will learn about this, and how doing the right thing badly is worse than doing nothing at all.
I have spent ten days of my life in Canada and I learnt of the tariffs by news reports concerning people driving to USA, loading up on milk, coming home.
Tariffs are not always stupid. But in most cases there is a better alternative.
E.g. Canada could subsidise domestic milk producers. (We used to do that in New Zealand)
There is a lot of nonsense talked about economics ("tariffs always bad" is an example) because there are strong incentives at work for the actors. It makes it very difficult for policy makers to have good, responsive, effective economic policy.
Money and politics? What could go wrong....
IMO tarifs are preferable to subsidies. Subsidies encourage over production, plus still places the industry at risk. Tarifs just incentivize purchasing local. Plus for whatever revenue there is, it's an income to govt coffers. Whereas a subsidy is an expense. And ultimately the cost is born by the consumer of that product, not the wider tax base.
So, well targeted, it's a more effective tool than a subsidy, and much less prone to waste or corruption.
Put another way, a tarrif is much cheaper than a subsidy (and tarrif makes for a better outcome.)
That's largely acceptable, and certainly preferable to underproduction, for resources that we simply can't do without. Dairy was (and still is) considered one of those resources as a superfood. Now maybe milk might not hold up anymore as being so critical to childhood nutrition (though I'm skeptical), but I think the reasoning behind it makes sense.
> Tarifs just incentivize purchasing local.
Sure, they also incentivize not eating. But commodification of basic resources is nothing new to americans, I suppose.
Some things are worth everyone pitching in for. Tariffs place the burden of living here on the individual. I don't really see any benefit from this.... fuck local businesses if they can't compete. The entire pitch of living here is that we'll let the market determine every aspect of our lives; why would we not double down when it came to letting businesses fail?
Government sets a supply goal and buys that amount from farmers and then resells to the grocers / public.
It's been this way for a long time. The tarrifs are there to control for a case of oversupply in the market, but I also seem to remember that those supply targets haven't actually been met in a single year so the tarrifs effectively don't apply.
Like the US does? Isn't that just a race to the bottom then?
The Canadian supply management system means that those that purchase milk pay the amount needed to keep the Canadian dairy industry afloat. If you don't buy milk you don't pay.
With subsidies everyone pays, regardless of whether you use the product(s) or not.
Of course subsidies make the price cheaper, which helps with cost of living, which can be quite progressive (and often children are the ones that drink the most milk).
Further, the US subsidies milk even though its consumption has been falling for decades:
* http://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2022/june/fluid-milk-con...
Which solution is better / "best"? I don't know.
(Am Canadian.)
I've yet to see a good use of tariffs.
You might not agree with that politically but I think the logic is defensible and discussion should be around the bigger picture of what else is done to support key industries or the rate structure rather than whether it should exist conceptually.
Below is a sketch of a keyhole solution to this problem, that would be cheaper than tariffs and cause less disruption to the overall economy:
Recipients could prove that they have capacity either directly by just pointing to their output. Or if they want to claim standby capacity and want to get paid for that one as well, there would be randomised drills every so often where the government asks industry to produce a large quantity of the relevant items on short notice. Anyone who fails would forfeit a huge bond.
To give more details: suppose we want to make sure there's enough capacity to produce one million artillery shells per year. The government would auction off the capacity obligations to the lowest bidders. Companies that already produce the relevant items anyway would presumably have lower costs in fulfilling these obligations, thus they would be the primary bidders. But there might be some companies who operate purely on standby and don't keep a production running.
Being subject to a randomised production drill would be a huge expense, even if the government pays for the output, because of all the fixed costs you have in actually turning on unused capacity, even if only for a short time. But if the drills are truly randomised, insurance companies would really love to insure against them to spread out the load. Insurance companies could also insure against failing the challenge, and that would turn the insurers into private sector inspectors, because they'll want to make sure they don't undercharge companies for the risk of failing to meet their obligated capacity.
(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_bond for why randomised risks that are independent of the state of the general economy are so beloved by investors.)
If there's not much domestic production, then keeping standby capacity would be more expensive for the companies and thus for the government. Conversely, paying for standby capacity is a subsidy for the fixed costs of the relevant industries. (However it's a very targeted subsidies, because it goes to the lowest cost bidder. It's not sprinkled indiscriminately like a watering can.)
---
About defense related tariffs: putting tariffs on your closed allies like Canada and the rest of NATO doesn't make any sense. Steel produced in Canada is as good as steel produced in the US when it comes to defense. (Actually, it's a bit better in some respects, because Canadian steel workers don't have nearly as much political clout in the US as American workers and unions, thus the administration can't be blackmailed and coerced by them as easily.)
Even worse: the US administration allegedly wants to pivot to containing PR China and protecting Taiwan. Putting a 32% tariffs on Taiwan itself and 24% on key regional ally Japan is rather counterproductive.
But I think we both agree that Trump's tariffs were and are stupid, and we are discussing the best case for tariffs here.
So in the best case, it would still be silly to put defense-motivated tariffs on your closest allies.
---
Another addendum: the mechanism described in the first part might not work so well for software, because it's not standardised and has practically only fixed costs, no variable costs.
However, you could address that with other customised policy. Eg requiring open source software (especially when it's bought from overseas), and looking for specialised mechanisms for locals to demonstrate maintenance skills on standby or so.
in practice, it didn't work because the US really can't decide where it wants to go with EV's. Fighting over standards, some trying to keep holding things back to sell ICE vehicles, etc. Inflation also didn't help, so a lot of cars just blew up in cost. So because of the indeisive industry, the tarriff is just a safeguard instead of an opportunity.
That's the tired old 'infant industry argument'. It's just as bad now as it always has been. Compare also Brazil's ill-fated attempt at creating a home-grown computer industry.
> in practice, it didn't work because the US really can't decide where it wants to go with EV's. Fighting over standards, some trying to keep holding things back to sell ICE vehicles, etc.
I'm not sure who you mean by 'the US'? Producers and consumers of EVs should make their choices.
> Inflation also didn't help, so a lot of cars just blew up in cost.
Inflation is a general rise of the price level. If both input costs and prices you can charge to customers go up in proportion, inflation doesn't make a difference. Just like moving from metres to yards doesn't make the distance between London and Paris larger.
Canada has a dairy tariff after a certain volume is imported. The US has not hit that volume and so the tariffs are currently zero.
> Last year, Canada was the second-highest importer of U.S. dairy products, buying about $1.14 billion US, and it was the United States' top export market for eggs and related products.
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-canada-us-dairy-trade...
USMC also has a carve out for allowing more dairy imports:
* https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/unit...
It should also be noted that the US subsidizes its dairy farms, which could be considered an unfair advantage and justification for anti-dumping measures (Trump's logic for many Chinese imports, e.g., steel). So Canadian dairy products cannot compete in the US market because they're 'too expensive' compared to what US farmers are selling things at: is that fair?
That’s such an absurd and nonsensical thing to say. How did you come up with it?
If you think it’s a terrible argument, why do you think the courts would think otherwise?
This is misunderstanding civics. Laws are not algorithms. All laws must be interpreted. The government organ responsible for interpreting laws is the judiciary, definitionally.
It's not like there's a condition in a law saying "get the courts to agree". It's that there is a disagreement (among parties with standing) about what the law means. And so they fight about it in court, which is why we have courts.
IMO that's being awfully generous.
(Case in point: Trump's travel ban last term).
Has the supreme court been refusing to hear an unusual number of cases against Trump.
I know the common feeling is that they have been siding with him more than usual, but that isn't avoiding scrutiny.
Argue, perhaps, but ultimately a court could decide that no, it's not a disadvantage. And that seems to be exactly what the court has done here?
You're omitting a key clause: a burden or disadvantage . . . by any of the unequal impositions or discriminations aforesaid
The "unequal impositions aforesaid" are:
1. a country that imposes duties/tariffs on the US but "is not equally enforced upon the like articles of every foreign country"
2. discriminates "in such manner as to place the commerce of the United States at a disadvantage compared with the commerce of any foreign country"
So the law only gives authority for retaliatory tariffs when the US is specifically being targeted.
Surely there's a mechanism through the courts for someone to challenge illegal tariffs on their imports if the president declares "There's a 50% tariff on everything because I woke up in a bad mood today and it's unfair of other countries to be doing that."
What you're describing is the Marbury tail wagging the Article II dog. The focus of the Constitution is allocation of power. The focus isn't creating a system where courts micromanage how the other two branches of government exercise that power. Marbury therefore goes to great lengths to draw lines between an executive's "ministerial" actions, which courts can supervise, and those that involve "discretion," which courts cannot. Marbury thus says:
> [W]here the heads of departments are the political or confidential agents of the Executive, merely to execute the will of the President, or rather to act in cases in which the Executive possesses a constitutional or legal discretion, nothing can be more perfectly clear than that their acts are only politically examinable. But where a specific duty is assigned by law, and individual rights depend upon the performance of that duty, it seems equally clear that the individual who considers himself injured has a right to resort to the laws of his country for a remedy.
The Tariff Act provision here is a classic example of something that Congress has entrusted to the President's discretion. The statute says: "Whenever the President shall find as a fact that any foreign country places any burden or disadvantage upon the commerce of the United States by any of the unequal impositions or discriminations aforesaid..."
Insofar as the courts can properly review such actions, their rule is to determine whether the prerequisites for invoking the authority have been satisfied--namely, did the President make a finding? Here, the President did make a finding. At that point, the courts' jurisdiction gives way to the President's discretion. The courts don't get to decide whether the President's finding is correct, or even whether it makes sense. At that point, the act is "only politically examinable."
This is not a novel concept. When courts review laws made by Congress, they don’t get to second guess Congress’s economic reasoning. Congress could ban interstate transportation of beer on Tuesdays. As long as the law was within Congress’s commerce power, courts don’t get to second guess the rationale for the law.
In particular, Section 338 requires a factual finding (from POTUS, which is not directly reviewable) but then also tasks USICT with "ascertaining" the facts. It doesn't explicitly give USICT ability to review the factual finding, but it's a very plausible argument that if USICT is tasked with ascertaining facts and those conflict with POTUS's declaration, then POTUS is exceeding statutory authority.
338 has never been used and it's not clear it'd pass Constitutional muster to begin with.
This seems incorrect
> cases in which the Executive possesses a constitutional or legal discretion
In this case though the laws wording would determine where the discretion starts and ends. "... whenever he shall find as a fact that such country—" so the president is limited by a.1 and a.2[1], the president was only granted discretion in under those proscribed limits.
So a find that says ~"neither a.1 or a.2 is occurring therefore I impose a tariff as president"(claiming no conditions to impose a tariff under the law are met but declaring a tariff anyway) seems reviewable by the court from your sources. Only having a finding is not enough, the finding has to follow the limits of discretion put forth by the law in question.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/1338
edit to remove double negative
Asking weather if follows a.1 and a.2 does not seem 100% independent of asking if it is correct or not.
"I as president claim a.1, and a.2 are not being violated their for the law allows me to impose a tariff"
"I as president stubbed my toe this morning therefore a.1 and a.2 have been violated and I will be imposing a tariff."
"a.1 and a.2 have been violated, no I will not tell you how, therefor tariff."
You are saying it is black and white, but it does not seem so in the examples above.
> That may be true of the NEA, whose Court Nos. 25-00066 & 25-00077 Page 41 operation requires only that the President “specifically declare[] a national emergency.” 50 U.S.C. § 1621(b); see also Yoshida II, 526 F.2d at 581 n.32. 13 But IEEPA requires more than just the fact of a presidential finding or declaration: “The authorities granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose.” 50 U.S.C. § 1701(b) (emphasis added). This language, importantly, does not commit the question of whether IEEPA authority “deal[s] with an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the President’s judgment. It does not grant IEEPA authority to the President simply when he “finds” or “determines” that an unusual and extraordinary threat exists.
That is very interesting. It assumes that the president is truthful
We're pretty sure there's at least one fatal bug in the Constitution, thanks to Kurt Goedel [1], but I don't think anyone has definitively nailed down just what the bug is yet. Maybe this is a candidate.
Which makes sense, since that would be uncomprehendingly stupid.
That quote is from the Tariff Act of 1930. The government didn't argue this was the authority for the presidents actions.
The courts aren’t making foreign policy. That’s a strawman argument.
The President also doesn’t have unlimited powers. It’s President, not King or Dictator.
The President must act within the powers granted by law. The court has determined this act was outside of the law.
Aside: I recommend the phrase "import taxes" over "tariffs", because a disturbingly large portion of my neighbors still don't seem to understand WTF the latter really is.
Hell we don't even need to go that far afield: your logic implies all taxes are foreign policy, as they all affect foreign trade.
What's the foreign policy goal of the blanket tariffs across every country? Hint: There isn't one.
Its stated goals are revenue generation (Congress's job) and domestic economic development (not foreign policy)
As of blanket tariffs across all countries not being foreign policy I tend to disagree, it’s a policy of protectionism. I just don’t think this particular foreign policy falls under executive oversight, and should originate in Congress.
Taxes can be for raising revenue, but they can also function as clubs for changing behavior. Cigarette taxes, for example, have the purpose of deterring people from smoking.
Tariffs similarly can serve as clubs against foreign countries. You might have a tariff on China to get them to change their domestic policies. In that capacity, the tariff is functioning as a foreign policy tool; the revenue generation is incidental.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/28/business/us-court-blocks-trum...
That seems to not agree with your "power Congress gave" characterization.
The major questions issue shows how out on a limb this court is. There’s currently a circuit split on whether MQD even applies to the president.
This statement is completely speculative. There is no evidence that substantive negotiations are happening on any trade deals.
>> There’s currently a circuit split on whether MQD even applies to the president.
The president is not a party to this suit so I don’t understand what this statement has to do with anything.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/25/trump-200-trade-dea...
You have somehow put yourself into a position of having to argue that an enumerated power of Congress actually belongs wholly to the executive so long as the executive has some constitutionally legitimizing purpose for the application of that power. I think you must be doing this for sport, just to see if you can wriggle out from the contradictions.
Sure he does. The various tariff-related acts don't give the president carte blanche to set tariffs whenever he pleases. The acts give him the power to enact tariffs under certain conditions. If the president cannot convince a court that "having a trade deficit" falls under one of those conditions, then a court should, very correctly, tell the president he cannot enact those tariffs.
> The President makes foreign policy
That's a rather simplified view of the president's constitutional powers; the reality is more complex, and in this case that complexity does matter.
Right, but the “condition” in the law is that the President first makes a “finding” that other countries have engaged in unfair treatment. The president only needs to convince the court the finding has been made. But whether a trade deficit results from trade barriers or something else is a decision that Congress has delegated to the President to make.
It's unclear to me if you think this is just a true statement of how Executive power works, or if you are arguing that the correct standard of review for a very restricted legislative delegation of authority is rational basis scrutiny.
A tariff is not foreign policy. It is a tax levied on American companies.
The congress never gave Trump the power to do this. Of course they didn’t refuse it either..
When it comes to china, this is definitely true. The rest of the world not so sure
There’s probably a different thread on this but, TACO and the damage of having your own courts nullify the tariffs are a huge strategic L for the orange man.
Why? If the GP quoted the law correctly and the plain-language reading is also the legal one, it's all about what the president finds as fact. I don't see how that language gives the courts space to second-guess the president's findings.
Facts are still different than opinions, that statute doesn't give him unchecked power to declare any crazy idea as fact.
I don't know about the president, but IIRC, juries have a quite wide latitude decide what facts they find ("In Anglo-American–based legal systems, a finding of fact made by the jury is not appealable unless clearly wrong to any reasonable person", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trier_of_fact).
Saying "whenever the President shall find as a fact" seems like it's giving the president the authority to determine what the "facts" are, and not putting any conditions on how he does that or subjecting them to second-guessing.
That’s the prerequisite to the lawful exercise of power.
We're in an odd spot in America, whites born here have freedom of speech still, as long as you don't have any economic dependency on anything involving the gov't, but we haven't really had to deal with what goes on in a nation with heliocentric tendencies. So it sounds like an attack to say the above. So it goes.
Freedom of speech is looking pretty damn thin at the moment.
But there aren't. The WTO generally put that system away and now to first approximation everyone gets the same deal as everyone else.
In particular, Wikipedia tells me that the Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1934 had a part makes it harder to go back:
"Another key feature of the RTAA was that if Congress wanted to repeal a tariff reduction, it would take a two-thirds supermajority. That means that the tariff would have to be especially onerous, and the Congress would have to be especially protectionist. Once enacted, tariff reductions tended to stick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_Tariff_Act#Reciproc...
Probably because they knew it'd be a losing argument.
The court that authored this slip opinion would be unlikely to be persuaded by such an argument, for two reasons.
First, the opinion spends several pages applying the non-delegation and major questions doctrine. Based upon that discussion, I am pretty confident that this court would've found your interpretation of the Tariff Act of 1930 to be an unconstitutional delegation of congressional power. A similar question was asked in the Nixon admin; grep for "Yoshida II" in the PDF.
Second, even if your interpretation of the Tariff Act of 1930 were found to be constitutional by this court, the argument you suggest would still hit a brick wall.
Around page 35, the court cites the President's executive order in finding that the WaRTs are addressing a balance-of-payments issue. The court then notes that Congress specifically delegated narrower presidential authority for actions addressing balance-of-payments deficits. So even if the president were allowed broad emergency powers, and were allowed broad discretion in defining what emergency means, that finding would be irrelevant, because Congress has specifically curtailed the delegation of authority to the President in the case of tariffs addressing balance-of-trade issues.
Specifically, the opinion notes that Section 122 of Trade Act of 1974 limits Presidential authority to response to balance-of-payments problems, such as "a 15 percent cap on tariffs and a maximum duration of 150 days".
The conclusion also specifically addresses your question about emergency powers: "Congress’s enactment of Section 122 indicates that even “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits” do not necessitate the use of emergency powers and justify only the President’s imposition of limited remedies subject to enumerated procedural constraints."
(These are not my opinions; I'm just applying the legal reasoning in the slip opinion to your question.)
Wikipedia: Sovereign immunity in the United States - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit...
It's less-clear whether the same is true for Customs and Border Patrol.
Sweeping immunity obviously doesn't exist, as evidenced by the court ruling this thread is about. The government gets sued all the time and frequently they have to pay damages.
Remember, the US was explicitly set up to see itself as an adversary. You can read this in practically any of the federalist papers. The founders saw government as a necessary evil and even talked about how democracies often become autocracies by autocrats being freely elected.
It's 250 years into that so yeah, things have changed a lot since then. But it's worth noting that a fair amount of this got embedded into the constitution. So it gets upheld as long as at least one party is adversarial to the other. Interestingly, in many ways this can be maintained even if both parties are adversaries to be people. Clearly something we don't want (cough) but that was by design. 250 years is a pretty good run
What that means for tariffs, will IANAL (pretty sure that's most of us here too). So I don't know. But I do know the gov can't be sued for damages and isn't immune from consequences. That's all I was saying
- § 1514 allows importers to protest CBP decisions on classification, valuation, duties, etc. within 180 days.
- § 1515 then provides that denied protests can be challenged by civil action in the Court of International Trade.
- These sections create the primary administrative exhaustion requirement for customs disputes.
28 U.S.C. § 1581[3] gives the Court of International Trade exclusive jurisdiction over customs matters.
- § 1581(a) specifically grants exclusive jurisdiction over § 1515 actions (denied protests).
- § 1581(i) provides residual jurisdiction over customs-related civil actions against the U.S.
- This exclusive jurisdiction means federal district courts generally cannot hear customs cases.
Tucker Act claims (28 U.S.C. § 1491[4]) allow recovery of improperly collected duties.
- While § 1491 doesn't mention customs, its broad language covering claims "founded upon the Constitution, or any Act of Congress" has been interpreted to include illegal exactions.
- Case law (e.g., Aerolineas Argentinas v. United States[5]) recognizes Tucker Act jurisdiction for customs refunds when protest remedies are unavailable or inadequate.
- However, courts generally require exhaustion of protest procedures first, making Tucker Act claims a limited fallback option.
[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/1514
[2]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/1515
[3]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1581
[4]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1491
[5]: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/077/77.F3d....
(I've been away for a while, and I'm not in the US so no "feel" for it.)
Not the highest tariffs since it wasn’t from China.
And a 170% tariff bill.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/05/08/high-tariffs-become-rea...
Some of these items are now completely out of stock, even after the prices went up x3 or x7.
But it was only ever a short term strategy; if they had persisted they would have had to reconsider.
You must not have looked hard.
Merchants have paid tariffs.
Albeit only for a short period of time.
And even if margin was 0, almost nothing would 3x, since the the tariffs were not (quite) that high.
Wyze importing electronics: https://9to5google.com/2025/05/01/wyze-floodlight-shipment-c...
Various accounts of individuals getting tariffs tacked on for wedding dresses: https://old.reddit.com/r/weddingplanning/comments/1kdirg4/wi...
Prices are definitely higher for products that didn't have a lot of inventory already in warehouses (mostly new models of higher priced goods, DJI, Lenovo, etc.) - that is when they're being sold at all. Quite a few products are simply out of stock now.
For cheaper things where there's still warehouses full of them, prices remain the same.
It's sad that it's come to the point of not being able to trust official government figures. That used to be a given, unlike some other countries (China being one).
It's just tax on consumption, the companies can choose whatever way to handle that(i.e. make less profit if they have the margins, increase prices if they can still sell it, go out of business etc. ).
But there are two options here. One is that some other irrelevant and obscure law from 200 years ago is dug up and used to justify the tariffs and another long court battle begins. The other is that the ruling is simply ignored, just like many others, and half the country will cry that the courts are being ignored and justice will rain down soon, and the other half will say hell yeah, ignore those woke courts.
Every single judgement has gone this way for the past 9 years. I'm always amazed when people keep expecting different. It's like being surprised about the events in a 10 season long reality TV show. It's the same script everyday.
Thing is, I think support for these tariffs is way less than 1/2 of the country. Even parts of MAGA have been expressing doubt about the tariffs (or at least the hamfisted way they've been implemented).
That 40% seems absolutely unshakeable in their support. No matter what happens, that group will support it. And 40% is pretty close to half.
[1] https://www.progressivepolicy.org/polling-u-s-public-is-agai...
But that completely ignores the fact that literally every other nation, including the US most obviously, has excesses of dependencies on other countries, many of which we aren't friendly with today, and even more that we won't be friendly with tomorrow. Times change. An 'advanced economy' is a misnomer, if not an outright facade. Supplanting agriculture, real manufacturing, and other core aspects of your economy with e.g. advertising driven high tech discretionary industries creates an inverted dependency. People don't need iPhones or Google. They do need food, the zillion things in your home labeled 'made in China', and gas. If those 'lesser economies' chose to stop selling to the US, they'd destroy the country.
Offshoring all of these jobs also distorts the economy driving excesses of wealth inequality. Many of the jobs that used to lay between flipping burgers and writing code are the exact ones that have been hollowed out by offshoring. The fundamental problem we've created is that it's cheaper than make a widget half way around the world and ship it here than it is than it is to make it here. So how do we fix this? Tariffs are a blunt way to change this, but change it they do. The most probable outcome is that these providers will simply increase their prices which will, in turn, enable and motivate domestic competition and/or incentivize these companies to create onshore operations.
[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/polling-20...
That's called trade. There's a recorded history of it going back about 5000 years (it goes back farther when you look at artifacts spread around the world before written history existed) and every great civilization partook in it and it's the reason they became known as great empires.
Societies that went nowhere and quickly collapsed, notably, did not partake in this system.
There is self beneficial trade, and there is trade which risks imperiling your own national stability if and when relations sour. People claim this is obvious in hindsight - and even criticize governments for not acting earlier, yet make arguments akin to yours (which frame it is a practical impossibility) when speaking of acting preemptively to resolve such issues.
And if there has been any trend of the 21st century it's to emphasize that the status quo on just about anything won't persist. So one needs to do like we always should in practically any endeavor - hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
You're likely arguing against someone else you've built up in your mind and definitely about another topic. It has no relevance and the trap you're trying to set isn't effective here.
But to take the irrelevant point you're bringing up, Germany switched a substantial amount of its energy sources thanks to having an extensive trade network built up. They would've been screwed if they were dumb enough to tariff all their allies and isolate themselves. Strong trade relations make a country durable during times of conflict.
North Korea is the ideal country in the sense that it's not dependent on outside resources (and blocks most of them) and makes everything at home. They don't have to worry about the risks of trade potentially collapsing. They're free to tariff all their allies. They'll be OK if another country cuts off their gas. And the lesson we can learn from North Korea is to always do the opposite of North Korea, because the country is an absolute failure due to these policies. While its southern neighbor goes all in on trade and specializes in its own unique goods that it exports in exchange for other specialized goods from other countries.
All the while they're left entering into unprecedented levels of debt just to try to keep their economy from outright collapsing. The most likely outcome for them is long-term stagflation and decline (be it relative or absolute). Germany as we knew it in our lifetimes, well dependent on your age I suppose, is probably dead. Creating dependencies on other countries isn't smart.
The point of the tariffs is to raise the price of foreign products, enabling domestic competition and/or to encourage foreign producers to create onshore production facilities. You're not isolating anybody or anything. Some companies will try to eat the costs, others will pass it onto the consumer. In general though, trade is still 100% possible - it simply makes it possible for domestic entities to competitive more effectively.
>All the while they're left entering into unprecedented levels of debt
So is America because of the tariffs and tax cuts for the ultrarich.
Also, a lot of the tariffs were delayed or canceled. Is that a good idea?
Also, those canceled tariffs were brought back. Was that a good idea?
Those brought back tariffs were also delayed again. Was that a good idea?
America entered into unprecedented debt exclusively by unprecedented spending. Government receipts (all the money the government takes in each year) has exponentially increased and basically never decreased except during major economic crises. [1] It's just that for every $1 the government takes in, they invariably decide to spend $1.20 more.
For the US this was more tolerable than for other nations because of a variety of factors - essentially coming down to the "special" place of USD in the world economy. But for a country like Germany diving into the debt hole will likely be catastrophic, even more so as they don't have control over their own currency. Gerexit starting to trend would be amusing, but also not entirely surprising if you've been paying any attention to German politics.
As for the implementation of the tariffs - no I don't think it's been done well. Of course I can take a purely ideological stance while the government is more obligated to take a pragmatic one, balancing the short-term pain such a change will entail against public support of it.
Do we have excessive dependencies on other countries (Madagascar) for vanilla? How about for chocolate? Are tariffs supposed to stimulate our own chocolate and vanilla production? How does that work if you don't have the right climate for these things? I suppose we could grow vanilla in greenhouses, but would that really be worthwhile when we can just import it from places where it does grow?
This is, in large part, why sanctions wars are playing with fire given our current status of trade. We, with "we" being most of 'advanced' economies, export discretionary/luxury goods and import critical/core ones. Even if the discretionary goods have a far higher $ value, they really just don't matter - it's those core goods that keep the gears of a nation turning.
For example, according to the highest law in the land, the Constitution, he can't be elected again. Do you really believe that's going to prevent him from running, much less remaining in office should he win, having previously tried to overturn a legitimate election?
The real question is, when he ignores the courts, what then? Normally that would be when Congress steps in. But even if Republicans didn't have a majority, impeachment would still require support from a decent number of them. Based on their behavior to date, how likely is that?
Strict partisanship appears to be a serious failure mode for this particular form of government. As Congress has become more partisan, they've gotten less and less done, both legislatively and in terms of serving as a check on the executive branch.
And the court here is ruling that the tariffs weren't made in a way that follows the law/Constitution, so your anger is misdirected.
The supreme court might have declared the president to be immune for official acts, but that doesn't extend to govt officials blatantly choosing contempt of court. They have practical immunity in the current administration. A future administration might not look so kindly on such actions.
Break the law all you want, long as the old boss or his successor is happy with you, you can’t be held accountable by the new boss.
(not supporting anything about the current strategy... just pointing out that the "line in the sand" doesn't imply that any individuals would actually get in trouble)
I thought more like you in the past -- I was near-certain he'd toss the whole lot of J6 rioters under the bus.
When he didn't, I've recalibrated to: if it "owns the libs", he'll pardon them (or something actionably similar).
The relevant bit from his explanation was
"Mostly that's because this general topic (His You-Know-Whoness) is the most repetitive/indignant one that HN has experienced in recent months. We're trying to avoid that, not because of the specific topic, but because those qualities (repetition and indignation) are the opposite of what the site is for, and destroy what it is for."
So, contrary to popular perception, it's not the flag/downvote brigade which causes these stories to disappear off the front page.
If the Supreme Court agrees with the district court, then the order probably isn't lawful.
The imbalance is tremendous
How can the people of the US be protected from the executive branch ?
That's only if he does illegal stuff, which he's doing like there's no tomorrow.
Appeals Court docket, V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump (25-1812): https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/70394463/vos-selections...
Yes, check and balances assume a conservative* theory of government in which politicians should be restrained and changes should be require overwhelming support to implement.
*- not conservative in the sense of political ideology, but conservative in the sense of attempting to conserve.
This is starting to sound like `Wool`
So? That's the same overheated rhetoric they trot out every time the courts rule against Trump. It's pretty tired by now. It's like they can't even come up with a new set of inflammatory adjectives; they're always reaching for the the same old ones.
The White House deputy chief of staff making a post on X has exactly zero to do with whether the decision was right or wrong.
In particular, the Trump camp acts like every time the courts rule on the legality of Trump's actions it's an overreach of judicial authority. They either failed Civics 101, or they want everyone else to forget what it said. This is the courts' job.
> This is starting to sound like `Wool`
?
The president doesn’t have the powers to handle tariffs, Congress does. This was the mockery of democracy and the courts are finally stepping in.
We elect Presidents to faithfully execute the law, not Dictators to ignore it. The courts have always ruled against executive for disobeying the law. Preventing any one branch from amassing too much power is the whole reason the system of checks and balances exists.
The system, while sometimes aggravatingly slow to change, has allowed us as a country to continually operate under the same system of government with peaceful transfers of power for nearly 250 years.
It is really weird how many people don't get this, and think Trump is getting special treatment! And an executive order with lofty legal reasoning will always be challenged. And judges on either side...they actually have some idealistic notion that law matters, not who nominated, so the 3 judges who unanimously decided against trump: one was a Trump appointee, one was an Obama appointee, and one was a Bush appointee. In an idea system, judges try to be impartial to law (they don't have to, and their only check is that they can be impeached by congress).
The current administration is doing their own laws and no one seems to actually be willing to stop it, like in many authoritarian countries.
If both things happen, it could place us back where we were but with an even more vengeful Trump.
* Anticipated by the equity market which rallied to the tunes of this news in the afterhours (ETH)
Isn't this that whole "checks and balances" thing I learned about in school?
master_crab•1d ago
blindriver•1d ago
jml7c5•1d ago
Here's a fresh capture: https://archive.ph/DMT9d
MBCook•1d ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-court-blocks-trumps-libe...