US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal | Hacker News Reader

US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

bloomberg.com

583 pointsmaster_crab508 comments

Here's the ruling (PDF): https://www.cit.uscourts.gov/sites/cit/files/25-66.pdf

I'm not a lawyer or even close to it, but why wouldn't the trump admin use the tariff act of 1930? quote:

"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)

That's probably coming next.

it does cap it at 50%

Pretty sure you're answering your own question.

...sigh... i mean i guess it really is just about saying they _can_ do it instead of actually _trying to do it_....

> (other than being almost 100 years old)

Age alone shouldn't disqualify a law. The law above all other laws, aka the Constitution, is more than 200 years old.

The Constitution as it stood 200 years ago is not the Constitution as it stands today.

Comparing an unmodified law based on age is not the same as comparing a mutable documents original age

Unmodified law? The law in question has been amended many, many, many times in the last 100 years.

For goodness sake, the original law set specific tariffs for 20,000 different goods. Little of the original law still exists unmodified.

People love to say things like this, but much like electing an 80 year old president, it should perhaps be a trigger for a more thorough evaluation.

i don't think anyone would disagree that a law can "age out", but simply ignoring it because it's old versus revisiting it's intent and modifying/removing/etc are two very different strategies.

In this case, age is not what disqualifies the law. Rather, what renders the law inapplicable to this situation is some combination of:

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.

The Tariff Act of 1930 reflects the duality between the President’s executive power to conduct foreign policy and Congress’s legislative power to set taxes.

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.

Right. this whole episode is about foreign policy, why not use the act that is meant for it?

Um..

Because 50% maximum.

How would that work when you want a 145% tariff?

Apply it thrice, of course.

I think what’s actually happened in reality is that Congress intentionally gave the President unrestricted authority over both of these things and with that, immunity, or in other words the power to ignore court rulings.

Regulating commerce with foreign nations is also a specific enumerated congressional power in the commerce clause of article 1.

This idea that the president has unrestricted ability to set foreign policy is an invention of this particular administration. In truth, powers are split between the executive and legislative branches [1].

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...

> 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.

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.

It's not a "gotcha". It's just objective fact. There were no war resolutions for Korea and Vietnam.

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...

>It's not a "gotcha". It's just objective fact. There were no war resolutions for Korea and Vietnam.

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 gotcha is that, given the thing is described as a war by more or less everyone in the world, clearly the power to declare a “war” has little to do with the power to start or join wars.

Well said! I also would like to note that something similar happened during the slow decline of the Roman Empire, where it morphed from a representative republic with a powerful senate to a dictatorial regime with one or at most three men in charge.

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.

> Most notably, only Congress can declare war, which has been a real sticking point in the last century

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.

Chevron decision told Congress to do its fucking job and stop delegating it to the for-profit entities the regulations are supposed to apply to, unchecked.

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.

This is a conservative talking point to justify stripping Congress 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.

Filling in “details” was the conceit of Chevron, but that’s not how it was used in practice. The agencies were creating vast new programs from whole cloth and demanding that courts defer to their interpretation of the statute as allowing it. Moreover, it has the effect of making it impossible for the legislature to count on the executive actually honoring compromises and trade offs baked into the legislation.

>> 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.

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?

This is incorrect. Chevron deference wasn't giving the executive branch sole power to interpret ambiguous statutes as you claim (despite your scary example). The so-called Chevron deference doctrine was simply that the Supreme Court ruled (~40 years ago in the Reagan administration) that if an agency is responsible for administering a statute that's ambiguous, that agency's interpretation should be deferred to.

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.

>> The so-called Chevron deference doctrine was simply that the Supreme Court ruled (~40 years ago in the Reagan administration) that if an agency is responsible for administering a statute that's ambiguous, that agency's interpretation should be deferred to.

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.

> I don't see how this diminishes congressional power

Congress is too incompetent to assert its power.

Overturning Chevron isn’t stripping Congressional power so much as it’s forcing Congress to explicitly use its power not to lose it. De facto, it does strip Congressional power, but that’s solely because Congress is too incompetent to fulfill its role.

Likewise, it also strips Executive power. Executive agencies can no longer fill in the obvious gaps in what Congress passed.

The President and the courts didn't neuter Congress. Congress neutered itself.

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 courts are mostly responsible for breaking Congress. Why? Citizens United. This is the case that decided "money equals speech" and allowed for unlimited dark money to be spent buying Congress.

I would say that plus Roe v. Wade. That created for people to be ideologically interested in controlling the Supreme Court. And Congress was a way to get that. So Roe v. Wade created the reason, and Citizens United created the means.

Congress didn't delegate tariff power to the president absolutely. The executive branch still needs to make the case that the tariffs are being put into place for specific reasons that are covered by the specific ways that Congress delegated tariff power.

The court here seems to have decided the executive has not done that.

Further, Congress can't delegate tariff power to the President absolutely; any such delegation would be unconstitutional.

Isn’t it actually more accurate to say that they _can_ delegate power and while unconstitutional, it remains in effect until challenged by the judicial branch?

You can make that argument about literally anything, so it's not especially meaningful or worth noodling on in a thread.

I disagree, it is worth talking about because the impacts of delegated decisions made impact real people in meaningful ways while those may or may not be challenged in court. To say a branch can’t delegate absolute authority is also a mischaracterization of reality. Assuming orders are challenged in the first place, it often drags on for many months or years leaving the impacts in effect until that concludes.

It's a classic example of an argument that proves too much. It might be correct, but it's not useful.

Eventually, it may not matter what the courts think as their power is also effectively limited by the reduction of consequences for ignoring court orders.

Source: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/te...

SEC. 70302. RESTRICTION ON ENFORCEMENT.

    No court of the United States may enforce a contempt citation for

failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.

He would have to convince the courts that I don't like having a trade deficit with anyone somehow means our trading partners are "placing a burden or disadvantage upon the commerce of the United States by any of the unequal impositions or discriminations aforesaid"

I don't think it requires the courts to agree - just that there's a burden or disadvantage and that it's in the "public interest" which seems like a pretty low bar to make up a story that sounds plausible. i think the idea that a trade deficit is a disadvantage is kinda brain dead, but it's plausible sounding enough to argue in court. throw in unequal tariff rates and it seems like an easier win than the IEEPA's emergency justification.

"Aforesaid" is a very specific word that means that the "unequal impositions or discriminations" refers back to specific concepts previously referenced in the law. He can't (legally) just invent his own interpretations for what "unequal impositions" and "discriminations" entails, he has to convince a court that the specific actions he's retaliating against are covered by the "aforesaid" definitions.

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.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/1338

> 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).

This still seems like a very low bar. If the country has ANY trade treaty with someone else that has trade advantage, than it would appear like that fits the letter of the law.

We have most favored nation status with most other countries, so they generally don't have any other nation that is getting better terms than we do. That's the point of the WTO.

> We have most favored nation status with most other countries, so they generally don't have any other nation that is getting better terms than we do. That's the point of the WTO.

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

They would surely have to convince the court that the exceptions were "unreasonable" which would be a higher bar than just declaring that there is an exception (i.e. an exception for a specific reason is not "unreasonable")

So many people in here are making the same mistake. The whole purpose of the courts is to decide whether some behavior does or does not fit within the confines of some statute. They don't just say "oh yeah whatever you say, go ahead." This very decision is just several instances of the court saying "the law says you can only tariff when X. you said X is true, but it's obviously not, so you can't tariff."

Right, but I think other people here may be making the opposite mistake-“according to my interpretation of the statute what the Trump admin has done isn’t allowed”-ultimately your or my interpretation doesn’t count, it is the courts

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

> an exception for a specific reason is not "unreasonable"

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

> Trump's tariffs.

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.

The political machine learns quickly, the previous administration used the Covid emergency declaration as a pretext to cancel student debt. Both sides have turned to extend the reaches of the checks and balances instead of reining them in. This is the root cause.

The amount of fentanyl (just fent) siezed through April of this year since January was enough to kill 700,000 people. I guess you can disbelieve the story that car part vsndors were trafficking fentanyl, but it is a problem.

Yeah the much higher volume of fentanyl going FROM the US TO Canada is a huge issue. Other way around? Not so much in comparison.

when you say "from the US" can you explain exactly what you mean? and what sources you're drawing from to show that the fentanyl is coming "from the US" into Canada? I realize it sounds like i'm incredulous, but it's only because the US doesn't manufacture fentanyl. Canada does. Mexico does.

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.

Between 2022 and 2024, 0.1% of all fentanyl seizures were at the northern border with Canada, vs ~99% at the border with Mexico. There’s also an (equally small, relatively speaking) reverse flow of fentanyl into Canada from the US. Not to mention that fentanyl trafficking is completely orthogonal to tariffs, except that the former is used as an excuse to utilize the latter to bully an ally.

Enough to kill is a meaningless metric.

Yeah: By my napkin-math, the average person has enough blood in them to kill ~20 other people by bad blood transfusions.

Yet it would be beyond stupid to claim that each person stopped at the border "saved" 20 Americans.

It's millions of "doses." Fentanyl is a scourge, and all manner of language decorations are okay to use in my book. "little blue pills" certainly doesn't match the description of any common medications, like Sildenafil or Naproxen, so approximately zero people would have overdosed and died.

> Discriminates in fact against the commerce of the United States, directly or indirectly, by law or administrative regulation or practice… in such manner as to place the commerce of the United States at a disadvantage compared with the commerce of any foreign country.

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

Nah like they said they have to show it meets an existing definition, not just make whatever claim they want that appeals to some random model or sense of injustice

Yeah - the tariffs imposed on the islands with little to no population are definitely because nobody buying anything is blame for the fact they have a surplus

That was stupid but also practically irrelevant-if an uninhabited territory has zero exports, you can set the tariff as high as you like, with no exports nobody is going to pay it. To be clear, I don’t agree with these tariffs and think they are a mistake, but I think we should focus on their real world harms not a silly administrative error

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

Falkland Islands were also hit with a tariff that had little to do with the reality of a trade imbalance caused by anything other than they don't buy stuff.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ygx81gpg6o

> Falkland Islands were also hit with a tariff that had little to do with the reality of a trade imbalance caused by anything other than they don't buy stuff.

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.

> 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.

How is this not what I'm saying?

Because you didn’t mention the fish exports. If they didn’t export all that fish, and still didn’t buy much, the US would quite possibly have a minuscule trade surplus with them instead of a tiny trade deficit

Right so a trade imbalance which by definition is someone selling more than they buy, needs to have someone explicitly say that they were selling stuff... in order for you to understand the point??????

Go you.

I thought what you said was missing important details, and it was worthwhile to state them explicitly. Even if you don’t see any value in that, maybe someone else will.

> That was stupid but also practically irrelevant-if an uninhabited territory has zero exports, you can set the tariff as high as you like, with no exports nobody is going to pay it. To be clear, I don’t agree with these tariffs and think they are a mistake, but I think we should focus on their real world harms not a silly administrative error

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.

> They just have to find some regulation which they claim disadvantages the US compared to other countries.

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

So, they need to argue that the foreign countries' practice imposes a disadvantage in fact on the commerce of the USA compared with the commerce of any foreign country? They already have argued that; it was headlined in Trump's first announcements.

Any business impacted by the tariffs will have standing to go to federal court and argue that trade practices accepted for a century by legislatures and administrations of both parties do not constitute "unequal impositions" under the intended meaning of the statute.

They'd have to argue something other than that. There could be a standing regulation that says "Ships carrying any American goods must pay 30% higher docking fees"; if that had been accepted for a century, it would still be a slam dunk case of "unequal impositions".

And given that most trading partners are members of the WTO then the kind of behavior covered here would be covered by the most favored nation clauses.

> I don't think it requires the courts to agree

Eventually the courts have to agree/disagree if someone starts challenging it up the chain.

Technically they don't. They can say, for example, that the burden placed on commerce is a political question. That would be a declaration that they agree with the government, which looks like agreeing that a burden exists right now, but automatically switches positions whenever the administration does.

They could say that, but they won't, because "unequal impositions or discriminations aforesaid" is a straightforwardly justiciable question. Deciding whether things are "unequal" or "discriminatory" is almost exactly what courts are for.

Nearly every country that Trump tariffed does have some sort of tariff on the US. Canada has a sizable dairy tariff, for example.

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.

I have no idea what this has to do with what I said. Maybe you think Trump can formulate a convincing argument that he is acting with the intended scope of the Tariff Act. Ok? All I'm saying is: his argument would very much be subject to challenge in court, and this is not a non-justiciable "political question".

I was agreeing with you, and expanding by pointing out an example of an inequality.

Like most things in life, tarifs can be used well, or used badly.

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.

Any Canadians here to comment on the milk tariff policies?

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....

Naturally individuals can cross the border and get cheaper stuff. But in the grand scale of things, that's irrelevant.

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.)

> Subsidies encourage over production

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?

The supply and purchase of Dairy in Canada is centralized through the government.

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.

> E.g. Canada could subsidise domestic milk producers. (We used to do that in New Zealand)

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.)

> Like most things in life, tarifs can be used well, or used badly.

I've yet to see a good use of tariffs.

The most common one is protecting defense-related industries: for example, things like steel, weapons, and automakers are protected in most countries which have them because in the event of a war governments want to have domestic industrial capacity. Microprocessors have gotten a lot of attention here and I think software isn’t far behind, too.

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.

The government could directly pay for domestic industrial capacity, if they want that. Recipients would get money for capacity, not for actual output. (And no tariffs would be necessary.)

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.

The US has (has?) a huge tarriff, something like 200%, on Chinese EV's. This in theory would be good because it gives American manufacturers a chance to catch up and giving them a huge advantadge for selling to American customers.

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.

> This in theory would be good because it gives American manufacturers a chance to catch up and giving them a huge advantadge for selling to American customers.

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.

> Nearly every country that Trump tariffed does have some sort of tariff on the US. Canada has a sizable dairy tariff, for example.

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?

Right. The average tariff on US goods applied by the EU is 4.1% IIRC Canada was significantly lower. So having “some sort of a tariff” isn’t that meaningful on its own.

It’s impossible to get the effective tariff rate because everyone works around them with VATs and random things like movie ticket taxes for foreign films that are effective tariffs but not officially counted as such.

> around them with VATs

That’s such an absurd and nonsensical thing to say. How did you come up with it?

in this day and age it doesn't even phase me. The president clearly doesn't care about coherent arguments, so why would anyone who potentially voted for him?

I was unaware EU goods are exempt from VAT over here. When did that change?

> think the idea that a trade deficit is a disadvantage is kinda brain dead, but it's plausible sounding enough to argue in court.

If you think it’s a terrible argument, why do you think the courts would think otherwise?

> I don't think it requires the courts to agree

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.

> It's that there is a disagreement (among parties with standing) about what the law means.

IMO that's being awfully generous.

That is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the judicial, legislative, and executive branches are set forth in the constitution. The co-equal branches are supposed to check and balance each other. Merely making up a "story that sounds plausible" but is in fact "brain dead" should not be enough for the courts. That should be such an obviously losing argument that the executive is immediately injunction to cease while the court case proceeds and eventually definitively determined to be acting illegally.

I think that's directionally true in this case but not generally true: powers delegated to the executive branch by the Constitution can indeed allow the President to make up complete bullshit and largely avoid judicial scrutiny (at least with a conservative SCOTUS that believes in unitary executive power).

(Case in point: Trump's travel ban last term).

> largely avoid judicial scrutiny (at least with a conservative SCOTUS that believes in unitary executive power).

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.

"should" carries a lot of weight here.

> i think the idea that a trade deficit is a disadvantage is kinda brain dead, but it's plausible sounding enough to argue in court.

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?

> just that there's a burden or disadvantage

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.

He doesn’t have to convince the courts of that. The President makes foreign policy, not the courts. As long as the President is plausibly exercising a foreign policy power Congress gave him, the courts don’t get to reweigh the evidence and decide for themselves whether the trade deficits result from other countries placing trade barriers or something else.

The courts interpret the law, so in fact he does have to convince them that his interpretation is true.

Why does the law list specific conditions in which the president can apply the law if the president can apply it for any reason he wants?

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."

> Surely there's a mechanism through the courts for someone to challenge illegal tariffs

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."

If that were the true intent of the law, it could simply say "whenever the President chooses," instead of detailing precisely what the president must, "find as fact." Even the administration believes this, as they chose the particular fig leaf of "reciprocity" to defend that the statue was being followed.

Legally, there is a major distinction between whether an entity charged with making a finding as indeed done so, and whether that finding correctly reflects the actual facts.

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.

But that's not the argument they're making. You are discussing whether Congress is allowed to pass such a law (they are), GP is discussing the gap between the statute and the executive's action -- that absolutely is reviewable.

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.

> id 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.

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

The court’s power is limited to determining whether the President made a finding in the nature of the finding required by the law. What the court can’t do is then second guess that finding—analyzing it substantively to determine whether it is correct or not.

> What the court can’t do is then second guess that finding—analyzing it substantively to determine whether it is correct or not.

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's just not true. This case is a specific example of exactly the opposite. Read the opinion. It's literally a panel of federal court judges, one a Trump appointee, going through each justification and calling bullshit on each one.

Lower courts get decisions wrong all the time.

More to the point, there’s a difference between the two statues. One of the points raised by the court in the current case is that IEEPA does not have that kind of “whenever the President shall find” language:

> 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.

> Here, the President did make a finding

That is very interesting. It assumes that the president is truthful

It doesn’t! The relevant issue is allocation of power (who gets to make the finding), or the substantive merits of the finding itself.

So there is no remedy available to those who are wronged by a false or fraudulent "finding?"

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.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_Loophole

Please read Marbury carefully. There is a remedy! An electoral one.

Except you're quoting a small part of a law, and conveniently lack the knowledge to understand that "aforesaid" means there's a definition to "unequal impositions or discriminations". These are quite literally spelled out, none of which are criteria met. Ergo, the president cannot simply declare himself King of the economy at will just because he wants to.

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 President makes foreign policy, not the courts

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.

No question the executive has had its powers extended beyond the original vision, but I don't often see the same criticism of the judiciary. Judges are more akin to a monarch than the US executive (courtroom is their kingdom), with very little recourse for ordinary citizens.

Hence the cases and controversies clause.

Complaints about "judicial activism", or complaining about "judges that go to far, have been blasted everywhere since the at least the 90s so more than my adult life, at least from what I can remember growing up in the middle of the USA.

Except judges can't do anything proactively and are forced to rely on the executive to enforce their decisions and the legislative to fund them. Really, they're absolutely nothing like a monarch. Especially compared to the guy who appoints all the secretaries, commands the military, and decides foreign policy.

Used to be a time when Congress made foreign policy. Oh, how fast they grow up... (sheds tear)

Honestly I'm not sure that was ever true, but it is funny.

Congress does have the exclusive power to declare war, but they've delegated that over the years with various authorizations for the use of military force or for police actions.

Congress is responsible for all formal declarations of war. I think it was Truman who started the concept, but JFK who truly exploited it.

Taxing things is Congress' responsibility, not the executive branch.

How is taxing American importers "foreign policy?"

Exactly. The same nonsense-logic for collecting these taxes could be abused to bypass Congress and give away zillions of taxpayer dollars to anybody (including his own companies) that go: "I just bought lots of Trumpcoin to be patriotic, and I ultra-promise not to do business with Iran or Venezuela or whatever."

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.

It does affect trade (setting tariff high enough basically equals to no trade policy for example) with those countries and hence it is foreign policy.

If that's true, then all criminal law in the US is foreign policy because the existence of laws restricts people's decision to visit the US to commit crimes.

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.

The policies you mention don’t target particular countries, and this is where the difference lies in my opinion. The part of the policies which is countries specific is in fact foreign policy.

By that logic, a president wanting to tariff the whole world could just specify some small country as not included, and then it be foreign policy.

I don’t think tariffs being foreign policy gives the president full control over them because foreign policy is presidents responsibility. Tariffs have this duality between being foreign policy and budget. So I don’t have issue with Congress delegating some of the tariffs power to the executive in some circumstances.

You have this backwards. IEEPA gives the president the authority to use tariffs as a way to achieve a foreign policy goal.

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)

I’m not arguing Trumps use of tariffs was legal (in fact I’m of an opinion it’s obviously not). Just arguing there are cases where executive have rights to set tariffs and it does fall under foreign policy in those cases.

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.

> Just arguing there are cases where executive have rights to set tariffs and it does fall under foreign policy in those cases.

The case when tariffs fall under foreign policy is only when used to achieve a foreign policy objective only in response to an "unusual and extraordinary threat".

No, because criminal laws don’t have the primary function of influencing foreign countries.

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.

In the same way economic sanctions are foreign policy. The tax is just a tool to alter the US’s economic relationships with foreign nations.

“IEEPA does not authorize any of the worldwide, retaliatory, or trafficking tariff orders,” the panel of judges said in their order Wednesday.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/28/business/us-court-blocks-trum...

That seems to not agree with your "power Congress gave" characterization.

Time to relitigate Marbury vs Madison, then? POTUS is currently in defiance of court orders on a number of issues, after all.

No, setting tariffs is a regulatory and economic power, and even in a hard unitary executive model, the President doesn't have plenary power over tariffs. This is literally an enumerated power of Congress, which makes it hard for me to understand why you started down this path on this thread.

That’s an argument that the Tariff Act of 1930 is unconstitutional, which is a different argument.

No, it's an argument that your interpretation of the act is (pretty clearly) unconstitutional.

I’d love to live in a world where non-delegation was such a robust doctrine. But “you can set tariffs if you find that other countries are being unfair” (paraphrasing) is a more than intelligible principle supporting Congress’s delegation.

The case before the Court of International Trade failed on non-delegation and major questions grounds. But my point isn't that SCOTUS will affirm the lower court here (though: they will), but rather that your logic upthread doesn't hold. You said "the President makes foreign policy, not the courts". Plain category error.

Trump is knee-deep in negotiating with foreign countries on trade deals using the tariffs as leverage. And the court must purported to kneecap him. Of course it’s an exercise of the President’s foreign policy powers, and that’s why Congress gave the President this authority over tariffs in the 1930 act.

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.

>> Trump is knee-deep in negotiating with foreign countries on trade deals using the tariffs as leverage.

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.ft.com/content/aac26993-8be0-499f-bc08-9a59ed7f4...

This is as “knee deep” as his 200 deals that were “made” a month ago.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/25/trump-200-trade-dea...

The FT is reporting it.

Your bigger problem here is "accomplishing foreign policy objectives using tariffs" is not an authority Congress has delegated to the executive branch, and, in fact, this cuts against his argument (that he is instead responding to an "economic emergency", despite the performance of our economy and the fact that he's responding to conditions that we have been working with for generations).

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.

If “racism” can be a “public health emergency” (https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-governor-declares-racism-publ...) then surely the gutting of american industrial capacity qualifies as an “economic emergency.” One that has serious national security implications, too. Surely it falls within the “emanations from the penumbras” of Congress’s delegation.

And I never said the tariff power belongs to “wholly to the executive.” My view is that economic warfare between countries falls within the scope of Congress’s delegation of tariff authority. And under existing precedent, that’s a sufficient “intelligible principle” to avoid non-delegation problems.

Yeah I don't think this "the other side called racism a public health emergency so we the word no longer means anything" argument is going to get you very far in court, but maybe you just think it'll get you somewhere here. Either way, under current law, the administration's foreign policy objectives have virtually nothing to do with their (limited) tariff authority.

> He doesn’t have to convince the courts of that. [..] As long as the President is plausibly exercising a foreign policy power Congress gave him...

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.

> The acts give him the power to enact tariffs under certain conditions

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.

> The president only needs to convince the court the finding has been made.

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.

I don’t think even rational basis review applies here, because there’s no constitutional right or due process issue. Courts simply don’t get to supervise this particular arrangement on the substance.

The phrasing is "finds a fact" (emphasis mine), not "makes a finding". They need to convince the court that what they found is a fact, which means that it needs to actually reflect reality.

That’s not how judicial review works. Even in the ordinary agency context when you’re talking about domestic issues rather than foreign policy, courts defer to fact findings of agencies.

Whether or not the courts defer to agencies in different scenarios is not nearly as big a part of "how judicial review works" as it sounds like you're trying to claim. Literally last year the Supreme Court removed a major precedent to how deferential the courts need to be to federal agencies[1], so there's absolutely nothing inherent to judicial review that would require things to continue working the way you claim they do even if it was current precedent.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Ra...

> The President makes foreign policy, not the courts.

A tariff is not foreign policy. It is a tax levied on American companies.

It’s also levied on non-American companies. I still wouldn’t count it as foreign policy though.

In this specific case the congress is the one making trade policy (in non-emergency situations which obviously this is not..).

The congress never gave Trump the power to do this. Of course they didn’t refuse it either..

> unequal impositions or discriminations

When it comes to china, this is definitely true. The rest of the world not so sure

Huh? American and European CEOs voluntarily move manufacturing to China, now everything gets made in China. And that's somehow China discriminating western countries?

I believe the reference here is that there are fairly protective trade policies in China, and they are similarly mercurial about what passes. See cases of IP theft, if you’re partial to IP as a concept (I’m not). They’re certainly not a laissez-faire paradise. Granted, merely terking our jerbs isn’t a good argument for slapping massive tariffs on them.

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.

You'd think, by this point, they'd realize if you don't want your IP stolen, don't send it to China. At least make them work for it, like everyone else.

It’s hard right? If you want market access, you fork over the designs so they can verify it’s not American spyware, then boom it’s stolen (message to be read by an AI made to sound exactly like a certain USA president)

> He would have to convince the courts that I don't like having a trade deficit with anyone somehow means our trading partners are "placing a burden or disadvantage upon the commerce of the United States by any of the unequal impositions or discriminations aforesaid"

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.

"Finds as fact" isn't the same thing as imagines/thinks/claims.

Facts are still different than opinions, that statute doesn't give him unchecked power to declare any crazy idea as fact.

It’s so surreal that this has to be explained in this day and age.

Or more formally: "findings of fact" are part of the purview of the judiciary, definitionally. As always wikipedia does a good job here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trier_of_fact

> 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.

No, it's precisely the opposite. The choice of that term isn't to empower the president, it's to clarify that such a decision is a "fact" in the legal sense and thus subject to judicial review. In point of fact the page you link says explicitly that courts (and not the executive branch) are the government organ responsible for determining facts.

Facts are facts, indeed, but bact finding is determining what the facts of the situation are, and this law makes the president the one who finds the facts. This doesn't let him declare squares to be circles, but it does pretty clearly let him declare more or less arbitrarily that a trade agreement is, in fact, disadvantageous.

This is covered in the ruling. The courts get to decide whether the executive's use of delegated legislative power (levying taxes) is both constitutional and within the bounds of the relevant legislation. They don't simply take the executive at their word, and in this case specifically there are several examples, such as the tariffs that are supposed to be about fixing fentanyl. Cited legislation requires a specific emergency justification, and the tariff has to meaningfully address the issue. The court rules that the justification of "it's suddenly a fentanyl emergency and making our own citizens pay additional tax will make China do something" isn't close to fitting within the statutory and constitutional framework.

“Whenever the President shall find as a fact”

That’s the prerequisite to the lawful exercise of power.

Right he's claiming that a trade deficit is the same thing as a tariff, and he will get virtually only get cranks who will be his stooge to try and prove it in court and judges will laugh at them, because the two judges I know actually have a pretty good grasp on basic math and econ 101.

"Whenever the president shall find" seems to establish Annoying Orange as the sole arbiter as to whether that satisfies the burden/disadvantage clause. This admin has successfully argued much shakier positions than that in court. Hell, he once argued successfully that he broke the law and the law prescribes a punishment but that punishment doesn't apply because the law doesn't say who should administer it.

Because the very act of being limited is emasculating and wouldn't close trade deficits in non-services, which he erroneously believes are some sort of taking-advantage-of, or at least, sees as an opportunity as a dominance ritual -- which would be utterly mundane, its traditional in autocratic regimes. Other Nations are always taking advantage of Us.

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.

I'm seeing lots of big business bending over backwards to erase all the words that are it of favor with the "free speech absolutists" in the GOP. And good luck of you've ever written anything down suggesting that maybe bombing Gaza isn't awesome...

Freedom of speech is looking pretty damn thin at the moment.

I’m also none of those things, but that section of Smoot-Hawley appears to apply when a foreign country imposes such burdens on the United States * which is not equally enforced upon the like articles of every foreign country.” So not just that it treats the US differently than itself, but that it treats the US differently than any other country.

People on this thread badly need to familiarize themselves with most-favored-nation/permanent normal trade relations. There seems to be a contingent who believe that there are a mess of separately negotiated tariffs between each country.

But there aren't. The WTO generally put that system away and now to first approximation everyone gets the same deal as everyone else.

You sure have a lot of confidence in the people in power today to think that they could produce something better than was produced 100 years ago when there was still actual debate and bills were read. These people today just pass bills based on it having a catchy sounding title.

"The One, Big, Beautiful Bill" is not catchy.

My bringing up it's age was mainly about it not being used in a LONG time, so using it now would seem like a hail mary. I made no mention about current day laws, so I'm not sure where your impression came from.

Also not a lawyer, but I think that there are legislated laws that superseded that, and since its legislated, you can't just go back and choose to enforce one law without the others.

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...

Many other statutory schemes were enacted afterwards that placed additional restrictions on the tariff authority Congress gave the President. You can’t read one section of one statute and just assume it alone applies. Just look at the variety of crap you can find in Titles 19 and 50 having to do with trade policy.

The ruling was basically that the tariffs themselves were unconstitutional. Specifically, the court found trump's tariffs so arbitrary that congress is forbidden from delegating the power to impose such tariffs to him. In order to not void the laws congress passes, the court can reinterpret the wording of the law so that it stops being unconstitutional. This leads to some explanation that the particular law he invoked gave him too narrow a power, but any law you can mention, no matter how broad it seems, would be interpreted by the court as too narrow (or as unconstitutional). Trump's argument in this case was basically, well I can declare an emergency any time I like, and I can claim that whatever I'm doing is fixing the emergency, so I can do whatever I want. Even though they might otherwise have given him that broad discretion, in order to maintain separation of powers they had to call bullshit on that reasoning.

Well the average tariff on US goods e.g. in the EU is 4.1%. So sure Trump could add a percentage point or two to make them equal. That wouldn’t exactly fit his goals though..

> why wouldn't the trump admin use the tariff act of 1930?

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.)

Update: on appeal, the government is sticking to its original argument (see page 15 of the motion). So it appears that on appeal the government continues to believe the path of least resistance does not pass through the 1930 Act argument about which OP is asking.

I wonder if this means businesses can request the courts order the government to repay their unconstitutionally levied duties - especially when it meant it basically destroyed their ability to do business.

Congressional Research Service: The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA): A Legal Overview - https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45732.pdf - April 17th, 2023

Wikipedia: Sovereign immunity in the United States - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit...

There are exceptions, IIRC you can sue the Internal Revenue Service to return overpayments.

It's less-clear whether the same is true for Customs and Border Patrol.

As your first link says, this doesn't give them sweeping immunity. The intent of the policy (again, discussed in the first page but more later) is to protect the government from doing reasonable things.

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

Based on my citations, I believe there is an argument to be made that government and presidential immunity might prevent any civil claims from sticking, but I would be pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong by the outcome of a legal action. If the tariffs are determined to be unlawful (after exhaustion of any appeals), one would think recourse would be possible, but only the outcome of legal proceedings would confirm.

There's an argument to be made but not one that will universally hold.

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

19 U.S.C. § 1514[1] provides for protests of customs decisions and judicial review under § 1515[2].

- § 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 still can't find evidence of anyone that has actually paid tariffs - nothing seems to be 3x more expensive compared to before the tariffs supposedly kicked in.

Weren't most of them suspended, and the Chinese ones lowered?

(I've been away for a while, and I'm not in the US so no "feel" for it.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/prusa3d/comments/1k0zsrx/1000_duty_...

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...

A ton of Walmart's "Mainstay" brand items from China got price-jacked even before their earnings call. Items which were $0.99 before went to $3 or even $7. I have a price tracker that watches a bunch of this stuff.

Some of these items are now completely out of stock, even after the prices went up x3 or x7.

I work for a freight forwarder. We have some customers that exported to the US and were hit with the boosted tariffs. Only a few smaller air freight shipments, so not container loads full - they decided to eat the extra cost to try to keep momentum, just on those shipments.

But it was only ever a short term strategy; if they had persisted they would have had to reconsider.

You might just be fortunate enough to have not purchased the items that went up. A simple Internet search and you'll find a bunch that did. There were also a lot of goods that ended up in bonded warehouses to wait out the eventual "TACO" (Trump Always Chickens Out) reduction of the tariffs.

?!??

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.

There are any number of examples:

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...

Why would retail prices triple? Tariffs are on wholesale price.

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.

Apparently US collected a record amount of tariffs in April, about $16B. So someone definitely paid that. Maybe for most consumer goods the companies ate that and took a hit until they figure out how to price things because TACO.

Is that a verified figure? Or are they like the DOGE "savings" figures?

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 doesn't have anything to do with DOGE, that's just the tax the US importers are paying as a result of Trump tariffs: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/12/tariff-receipts-topped-16-bi...

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. ).

I know it has nothing to do with DOGE.

My point is that DOGE's total clusterf*ck of published numbers/data, whether intentionally or by incompetence, has now made me think twice about numbers being published by the government (doesn't help that Trump is an inveterate liar).

This feels like bringing up an old issue again. These days, a lot of trade policy just comes down to whatever the president decides, with very little public debate. When a 70-year-old law gets used as the main justification, it makes you wonder if emergency powers have simply become too convenient for anyone to walk away from. Whether this ruling will actually change anything probably depends on whether people care enough to follow up later.

90 year old law

Age doesn't matter. The Constitution is even older, and it's not like that makes it moot.

Not saying this is good or bad, but this doesn’t seem surprising. Isn’t the point of our government structure to stop any one person from acting like a king. I’m surprised it took this long.

Checks and balances are good things. Hopefully we see more.

Congress seems to want a king?

[flagged]

Better hope this bill that house republicans have passed dies in the senate, since in effect it lets Trump override the courts: https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-hidden-provision-in-t...

Whoa. It is scary, but not surprising, to me that GOP representatives slipped that into the bill.

I think it might be struck down by Byrd rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_provision#Budget_Act_an...)

That sounds like immediately forcing a constitutional crisis. It’s essentially a coup of two branches against the third.

> It’s essentially a coup of Republicans

Do not pretend otherwise.

I'm not sure how much difference that bill's clause makes in practice. As I understand it (courtesy of the "Advisory Opinions" legal podcast, but any misunderstandings are my own), the problem is that, if the executive branch is going to ignore the courts, then they're going to ignore the courts. A court can recommend prosecution for contempt, but prosecutors are part of the executive branch. A court could try and appoint their own prosecutor, but then the court is both judge and prosecutor - which goes against the US system's goal of an impartial and independent judiciary. The court could issue a fine for contempt, but then the government is paying a fine to the government? It could issue a sentence of jail time, but the executive branch administers the prisons and has the pardon power.

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.

> 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.

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...

Usually I think saying both-sides is pretty lazy, but has any Congress in the last few decades done anything but delegate more of their authority to someone else? One party always complains about Executive Orders and interference when the other party is President, but then never curtails the power when they get a chance.

There are things both sides do and it is valid for those things to annoy you and be your primary cause

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

How does this relate to the parent comment?

It seems like the parent is clearly asking for a concrete example.

In that regard, yes, both. However in that time they were never really faced with any president who would take the power granted anywhere near the extreme we see today. When that happened, one party recoiled in horror and the other cheered it on.

Stuff like the Muslim ban was pretty bad the first round of Trump, but it didn't seem to motivate the Democrats to start limiting the Executive branch in any way when they got back to power. I am pretty sure, it will be the same next time they regain power.

I remember Obama struggling pretty hard to get Obamacare through congress (and it ended up fairly watered down).

Obamacare still has stood the test of time. Even in the face of the first Trump administration and both houses of congress being run by the GOP.

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 ;)

And it started as simply rebranded Romneycare (the 2006 MA state plan), so Rs should have found it palatable. And for the first half of Obama's first term, Ds could vote in anything they wanted but we still got a terrible version of a R health care plan.

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.

MA state run health care is still a great program. Hoping we go to fully socialized - ie: basic duty of care is "free" (my taxes)

Despite having a super majority on paper, Obama never effectively had one with various R challenges and D health issues in Congress.

It's funny how Nixon definitely was a crook, and a loon, and should have gone to prison, and his paranoia and shenanigans set the pattern for and gave license to things to come, up to and including the current crisis... but he's still probably the best postwar Republican president, in terms of good things done or attempted.

One can't claim this without addressing Obama's (correct) decision to follow the spirit of the law and not push through[1] Merrick Garland when Republicans refused to conduct committee hearings[2].

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/138787/obama-can-put-merrick...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland_Supreme_Court_...

That's half the story...

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

Isn't that every party currently in power?

No?

10 seconds on google: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sinema-manchin-reject-biden-...

This situation is historically different than anything recent.

Not Congress - Republicans, who have a congressional majority.

... for now, and barely.

What evidence do you have for this? The democrats are showing nothing that suggests they will take either chamber of congress. Even if they got control of the house and actually impeached, the results would be no different than the previous 2 impeachments where the senate took no action. Even if they get control of both chambers, they'd have to have an over whelming victory to reach enough seats to secure a conviction since it needs a 2/3 vote.

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?

History, particularly in the last 30 years where political polarization has significantly increased:

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.

A plurality of Americans voted for this government, for better or worse. The courts are one of the primary avenues for the minority to express their will, but they move slowly, although slightly faster than congress.

That assumes a fair vote, which is arguable. Between Gerrymandering, purging voter roles, suits over who is allowed on the ballot, ID checks and associated issues I’m not sure it’s so clear cut.

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.

There are no “attacks on people’s voting rights.” It’s a canard Democrats trot out to energize their base, just like Republicans trot out lies about election fraud. For example, studies show voter ID doesn’t reduce turnout (but also doesn’t reduce fraud). https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/21/18230009/v.... Gerrymandering doesn’t affect the presidential election. But the GOP won the House popular vote by even more than Trump won the Presidential popular vote.

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...

You are so dead wrong I don't even know where to start.

Gerrymandering doesn't affect the presidential election? Surveys show how everyone would have voted? Do you even hear yourself?

There are attacks on people's voting rights, but gerrymandering actually doesn't affect the presidential election in the US. The electoral votes are chosen by statewide popular vote, except in Maine and Nebraska.

> The electoral votes are chosen by statewide popular vote, except in Maine and Nebraska.

Which means it does :-) just not by much.

He's wrong, yes, but no, gerrymandering does not affect the presidential election, since the gerrymandered borders are congressional district borders. (Unless you've got an argument that the state borders are gerrymandered, in which case, let's hear it!)

I think, indirectly, gerrymandering might impact the presidential election because a) redistricting can cause polling location changes[1] and b) the voter's knowledge/sentiment of living in a gerrymandered system.

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 could be used electron more of party X, which could be used to get enough votes to make new laws to try to effect voting on a national level.

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.

The presidential election is not directly gerrymandered. It's also not the president who chooses where ballot locations are, who gets registered and how, or who gets sent a mail in ballot. The more local the politician, the more power they have over the voting system that is used for all elections.

Gerrymandering is not just used on its own. The legislators that use their authority to disenfranchise voters use gerrymandering to dodge accountability. When Republican state legislators, congressmen, and senators do this, they do it to disenfranchise the same voters that would vote for a non-Republican president.

So yes, it's technically indirect, but gerrymandering obviously affects presidential elections. It couldn't not.

The presidential election depends on where the borders of each state are, and the population of each state as determined by the decennial census. Gerrymandering does not affect either of those things.

(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.)

Setting rules and regulations for elections isn’t “voter suppression and disenfranchisement.” That’s just activist propaganda to delegitimization elections. David Shor, a top Democrat voter researcher, conducted millions of interviews after the 2024 election and found that if everyone had voted, Trump would’ve won by almost 5 points: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202...

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.

Gerrymandering can have an effect, but I'm not sure how to measure it. Gerrymandering contributes to voter disenfranchisement. If you have been disenfranchised for the 3 years before the presidential election, why would you then choose to participate in the elections in the 4th year? To me, that number has to be non-zero, but it isn't obvious if it's anything significant.

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.

I’m a republican in Maryland. Am I “disenfranchised?” That terminology is just activist wordplay. It is insanely easy to vote in America.

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).

I'm not sure how you can call disenfranchisement activist wordplay. It makes me not even want to engage with you.

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.

> I'm not sure how you can call disenfranchisement activist wordplay. It makes me not even want to engage with you.

"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.

If you cannot vote because you have no way to prove who you are or cannot get to a polling location, that is a de-facto lack of a right to vote, otherwise knows as disenfranchisement. If you can own guns but not buy ammo, you also would not have a second amendment right.

I don't even know what you're going into with the civic ritual portion of the comment. You originally said voting in the US is easy, which I countered, and you seemingly did not respond to it.

> I’m not sure I could call those fair after years of attacks on people’s voting rights.

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...

They voted for an R. To be fair it is hard to argue that they voted for this government when Trump maintained he had nothing to do with these plans outlined in Project 2025 all through the campaign and his approval rating has plummeted as people understand the scope of what has happened.

To be fair, it's hard to argue that they voted for anything but this government, given that everything in Project 2025 is part of the Trumpist and right-wing agenda, and given the numerous links between Project 2025 and Trump's administration, and given his known history of dishonesty.

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.

They voted against inflation. Most people don't care about politics, they only care about their pocketbook. And to your point, Trump hasn't solved inflation, so he's left with only his core supporters now.

I mean a plurality of Americans voted for Obama. Should he have been able to ignore the will of congress and appoint supreme court justices to the vacant spots?

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 courts are one of the primary avenues when the other two branches don't fully ignore them. Trump has clearly demonstrated that he doesn't care what courts say unless it supports him, both in criminal court and when they rule against his executive actions (see: deporting citizens illegally despite it neing explicitly ruled he can't do that). That is the big reason so many fear that the American democracy is giving its last breaths.

It seems to me that between gerrymandering and the filibuster, congress is basically unable to pass normal legislation when either party has a majority. Hence why all sorts of stuff gets passed by budget reconcilation now, because that is exempt from filibustering. And also why the parties are so keen to find creative new ways of effecting change - if they can't pass laws, they can let the president do what he wants, and just not stop him.

Why they haven't changed the filibuster back to the way it used to be (with actual speaking, but only needed a majority vote to pass things) boggles the mind.

Guarantee Clause forbids it.

Can't happen unless 2/3rds of congress agree they want the same king

Congress wants powerful lobbyists with truckloads of money.

The people want a king.

It's Democracy going exactly the way how Plato already described it.

The Biden admin not only kept the first Trump admin's China tariffs in place but significantly expanded them under the same law. Was Biden acting like a king or does this analogy only go one way?

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"

But those weren’t under the emergency economics power law Trump is using this time right?

And these tariffs apply to the entire world for some reason?

The rationale for universal tariffs is it prevents rerouting goods to circumvent their intent.

God. The WTO penalties are gonna be epic (if much of this stuff ever actually goes into effect).

I believe you are correct. Biden used Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. Trump has used the 1974 act, but he's also used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which is what the trade court just ruled on. My understanding is the Trump admin's strategy of putting a tariff on every country as an opening to negotiations doesn't fly under the 1974 act, which only allows placing tariffs on a country if there is evidence that it has broken fair trade practices in the US.

Biden used executive authority on tariffs repeatedly, the same method Trump is using. And you're totally incorrect, Biden maintained the existing IEEPA tariffs on China that were imposed in Trump's first term.

Did raise them with that power?

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.

You’re making a false equivalence.

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.

You're literally replying to a comment putting in a great detail which statues were used in case of Trump tariffs this time and in case of Biden tariffs (and Trump to the extent) last time. Just saying "this is executive authority on tariffs" doesn't equate these usages, it is important what laws does this authority rely on.

As far as I'm aware, Trump's first term tariffs on China were Section 301 tariffs, and even though he floated the idea of IEEPA tariffs, he never actually invoked IEEPA in his first term [1]. Every article I can find about Biden extending and/or increasing Trump's China tariffs that mentions the legal authorization says it's under Section 301 of the 1974 act [2, 3, 4]. If you're aware of any evidence to the contrary, please share.

[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...

[4] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202502/1328911.shtml

Did Biden do that unilaterally claiming that a half-century economic trend was an EMERGENCY!!! or did he follow the legal process and negotiate with the Congress? They’ve delegated some powers but that’s not carte blanche.

Those tariffs were imposed under Trump's authority given to him by Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 which, in brief, allows the Executive to impose tariffs if a foreign nation's trade practices are affecting national security. Crucially, this determination is not made by the president, but rather the Department of Commerce.

Here is one such report from 2018 that was the impetus for the steel tariffs: https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/232-steel

It’s almost like you don’t understand the concept of doing things in moderation and abusing a granted privilege - you know, the origin of the phrase “this is why we can’t have nice things”. That is, what is happening now is different, and we all know it is different, hence the unanimous court ruling.

In the linked Biden press release I see an announcement of tariff changes under section 301 and section 232. From today's article:

>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 administration has previously contemplated imposing duties under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows for tariffs that counter unfair foreign trade practices. That is the provision Trump used to underpin his first term tariffs on China and is considered to be on firmer legal footing than IEEPA. So they'll likely just use that justification going forward.

They’ve already mentioned that in the EOs - it’s what Trump’s first administration used - but it’s more limited and slower than he wants. That requires them to follow a process where they identify a trade barrier and first attempt to negotiate it, and it’s limited to trade barriers. That’s a lot of work to use to demand concessions individually from each country world – these are not people who like to do their homework – and it doesn’t cover non-trade pretexts like fentanyl or failing to confiscate some Vietnamese farmers’ land so his family can build a golf course and resort. Once they concede that it has to follow the usual legal process, they’re going to have to give up the most appealing ways to monetize his office.

You called GDPR a 'trade barrier' as a justification for tariffs against the EU so it's extremely obvious you're not arguing from any position of good faith at all here.

> You called GDPR a 'trade barrier' as a justification for tariffs against the EU so it's extremely obvious you're not arguing from any position of good faith at all here.

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.

Are you suggesting what Trump and Biden did are the same thing?

Both literally imposed tariffs. How can you not compare and group them?

What did the courts say ?

You’d think, but many recent events make that seem questionable at best.

> Isn’t the point of our government structure to stop any one person from acting like a king.

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.

> What the constitution seeks to avoid is consolidation of all the government’s powers under a single entity

Yes, wealthy inter-state individuals would be so much better. Right?

Exactly so. It is quite difficult to come up with a wealthy non-state actor who's wreaked the same sort of havoc as a Hitler or Mao. Let alone even relatively minor players on the international stage who're responsible for billions to trillions in actual damages to people's living standards.

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.

> Isn’t the point of our government structure to stop any one person from acting like a king.

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.

> I’m surprised it took this long.

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.

Yes and no.

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.

I'm sure his tariff schemes will be unwound by the end of the year, and be pushed to Congress which will scoff at it. But it will move at the speed of tree sap, as courts dismantle it a piece at a time. Government is slow, but it can work

Betcha he just ignores the ruling and carries on as normal (or tries to, anyway).

Trade Court docket, V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Donald J. Trump (1:25-cv-00066): https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69888953/vos-selections...

Appeals Court docket, V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump (25-1812): https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/70394463/vos-selections...

So, since they were apparently never legal in the first place, will there be refunds for all the tariffs already paid? That could really help out small businesses that were hit with huge tariff bills. Common sense would say yes, but not sure how the law actually works.

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?

Yeah, that's a very good question. I kind of doubt it since we've moved beyond a world of common sense.

If this ruling holds the best thing would have been to have never paid the tariffs.

If this ruling is upheld (will probably be fought all the way to SCOTUS), then I would imagine that US businesses who paid the tariffs indirectly (i.e., the seller tacked it onto the price), will sue the US Gov to get that money back.

> The Trump administration argued in court filings that the plaintiffs are improperly questioning his executive orders, “inviting judicial second-guessing of the president’s judgment.”

Isn't this that whole "checks and balances" thing I learned about in school?

No it’s the authoritarianism you learned in school

Great, now does it matter?

The current administration is doing their own laws and no one seems to actually be willing to stop it, like in many authoritarian countries.

And the brain drain will continue…

So when do prices go back down?

Bold of you to think that's ever going to happen, or that it was ever even intended to happen :(

No way major corps will lower prices.

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.

Sadly, DOGE probably fired all the people in the SEC and other agencies that would have gone after corporate price fixing from this current debacle. Hard to believe that this administration may have made prices worse than the Biden administration.

Actually, its not hard to believe, its totally Trumpian.

It was the FTC investigating grocery retailers in general creating higher prices to protect their profits while the retailers blamed COVID.

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...

We've already seen it happen with the Chinese tariffs being temporarily (possibly permanently, now) lowered. Competition works, as always (price fixing excepted).

How long did it take for prices to go back down after the first round of senseless Trumpflation?

Any inventory imported under the tariffs still needs to be sold through. There’s also a threat that this administration will ignore the ruling or pull other tricks to suddenly impose tariffs through some other avenue.

As long as tariff threats are being thrown around and this administration continues to act unpredictably, we are far from out of the woods.

Stock prices go up immediately. :-)

Prices tend to be sticky! Deflation isn’t common these days. When will price stabilize is a more appropriate question.

It’s not the end of this saga. Prior administrations, Republican and Democrat, have enacted tariffs without additional congressional approval.

Congress granted some options to the executive branch to do so.

The justification given by this administration to act independently is legally absurd.

My understanding is that in 2024 that some power of congress to delegate to power to the executive was limited in "Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo" over turning(partial I assume, I am not well versed in this) the opinion called "Chevron deference" from "Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council".

So the Supreme Court at least puts limits on what/how congressional powers can be delegated.

There are other avenues, but I think those last tariffs were targeted. Another scenario where executive branch appears to have power, delegated from Congress, to enact tariffs https://www.usitc.gov/press_room/usad.htm

Also as someone else noted https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/other-areas/office-of-tech...

True, though none have done it this aggressively and this aimlessly.

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.

> True, though none have done it this aggressively and this aimlessly.

or illegally!

Not across the board, and not explicitly based on trade imbalance.

Does it really matter what a court finds, anymore? We don't exactly live in law-abiding times.

A lot of people really seem to think this is the end of everything.

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.

> 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.

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).

Apparently up to about 40% support them, depending on the poll. [1]

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...

It's not like people are just closing their eyes and trusting in leader. I'm part of that 40% (and probably substantially more given contemporary pollsters difficulty in reaching people like me [1]), and I think my rationale is quite sound. The fundamental reason is that we are creating an unsustainable system. When Germany chose to limit imports of Russian gas, they wrecked their economy. Many people, blinded by hindsight, wondered why they would have created such a dependency to begin with.

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...

> 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

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.

When you make comments like this, it makes it sound like you think Germany tying their entire country's economy to Russian gas was a reasonable thing to do, because it's just trade after all. I'm trying to avoid straw manning you because I am certain you don't believe this, but your argument would suggest you do.

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.

America isn't tied to any single country. Adding tariffs to discourage trade with every country on earth (except Russia, which was exempt from tariffs, while other sanctioned countries like Venezuela were not) isn't anywhere near equivalent to making one's entire energy sources dependent on another country.

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.

Germany isn't a "trap". They're a crystal clear illustration of the problem with no hypotheticals necessary. Their economy is in recession, businesses are collapsing, and and their "solution" is to swap one dependency for another.

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.

>Their economy is in recession, businesses are collapsing

>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?

With due respect, I really don't think you're thinking about your arguments. You're complaining about tax cuts and tariffs in the same sentence. You probably don't realize that tariffs are literally a tax, generally paid by the richest companies in America. The partisan takes on these issues often don't really make any sense whatsoever.

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.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGRECPT

> including the US most obviously, has excesses of dependencies on other countries

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?

I agree that those are great examples of good trade products: luxuries relatively region locked that you don't really need, but enhance quality of life. These products, if suddenly unavailable, might cause some discomfort but not much more than that.

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.

Laws are laws and their age has no bearing nor does it make them irrelevant. The constitution is “from 200 years ago” too.

In theory, sure. In practice, it's only true when there is broad based respect for the law as a whole. I'm really not seeing evidence of that from this administration or its supporters. To put it very mildly.

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.

I like how you focused on "200 years" and not the fact I said "irrelevant". Being old and irrelevant doesn't suddenly make it relevant, no matter how many people like to pretend it is to support their weekly stock pump and dump tariffs on/tariffs off schemes.

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.

It depends on which community the ruling affects.

Yes, it does. Because it draws a clear line in the sand. The administration can choose to disobey the order, but that opens up individuals in the govt to potential prosecution later. That's why governments try fairly hard to go the legal route or at least maintain a fig leaf of explanations, however implausible.

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.

But now we have the “deathbed pardon” or the lame-duck preemptive blanket pardon, popularized by 46.

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.

Yes, but even then, as an official, you don't know if you'll be sure to get one. A court ruling significantly increases the risk of wilful disobedience for officials and hence dramatically lowers the probability of being ignored.

Hmmm, I think a "pardon factory" would counter that.

(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)

Yeah, but then you're depending on a notoriously fickle and unreliable person wanting or remembering to do that when the time comes. Sure, if you're a true believer in the cause you'll take that risk, but a majority of the people in any administration are opportunists, not ideologues.

Fair point!

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).

So far, his modus operandi seems to be "You and what army?"

Even though Trump threw pretty much everybody from his previous administration under the bus, there was no shortage of new volunteers willing to take their chances.

This is the guy who bussed people from parking to his rally, but then declined to also get them from the rally back to parking. Seems like depending on a pardon down the road is a risky move.

does this mean we stop paying tariff tomorrow ?

The order gave them 10 days to start winding it down.

Not an expert on tariffs, but I believe they are assigned based on the date they leave port from their source (or arrive at port?). So there were some rushes for suppliers to ship things before the new tariffs kicked in, even though they would arrive at port after the new tariffs were "in effect".

This could turn differently than anticipated* if 1. Negotiations with EU and China stalls because of the ruling. 2. The Trump administration appeal and win or just ignores this completely.

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)

And what happens now?

Trump already appealed. It goes to the next court up. Fun continues until the Supreme Court takes it + decides or chooses not to (effectively leaving the appellate decision in force).

And then? Trump doesn't follow SCOTUS rulings anymore.

You know when a programmer first moves from rote understanding of syntax and running through tutorials into that mode where they're testing the limits of what a new (to them) language can do and how it performs? This reminds me of that. It just took Trump several years longer than I expected.

They've issued a stay. So, this is a giant nothing burger until 9 June, and then it's a giant nothing burger until it gets to the supreme court, because they can issue a stay until they've ruled on it.

Trump seems to be in control of the supreme court, so i imagine this will all end in a giant nothing burger.

The GOP controls the house and senate. Congress controls tariffs.

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 ...

Wouldn't they still have to deal with filibusters?

The bigger problem would be their own party members.

In what sense?

The GOP in congress has struggled, even last election cycle to gather enough votes to take action.

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.

Additionally, in the first Trump presidency congress temporarily removed the debt limit. I don't think there are even votes to do that now so compromising on how to fund the government is going to take a lot of effort (that can't be spent on tariff rates).

I wish they would replace the debt limit with something more sensibly designed like the German (or Swiss) debt brake ('Schuldenbremse').

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.

Codifying tariffs would also mean they probably can't change it every day to different numbers, no?

Potentially they can codify broader authority for executive to regulate tariffs…

Too much of that should, but probably won't, set off every alarm and siren with the conservative justices, for stepping way over the line, after their reasoning on Chevron.

They can put a procedure in place to allow for some changes, just not under the ridiculous “state of emergency”.

isn’t it easier to just say that the shadowy courts are the reason for all the problems and not actually ram the tariffs through? This seems like an off ramp is being extended. Who actually wants the tariffs?

It's not clear to me if there's a strategy as detailed as that. I honestly think Trump thinks like he tweets and it's just that shallow, and arbitrary.

>Who actually wants the tariffs?

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.

>Who actually wants the tariffs?

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 don't see any political party cherishing "independent thinking."

They have a narrow so small that passing tariffs would still be politically difficult even though they control both chambers, and that is not even considering a filibuster.

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.

It would be difficult, but arguably everything has been difficult for the congressional GOP as even when they ran the house during the last cycle they could barely operate.

They struggled to pick leaders among their own party members numerous times.

It has been hard for the judicial system as well, with Trump ignoring injunctions and orders as if they were just advisory. I wonder if he will try that here as well? "Oh, the court said no tariffs, but I'm not even going to bother with an appeal to the Supreme Court and just use an executive order to invalidate...", here is hoping he doesn't do that.

It would be nice if some US marshals put Trump in jail for ignoring the court but we know nothing will come of it.

> some US marshals put Trump in jail for ignoring the court

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.)

Given how often American "kings" leave the metaphorical playing board, this isn't chess: it is non-euclidian, real-time, penultima, on a continuous board, with hundreds of players and billions of pieces (and any given piece is under the control of potentially multiple players), and where the secret rules for every piece include self-playing behaviours and weird emergent dynamics.

And in penultima, sometimes the king isn't the real target, and attempting to capturing it destroys random other pieces instead.

Three of the post senior citizen Democratic representatives died in office so far so the margin is actually getting bigger as time goes on, the GOP had room to make multiple mistakes on the budget bill where one GOP rep fell asleep and didn't vote and one rep was present but just missed the deadline to vote. The Democratic senators have not shown the spine to put a hold on any appointments or pull a Tuberman and not let appointments through, let alone a filibuster, and Fetterman has gone off his meds and it shows, he's turned into a GOP senator after his strokes. Chuck Schumer on the other hand appeared earlier to be more interested in going on a book tour to sell his book. The whole thing appears to be on the precipice.

Schumer letting a Muslim appellate judge nominee be swiftboated also has to be up there

> Three of the post senior citizen Democratic representatives died in office

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.

But the Dems are still down three votes until those seats are filled.

Why would they ever be empty for long? Isn't it already determined who gets to join?

The one in Texas stood out for me when it happened, because the governor is GOP, he put off the special election until November so that a Democratic stronghold will not have a representative for ten months.

Sounds like there isn’t support for this agenda, and they’re breaking the law to force it on the country. They could moderate their position to something that would pass congress if they cared about the Republic.

There is no filibuster. Somehow the democrats are to weak to attempt one and completely caved on everything.

Cory Booker's world record fillibuster wasn't real?

He got a record but didn’t actually stop the bill from passing as I remember it.

The republicans leadership in the house has put mechanisms in place to prevent reps from challenging the tarrif laws. I don’t think it’d be a cake walk for them to do it through the legislative branch

Trump is claiming that imbalanced trade is a national emergency, allowing him to address it via executive order.

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).

Most GOP senators don't want the tariffs. It's just they're too scared of retaliation hurting their re-election chances (exhibit A: Cheney) if they defy Trump. It's easier to not challenge an Executive Order, which also puts the blame on Trump if people are unhappy, which they are, than it is to vote on the Tariffs at which point the Senate/House is responsible for the fiasco.

https://archive.is/feHjm

This link doesn't contain any information.

Yeah, looks like it archived a stub from before Bloomberg added anything substantive.

Here's a fresh capture: https://archive.ph/DMT9d

Reuters has got you:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-court-blocks-trumps-libe...

Summary of the ruling with annotations (written & audio): https://guidedsearch.ai/results?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cit.usco...

It will be interesting to hear what Justice Thomas’s supine justification will be for attacking the ruling.

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.

This would fit the standard of taxation with representation. Both Trump and Congress are elected, via a representative democratic process.

The Trade Court disagrees.

"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"

This won't really change anything, Trump has already shown a willingness to disregard the courts. He will appeal, and continue to disregard and impose the tariffs.

I'm really surprised to see this on the front page. Usually stories like this move off the front page in minutes. It's not because of flagging though. I had asked the question on a previous article which disappeared off the front page in minutes and Dang was kind enough to provide an explanation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43487014

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.

It's interesting. Nearly all orders from the executive branch are banned by some federal judge/court now(there are about 100 of federal courts, any one will do). While I don't agree with all the orders, the power of a random federal judge who can issue a nationwide ban relatively easily seems a little too much. To the point that the president is pretty much useless.

That is why appeals exist.

which could take years to effectively kill all the orders.

That’s why temporary restraining orders and injunctions exist.

They're nearly all banned because they're nearly all illegal. The president is not a king. If Trump followed the law, this wouldn't be happening.

except most of the orders are blocked by the opposite party judges, I would not call it 'illegal' until it went through the supreme court, problem is that it could take years, so the opposite party judges can block pretty much every order at the whim of whatever.

Where are the stats for your claim?

If a lawful order is enjoined by a district court, you can appeal to higher judges. If the higher judges agree with the district court, then you can appeal to the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court agrees with the district court, then the order probably isn't lawful.

this could take years, which essentially blocks whatever the executive branch wanted, quite effectively at minimal cost.

Judges doing bad faith rulings can be removed by Congress. Checks and balances works.

The president has the US military, DOJ lawyers, and the whole executive branch at their disposal- what chance do I have to defend myself from a piece of paper signed on a whim tonight?

The imbalance is tremendous

How can the people of the US be protected from the executive branch ?

> To the point that the president is pretty much useless.

That's only if he does illegal stuff, which he's doing like there's no tomorrow.

It's risky to give so much power to a single person anyway. The president is "useless" in a lot of countries and it's usually a good thing.

It wasn't a random federal judge. It was a three judge panel, one of which appointed by Trump and another appointed by Reagan (the third by Obama).

got that, but I'm talking about the general condition, not the specific one here.

Turns out, the “executive” in executive branch, means it is in charge of executing the law. It is the legislative branch that makes laws. So yes, the judicial branch can stop the executive branch from “making law” because that is how the separation of powers works.

Why is this country insisting on this ridiculous infighting? Why do you have a democracy if your bureaucracy is set up to resist the person the people elected? Didn't this exact sort of thing happen when a democrat was elected, the republicans basically stonewalled all progress? Now the dem bureaucracy is stonewalling the republicans? Is this how checks and balances is supposed to work? Am I being naive in thinking it wasn't always like this?

> Is this how checks and balances is supposed to work?

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.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said to X, "The judicial coup is out of control."

This is starting to sound like `Wool`

> White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said to X, "The judicial coup is out of control."

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`

Do illegal thing, court says it is illegal, blame court for enforcing laws and constitution like that isn't their job.

> country insisting on this ridiculous infighting? Why do you have a democracy if your bureaucracy is set up to resist the person the people elected

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.

Yes, it has always been like this.

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.

Executive orders are shot down by courts all the time. And it always starts in lower courts, with appeals going up to higher courts (both sides can appeal!). This is true for any president, Democrat or Republican, the judicial system is a check on executive power, with the understanding that the executive gets to nominate judges and congress gets to approve them.

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 discourse coming from the political right is clearly meant to attack the Judicial branch. They are going after what they call "Partisan judges" or "Activist judges" or "Radical leftist judges" or "Clinton and Obama appointees". They want to remove all judges who do not let them support whatever the administration wants to do.

Ya, it is going to be awkward when they start removing "Trump appointees."

I'm a little worried about this. This president may take out this setback on innocent people. I don't think it's out of the question that he may start a war.

So he gets to flaunt the law because he's vindictive? Not a system I wanna live in.

That's why I'm worried. To me it's obvious he was extremely upset with all those court cases against him, and now the courts and the Fed Chair are just straight ignoring him. So is Putin.

Yeah I get personally being worried but it's a weird thing to post online because the implication shared is that it'd be better if he [was allowed to]* just abuse emergency powers.

*edit

What’s the alternative? Roll over and let him do whatever he wants?

You have to force the issue. At the end of the day, congress will either stand by and allow the president to ignore the court, arrest judges, send his flying monkeys to intimidate them… or not.

If the president doesn’t back down, we’ve crossed the rubicon.

We already crossed that rubicon Jan 6th

I was going to say, now is the best tome to double down and escalate. Never back down.

In the US the president doesn't have the authority to start a war.

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.)

He only has to notify Congress within 48 hours, and if they don't approve it, those troops can stay deployed for up to 60 days. I'm just saying, he has already shown he's very interested in finding every loophole possible.

For people who may not know about this, it is in fact law.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution

Oh, but isn't that law just for 'special military operations'? It's not proper 'war'?

(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.)

The last time America formally declared a war was 1942. Every war since then has been various shades of "special military operation".

At least the American public does recognize them as wars, so there's that at least.

> 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?

Metaphors are a thing. People can (mostly) tell the difference between a literal war and a metaphorical war.

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.

“Finding every loophole” implies he cares.

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.

Starting a war and declaring a war are not the same thing. The president absolutely has the power to start wars.

If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does it have?

See my parenthetical remark, and my follow-up comment about 'special military operations' at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44121957

To make it short, I agree with you.

The US hasn't declared war since 1942. They seem to have fought a few large ones since then.

Those were all "Special Operations"

Innocent people are already being abused by the tariffs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com