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Comment by palmotea | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

"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.

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.

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.

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

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