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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

This is power explicitly reserved for Congress, which is being extra-constitutionally seized by the President (on the pretext of "national security") with no public support. The problem here is electing a lawless president and putting the Congress in charge of a GOP which is full of unprincipled cowards from top to bottom, not the institutional framework.

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If the answer to a lawless president is a cowardly and corrupt congress, then god help us. Economic policy simply cannot be trusted to politicians whose only incentive is re-election and serving campaign donors

That's true for every aspect of US government and society; having policy set by an elected legislature answerable to the people is how democracy works. If you want things to function better, start electing people who behave honorably and act in good faith and start demanding accountability from your representatives when they don't.

(Also, don't get your hopes up about the Federal Reserve in the current climate. Just like the Supreme Court or the FBI or the EPA or the NIH, the Federal Reserve is only as good as the people in charge, and Trump is doing what he can to seize control and abuse its powers for personal gain.)

The Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which is still current statutory law, empowers the president to set tariffs. There’s an argument that Congress didn’t have the power to pass that law, but they did.

In my understanding, this is only applicable when "an article is being imported into the United States in such quantities or under such circumstances as to threaten or impair the national security". But "national security" is pretextual in this case.

National security is one of the primary motivations for wanting to protect American industry in the first place; it’s hardly pretextual. And even if it was, the law states that whether or not national security is threatened is up to the judgment of the Secretary of Commerce.

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