Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

Fully agree, but that's what happens when you keep piling laws on top of laws on top of laws and never go back and refactor. If I recall correctly, the case hinged on some vague wording in a semi-obscure law passed back in 1977.

View on HN

The whole legal apparatus of the US doesn't want to hear that but your laws suck. They're flawed because of the political system borne of compromise with parties incapable of whipping their members to just vote in favour of a law they don't fully agree with.

This is a global issue, laws aren't math formulas, law is interpreted, hence the need of judges.

That's the case in any country where a parliamentary body is split so closely.

When you need every vote to get legislature to pass, because you control 51% of a chamber, backbenchers on the ideological fringe of a party, (DINOs and RINOs) have a lot of power.

When you have a majority with comfortable margins, you can care a lot less about what the Sinemas and Manchins and McCains of a party think.

You're looking at the world with your American blinders on. The rest of the world's elected representatives vote with their party or they leave their party. What you're describing is a fundamentally American phenomenon.

But parties typically have to compromise with other parties in their coalition, so it would seem to amount to the same thing (compromise is required to pass legislation)?

Correct. The difference between FPTP and PR systems (Or countries with very strong regional parties) is that in a multi-party PR system, the coalition happens between party, in a FPTP two-party system, the coalition happens within the big tentpole parties.

There are many reasons for why two-party FPTP sucks, but this phenomena is present in multi-party systems, too. And, of course, sometimes politicians end up crossing the aisle, much to the chagrin of the party whip.

Karl Popper would like a word

"In fact, [proportional representation] robs him of personal responsibility; it makes of him a voting machine rather than a thinking and feeling person. In my view, this is by itself a sufficient argument against proportional representation. For what we need in politics are individuals who can judge on their own and who are prepared to carry personal responsibility."

https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2016/01/31/fr...

Old laws are often superseded or modified by newer legislation that's not novel or rare. This one wasn't because it hadn't been so roundly abused by previous presidents that it had been an issue worth taking up. It's the same with a lot of delegated powers, the flexibility and decreased response time is good when it's constrained by norms and the idea of independent agencies but a terrible idea when the supreme court has been slowly packed with little king makers in waiting wanting to invest all executive power in the President. [0]

[0] Unless that's power over the money (ie Federal Reserve) because that's a special and unique institution. (ie: they know giving the president the power over the money printer would be disastrous and they want to be racist and rich not racist and poor.)

An additional problem seems to be that this law had some congressional check that has been ruled unconstitutional since.

Except that isn’t relevant at all. This Supreme Court is completely cooked. If the case was “can Trump dissolve New York as a state” you would still have 3 justices siding in his favor with some dog shit reasoning.

Read the opinions. Both are pretty reasonable. I think the dissent has a good point that a plain language interpretation of the term "regulate imports" would seem to include tariffs.

The bigger issue I think is that that statute exists in the first place. "Emergency powers" that a president can grant himself just by "declaring an emergency" on any pretense with no checks or balances is a stupid idea.

Kavanaugh's opinion seems to say "well, this would be too hard to undo, so we should just leave it alone and let Trump continue". That hardly seems 'reasonable'. Just lazy and/or partisan.

> The plaintiffs argue and the Court concludes that the President lacks authority under IEEPA to impose tariffs. I disagree. In accord with Judge Taranto’s careful and persuasive opinion in the Federal Circuit, I would conclude that the President’s power under IEEPA to “regulate . . . importation” encompasses tariffs. As a matter of ordinary meaning, including dictionary definitions and historical usage, the broad power to “regulate . . . importation” includes the traditional and common means to do so—in particular, quotas, embargoes, and tariffs.

That doesn't sound like "well, this would be too hard to undo" to me, and making that argument elsewhere doesn't diminish the main point.

It's hard for me to pay my taxes

The original law (like many laws that delegated congressional authorities at the time) contained a legislative veto provision which gave the legislative final oversight of any administrative action. In the 80’s the Supreme Court found that legislative veto provisions were unconstitutional, but left all of those delegations standing. After that ruling, the administration can now do what it wanted without congressional oversight and the ability to veto any attempt to repeal the laws. In the oral arguments, Gorsuch raised the possibility that the law itself should have been found unconstitutional in the 80’s because the legislative veto was essential to its function. It looks like the court today took a minimalist approach, letting these delegations stand but minimizing the scope of the powers delegated.

Indeed, if you want to case intuitional blame here, it’s far more Congress’ fault for forcing the court to split these linguistic hairs rather than address this issue head on themselves.

Only if you ignore the explicit grant to Congress in Article 1 Section 8... You're trying to argue an implicit grant somehow trumps an explicit grant.

> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C1-1-...

It's obviously not that simple. If we follow your logic then we would expect that no previous President was able to enact tariffs. We obviously know that to be false as Presidents in the past have enacted a wide range of tariffs.

We also know that in the past the constitution has been violated for political expedience.

The argument the majority of the court went with in a few different forms is that a grant that goes against the constitutional grants needs to be explicit and IEEPA is not explicit.

In fairness Trump is the first guy who uses this cheatcode so blatantly. There used to be a kind of decorum.

But yes it is basically eliminating parliament and rule by a monarch- making a mockery of 1776.

Well, not really because that part doesn't grant the US President arbitrary powers to perform any action that would result in regulation (for example, he is not given the power to go around killing random people even if doing so would effectively regulate international trade; he can't declare war on another country even if doing so would be the best way to effectuate regulation of trade with another country) it gives him the OBLIGATION to perform regulation, using the powers delegated to him.

If giving the US President unlimited and arbitrary authority as long as they can claim it was useful for meeting a legal obligation created by Congress were the correct interpretation then we need look no further than the "Take Care" clause of the US Constitution, where the US President is given the obligation to take care that all laws are faithfully executed -- which, with this interpretation, would mean that any action would be under the purview of the US President as long as they could claim at doing that action resulted in the laws being faithfully executed.

Not a lawyer, but I found the majority opinion's position on "regulate" much more compelling than the dissent. In particular, the majority's argument that "regulate" is a pretty common function of the executive branch that in no other context implies the authority to tax (tariff), which is a pretty clear Article I power. The majority also convincingly argued that it seems unreasonable to interpret a law to broadly delegate Congressional power to the Executive branch without Congress making that intent explicit in the law. The dissent not only didn't make good counter arguments even read by themselves, but the majority opinion did a pretty good job refuting those arguments specifically.

> If the case was “can Trump dissolve New York as a state” you would still have 3 justices siding in his favor with some dog shit reasoning.

As a counter-example, if the case was, say, "can a college use race as a factor in admissions"[0], you get 3 justices siding in favor using dogshit reasoning, just from the other side of the aisle. It's a bit ridiculous to think there aren't Democrat partisan judges on the Supreme Court.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...

That is not contraexample. It does not show conservative justices not being hacks.

Besides, conservatives including conservative justices are literally pro racial profiling and arresting people on race only.

I guess there are “hacks” on both sides?

The Bakke decision in 1978 upheld that race could be used as a factor in admissions. Your counter-example is precedent from 50 years ago. Does that same precedent exist in this tariff case?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com