U.S. Cannot Legally Impose Tariffs Using Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Cannot Legally Impose Tariffs Using Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974

ielp.worldtradelaw.net

Good to know. What I want to know is, who will stop him? If Congress impeaches, will the Senate ever move to convict him? His MO is to push everything to the limit and beyond, so even if they do, what's to stop him from ordering the military to attack Congress?

No, the Senate will never convict.

Using the military to attack Congress is unlikely. What's stopping him is that the military itself believes pretty firmly in the Constitution. He has control over a lot of top leaders, but there are a lot of intermediate levels that will reject it. That itself might lead to a conviction.

However, he has a ton of other tools at his disposal: ICE, national guard, a bunch of governors, etc. A lot can happen, and it is not clear what the responses would be.

None of these alternative statues give Trump what he wants and what he used the IEEPA for, which is unlimited power to use tariffs to force specific countries to comply with his edicts and more importantly to stop laughing at him. The SCOTUS took that away leaving him with the only other kind of power that he knows how to use: missiles and war ships. The next few months may prove disastrous for the US and for the world.

I'd say the past few months have also been disastrous. I don't think there's been one lasting good thing with Trump at the helm.

As comedians say: the last few months have been disastrous, but the next few months will be disastrous, too. Just lots of ... disaster ... going around. (cue grim laughter) Sooo, as I was saying: giant meteor ...

America finally caught up to Canada and ditched the penny. That's a victory everyone can feel good about. Hopefully the nickel is on it's way out too, and we can get bigger bills back in circulation to catch up with inflation

I suspect that 122 was used for grift: numerous exemptions of specific companies were made, quite often after a company personally met with Trump or his family members.

I believe you meant graft, not grift.

I believe 'grift' is a recent alternation of 'graft': https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/usage-in-the-midst-v...

Ahh, thanks! I was unaware of the subtle distinction. Definitely graft in this particular context.

> give Trump what he wants … unlimited power

This is a species of a genus.

> the only other kind of power that he knows how to use …

The truth is that he knows how to abuse all kinds of power. In the immortal words of Office Space, he celebrates the entire catalogue.

> missiles and war ships

Turns out the Constitution doesn't let him do that without permission either!

> stop laughing at him

What would it be like if we had a Freaky Friday situation in which a six-year-old's mind inhabited the body of the POTUS? Hold my beer.

> Turns out the Constitution doesn't let him do that without permission either!

He is using them without permission tho. The army is regularly murdering people in pacific and Hegseth is all proud of it. Makes them feel manly.

In general I agree with you that enabling and caving is wrong. But, army is already commiting crimes.

All sticks no carrots

> Section 122 does not define the phrase “fundamental international payments problems.”

This seems like the gaping hole that this will be driven through.

Yes. My bet is they are going to try to say that a “balance of payments” problem is a “payments problem”, which maybe it is maybe it isn’t. It certainly sounds like it wasn’t what the framers of this particular law had in mind but there we are.

> they are going to try to say that a “balance of payments” problem is a “payments problem”

"The balance of payments consists of two primary components: the current account and the...financial account" [1]. The current account is the trade deficit or surplus in goods and services. The financial account (a/k/a the capital account) tracks movement of money.

If you have a free-floating currency, your balance of payments is always zero. This is the principle advantage of a free-floating currency: your exchange rate adjusts to finance trade deficits and invest surpluses [2]. America does not have a balance of payments problem because America doesn't fix the price of a dollar.

The best the U.S. could argue for § 122 jurisdiction is that a trade deficit constittues a fundamental international payments problem. That is, of course, nonsense from an economics perspective. But I don't know how these terms have been used in U.S. trade law. (My strongest argument against the author's argument woudld be that the Congress passing statute that "no longer applied by the time the Trade Act was introduced" merits deeper scrutiny of Congressional intent.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_payments

[2] https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/meltzer/fribal67.pd...

> That is, of course, nonsense from an economics perspective.

No problem. Ketanji Brown Jackson is not an economist either!

I don't think the legal path is how these issues will be fixed.

If the Trump administration have proven anything, it's that law can be ignored with very little consequences.

We've known that since Andrew Jackson. The only good thing Nixon did was choose to resign. Nothing was done to him though.

Our society has finally degenerated enough that this particular flaw is being actively exploited

To me the most interesting aspect of all of this Trump shitshow is that the US, always brought as an example of "well designed democracy with it's checks and balances" is showing very clearly that it's a banana Republic

The checks and balances do exist, they're just not being used. It took some extreme circumstances and decades of work for a single party to seize control of all the levers of government, and active collusion to continuously enable this level of dysfunction. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of people scattered across the various branches of federal government, both elected and career bureaucrats, who could put a stop to this at any time but choose not to. An extremely vocal, and not-insignificant sized chunk of the populace fanatically supports these actions. This is not a broken system, this is a fully functional well oiled machine being used skillfully to do horrible things.

it remains quite telling that in the wake of world war 2, when the us military designed the postwar japanese government, they based it on the westminster strong parliament system and explicitly avoided the us strong president.

America is a global superpower. Trump is not bound by laws, anymore than Bush 1 and 2 were restricted in Iraq, LBJ in Vietnam, FDR in everything, and on and on. It really doesn’t matter. Some loophole will be found. It’s meaningless

Elect a new president who decides they care again about restrictions on American trade. Your only hope

Okay monero. Just because our country has slipped towards an over powerful executive does not mean it was always so, not will remain so.

America wasn't always a global superpower either and maybe it won't remain one. But it's still useful to operate within the context of the reality we live in, which is what monero was describing.

> Trump is not bound by laws

That’s what Nixon thought too.

Nixon resigned. Was he ever even charged with a crime?

> Nixon resigned

Because the Senate had the votes to convict and remove him from office. Presidents don’t resign absent the rule of law, largely because that constitutes a death sentence.

Which president was executed?

Like common, American top level politicians are protected against the law like no one else. They can commit any crimes, literally, and norms are to look away and celebrate them anyway.

Lincoln and Kennedy, extra judicially of course.

> Which president was executed?

...why is the measure of the rule of law?

Nixon was pardoned by Gerald Ford in 1974 before the grand jury and prosecutors could decide whether to charge him.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-88/pdf/STATUTE-8...

> “Although I firmly disagree with the Court’s holding today, the decision might not substantially constrain a President’s ability to order tariffs going forward,” Kavanaugh wrote, “because numerous other federal statutes authorize the President to impose tariffs and might justify most (if not all) of the tariffs at issue in this case—albeit perhaps with a few additional procedural steps that IEEPA, as an emergency statute, does not require.”

https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-dow...

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