No, he won’t. “Tim Apple” will buy some $TrumpCoin or agree to build his library, or prostrate himself to Trump some other way and the tariffs will go away.
I know that this is a stupid question, but what (law/policy/directive) gives the president the authority to tariff a particular company?
All of his tariffs are essentially illegal, I think – the executive got the ability to impose tariffs in times of national emergency or something along those lines. Normally, it lies with the legislative branch.
I’m not even sure they would be allowed to impose tariffs on a specific company. I’m sure if it happened, Apple would sue, the judge would impose a stay, like they’ve been doing for lots of his extra-legal actions, and at some point, he would claim he made a great deal with Apple and drop them.
I believe the precedent he hangs his hat on is Might v Right. He knows people can stop him but those that can, won’t. He knows he has about 1/3 of the electorate in his back pocket and he can rain fire and brimstone on any Republican about to grow a spine. I think the tariffs are illegal since there is NOT an emergency. When he leaves office, we need to prune back presidential powers.
If the Republicans are still in charge in the House and Senate, and a Democrat is elected president, you can be sure those powers will get pruned to the roots.
Hey, a panel of judges agrees with me!
I’m keeping my hopes up until SCOTUS rules 6-3 in his favor, totally ignoring both the words and the intent of the Constitution.
Looks like the Big Beautiful Bill includes the unrestricted ability for the Executive to target and tax any foreign asset holders:
This could, for example, mean taxing US Treasury bond holders to reduce the yield, retroactively.
Where recession is blocked along one path, the Administration will pursue it along another!
Apparently Treasury interest is exempt, as per WSJ:
Analysts and economists are still trying to decipher exactly how the proposal would work. But the tax is intended to avoid placing additional burdens on foreign investments in Treasurys.
A footnote in a congressional committee report says the tax wouldn’t apply to “portfolio interest” that is already exempt from tax. That category includes interest on Treasurys paid to foreigners and other debt traded on public markets.
But it goes on that it’s likely to have a detrimental effect on foreign investment and invite retaliation from other countries.
I don’t have a cite handy but one of Trump’s economy guys said this out loud on TV recently regarding tariffs. His comment was to the effect of “if the courts block us from doing this, we’ll just do it another way.” Exactly what I would expect from this crew but bold of them to just declare it instead of trying to be sneaky about it.
A Congressional report can say anything it wants to say. A textualist judge isn’t going to give a damn if it doesn’t say it in the law itself. Such notes might be the sort of thing that party whips or those pushing a bill will put out to confuse congressmen who would oppose the bill, by making them think that it says something different than it actually does.
I recall, for example, that Obamacare was written specifically to be confusing and pushed through before people could crack what it actually meant.
I’d want a cite for that.
I hope it’s not referencing Nancy Pelosi’s “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”.
Because while it sounds sinister, it’s just a baseline reality about the legislative process. As anyone that’s watched a bill pass on C-SPAN knows, the final language of a bill is not set until it’s had it’s final vote for passage.
Sweet summer child, you think laws still matter?
Oh, definitely not! Case in point, a few posts later, I assume that SCOTUS would rule in his favor.
Note that I’m not trying to talk the American Care Act up nor down, just that it’s not unthinkable that politicians would use obfuscation and misdirection to get laws passed.
Personally, I think that we need to go back to giving Congress sufficient anonymity that they can vote for laws on the basis of what they do, rather than by which team put it forward, and solve issues of corruption, deceit towards the public, and backroom deals in other ways (detailed elsewhere). Forcing everything that Congress does be public, as far as I see, just creates a system that encourages special interests and irrational voters to dump tons of money into politicians’ pockets, just so they can create gridlock without any blame, knowing that they can always blame the other party. Ultimately, tricks like misleading your own team are harmless because, even if the law does get passed and does give your team the points that it needs to maintain mass through the next election, the other team can be trusted to gut and axe it.
Maybe we’re not supporting banana companies to control Latin American countries through autocratic means, but that’s because we’ve created sufficient gridlock to not allow anything to happen, not because public transparency laws have convinced voters to vote for honest, upstanding individuals. We can’t get basic healthcare nor resolve simple and easy issues with immigration nor agree which side to support when a country has been invaded by another nation without any provocation and purely for the sake of conquest.
ACC I don’t really care about. It was always not going to happen by dint of being the product of one team, not two. How it got passed is a matter of interest purely for how politics works today, not because we should actually care about it or any modern, politically meaningful bill. They are all vaporware, whether delivered or not.
ETA: Never mind, this is clearly a hijack.
You had said:
But he talks about two things that could have sunk the ACA.
One was scoring the mandate as a tax - likely because the opposition party would talk about the huge tax hike on the American people that would represent, and Democrats would get cold feet and bail. Reasonable - and of course SCOTUS later ruled that it was a tax, interestingly enough.
The other thing he talks about was that it did not explicitly say that healthy people pay money in and sick people get money out - but that is the essential basis of all health insurance! It’s not something you have to say - group health insurance that individuals get from having a job works on the exact same principle.
So I’m not sure how “written to be confusing” applies, and as far as “pushed through” in a hurry, it was six full months between introduction and passage.
Also, historically, everything Congress does has always been public, from 1789 until now. The historic bias toward gridlock is a legacy of the rhetoric and legislative destruction of the Gingrich era, along with the sorting of the parties along ideological lines and the nationalization of party discipline and messaging, the latter of which has led to the disintegration of loyalty towards the prerogatives of the legislative branch by its own members. Since the Republican party has assumed the role of a personality cult, its members cannot keep the party from leading the nation into a self-destructive recession; they are relying on the unelected and politically near-untouchable judicial branch to keep disaster from overtaking their party, because they know that the unified action required for their branch to perform its constitutional function is politically both ineffective and suicidal.
Even that, AIUI, was a little more nuanced then it’s usually presented.