I just hit play, heard him bragging about saving 35 million lives, and stopped watching.
I bet Whack-A-Mole is his favorite carnival game.
Yep:
As Trump social media posts go, that one was pretty sane. The lies it contains come close to those made by normie politicians.
Looking at the SCOTUS decision, even the liberals seem to believe Congress has the power to delegate tariff-making to the executive. What they called Trump on was him citing a law, to justify tariff-making, that says nothing about tariffs.
SCOTUS has the power take away the dictatorial powers Trump has assumed. They will not do it. One reason is that, gradually, over centuries, Congress has delegated its power to the executive. If SCOTUS actually enforced the Constitution, they would be overruling a boatload of precedents, and it would make it hard for the next president, even if not inclined to dictatorship. Of course, I think that the No Kings principle, as embodies in the separation of powers, is a lot more important than making things easier for President Newsom (much less President Vance).
He’s basically making the case that the law is capricious. He can ban items but he can’t tax them for 1 cent. Which is the greater harm?
But that’s sort of like arguing that, as a batter in baseball, I can hit the ball every bit as hard as I want with the bat, but you’re telling me that I can’t throw the thing?
Well yes, because that’s the literal rules of the game.
The objective of the rules of baseball aren’t to delegate harm to baseballs, it’s to define roles and objectives that are entertaining. And likewise, the Constitution wasn’t written to decide how to harm foreign nations, it was formed to delegate tasks in a way that put groups with different interests in conflict with one another.
SCOTUS could have made a broader ruling, stating flatly that except in emergency situations, tariffs are solely the purview of Congress, not the executive branch. But the risk was that there are a sufficient number of nutcases on the bench that a broader ruling may not have won the required majority. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. This long-awaited long drawn-out ruling may turn out to be an ineffective nothingburger as the insane rampage by the Orange Tyrant continues.
No, Justice Roberts wrote a broad opinion - requiring, at least, that delegations of major legislative power be unambiguous. He risked it and failed to get the votes for the broad parts. The binding opinion of the Court is only the part of Roberts’s opinion dealing with statutory interpretation.
Thomas is the only one to address the delegation question, and he would have held it to be valid. I think he’s right on that point. Otherwise, for example, Congress couldn’t give the Attorney General the power to declare drugs controlled substances, etc.
~Max
Here is a good take on the issue, with excerpts from and very limited giftlink.
Excerpt:
Rarely does so totemic a presidential policy receive so resounding a smackdown. On February 20th the Supreme Court ruled, in Learning Resources v Trump, that the bulk of President Donald Trump’s tariffs were illegal. Mr Trump had asserted that a 1970s-era law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (ieepa), allowed him to bypass Congress and set tariffs according to his whims. Six of the court’s nine justices disagreed, including John Roberts, the chief justice, who wrote the majority decision. In a press conference held shortly after the announcement, Mr Trump said the ruling was “deeply disappointing” and that he was “ashamed of certain members of the court”, before pledging new trade barriers.
The president had claimed that two emergencies demanded the increase in tariff rates: a “public-health crisis” stemming from the importation of illegal drugs, and “large and persistent” trade deficits. A number of lawsuits brought by small businesses challenging Mr Trump’s reading of ieepa met with success in lower courts. When the matter arrived at the Supreme Court in November, liberal and conservative justices alike seemed wary of endorsing a robust presidential power to set tariffs under the statute. The decision in Learning Resources confirmed this scepticism. In his opinion for the court, Chief Justice Roberts noted that the constitution’s framers “gave ‘Congress alone’ the power to impose tariffs during peacetime” and “did not vest any part of the taxing power to the executive branch”. The words “regulate” and “importation” in ieepa, he continued, do not confer an “independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time”. When it passed ieepa, Congress did not “hid[e] a delegation of its birthright power to tax within the quotidian power to ‘regulate’”.
The verdict takes a battering ram to Mr Trump’s tariff wall. Knocking out the ieepa levies should lower America’s effective tariff rate by about half, calculates Yale University’s Budget Lab. But the president has promised to rebuild his tariff barriers, pledging “methods, practices, statutes and authorities that are even stronger than the ieepa tariffs”. For now, he has invoked Section 122, another provision from the 1970s, to impose a global 10% tariff on top of existing levies. That will buy some time, but Section 122 only permits temporary duties for up to 150 days. The authority has also never been used before, and could well prompt legal wrangling, as it requires pointing to “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits. To rebuild the tariffs in full, Mr Trump needs to look elsewhere. One option would be to push them through Congress; tariffs are taxes after all, the domain of America’s legislature. But with slim majorities and upcoming midterms, that looks like a nonstarter. Another risky route, which Mr Trump nodded to, is Section 338, a never-invoked part of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. That permits high tariffs if a country “discriminates” against American commerce.
I haven’t found any cites for this (because I haven’t looked), but a FB post claims Trump said:
“Foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years are ecstatic, they’re so happy!” Trump said, sounding as if his dentures were slipping around in his mouth. "And they’re dancing in the streets but they won’t be dancing for long, that I can assure you…
“The Democrats on the court are thrilled but they will automatically vote no. They’re an automatic no just like in Congress, they’re an automatic no. They’re… Against anything that makes America strong, healthy, and great again,” he whined. “They also are a, frankly, disgrace to our nation those justices. They’re an automatic no no matter how good a case you have! It’s a no. You can’t knock their loyalty, it’s one thing you can do… With some of… Our people.”
…
“I was very modest in my ask of other countries and businesses because I wanted to do, and it’s very important, I wanted to be very well behaved because I wanted to do anything, I didn’t want to do anything that would affect the decision of the court, because I understand the court, I understand how they are very easily swayed,” he said. “I want to be a good boy.”
I read an article suggesting that the delay in releasing the opinion was likely to get the details down to try and limit the President from simply doing the same thing with a different law.
Looking at the opinion itself, I’m not sure that they’ve done that.
In general, the likely intent of the Constitution and much law is that the President should basically be able to play King in a true emergency. You don’t want to have a case where the British Empire launches a sneak invasion from the Louisiana territories, driving straight for DC, New York, and Philadelphia with tens of thousands of troops and you’ve got to assemble Congress and get them to all agree on a course of action of calling up troops, starting the manufacture of munitions, and expropriation all the large ships along the coast for the war effort.
In general, the Supreme Court doesn’t want to put itself between the President and those powers, during that day of true emergency. You don’t want people refusing to obey the President’s orders on the basis that they think it’s nonsense and that he doesn’t have the legal authority. If it’s going to take a year for the President to sue all the non-compliant actors and get the Supreme Court to rule against them, the country will already be British again before any decision is actually reached.
That’s the basic background we have to consider, reading the decision.
The decision mentions the opportunity for the President to simply declare pretty much anything an emergency and, thereby, override Congress. Basically, all law becomes whatever the President says it is.
But, having made that mention, they basically don’t address it. Roberts merely continues on to say, “If you want to do something big, and it’s not a time of war, then there needs to be more than some vague text that you can squint and turn sideways to determine reads to mean that Congress is willing to grant a major implementation of one of their core powers to you.”
Indirectly, you might read it to say, “C’mon man, both you and I understand that there’s no real emergencies here.” But, any such direct statement - as said - risks opening up doubt among the plain folks about how compliant they need to be during a true emergency.
Likewise, Barrett’s dissent is basically a treatise on textualism and how other textualists are doing it wrong by ignoring context and common sense. Basically, they’re being “textualists” not “originalists”.
In an extreme form of textualism, the text of some law might say, “You can’t abort fetuses.” But then the government might say, “No, those women had frogs inside them. We commanded the military to round up all the Native American women with swollen bellies and dose them with this anti-frog medication that you can see we’ve written with in crayon, ‘frog killing medicine’. The law doesn’t say anything about that.” And since the crayon writing says, “frog killing medicine” and the law is about “abortifacient drugs”, and the government has sworn up, down, and sideways that the women had frogs in them, it’s all kosher.
Basically, if you’re willing to lie and make words mean things that they don’t mean, then so long as your re-definitioning is consistent and your actions are consistent under the law as applied after the re-definitioning, then anything can be legal. It’s like a magic wand that I wave over something and change it from one thing into a different thing, whatever I need it to be.
It’s an even stronger form of “living document” free form Constitutional interpretation.
But so, Barrett is denouncing that sort of activity. She’s trying to adhere to “textualism” but basically can’t stomach it when you give even a cursory originalist read. “No, you can write the word “frog” onto anything you want but the actual thing is a fetus, the actual medicine is an abortifacient. That’s their true and original form and you can’t just change that by saying otherwise to the air and spinning around clockwise three times. That’s not how reality works.”
So, both her and Roberts are shooting some warnings about malicious abuse of the President’s true and accepted powers.
But, fundamentally, they make no actual ruling on that basis.
The ruling that they give is pretty much, “This law isn’t clear enough. Maybe if you announce a war against these countries, however, we’ll probably have to go with you. Or if you think that there’s another law that’s 1% more clear. Or…”
The Supremes have supported Trump 80-90% of the time with regard to cases on their “emergency docket”. It seems they will be less compliant regarding the more detailed regular cases?
Another opinion; Washington post op-ed (see limited giftlink).
Rather than repeat the above stuff, I will excerpt the dissent discussion.
Excerpt:
The dissenting opinion, authored by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas, is more than twice as long as the majority’s. It has to be, because it reaches for an array of justifications and principles to try to get around the majority’s straightforward logic.
One justification offered is that the court shouldn’t apply so much scrutiny to tariffs because they involve “foreign affairs.” In several past cases where the president claimed broad economic powers based on vague or general language in an old statute, the Supreme Court has been skeptical. The idea behind this skepticism — known as the “major questions doctrine” — is to prevent the president from usurping Congress’s role.
But Kavanaugh argues that this doctrine only applies in cases involving purely domestic affairs, such as the student loan case of 2023. In that decision, the Supreme Court said President Joe Biden couldn’t unilaterally cancel $430 billion of student loan debt.
The problem is that tariffs are paid by companies in the United States, making Kavanaugh’s foreign affairs distinction questionable. Moreover, the Constitution gives Congress and only Congress the power to tax, whether the tax is domestic or on imported goods. And as Justice Neil M. Gorsuch points out in a separate opinion, the Supreme Court has applied major questions scrutiny in cases involving climate regulation and the pandemic. Those subjects could be said to implicate foreign affairs.
One narrative about this Supreme Court is that it is subservient to Trump. Now the court has frustrated his signature initiative. Last year it also blocked his deportations without due process to El Salvador and ruled against his deployment of the National Guard in Illinois.
This may have already been mentioned in some of the extensive excerpts upthread, but Trump has now doubled down and in an apparent “fuck you” to the Supreme Court, raised tariffs across the board by another 10%.
Impeachment could not come too soon.
“Youre not the BOSS of ME! Thank you for your attention to this matter.” - Donald J. Trump
If it was, I missed it. Your post is the first I’ve heard of it. So I found this:
This tariff can only be applied for 150 days unless Congress authorizes an extension (which it probably won’t) and is probably also unlawful anyway since it can only be enacted undsr specific circumstances which don’t exist right now.
I expect it to be challenged in court immediately.
@Johnny_L.A, the pic was so bad in that Time of India article that I suspected possible junk news, so for anyone who also felt it looked fake… it’s real, here’s the CNN reporting:
Inside the administration, officials had spent months gaming out potential outcomes and planning the fallback options that Trump is now expected to utilize. The 10% global tariff announced Friday will be carried out through a pathway that allows the administration to set duties that don’t exceed 15% for up to 150 days.
Other existing authorities that officials are likely to invoke would allow Trump to reconstruct many of the tariffs that were just struck down — but at a far slower pace requiring more procedure than the single stroke of a pen.
“They’re not going away,” said Everett Eissenstat, a former Trump trade official. “But the biggest impact is the inability to use rapid tariffs to drive geopolitical and foreign policy issues.”
At one point, officials had considered a more aggressive maneuver that would rely on charging “licensing” fees instead of tariffs, preserving Trump’s ability to impose them at will, people familiar with the discussions said. But though the president acknowledged Friday he was “thinking about using it,” the approach is viewed as highly risky and likely to result in yet another legal challenge.
So basically, he’ll keep unilaterally trying option that have the same effect using different excuses, laws, or even names and the legal challenges will likely outlast his term, life, or the continuation of our government as it’s theoretically construed.
After Trump repeatedly says Congress simply does not matter, perhaps a few recalcitrants will decide it does. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting, though.
But even though the law is reasonably clear, about Congressional authority and the purported justification not actually mentioning tarriffs… the known workarounds will be attempted but have less force. The question was how many Supremes would invoke bullshy*te to turn Trump’s wadset into whine.
They seem less inclined to do this on issues not in the temporary emergency docket - but at least now a majority of Supremes are supporting clear law. This seems not to have protected them from presidential critique.
It looks like Kavanaughs dissent was based on… “This is going to be a clusterfuck”
“The Court says nothing today about whether, and if so how, the Government should go about returning the billions of dollars that it has collected from importers,” Kavanaugh wrote. “But that process is likely to be a ‘mess,’ as was acknowledged at oral argument.”
Then… Why did they allow Him to do it? Surely it was foreseen.
“It might be difficult to follow the Constitution, so let’s not bother trying.”