A tariff is a tax. The Constitution puts that power squarely in the legislative branch.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-congress-can-end-trumps-trade-war/
There’s an array of things that Congress needs to do to take back some of its power. They should start with these tariffs.
My understanding is that they need to amend the law that was passed by an earlier Congress to take back that power.
They could simply repeal the grant of power given the President, and then tariffs could only be set by Congressl.
An alternative would be to give the President some power to set tariffs, but provide that any tariff set by the President must be approved by Congress within a set number of days (say 30 days), or else it is automatically void.
Given how the executive branch has abused the very similar war powers act . . . that sounds exactly like something Congress would actually do.
The fundamental problem is that they don’t want to take that power back. All they would need to do to take it back is to decide that they want to. Of course that’s the tricky part.
That’s essentially a variation of the War Powers Resolution, which many a president have had no problem ignoring over the last 50 years.
Kinda. Most abuse of the WPA is around defining a “war”. I.e. “That’s not a war, That’s just the DoD killing people and wrecking things on the president’s sayso”
The other problem with WPA is that by the time 30 days has run, the DoD has been in action for 29 of them and there’s now a political sunk cost of blood and treasure to reckon with.
Both of those problems could have been drafted around but were not.
A better job defining what a tariff is, saying the prez can’t levy any that start sooner than e.g. 60 days from the date of his EO, and congress must affirmatively approve it within 30 days or it is void would do the trick.
As already noted upthread, the real problem today is that the Ds lack the numbers to force this through. And the Rs are all afraid of trump.
We really are now in the era where “If you go for the King, you’d better not miss.” The congressional Rs need to be assured they can unseat trump before they dare lift a finger against any of his whims. That’s a darn hard place to be.
Clearly the congress has been paid off by being able to profit from insider trading when the markets get jerked around. They are also working on rigging the elections to make damn near impossible to vote them out. We are not a democracy anymore.
The difference, though, is standing. Who has standing in the courts to challenge the President’s use of commander-in-chief powers? And the courts are generally very deferential to the President in all matters military / foreign relations.
It’s different with tariffs. There are loads of people who have standing to challenge a tariff if it has not been legally enacted.
If under this proposal, Congress does not ratify the tariff within the set period, then it’s legally void. And then anyone who imports goods after the expiry, say Mr Fudd, would have a legal claim to oppose paying the tariff, and could bring that claim in the courts, if the federal government insisted it was payable as a condition of releasing Mr Fudd’s imported goods.
That’s the kind of hard law case that doesn’t turn on military issues or foreign relations: is the tariff legally in force?
And note that under this approach, inaction by Congress would be in the importer’s favour.
I mostly disagree. There’s still a few Old Guard Republicans who might be in that position. John Cornyn here in Texas is one. He’s facing a primary from Ken Paxton, the Texas AG who is a true MAGA. But mostly the Republicans in congress are now true MAGAs. Those representatives and senators aren’t refusing to act because they are afraid that King Trump will come after them if they do. They are refusing to act because they actually like King Trump.
ETA: In other words, what it would take would be the MAGA Republicans losing primaries en masse to Old School Republicans, or for Democrats to take control of congress. How likely either of those things are is, I think, a matter for a different thread.
To pass a law you need both a majority in the House and Senate–and you also need to overcome the 60% filibuster rule in the Senate.
But the President is going to veto this. You then need a 2/3 majority in both houses to pass the law over the Presidential veto.
Right. In other words, the question, phrased differently, is something like this. “What would it take for the American public (and Congress by proxy) to repudiate the Trump agenda?” IMHO that’s what it comes down to.
Agree with this analysis. And without (I hope) stretching the boundaries of this thread too far, I think it’s also clear that it will take vastly more widely shared misery before enough people spit out the kool-aid (yes, I know) and demand trump’s ouster and/or the reversal of most of his works.
They put themselves there. And they’re putting a whole lot of other people in much harder places. They should do their job. It was never guaranteed to be easy. And as they’re putting lots of other people in danger, they’ve got no business complaining if it isn’t safe.
I don’t mean to excuse their inaction. As you say, they totally did it to themselves. I just find it unsurprising. It’s “tough” in that it has very big obstacles to them taking action. So the smart money says they won’t take action. “Should” has nothing to do with it in their minds.
It’s now about like organizing a coup. Anyone could be either ready to revolt, or be a spy from the king. Better not guess wrong with anyone you try to persuade to join your conspiracy.
I can unfortunately foresee situations where there is a dire emergency requiring us to go to war without time for congressional action.
I cannot see any emergency requiring imposition of new tariffs without waiting for congressional approval. If Congress ever gets the gumption to stand up to the executive, the Go By the Constitution Tariff Act can and should written with no loopholes.
This is the ultimate issue. No way does Trump ever agree to this, so he must be overcome. And that’s basically impossible in the era of Congress being nearly evenly split. The Democrats would need a ridiculously huge win in 2026 to even start dreaming about this.
I hope I’m wrong, but I think at some point this is going to hit their constituents hard enough that they don’t have a choice.
The effects are going to reverberate across the economy HARD. Rising materials costs will send already barely affordable insurance premiums skyrocketing. Rising costs of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies and devices will skyrocket already barely affordable medical care.
I think very few businesses will be immune from second and third order effects. I read an article about a company that makes decorative tins for cookies and other snacks, and their costs are more than doubling. This is going to hit small baking businesses, maybe not incredibly hard, but it’s the kind of business that probably thought they were immune.
The article didn’t say how the decorative tin maker voted, but the tins had tacky American flag and eagle designs, so I think he was a leopard snack
My theory is that very little of this is priced into the stock market yet. It’s a complex analysis with no historical precedent that changes completely day to day and no one really knows what to do. I think we are at that cartoonland point where we’ve walked of the cliff but are hanging in midair because we haven’t realized it yet……..although I think a better analogy for some people is they walked off a cliff and are flapping their arms, and they haven’t yet realized they can’t fly because their cult leader told them they could.
And the pain that is coming for ordinary citizens is nothing like the pain of Covid inflation. That was relatively diffuse, affecting everyone but not really that destructive. That’s what his supporters are think is coming, and they are agreeing to it because the Biden inflation wasn’t really that hard on most of them, they just liked to bitch and moan about spending a few buck more on eggs because Biden sucks.
But what is coming is the kind of pain that’s going to destroy their businesses and life-savings, and it’s going to come on fast.
When it does hit the fan, they (Vichy Congress) may not have a choice but to act.
Even if I’m wrong and the world doesn’t crash as hard as I expect, or if Trump actually settles on something reasonable, the effects on business are still going to be devasting unless Congress acts.
Not knowing what anything is going to cost tomorrow or next week is paralyzing. You can plan for normal cost increases, but when anything and everything is subject to price fluctuations in triple digit percentages daily……it’s mind-boggling, I’m not sure how my business would’ve handled that, contract-wise “Here’s what I think it’s going to cost but it might be twice that” really doesn’t fly.
As long as Trump has these powers this is a confidence problem. There’s no permanence to any of his deals, they are just another episode of The Trump Show Season 2 and no one knows what fresh hell the next episode will hold.
I’m actually more pissed at the Republican Congress than Trump, because if they don’t know this, they should …….but they still think they can jump off a cliff and fly away by flapping their arms because Trump told them they could.
Trump’s constituents will be hurting. They’ll know that they’re hurting. And they won’t know why they’re hurting.
But, here’s the sad part that makes it all the more frustrating: those base constituents have become accustomed to be hurting. That “white working class” has been getting undercut for so long by the system that the added pain will get a “so what else is new” reaction, and be attributed to the system as opposed to Trump’s or their congress member’s policies. They will cling to any possible justification to refuse to let go of the illusion.
Democrats should start campaigning now, with small businesses as their target, speeches to the local Chambe of Commerce, etc, with a simple message: “Republicans are not supporters of small business. If they were, the Congress would be reacting to cut the tariffs.”