Other Sources
The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a major blow to President Donald Trump’s trade agenda Friday, ruling the tariffs he issued under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act are illegal.
In a 6-3 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court said Congress alone holds the power to tax in almost all circumstances. The Trump administration’s argument that trade deficits and illegal drug imports granted it emergency power to levy tariffs was not justified, the court said. Tariffs are taxes on imported goods.
The Trump administration had argued that a provision in the law, known as IEEPA, that said the executive branch could “regulate” imports empowered the president to levy tariffs.
“Based on two words separated by 16 others (in the law)—‘regulate’ and ‘importation’—the President asserts the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,” Roberts wrote. “Those words cannot bear such weight.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Roberts’ opinion.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh filed dissenting opinions. Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito joined Kavanaugh’s.
Kavanaugh’s dissent accepted the administration’s reading of the law and said it was not the justices’ role to decide a policy matter that has “generated vigorous” debate.
“The sole legal question here is whether, under IEEPA, tariffs are a means to ‘regulate . . . importation,’” he wrote. “Statutory text, history, and precedent demonstrate that the answer is clearly yes: Like quotas and embargoes, tariffs are a traditional and common tool to regulate importation.”
This is not winning this is robbery.
Companies are raised prices and pushed tariffs costs onto US consumer, and now the Treasury department is going to refund the companies. CONSUMER GETS NOTHING BUT CONTINUED HIGHER PRICES
They’ll bring the prices down, for about a week before the midterms so Trump can take credit, then they’ll jack them back up again.
And the worst part is, it’ll work. The electorate has the collective memory of a goldfish.They misunderstood Ted Lasso so hard.
If this makes prices go down, whenever that happens, like you say, I guarantee that Trump will take the credit. Probably as soon as he can make a post about it.
My understanding is that it was generally expected that SCOTUS would rule against it, but also expected that the administration would then fall back to other authorities to achieve a similar goal, so it’s not clear whether we’re going to be functioning without tariffs.
That doesn’t meant that it isn’t impactful — it’s important from a legal technical standpoint, in terms of defining powers of Congress and of the President.
I also expect that it will likely result in importers getting reimbursements, which is going to create a lot of financial and political issues, since the tax cuts for the wealthy were functionally in part paid for by tariffs, and all that money just evaporated. I have wondered whether the Trump administration will try to push the tax increases down the road to the next (potentially-Democratic) administration, then blame them for having to cover the costs that the Trump administration incurred.
EDIT: Probably be a lot of news coverage and analysis of this from experts coming up, not to mention responses from the administration and maybe more legal challenges, so I imagine that it’ll become clearer over time.
There are and still will be tariffs (like section 232 steel and softwood lumber)… but I think that it’s understood that he can no longer declare his hurt feelings as an emergency, and levy blanket tariffs on a country in response to anything he doesn’t like. The incompetent scraps left in his administration have to put together an explanation on what specifically is tariffed and why Congress had authorized it. It’s his choice to keep screaming “tariff” but those threats are emptier than ever.
Edit: See? His first “escalation threat” is a global tariff not really directed at anyone (aside from the USA)
I don’t think they are concerned with funding the government. They are borrowing, putting it all on the card. They will be out by the time the bill is due, by the time they max out the borrowing, they figure.
Every excuse they will borrow as much as possible. I mean what they gave homeland security 200 billion last summer, and Ice what was it, 60 billion? Just an incredible amount of money, imagine how much health care that could buy if a single payer system eliminated parasites that didn’t contribute value. They are giving them MORE money as we speak. If AI pops, they will bail them out, any recession they will borrow trillions, if not tens of trillions. Which they will be able to do until they destroy the trust in the system, which could evaporate sooner than we think.
If these other avenues for enforcing tariffs are better why not just start there? Why start with blatantly shitting on the wording of the constitution.
If these other avenues for enforcing tariffs are better why not just start there?
So, I haven’t read deeply into what other routes would be used, just read that they exist. Thus, I’m not the best source for this, and I’m sure that there are people who are and will have more-informed commentary who will be getting interviewed on the news a lot in the aftermath of this. However, if I had to take a guess, my understanding is that Congress has extended the President the authority to block trade with a country entirely, and that that’s on firmer ground. Trump might be able to say “I’m now entirely blocking trade, but if you agree to functionally accept tariffs, I’ll unblock you” or something like that. From the Trump administration’s standpoint, that’s more hassle and difficulty, but he might avoid the ruling here.
But don’t take that as authoritative, please — as I said, I haven’t spent time on it, and a lot of people who are better-equipped to answer will be answering the same question on the news and such. I just want to raise the prospect that we may still be looking at tariffs, to make people aware of it, before everyone starts throwing a party and saying that everything will be as it was pre-Trump.
Gotta go fast sonic meme.gif
Their strategy has always been “go so fast no one can keep up with the awful things, and pile controversies to cover up controversies”. A slow durable administrative action that respects separation of powers and doesn’t treat the executive as a godking was never in the cards.
I think you answered your own question.
