alephnerda day ago
Semi-related - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088609
Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.
Is that because of scarcity? We’re manipulation? Or something else?
Y'all have proven how worthless that piece of paper is.
It’s not impossible for the USA to get there one day.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
These things can be fixed even though it's difficult. Sometimes the pressure just boils over. Americans are a lot more defeatist about their politics than in many other democratic countries.
Change that seems inevitable in retrospect often feels like a surprise in the moment. France its on its fifth republic. A second American republic is not impossible.
Au contraire, a Constitutional Convention of the states to define the way they can all agree to be united.
Just like the first time.
There weren't that many states back then anyway.
And I wouldn't mind if the American constitution did provide all of these tremendous benefits that everyone bangs on about all the time. That'd be great! But it turns out nobody's really tested that, until now.
And you get an F, my friend. Hard fail.
If you put 500 mock Constitutional conventions together at universities and cities across the country, I would polymarket my 401k that none of them would come up with the same structure we have today in the US. Many republics founded since 1791 have far better democratic structures than the US does. I call the US a semi-democracy because of our Senate, Electoral college, gerrymandered House districts and first-past-the-post voting.
Edit: I got "danged" so here is my response to the person below -
Consider the bill of rights and federal limits separately from the structure of government.
I believe France and Australia have better "democratic infrastructure" and I'm sure they aren't the only ones.
I'm not talking about legally protected rights, I'm talking about the "democratic infrastructure". Voting systems, legislative assembly design, power balance, and so on.
Which later constitutions do you grade higher? Who has stronger rights?
For sure. Question is what would be enough to regain trust? I don't really see it happening
States' Rights have been slaughtered by these false patriots.
These are system problems. Think in systems. No different than having an abusive family you have to decouple from for self preservation, just at geopolitical scale. Capital, people, information are all mobile, and can relocate as needed. There is nothing on US soil that cannot be replaced or replicated elsewhere on the globe (besides perhaps national parks and other similar public goods, which can hopefully be protected until improved governance emerges). Please, challenge me on this if you think it's wrong, I've put much thought into it to provide guidance to others.
The only thing we had of value was trust (value of US treasuries and the dollar) in the rule of law and stability, and we burned it up. Humans are tricky. Get as far away as you can from harmful humans.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/697382/record-numbers-younger-women-leave.aspx ("In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups.")
[2] Global Trade Is Leaving the US Behind - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-02-12/on-trade-and-tariffs-the-world-is-moving-on-from-the-us | https://archive.today/dsI9R - February 12th, 2026
So don't present a candidate with shit vibes that people wont vote for? Democrats lost this election, if they got as many votes as they usually do they would have won.
Democrats in power would rather lose the election than break down their own power structure, that is the main reason Trump could get re-elected.
Mass deportation? Tariffs? Dismantling the government? Hate? All things he campaigned on. He is doing exactly what his voters were told he was going to do. Dems are going to win those votes? Unlikely, they’re not going to run a candidate that appeals to their values, which aren’t going to change.
> “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be”: a Trump voter says the quiet part out loud A Trump voter hurt by the shutdown reveals the real reason the president attracts hardcore supporters.
> The president’s particular brand of identity politics — the racist attacks on blacks and Latinos, the Muslim ban, his cruel treatment of women — similarly depends on negative rather than positive appeals. Antoine Banks, a political psychologist at the University of Maryland, wrote a book on the connection between anger as an emotion and racial politics. When politicians gin up anger, an emotion that necessarily has a negative target, voters tend to think about the world in more racial (and racist) terms. Trump makes his voters angry, he centers that anger on hated targets, and that makes them want to take his side.
> This is what makes Trumpism work. This is the dark heart of our political moment. Even people who are tremendously vulnerable themselves, like Crystal Minton, support Trump because of his capacity to inflict pain on others they detest. The cruelty, as the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer says, is the point.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/trump-shutdown-voter-florida
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/florida-government-shutdown-marianna.html
I mean if I had to choose between being ok with Jews or supporting Hitler, i can understand why people would pick Hitler. The election of Hitler was really quite an indictment of the Jews.
(I am not saying Trump is Hitler)
That’s the problem.
If the majority of American voters elect snoopy the dog snoopy can do all of the things snoopy wants to do within the bounds of the law. Snoopy can use his bully pulpit to fight against dog restrictions in restaurants and grant pardons to previous offenders. Snoopy can ensure efficient spending of money on public water fountains accessible to canines... but if snoopy starts issuing open hand-outs to the red baron (snoopy in a moustache) that's when the other branches of government are supposed to step in - we aren't supposed to need to wait four years for the next election to stop open corruption (especially since corruption is really good at funding more corruption so there's a vicious cycle that can begin if you let it fester @see the recent FBI raid on GA election offices).
You mean like how President Trump just gave 10 billion USD of taxpayer money to a board operated by Private Citizen Trump?
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/trump-board-of-peace-first-meeting-gaza-un-israel-rcna259509
Republicans who wanted to prevent Trump from doing this kind of shit were voted out.
This is what the voters want.
Gerrymandering keeps extreme politicians in office. Partisanship gets people to vote against their own interests. Media gravitates toward spectacle rather than substance, to the benefit of those that know how to use that; and social media in particular entrenches deeper into preconceived biases.
In short, manipulating voters is a profitable business. Electoral results are the output of that business, and voters are just the instrument.
Theres plenty we can do. That's off the top if my head. I'm sure if smart people sat down to think about it there are lots of practical and clever ideas.
The majority didn't ask for this. 49% of voters did.
We need changes that address the kind of people that are running for these spots and winning then go on to do a bad job. Congress isn't incentived to be effective.
>Or hear me out - the congress should start doing their job.
Well, we make them do their job by holding them accountable to the people rather than a billionaire donor class. Citizens United is at the root of all this.
We need to do something to fix this: gerrymandering ban, increase the number of Reps, add more states for more Senate seats, etc.
how is it possible that congress has consistent single digit approval ratings and they vote for things 90% of their constituents disagree with and still get elected? This is the core problem of American politics. Politicians are beholden to donors not voters.
You would describe this as being different from competitive?
I doubt any amount of money would matter if we had 1 representative per 30k people as written in the constitution, NY State is about 20 M people so you'd need to bribe ~300 of the ~600 representatives in order to get your way (and also do that for every other state).
They don't have to care about actually representing anyone. They can skip town halls, ignore requests, etc. Primaries are a very weak form of influence.
If you want numbers, reps in competitive districts hold more town hall meetings. And they also hold more personal staff (limited back in 1975) in their home states. This is kinda a no-brainer. If you have to care about re-elections, you'll try to help your local consituents.
It was 49.8%, which is not quite a majority.
It's also worth noting that Kamala Harris received precisely 0 votes in the 2024 Democratic primaries.
[EDIT:] I see that the parent comment has now changed "majority" to "plurality."
If I could make one Constitutional amendment, it would be this: publicly finance all election campaigns, and make private contributions illegal bribery, punished by imprisonment of both the candidate and briber.
I think a competent opposition party would be great for the US. But regardless of the candidate, US voters had three clear choices in the 2024 Presidential election: (1) I support what Trump is going to do, (2) I am fine with what Trump is going to do (abstain/third-party), (3) Kamala Harris. I think it’s extremely clear 3 was the best choice, but it was the least popular of the three.
Was that less bad than what Trump has done in one year? Yes. But Trump in his first term was less bad than this, and recency bias means that what we didn't like about Biden was more prominent in our minds.
But my option 4 looks just like your option 2 in terms of how people voted. I'm just saying that the motive may have been different.
Democracy is a healthy process - I don't know why we buy the stupid line of "we need party unity" when what we need is an efficient expression of the voters will and having that expression is what best forms unity. There are some old Hillary quotes that make me absolutely rabid.
It's really a problem of money though. The DNC really are the king makers when it comes to candidates. That and PAC money are the requirements to get a nomination. At least when it comes to presidency. Smaller elections you get more freedom to have a successful without such things. The whole system needs an overhaul unfortunately and I don't see any candidate from any party looking to fix that any time soon.
That's only problem in the USA. Other western democracies are able to have snap elections done in two months.
The first couple states really end up determining who usually wins the nomination and financial backing. It takes time to move a candidate between places and set up multiple events and fundraisers. Now in state and city elections the US can do those quickly as well. Smaller area to cover and campaign and the community stays informed. It doesn't help that national elections involve institutions like the electoral college instead of a popular vote. That's a different problem though.
At the very least, we need a clarification on presidential immunity.
Importantly, prosecute every member of the Trump administration for their blatant respective crimes.
I agree with you that the Republican party has failed the country by allowing this to happen. But I think we can still do better.
More "big picture" ideas would be to fundamentally alter the House and Senate, and implement score/ranked voting to allow a multiparty system.
It's certainly an interesting situation that wasn't explicitly spelled out in the law. But as far as everything that's working, it's realistically all within the legal framework of the Constitution. There are procedures to remove an unfit President, sure; but there's no requirement baked into the Constitution that requires those parties to act upon those procedures.
In short, it's a whole lot of short-sightedness of the Constitution combined with willing participants across multiple branches of the government.
The problems unearthed and the damage being done will take decades to fix just our internal issues, and it's very likely we will never resolve our international problems.
I don't know what the future holds for the United States, but we are certainly going to be operating from a severe handicap for quite a while.
The lines have definitely blurred a lot, especially since the early 1900's. And that's just between the branches, let alone the growth of govt in general.
Examples? The activist judges thing I can see, but I'm not so sure I'm concerned of a body with more singular authority (the president) delegating to a body with more democratic accountability and representation (congress), nor can I easily find any examples of it.
Can you expand? The Constitution gave the Executive powers that were then transferred to Congress and are now performed by the Federal Reserve?
So, if the president gave up his power to conduct monetary policy. Than good! But then that doesn't seem to correlate with Congress giving up their power so that they don't have to make unpopular votes and risk losing elections.
The Constitution created SCOTUS as a political body.
The sole role of a Supreme Court Justice is to cast votes.
The constitution places zero restrictions on how a Justice decides which way to vote. The Justice is not bound by anything in deciding how to vote.
That includes bribery or other corruption. If bribery is proven, the Justice is subject to criminal prosecution. But conviction does not remove the Justice from office. And removal by impeachment does not undo the cases decided by the corrupt votes of the Justice.
Every vote of every Justice in US history was an "activist judicial practice" in the sense that each vote was made for personal reasons of the Justice that we will never know (opinions only reflect what a Justice chose to say, which in no way means it reflects the personal reasons for the Justice's vote).
Your comment is a political statement about a political body - although you seem to incorrectly believe you are making some type of legal statement.
The Constitution is designed such that it defines no rules and places no restrictions upon how Justices are to interpret the Constitution. The original design of the Constitution is that the Justices are to interpret the laws of the United States as they see fit.
There is no such thing as an "activist" Supreme Court.
The suggestion there must be an "Originalist interpretation" of the Constitution (e.g. it must be interpreted as intended by the Founding Fathers) is pure hogwash. If that were so, then by an "Originalist interpretation" the Constitution would already say so (and of course it doesn't). Nevertheless political conservative Justices actually made that part of their opinions that now impose the concept of "originalism" when interpretating the Constitution. A pretty neat magical trick by which the conservative Justices violate the philosophy of "originalism" to impose "originalism".
And as for "further down the line at the district level", there is likewise no such thing as an "activist" court - in the sense that lower courts, unlike SCOTUS, are constrained by the Constitution and statutes passed by Congress. There cannot be "activist" district courts to the extent that if they overstep their bounds, SCOTUS will be called upon to address it.
The phrase "activist court" is nothing more than a fictional invention of The Federalist Society. If there are actual politics being played in SCOTUS (this time I mean Republican vs Democrat), it is the Republicans through The Federalist Society and appointments to SCOTUS of Federalist Society Members. But now I am chasing down a rabbit hole that is best avoided.
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): As an independent regulatory commission, it oversees markets, yet some proponents of a unitary executive argue it should be subject to White House control.
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC): A regulatory agency that, along with the Fed, has been subject to executive orders aiming to tighten oversight.
Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC): An independent agency that issues regulations and recalls, often cited in discussions regarding the scope of executive authority.
Can you give any example of the opposite? A case where the executive has delegated power to the legislative or judicial branches?
Maybe we have a misunderstanding. I'm not asking a kind of broad speculative question like "hypothetically, what could a hardcore monarchist say to critique our constitutional system?"
I was asking for a plain old real-world example of delegation of power from the executive branch to another branch. In the real history of the USA. Agreed on one point, though: I can't think of one either.
This would be enforced how?
Bingo. The flaw in the constitution. The Executive holds the only enforcement mechanism in government: the FBI, military and other police forces.
Having majored in political science as an undergrad and then being a trial attorney for 40+ years, I would argue that my use of the word 'flaw' is probably misplaced. 'Flaw' implies it could (should) have been created differently.
Alas, I am unaware of ever reading a workable way to 'fix' our constitutional 'flaw'.
Specifically, fund a distant vassal state which requires a military so enormous to maintain peace that any general in charge of said military would pose a legitimate threat to the executive back home.
Enforcement could, then, simply be accomplished by Congress, et al. incentivizing said general to stage his coup.
Now that I think of it... this could be one practical way to accomplish something akin to Trotsky's "Permanent Revolution".
Consider that most totalitarian states have constitutions that explicitly forbid torture, discrimination, and many other forms of government suppression of people. This does little in the face of a police state bent on suppressing the people.
As far as I can tell the US system is designed for gridlock. Things like filibuster, lower house elections every two years, state elected upper body, electorate system are all designed to create girdlock.
While Americans as a whole are to blame for some of this they are working in a completely broken system. In tech we try not to blame a person when something goes wrong so we look at what process allowed this to happen. I think many of the US problems are explained by their underlying system which is basically a copy of the English one at the time of Independence with a monarch and a parliament. Unlike the English system though it barely evolved since then.
For better or worse, our system today isn't quite what it was originally designed as... The Senate was originally selected by the state govts, not direct election... the Vice President was originally the runner-up, not a paired ticket and generally hamstrung as a result. The VP didn't originally participate in the Senate either, that came after WWII.
The good part about the constitution is there is a reasonable set of ground rules for changing said constitution with a minimum that should clearly represent the will of the majority of the population. (corrupt politicians not-withstanding)
The reasonable set of ground rules seem to favor states over the will of the majority of the population. It is possible to change the constitution with states representing only 25% of the population. And remember you'd only need a majority in each of those states so could be way less of the population.
Overall the system seems flawed in that instead of having clearly delegated areas of responsibility to states and then doing the federal system as based on the population of the whole country it muddled areas and then made a federal system that couldn't respond to the population.
There are clearly delegated responsibilities to the states... the 10th amendment specifies as much... that the govt has grown beyond this wouldn't have been stopped by a parliament any more than the current system.
The 10th amendment isn't clear. Too many areas are dual responsibility. That's never going to be clear.
I'm being a bit hyperbolic only to make the point... I don't think anyone's "rights" should include forced labor of anyone else. So certain things, even food cannot be a right... I would think that public lands and a right to hunt/gather or even some level cooperative gardening/farming might be okay as a middle ground though.
A similar problem in the United States is the excessive amount of law making by the Judiciary. In most countries the Judicary doesn't' make law it just tells Parliament that they need to change the law. This again means the consequences of who you voted for are not faced.
The pressure builds till there's a breaking point.
Even by the time of the civil war, Robert E Lee decided he was Virginian ahead of his national identity.
If you have a bunch of sovereign states, then you need some state-level evening out. If everyone is a citizen of one large state, you can just go proportional.
On top of this, it was never going to be easy to gradually move from one to the other with the issue of slavery looming large, so they didn't fix it. This was still a huge issue in 1848 when a lot of Europe was grappling with how to do a constitution.
So it stayed broken and here we are.
The US quickly realized that the loose federation wasn't going to work and centralized a lot of power. It should continue to evolve it's system.
It's worth noting that even the US doesn't think it's system is a good idea. When it imposes a new government on countries (like Iraq) it chooses a parliamentary system.
The fact that the US Constitution is basically more sacred that the Bible when you talk to the average American is even weirder. The Founding Fathers are the Original Gods (Gangsters?).
because theres no example in history that has worked better. Its unclear how much of the success of the US should be attributed to the Constitution (what history would have looked like if the US had a canadian constitution for example), but what cant be argued is that the US is the most successful political body in world history and it is the old continuous Constitution in the world.
Under that lense it makes sense that Americans are fairly conservative about changing the constitution and why the founders are so revered. Its just fucking worked out great for us until now. Its really a miracle in many ways.
That’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_San_Marino.
The other bit, “the most successful political body in world history”, isn’t even a falsifiable claim; it’s pure opinion.
The Pope might disagree on it, for example.
because theres no example in history that has worked better. Its unclear how much of the success of the US should be attributed to the Constitution (what history would have looked like if the US had a canadian constitution for example), but what cant be argued is that the US is the most successful political body in world history and it is the oldest continuous Constitution in the world.
Under that lens it makes sense that Americans are fairly conservative about changing the constitution and why the founders are so revered. Its just fucking worked out great for us until now. Its really a miracle in many ways.
i mean is it really hard to imagine why Americans might be wary to change things? maintaining a stable civilization is a pretty precarious undertaking.
That system explicitly encourages mucking with it. We have elections every 2/4/6 years. It has an amendment process. Parts of it, like judicial review and qualified immunity, were just plain invented.
Per Jefferson:
“On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, & what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, & consequently may govern them as they please. But persons & property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course, with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, & no longer. Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.”
All im doing is explaining why Americans in the current moment are conservative about the constitution. Why are you failing to acknowledge this? Im not making a value judgement im explaining why people think this way.
You can very much argue about this.
If you've ever had the task of writing an essay about the nature of success, I don't think you would offer a sweeping statement like this.
I'd avoid reading too much into this. The US simply tries to avoid making too many major changes to the system of government and Iraq was familiar with a parliamentary system already.
The Empire of Japan was a parliamentary semi-constitutional monarchy. Today it is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy. That doesn't mean the US loves kings/emperors.
By contrast, the Dominican Republic stayed as a presidential system.
At the federal level the US system was designed for gridlock on purpose, with the premise that something shouldn't be federal policy without widespread consensus, and without that consensus it should be left to the states.
The problem is really that many of the gridlock-inducing measures have been thwarted, e.g. delegation of rulemaking power from Congress to the executive and direct election of Senators to prevent state-representing Senators from voting down federal overreach. But those things weren't just there to induce gridlock, they were also the accountability measures, so without them you put corruption on rails and here we are.
I'm not sure why Americans think that the creation of agencies is the problem when other well governed countries do the same. The idea that a legislative body could possible create appropriate regulation in a modern complex world is crazy. That's what a parliamentary system solves. It keeps the executive accountable to the legislative at all times.
Only if there is no other way to address the issues, but the system provides one. You adopt the policy at the state level instead.
> I'm not sure why Americans think that the creation of agencies is the problem when other well governed countries do the same.
The US at the federal level is larger than nearly all other countries. North Carolina has more people and a higher GDP than Sweden. California has almost as many people as Canada and a higher GDP. The US has the same order of magnitude in size and population as the whole EU.
Bureaucracies have diseconomies of scale. There is a point past which "larger" is no longer getting you significantly better amortization of fixed costs and is instead just increasing communication costs, adding layers of middle management, exacerbating the principal-agent problem and making you a more attractive target for corruption.
The US federal government is well past the optimal size for solving most problems; probably even California is too big.
You write this as a self evident truth but it isn't. In what way is having a single trucking standard for the entire country less efficient than having 50? In what way is having a single currency across the entire country less efficient than having 50? In what way is having a single standard for approval of medication less efficient than having 50?
The US's advantage is precisely because of it's scale. It provides a massive addressable market allowing companies to scale rapidly.
This is why issuing currency and interstate commerce (meaning actually crossing state lines, not the modern interpretation of anything that affects commerce anywhere) are among the explicitly enumerated powers of the federal government.
> In what way is having a single standard for approval of medication less efficient than having 50?
It allows large states to set their own standards and smaller states to choose which of the standards to apply, e.g. Arizona says you can sell anything in Arizona that you can sell in Texas, without requiring everyone to agree on how the trade offs should be made, e.g. California can have more stringent rules than Texas. Meanwhile people in Texas could still choose not to consume anything if it hasn't been approved in California and people in California could go to Arizona to get things they think California is being too reserved by prohibiting.
> The US's advantage is precisely because of it's scale. It provides a massive addressable market allowing companies to scale rapidly.
Which in itself has the tendency to promote megacorps and market consolidation over competitive markets with larger numbers of smaller companies, and consolidated markets themselves have significant inefficiencies and costs.
Meanwhile why would that require the federal government to insert itself into local education policy or be issuing subsidies to oil companies etc.?
The US system was designed as a grand experiment. It made a certain amount of sense at the time: the country as a vast plantation steered by a benevolent master with policy set by wealthy landowners and businessmen who knew what was best for everyone. It was a system already in place in the Americas for generations and most national arguments could be hashed out at the club over some fine imported brandy or, for people like Franklin, some imported tea.
As far as it goes, there have been worse set-ups.
The setup isn't the problem. The refusal to evolve is the problem.
I'd argue that it wasn't really the system in place. The system in place was one of states governing themselves. Before independence the states didn't really deal much with each other.
The only way this will change is if the rest of the world leaves America behind and the quality of life here becomes so bad that radical change becomes possible.
But you are right that Trump won the popular vote in 2024, so you can't blame that on the system. But a functioning democracy would have more constraints on him. Our legislative branch has been dead in the water for 20 years at this point.
1. Ranked Pairs voting for national elections, including eliminating the electoral college. Break this two-party duopoly of bad-cop worse-cop.
2. Enshrining the concept of independent executive agencies, with scope created by Congress, with agency heads chosen by the same national elections. (repudiation of "Unitary Executive Theory", and a general partitioning of the executive power which is now being autocratically abused)
3. Repudiation of Citizens United and this whole nonsense that natural rights apply to government-created artificial legal entities (also goes to having a US equivalent of the GDPR to reign in the digital surveillance industry's parallel government)
4. State national guards are under sole exclusive authority of state governors while operating on American soil (repudiation of the so-called "Insurrection Act"). This could be done by Congress but at this point it needs to be in large print to avoid being sidestepped by illegal orders.
5. Drastically increase the number of senators. Maybe 6 or 8 from each state? We need to eliminate this dynamic where many states hate their specific moribund senators, yet keep voting them in to avoid losing the "experienced" person.
6. Recall elections by the People, for all executive offices, members of Congress, and Supreme Court justices. (I don't know the best way to square courts carrying out the "rule of law" rather than succumbing to "rule of the fickle mob", but right now we've got the worst of both worlds)
(yeesh, I can't believe I forgot that. I started thinking about reforming sovereign immunity, concluded that was something more fine-grained that Congress could do that didn't need to be in the Constitution, and moved on)
But sometimes I think about the fact that you guys don't even have the metric system yet...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_New_Zealand_electoral_reform_referendum
Slower democracy, sure, but fits advanced economies that need consistent small refactors and never full rewrites every 4 years.
Even if part of the tariffs are rolled back, we may see other ones remain. And I bet they will not make it easy for people to get their money back, and force them into courts. Not that it matters. If people get their money back, it will effectively increase the national debt which hurts citizens anyways.
And let’s not forget the long-term damage of hurting all of the relationships America had with other countries. If Trump wanted to use tariffs as a tool for emergency purposes, he should have just taken action against China and made a case around that (pointing to Taiwan, IP theft, cyber attacks, etc). Instead he implemented blanket tariffs on the whole world, including close allies like Canada.
In the end, my guess is China and India gained from this saga. And the Trump administration’s family and friends gained by trading ahead of every tariff announcement. Americans lost.
What is the emergency with China?
This is kind of a bizarre whataboutism to throw in there. The current administration (with the full support of Congressional majorities in both houses that have largely abdicated any pretense of having their own policy goals) has been flouting constitutional norms pretty much nonstop for a year now and literally ignoring court orders in a way that probably no administration has ever done before, and yet the playbook they're following for extrajudicial activity apparently is from the Democrats? Just because there's bad behavior on both sides doesn't mean that the magnitude of it is equal, and in terms of respect for the rule of law the behavior of the current administration really has no comparison.
You can answer these questions for yourself and decide. But for me it’s clear that Democrats have repeatedly violated the first and second amendments and normalized those practices. They’ve played a part in creating the norms that now are exploited by the Trump administration. I consider these amendments to be way more important and consequential than a misuse of IEEPA.
I guess what I’m saying is the two sides are indeed comparable, even if I agree the Trump administration is a greater violator of laws and norms than anything before. And we shouldn’t ignore the rot on either side but instead strengthen the constitution to avoid these abuses.
I don't know about trust but the constitution isn't what enabled this type of behavior, it's the legislature. They've been abdicating their duties to executive controlled bodies (FCC, FDA, FTC, EPA, etc.) and allowing the president to rule through executive action unchallenged. They could have stopped these tariffs on day one. SCOTUS isn't supposed to be reactionary, congress is.
The constitution has all the mechanisms in place to control the president, they just aren't being used by the legislature.
It's a tricky problem that has a number of proposed solutions. I'm not going to act like it's a silver bullet but I think open primaries in federal elections would go a _long_ way towards normalizing (in the scientific meaning) the legislature and allowing people who want to do the job, rather than grandstand, into the offices.
A nuclear Iran would lead to a nuclear KSA, Turkiye, UAE, Egypt, Qatar, etc and would make the Middle East more unstable.
We don't need to put boots on the ground though. The reason why we had boots in Afghanistan and Iraq which led to it's unpopularity was due to our moral commitment to nation-building in the 1990s-2000s (especially after Yugoslavia). Americans no longer feel that moral compulsion.
If Iran shatters like Libya, the problem is solved and KSA, UAE, Qatar, Turkiye, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Russia, China, and India can fight over the carcass just like how ASEAN, China, Russia, and India are doing in now collapsed Myanmar (which had similar ambitions in the 2000s); how the Gulf, Med states, and Russia are meddling in Libya; and how the Gulf, Turkiye, Russia, China, and India are meddling in the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia).
This is why North Korea prioritized nuclear weapons - in order to gain strategic autonomy from the US and China [0], especially because China has constantly offered to forcibly denuclearize North Korea as a token to SK and Japan for a China-SK-Japan FTA [1]
Edit: can't reply
> How many more years will it remain inevitable, do you think?
As long as Iranian leadership remain committed to building a nuclear program.
Thus Iran either completely hands off it's nuclear program to the US or the EU, or it shatters.
The former is not happening because the key veto players in Iran (the clerics, the Bonyads, the IRGC, the Army, and regime-aligned oligarchs) are profiting from sanctions and substituting US/EU relations with Russia and China, and have an incentive to have a nuclear weapon in order to solidify their perpetual control in the same manner that North Korea did.
That only leaves the latter. The same thing happened to Libya and Myanmar.
The only reason the Obama administration went with the JCPOA was because the EU, Russia, and China lobbied the Obama admin that they could prevent Iran from nuclearizing. China+Russia are now indifferent to Iranian nuclear ambitions due to ONG (China) and technology (Russia) dependencies, and the EU does not have the power projection capacity nor the economic linkages to stop Iran.
[0] - https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/six-party-talks-north-koreas-nuclear-program
[1] - https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/47844?device=smartphone&phrase=okinawa&words=
The NATO campaign in Libya was similar with no American boots on the ground, with the Gulf and Turkiye largely stepping in. And unlike Libya, we don't have US citizens in a consulate in Iran.
"You break it, you buy it" doesn't hold in 2026 anymore.
"Hands off the nuke or we kill you" is a great populist policy on paper, but difficult to implement in reality. Especially if your air campaign fails, necessitating a suicidal ground invasion.
Libya's population was overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of regions in the same manner as Iran.
Furthermore, Iran no longer has functional AD systems and the initial strikes were limited to nuclear sites and a handful of strategic site.
This time strikes are planned to be more generalized
> "Hands off the nuke or we kill you" is a great populist policy on paper, but difficult to implement in reality. Especially if your air campaign fails, necessitating a suicidal ground invasion
We can keep striking Iran indefinetly.
A nuclear program requires an industrial base, and with what is current being proposed, a scorched earth approach of targeting Iranian industrial [0], security [0], and leadership capacity [1] is being planned.
You truly do not need boots on the ground if you do not care about maintaining a functional country at the end of such strikes.
That is the approach the US is adopting now. For all this talk of "regime change", the answer is we don't care what happens after.
This is why I called out Libya - it was an industrialized country with an active nuclear and ballistics missile program with the capacity to harm much of Europe. The months of NATO strikes degraded their industrial capacity and the country collapsed into civil war, but it was no longer a major headache for Europe in the same manner that it was under Gaddafi.
Iran collapsing into a Libya or even Syrian style civil war is a good outcome for the US. It sucks for the region (and hence why the Gulf and Turkiye has been lobbying against it) but it is good enough for us in the USA.
People said that in the Twelve Day War, and it was entirely unclear at the end whether or not the key OKRs had been achieved. It seems silly to suggest that they can expand their target list and receive more clear results.
The US only conducted limited strikes on Iran's nuclear program. The rest of the conflict was unilaterally led by Israel.
> whether or not the key OKRs had been achieved.
Iranian nuclear capacity was degraded [0] setting the program back by 2 years [1].
For a short term conflict, it met the limited OKR of preventing an Iranian nuclear breakthrough in 2025-26.
But this game of cat-and-mouse will continue as long as Iran maintains industrial capacity. The only solution at this point is generalized strikes degrading Iran's industrial capacity indefinitely.
If that also means Iran collapses into a Libyan style civil war, so be it. You put boots on the ground if you care about controlling strategic points and reducing civilian casualties - a generalized airstrike to kill one high value target and killing 200-300 civilians is easier than risking a strike force to extract that target.
We don't care if the Bagh-e-Chehel Sotoun becomes a bagh-e-chehel hazar jamajmeh, if Tehran's urban infrastructure collapses, and Khorasan, Sistan-ve-Balochistan, Kurdistan, Iranian Azerbaijan, and Khuzestan collapse into ethnic and communal violence.
This is what we did to Imperial Japan in WW2, Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and Libya in 2011, but unlike Japan and much of Yugoslavia, we have no appetite or interest in deploying a Marshall Plan or Dayton Plan.
That said, there is an offramp - give up the entire nuclear program and place it under American or EU control.
Those are the options.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-is-status-irans-main-nuclear-facilities-2026-01-16/
Pretty cavalier way to talk about a monumental humanitarian catastrophe.
Say what you will about the Libyan leadership, the collapse of the country was categorically A Bad Thing. Wishing that on the people of Iran is monstrous.
Morally, absolutely.
But morals don't run the world - interests do. And it is in our interest to not spark a nuclear race in the Middle East, the same way it was in our interest to firebomb every Japanese wooden city during WW2 instead of putting boots on the ground as well as airstriking much of Urban Serbia during the Yugoslav War.
As such, Iranian leadership will have to give up their nuclear ambitions if they wish to offramp.
This is what a multipolar world looks like.
> As such, Iranian leadership will have to give up their nuclear ambitions if they wish to offramp.
It's not remotely in Iran's interests to give up on its nuclear program. Probably the best thing that could happen for their security would be an above ground nuclear weapons test to get everyone off their back.
It's not like surrending their program is going to save them, just ask Gadaffi about how it worked out for him. Oh wait.
Also, it's not like they're the ones starting the nuclear race in the region: that one's on Israel.
Then KSA makes a nuke. Then Turkiye. Then the UAE. Then Egypt...
> It's not like surrending their program is going to save them, just ask Gadaffi about how it worked out for him. Oh wait
Yep.
But it will reduce the risk of us using scorched earth tactics to deindustrialize and collapse Iran as a warning to other countries.
A managed transition to amenable leadership (clerical or secular) and complete US or EU control of Iran's nuclear program would be good enough for us.
> it's not like they're the ones starting the nuclear race in the region: that one's on Israel
Take up Israel's nuclear program with the French, not us Americans - it was De Gaulle who sent his nuclear engineers to build Israel's nuclear program in the 1950s-60s [0].
We could not denuclearize Israel on time in the 1970s, just like we can't denuclearize China, India, Pakistan, or North Korea.
This is also why Israel was treated as a pariah state by the US from the 1970s-90s [1][2][3]. The US-Israel relationship only took off in the 2000s under Clinton 2 and Bush.
[0] - https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000271219.pdf
[1] - https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86T01017R000100770001-5.pdf
[2] - https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP91-00561R000100060008-7.pdf
[3] - https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00965R000807260012-9.pdf
imho that's the real endgame anyway, the US is just hired muscle to beat up KSA's regional rival, and eventually when the US is done collapsing and retreating to isolationism KSA will do a big show of their nuclear weapons.
If KSA wants a nuke they'll get it, and the US politicians they've purchased will all applaud them for the accomplishment.
> eventually when the US is done collapsing and retreating to isolationism KSA will do a big show of their nuclear weapons
They will not. If they do, they will go the same way Iran did. Iran used to be our KSA back in the day.
KSA getting a nuclear weapon means threatening the UAE, which now has a defense pact with India. A KSA (or UAE) nuclear bomb leads to a four-way KSA-UAE-India-Pakistan war.
Both the Gulf states hold India and Pakistan back from extended wars, and India+Pakistan hold the Gulf from falling into a regional war.
In fact, it's been Pakistan that has been setting the US's Iran policy under Trump [0][1][2].
No, it is not in the interests of the very corrupt and evil Islamic Theocracy running Iran to give up their nuclear program. It doesn't benefit the average Iranian all. In fact the program harms most Iranians by making Iran an international pariah.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises
They might go without it, but if they're waiting on the Ford, they'll be cutting it close to fit the opening strike into this weekend.
I doubt Trump's seriously seeking a nuclear deal as he (in)famously withdrew from the deal established by the Obama administration [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_the_Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Action
Or is this just another "trump did illegal thing but nothing will happen" kind of scenario?
I think this issue is effectively dead at least until we see how the new majority shakes out in November.
A typical pattern is the appeals court (of which scotus is one) clarifies the legal issues and send the case back to the trial court to clean up and issue specific orders.
Anthropomorphizing markets as evil cartels is 100% just as bad as the efficient market fetishization you see in libertarian circles. Markets are what markets do, and what they do is compete trying to sell you junk.
That's correct, the laws exist but it's up to the executive to enforce them. The US has not meaningfully enforced any anti-trust laws since the Microsoft web browser bundling case in the 90s. There was a brief glimmer of anti-trust being resuscitated by FTC during the Biden admin, but the tech company monopolies got so spooked by that that they brought all their resources to bear in 2024 to ensure their guy won, and he did. Anti-trust remains dead in the US for at least another generation.
It's baked into the system...
At the same time, USD M2 supply increased an unusual 40% from Jan 2020 to Jan 2022. It only fell a little after. So prices that were inflated for that reason, I wouldn't have expected to fall back down.
I do feel like some local businesses just price according to costs but keep that ratched up if costs fall, like you said.
Trump administration officials had indicated that they developed contingency plans to attempt to reinstate levies in the event of this outcome. CNN reported that Trump called this ruling a “disgrace” and said he had a backup plan for tariffs.
And we know in practice that Trump TACOs out rather than pick real fights with established powers. Markets don't like it when regulatory agencies go rogue vs. the rule of law. They'll just shift gears to something else.
Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO) is a term that gained prominence in May 2025 after many threats and reversals during the trade war U.S. president Donald Trump initiated with his administration's "Liberation Day" tariffs.
The charitable explanation is that he chickens out when confronted with real backlash.The less charitable explanation is that he 'chickens' out after the appropriate bribe has been paid to him.
1. That's transparently NOT what the white house said the tariffs were for.
2. There has been NO significant change (via negotiation or not) in non-tariff trade policy under this administration. Essentially all those "announcements" of "deals" were, were just the acts of rolling back the tariffs themselves. No one caved. We didn't get any advantage.
It's just absolutely amazing to me the degree of epistemological isolation the right has created for it in the modern US.
The man has a lot of cheques to write for the 175 billion he stole illegally from foreign countries.
Please learn a bit about the incidence of taxation: https://stantcheva.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum7746/files/stantcheva/files/lecture3_1.pdf The main models supporting your view is where consumer income is exogenous and all firm profits are redistributed to the representative consumer as a lump sum transfer: https://www.ief.es/docs/destacados/publicaciones/revistas/hpe/216_Art2.pdf
Please avoid simplistic beliefs and moral outrage for things as complex as trade policy. The people who say that the incidence of taxation falls heavily on sellers may just be better informed, particularly when listening to wall street earnings calls while simultaneously looking at the consumer price data.
Let's take a look at the latest EU-consensus reinforcing pamphlet pushed out by Kiehl, because when Mahlkow wrote about tarrifs in 2022, he was all for them. At that time the EU was debating imposing tariffs on Russia, and here Mahlkov insisted that there would be massive economic long term contraction for Russia - which did not happen -- yet simultaneously, Mahlkow predict no meaningful effect of the EU's tariffs on the EU itself. You see, at that time, Mahlkov insisted that because the EU GDP was larger, there would be no impact on the EU itself as a result of tariffs.
Now let's dig into the crazy assumptions of Mahlkow's model. Does he use sophisticated econometric analysis? No, what he does is look at shipping containers and published tariff rates. What he assumes is that if, before the tariffs, there were 100 units shipped, but after the tariffs, there were also 100 units shipped, then it must be that 100% of the cost was passed onto the consumer.
You see, some tariffs (which the EU bureaucracy and it's various patronage organizations like Kiehl) support don't cause any harm to the nation levying the tariff, but other tariffs are deadly, and fortunately Mahlkov will pick the right model to reach the right conclusion. No looking at pallet data in 2022!
Now what is wrong with looking at pallet data for a brief period of time. It never occurs to Mahlkov that the corporations importing the goods have to absorb some of the cost. Mahlkov just assumes 100% is passed through to consumers and the importers pay nothing.
This must mean the BLS is committing some kind of fraud as this has not been showing up in CPI data.
I'll leave you to decide whether this is warranted or not, but let's just say there is a reason this remains a "brief" available to download and is not a published paper.
Meanwhile, real economists, even though the profession is politicized, nevertheless understand that they missed the boat on estimating tariff effects, and that the models need updating. To a real researcher, it's actually a great opportunity. But to someone like Mahlkov, who is trotted out whenever there needs to be economic support for or against the same policy, he will gladly write a paper. And then others will cite it.
He raised tariffs illegally by 10% for most countries immediately, which triggered a bunch of negative economic effects around the globe in those countries directly tied to the illegal raise of those tariffs by who represents the United States of America.
Damages have to be paid to those countries and their companies.
Because those costs occurred from an illegal action. We do agree that if you do something the highest court has deemed illegal, if it caused damages to any party as direct result of that illegal action, the entity who suffered those damages should be entitled to claim damages, right?
A lot of companies had to deal with the same problems.
You can’t really plan exporting into a country that raises different amounts of tariffs basically over night depending on how his majesty, the king of the free world has slept the night before.
Someone needs to plan with the new realities, workers need to put in more hours, external expertise needs to be hired, all costs have to be evaluated, partners in the US might no longer be able to clear their inventory, new business terms need to be negotiated.
Don’t get me started about the Logistics troubles, but all of the above are costs which wouldn’t occur if the president had gotten legal advise from the Supreme Court about his economic plans before he did something illegal. Right?
So do you follow the law?
If yes, your conclusion needs to be that the president needs to write a lot of Cheques and probably needs the autopen. Because it weren’t only us importers and customers suffering from the presidents illegal action.
American citizens and American importers are not foreigner countries.
Don’t propagate or fall for trumps repeated blatant LIE that foreign countries pay tariffs.
They are direct taxes on Americans and American importers, the exporter does not pay it.
- $TRUMP meme coin, down 87% from ATH
- $MELANIA meme coin, down 98% from ATH
- $WLFI, down 50% from ATH, with 4 Trump co-founders
The first two coins were actually hyped up so hard at launch that they drained liquidity from most of the crypto market because of people dumping everything to buy in
They exist as a way for money to be given to the Trump family in an legally obfuscated way. Most of that happens/happened right after launch.
Always useful to have a grasp on reality.
Actual event may not have occurred, but DHL flat fee is real.
I dunno if a class-action lawsuit is realistic or not in this case or how likely a court decision stating that all tariff revenue must be refunded.
Sorry, but tariffs on aluminum or steel that is only made in China or microchips or components. I think that’s a valid discussion to have. … you’re complaining about disposable cat toys that were likely made in a sweat shop where the workers were not making a livable wage and then putting in a container on a ship burning crude oil and pushed around the world so you can have some junk that was a couple dollars cheaper than a domestic option?
Not the same thing.
If they refuse, sue them in small claims court.
You can't do that yourself? In my EU country if I get a package with tax and customs fee I can pay myself and not pay DHL.
Is it like the gas pump thing? Where you can't do it yourself.
There is a normal process in place for importers/brokers to request refunds if a specific tariff was overpaid or a tariff was ruled to be illegal.
But if you imported through DHL and you were not the broker, that is more complicated, you might need to ask DHL for it, and they might not want to do it for you (as they don't have a standard process in place).
I spent a bit of time attempting to find a broker [1] to handle this for our project (since we had a large amount of eligible refunds due to importing then sending out of country after QA) but in the long run gave up...which is what they hope for.
Keeping an eye on all this to see how it plays out.
[1] Not only did I look for a broker but I debated becoming one myself due to this.
i.e. Where you upload your paperwork, fill in and certify the forms online, make a payment, and the broker just feeds all that through. You do the work, they're just your gateway to the system.
I've used courier's internal brokers (like DHL/UPS offer, at their ripoff rate), professional private brokers, etc. and seen all of them make stupid mistakes costing me money/time (eg. including the shipping cost in value for duties, transposing the wrong currency at face value, etc). I could do a better job myself, and frankly with a decent portal it would take me less time. Heck I bet I could build a fairly automated system that is more efficient (higher-margin) and accurate.
Here in Canada there's new legislation that even if you use a third party broker, you still need to post a security or bond with CBSA (see CARM) maintained on an annual basis. It boggles my mind they made the infrastructure to deal with money from all the individual buyers, but not a self-service portal to deal with the forms. Self-clearing here still entails a physical visit to a CBSA office.
He probably didn't say it either, its first appearance is in an 1860s book by Horace Greeley.
But I guess this is not very surprising. I am sure every friend and family member of Trump administration people made trades leading all those tariff announcements over the last year, while the rest of us got rocked by the chaos in the stock market.
“LUTNICK was a neighbor of JEFFREY EPSTEIN (EPSTEIN) in the adjoining property at 11 E 71st Street, New York, New York. LUTNICK bought the property for $10 through a trust. LES WEXNER (WEXNER) and EPSTEIN owned the building. LUTNICK bought it in a very roundabout way from EPSTEIN.”
Welcome to America.
This isn't even in the top 10 of corrupt activities our government officials undertaken in the past year.
Corrective upvote applied.
That's more sadistic than I had guessed.
------ re: below due to throttling ----------
Lutnicks profit requires some 2nd order thinking. How Trump et al might profit off of import/export insider operations also requires some 2nd order thinking. My apologies for not spelling it out, although it should not take much imagination.
That's why it taxed the economy much worse than a legitimate President would do.
Once again, count on hn for the downvotes. Yep, those shall not speak of downvotes, or taxation.
I lean quite heavily myself.
In more ways than one though ;)
The most legitimate tax I see is one that citizens would cheerfully pay willingly under any economic conditions.
But that’s irrelevant - excise taxes are the classic example of taxes people pay willingly.
excise taxes are hidden taxes, so I wouldn't agree with "willingly"
Citizens still need to come to some consensus.
One key feature I didn't emphasize was the requirement for the tax rate to never rise to a significant enough level to be a burden on the wage-earning taxpayer.
Otherwise it's just a sinkhole which brings down the prosperity ceiling with it.
That's means its not a legitimate tax
I don't know if your comment was intentionally ambiguous or not but it makes sense to either extreme, plus anything in between.
Really one of the things that can (has) stimulate ideas from many directions.
Too bad when you end up as a punching bag from the fraction of partisans just because some of them are so extreme, usually it's only the ones that harbor a lot of hate more than anything else, where negative outlook emanates in all directions.
So you get put down from all directions :(
When the message stands alone as completely neutral and it ends up as a target of the "non-nattering nabobs of negativity" it is still kind of disappointing. So much better responses could be made. I still haven't found any reason to downvote anybody, ever.
Hope it wasn't my mischaracterizing your comment that dismayed anybody worse.
Now with more meat on the bone, infrastructure and real public utility are table stakes which somebody has to pay for, and I'm perfectly willing. Cheerful only if the rate is not exorbitant, which is the real problem.
I'd like to be more cheerful but the corruption sunk in so long ago that it's not pretty. One of the reasons that things dedicated to the public are always more expensive than they could be.
But I also don't agree with the taxes I pay because I feel like too much goes to waste and that I don't get the value back from what I'm putting in. Most of the roads I drive on today, are very poorly maintained. Where did the money go?
I pay the taxes that employ local lifeguards at my beach. They save people's lives. Good. But they also get angry at me when I'm not holding my dogs leash, even if there are no other dogs around. I don't think that overlapping ocean safety with a nanny state around dogs, is a good use of my taxes. Especially when there are people living in RVs at the beach who are breaking the laws stated on posted signs and they do nothing about it.
The original question about legitimacy was more philosophical. If you are a believer in government and laws, then legitimate is that a group has made up a rule (or law) in order to make it legitimate. I don't agree with that defining legitimacy, it is something else. It isn't law, it is a social contract. We should contribute to society by definition, not by law
So at the end of the day, it is a lot of give and take. Some better or worse. It is what it is. I just try to live my best life and ignore the rest.
Why do you feel this?
Why do you feel this
One that goes through all three branches of government, the way it's been since we decided "no taxation without representation" is how such things should be collectively implemented.
If a citizen's stance is there is no such thing as a legitimate tax, perhaps there should be a legal process for banishing them from all public services, including roads, electricity, telephone, fire and rescue services, etc. and make consuming them a crime. But I guess even that would be a problem because we need to pay for the justice system that would prosecute such a sovereign citizen that breaks the rules...
Basically an "opt-out" of modern life almost in its entirety. I think most people that subscribe to "no legitimate taxes" might be surprised how isolating that would be if they actually think it through.
To be clear, I don't think this is a good idea, it's simply a thought exercise.
from another comment you made> The way I see it, those who can't see through my statement to the true meaning with some form of EQ, are the ones downvoting.
Nah.
Does it feel good to say the people that disagree with you have lost the ability to reason? I hope you don't actually believe that flamebait self-aggrandizing nonsense.
Though I'm surprised you're citing the guidelines after writing the comment I referred to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47093780
I'm not trying to backseat mod here but do you really think that comment is okay?
Not knowing exactly who you're attacking doesn't make the attack okay.
I'm going to keep hoping you said that out of anger rather than actually meaning it. It's a completely unreasonable inference to make about people.
So, that line was snarky. But my last few comments have been far from flaming, and I'm not going for a cheap putdown. You made some very harsh judgements about people based on a tiny interaction. That's bad for discussion in a whole bunch of ways.
And I guess that's about all I can say, and as clear as I can make it.
When Donald Trump didn't run his tariffs through Congress he blatantly violated separation of powers. In normal times this would be 9-0 ruling from the Supreme Court for being so open and shut and it would not have taken over a year for the decision, but those times have passed.
The expression "this is a tax on..." is analogy for purposes of deciding if this tax was legal based on the process for enacting new taxes.
I'm actually impressed. Trump's allies figured out how to raise taxes on the working class without the George H. W. Bush backlash. And now they're going to get enormous refunds that will not be passed on back to the consumers. It's yet another wealth transfer from the poor to the rich and their voting base is standing up and delivering thunderous applause.
For instance complaining about downvotes always draws more as does collectively insulting the community you are participating in.
As to the original question the problem is that it suggests confusion on a basic topic that was decided here centuries ago and taught in elementary school. If someone said what even is addition in an adult forum would you teach them addition or would you assume that they actually know addition and are arguing in bad faith because they feel math really ought to work differently?
Also when you can divide a particular topic into clearly delineated camps appearing to disagree or question the basic premises that one camp holds is oft taken for disagreement and alignment with the opposing camp even when you are just debating a side issue and may in fact be mostly or entirely aligned with the people who feel like you are opposed to them. This shortcut as far as identifying motive and perspective can misfire but it's often correct and "just asking questions" is often underhanded opposition.
Lastly a legitimate tax is one that is passed by Congress in the normal fashion and not overturned by the courts.
As for talking about what shall not be talked about, how else shall we talk about it? Once I hit -4, it doesn't matter anyway so a few drops on what I have is not really a big deal. In reality, I'm not counting the numbers, I'm counting the people who have fundamentally lost the cognitive ability to reason about deeper meaning in a more philosophical sense and just click click click.
Legitimate from a cultural / legal sense, but not from a philosophical one.
The best you could do is perhaps model the additional per household cost (which has been done) and issue them checks from the Treasury (stimulus check style), but who is going to pay for it? The taxpayer! There is no way to incur this economic cost on the people who incurred the harm (this administration). You could potentially get the funds back from companies through higher corp taxes. Is Congress going to pass that? Certainly not. Them the breaks of electing Tariff Man. Does exactly what it says on the tin.
> ....I am a Tariff Man. When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so. It will always be the best way to max out our economic power. We are right now taking in $billions in Tariffs. MAKE AMERICA RICH AGAIN 9:03 AM · Dec 4, 2018
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1069970500535902208 | https://archive.today/BBEmH
Historical lesson in governance failure. Can't change history, the outcome is regrettable, we can only try to do better in the future. Onward. Let the lesson not be for naught.
They should be well aware of what extortion is.
If Trump did it on his own that's one thing if not it's a conspiracy.
It's very much possible if money isn't (or only partially) returned to the companies and used for targeted investment benefiting the public. Of course this won't help much if government spending priories and legislative objectives aren't revised, but that's unlikely because there's nobody in government or academia with anything close to a good idea about it.
Otherwise it’s the same as just leaving the illegal tax in effect.
The SCOTUS didn't say that in their decision. No matter how you call it, the tariffs were found in breach with simple law passed by Congress - that is, the undoing of tariffs can be legislated by Congress and it can take any shape they like - it will be legal. Anyway, fine-tuning this is a waste of time, the big problems are elsewhere.
But we all know they are actually the party of unsustainable debt (with the political agenda of it blowing up the country as they lay out in their 40+ years of starve the beast policy). They then come to threads like this and talk about...the unsustainable debt that their 40+ years of policymaking has created and how government doesn't work (because of their 40+ years of policy making) and we need to get rid of it. 40+ years of destroying the country via starve the beast policy and placing the country in unsustainable financial peril all for a political agenda they can't reach any other way.
I can't imagine their margins are usually very high, the tariff rates are astronomical compared to their usual margins. Hopefully someone here has more information than me because to my naive mind this basically absolutely explodes the free cash reserves of importers from high volume high tariff countries creating a lottery winnings for a business sector of epic proportions rarely seen.
This story is often repeated, especially by businesses advocating against taxes, but transparently false if you think about it: Taxes and tariffs are costs for a business, no different than an increase in the cost of hops for Budweizer, or an increase wholesale cost of M&M's for the corner store.
When hops' cost increases, Budweizer doesn't just pass it along to consumers; the corner store also doesn't just raise the price of M&Ms. Everyone knows that if you raise the price, fewer people buy your beer/candy and your profits may drop overall, while your scarce assets (money) will be sunk in products sitting on the shelves when you need those assets elsewhere. They can't just raise prices arbitrarily: if Budweizer charged $20/can they'd have zero profit.
As we know well, some companies even sell products at a loss because that is the best outcome for their profits - e.g., car manufacturers, rather than have a hundred million in assets 'lost' indefinitely to unsold cars, and having no pricing that is more profitable, will sell at a loss to get what they can out of it. The clothing store puts last season's unsold clothes on sale around now.
In economics the tradeoff between price and quantity sold is called the demand curve. There's a theoretical point on the curve, hard to identify precisely in reality, which maximizes your profit.
So when costs increase, businesses still want to maximize profits: They decide how much of extra cost to pay directly out of their profits, and how much to raise the price and have consumers 'pay' for it. The consumers don't always go along with the plan: For products that are easy to forgo, such as M&Ms, consumers won't pay much more and businesses tend to eat cost increases. For products that are more unavoidable, such as gas for your car, consumers are compelled to pay more (until they buy more fuel efficient cars, or take a bus or ride a bicycle).
Thus both of you are really right. The tariff is paid 100% by consumer receipts if you track the flow of money, but this might also still be reflected in reduced profits. The actual flow of money might be $X revenue from customers, out of the $X paid from customers $Y is taken out for tariffs. $Y comes from the dollars received from customers but still reflects lowered potential profit if $X rose by less than $Y after tariffs started.
Tariffs do not necessarily increase prices for consumers, especially not at a dollar-for-dollar rate.
You were the one that presented the dichotomy of receipts from customers and diversions of profits. Then when I used your own framing, by using the exact same two variables, you switched the game and object to not including the investors. This is absolutely hilarious, as you're objecting to the very foundation you outlaid.
>Tariffs do not necessarily increase prices for consumers, especially not at a dollar-for-dollar rate.
The 'question' was twofold. Whether consumers pay it. And whether tariffs increase price for consumers. It can be true that the consumer pays ~100% of the tariff, yet the price doesn't rise as much as tariffs. It's still the consumers paying, they're just paying more to tariffs and less to profit. So you're both right, and your failure to acknowledge that is why your comment got grayed out. Had you acknowledged that, it would have been a very easy 'win' for you and close out of a decent argument.
> [T]he net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)
This is a serious document written by a bunch of serious economists. You can find a list of them at the bottom of the page. That you have written their conclusion off as "transparently false" should give you pause.
I didn't say that. I said that the common argument that tax/tariff increases are always passed along 100% to consumers is transparently false. And contrary to your criticism, the cited paper agrees with my claim (in this case, while my claim is general):
"In CBO’s assessment, foreign exporters will absorb 5 percent of the cost of the tariffs, slightly offsetting the import price increases faced by U.S. importers. In the near term, CBO anticipates, U.S. businesses will absorb 30 percent of the import price increases by reducing their profit margins; the remaining 70 percent will be passed through to consumers by raising prices."
It goes on to say that other businesses, whose costs haven't increased, will raise prices - which is not at all 'passing along costs to consumers' but a different dynamic - and that the combined two dynamics yield the overall consumer impact equal to 95% of tariff costs:
"In addition, U.S. businesses that produce goods that compete with foreign imports will, in CBO’s assessment, increase their prices because of the decline in competition from abroad and the increased demand for tariff-free domestic goods. Those price increases are estimated to fully offset the 30 percent of price increases absorbed by U.S. businesses that import goods, so the net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)."
I think the tariffs are a big mistake but the argument I was addressing - if you tax businesses then consumers effectively pay the tax - is widespread disinformation.
> Those price increases are estimated to fully offset the 30 percent of price increases absorbed by U.S. businesses that import goods, so the net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)."
The idea expressed previously in your excerpts is that domestically-produced US goods do increase their revenues by the amount that their produced-abroad competitors. So things are okay from that perspective.
But what that final quotation says is that those increased revenues are 95% paid for by US consumers. In other words, they "effectively pay the tax."
For them this reversal sets up a true irony. Trump effectively forced US citizens to pay more the imported goods. He thought that money would go to the USA treasury. Now the US treasury has to pay it back, so it is a free gift to the exporting countries. Like China.
Truly delicious.
This is no excuse. If they knew this would be a business, being a broker of such deals would be sure to make them money.
not sure why you'd give them any benefit of the doubt. they haven't earned it.
Trump just gave himself a $10 billion dollar slush fund from taxpayers. Who stopped him? No one. This amount of money will buy you one great den.
Noem wants luxury jets from the taxpayer.
So. Much. Winning.
Like the man said, I'm definitely tired of all the winning. Emoluments clause be damned.
Technically, no, they did not come up with this thought on their own. It's been heavily propagandized that 'voting does no good, so just stay home". I just want to point that out as it's an active attack on American voters.
Joe Average the Trump voter got to be the way they are from a "grooming" process of some kind.
Who would Trump have ever have picked up something like that from?
By the time Trump's face was on TV every day it was already full-blown abuse.
Also, I think a big element was the rallys.
Once Trump was confirmed as the big loser in 2020, he immediately started his comeback, live and in person.
Constant rallys for 4 years, real slim attendance at first but eventually getting a baseline crowd who would make gatherings seem more popular than they were. Traveling from one rally to another like many Taylor Swift fans do, but all Trump rallied about was hate.
That's the crowd that he grew by testing different targets of hate, running it up the flagpole to see who salutes.
By the time Biden started campaigning in earnest, Trump already had four solid years behind him and his pitch was tested and honed well enough to draw a much more loving and obedient crowd. Of haters. Nothing less would be appropriate.
Giving thousands of disgruntled voters a full "live concert" or "game day" experience like they never had before, making a strong impression that lasted and put him over the top. Across the country.
And the Democrats did nothing like this. Biden was already moving slow and was never an emotion-driven attention-getter, plus he was busy doing the job he was elected to do and nobody dreamed of putting him on the road full-time like Trump.
It might have taken more than 4 years of Democrat rallys to compensate also, so starting early makes a big difference.
By now there's not 4 years remaining and they're still not doing squat.
Success at the midterms is more critical than ever and that's much less than a year away too.
Dems need to bring forward a new personality now that they can rally behind all the way to the top. Get the show on the road and pack those stadiums constantly, similar to "modern" Trump voters, an actual platform is not necessary.
None of the strategists who dropped the ball for Biden and Harris seem to be doing anything different yet.
Why continue with the same failed machine that is proven not to work against built-up MAGA hate?
If Democrats aren't going to hate back they're surely going to need to express their dissatisfaction a lot more strongly.
Every false move that Trump makes would be plenty of new fodder, an unending well of new topics to rouse the crowds' congealment around when they come up. If a nationwide tour were constantly underway, these could be added to the pitch while taken in stride, and the momentum could be made to increase each time Trump makes a new foible which the opposition can focus on to gauge the popularity impact.
That may still not be enough and it may take longer than it should so you've got to start earlier rather than too late.
Ideally a new attractive personality will bypass the failed old Dem machine, and with nothing but positive aspirations from the podium, trigger a natural gut response from the crowd, whatever stadium the tour takes them to.
Could anything be more appropriate than thousands of more patriotic ralliers than ever cheering for the Democrats in unison, spontaneously repeating the rallying call "Lock him up !" ?
People that are actually leftist don't vote because there's nobody that represents them. Most Democrat politicians are centrist.
But it’s of course a hellishly complex problem
Swamps are rich ecosystems with incredible natural beauty and diversity. Draining a swamp is extraordinarily bad in general, even if good for wealthy property developers.
Ironically, it seems that "drain the swamp" turns out to be an apt metaphor for what Trump and that gang have been doing, as promised.
Had the Democrats ran a half decent candidate, they could easily have won. But they're just not capable of doing that.
“If only all those idiots on the right and in the center could see they should vote for the bumbling but well-intentioned candidate over the obvious liars and thieves” is an explanation that feels good to tell yourself, but also incredibly patronizing and prevents actually understanding why people vote the way they do.
I find the arrogance of the left pretty abhorrent. I also despise aspects of the right, but boy does the left rub me the wrong way.
Personally, I don't expect people on the right to come around. I am mystified by people on the center who looked at Trump and Harris and decided Trump was the way to go, or even just didn't care. If you'd like to enlighten me why they did that, I'd be interested.
My real confusion is people on the left who did this. They decided that Harris didn't say the right things about Israel, or they were upset at not having a primary, or they were still upset about Bernie, and decided to stay home. That is baffling.
The short answer to your question is that the Democratic establishment in general and Harris in particular repeatedly lied throughout the Biden administration, culminating in the bald-faced lie that Joe Biden was completely competent. This was done with the attitude of “well what are you going to do? Vote for the other team? Don’t be ridiculous.” There were so, so many other things throughout the Biden administration, it felt (feels) like a race to the bottom.
So Trump, who is notorious for lying, won. To be fair to Republicans, Trumps lies are more like crazy exaggerations sprinkled with outright bullshit which somehow is more palatable than being gaslit.
If the defense of the Democrats is “Well look at how bad Trump is!” it should at least be acknowledged that is one of the worst defenses possible. And in general, if my options are to be stabbed by person A twice, or by person B once but person B expects me to be grateful, I might just go with person A.
The end result is we will keep toggling between the two parties until one of them decides to run using sane people. I sincerely hope that will be the Democrats this year.
He already was president for 4 years, which - aside from a lot of crazy talk - was a pretty stable and prosperous time.
OTOH, Harris had no track record to talk about, and hardly impressed anyone in any way.
you did NOT just write this seriously???! :) I hope you are being as sarcastic as one can be or did you sleep through it. just check how much of the total national debt comes from his first term… it is arguably the least “stable and prosperous” 4 years any American who is alive has ever seen
It is easy to be the President when shit's easy. I don't follow politics at all anymore, stopped right around the time someone like Donald was able to get a nomination for a political party in the United States so this isn't a liberal bashing Donald, these are just facts that he was about as worse of a President in his first four years as we've ever had. The jury is still out for these 4, we'll analyze that in 2029 :)
Harris wasn't the worst possible replacement, sure. But the Democrats have several very competent governors who could have done a lot better, but that was not considered.
If that was me, I would have used my substantial wealth to have lunch literally anywhere else in the world, with anyone else in the world.
Why would they bother hiding it when the populace is apparently powerless to do anything about it?
Then they can take their time to reverse all immunity granted by this President so all snakes can be rooted out.
But presidents are also immune against prosecution for official acts. Could a president just disregard pardons from a prior administration? Immovable object, irresistible force kinda situation right?
That is plainly wrong. A constitutional amendment can say anything. There are no prohibitions.
An example needs to be set.
The purge of DOJ (They can’t even find confirmable US Attorneys at this point.) and the military officer corps makes that not a certainty.
do you mean because POTUS can't forgive State convictions? But why NY?
Unfortunately, SCOTUS has already absolved Trump of anything he does in office
But, sometimes a groundswell movement really can build momentum and drive the conversation regardless of what the leaders think about it. Write to your state & national representatives demanding that they publicly support prosecution for the incredible crimes we're seeing committed by this admin. Try to make it a policy platform for your state party. Maybe we can build enough support from the bottom up to get popular momentum behind it. Holding criminals accountable for their crimes is not really a controversial position, we have to demand that they actually do it.
Biden is gone, but Schumer and Jeffries aren't exactly looking any different.
I'm currently livid at the dem leadership that doesn't have the guts to do anything hard. Dem leadership needs to go and we need a serious response here. South Korea just jailed their criminal president for life. Just imagine.
Doesn’t seem like a trivial task, given the Nov 2024 election results.
Best we can do is a couple dozen golden parachutes.
EDIT: Link to old but good joke [0] provided for context.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/16imt2f/long_an_old_joke_but_a_good_one/
If a dem wins in 2028, the big push will be one of reconciliation and acceptance. Let bygones be bygones. And it'll happen. And then for the next 4 years conservative media will absolutely pound that person's backside over made up and/or exaggerated corruption claims. Then in 2032 the GOP candidate will claim they're going to look into these claims.
However, I am unfortunately an incurable optimist, and sometimes we Americans really do pull off amazing feats. I live in the Twin Cities and we actually defeated DHS/CBP/ICE here. It was an amazing thing to witness, and maybe there is enough outrage at this admin's looting of the US that we can build the support nationally to do that kind of thing again.
Minnesota has a very high probability of sending 2 Democrat senators and all their electoral votes to the Democrat presidential candidate. Minnesota and the Twin Cities are of zero consequence to this administration, so why not use them as a distraction?
The primary goal of the administration, sweeping tax cuts, was already accomplished in Jul 2025, so even Congress is of limited value now until after the next presidential election.
Heck, Obama won the peace prize for no other reason than he wasn't George W Bush
That's Sarah Kendzior, one of the few journalists who was talking about Epstein long before all that started to became well known.
'Fun' fact: The Attorney General is able to unseal court documents at will. And for four years Garland didn't do that with the Epstein files. It was beyond clear that the SC were slow rolling Ghislaine Maxwell's appeal, and still nothing even leaked.
0 - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-of-the-mafia-state
With hindsight, it's pretty hard to believe that wasn't always the plan.
It was a pretty clever plan too, because everyone calling Obama out for [mass surveillance, illegal wars, promoting the '08 crash bankers, torture, funding ICE, bombing a wedding/s, assassinating US citizens without trial, attacking whistleblowers, using his supermajority to implement a Heritage Foundation healthcare plan, etc] was dismissed as a racist.
To this day I see people talk about the tan suit and the dijon mustard thing as if those fake outrage stories were the worst things he did. 'Wasn't it nice to have a President who could talk in complete sentences'.
At this point I think I'm most scared of the next fascist president. Trump has opened up a lot of avenues for blatant corruption and tyranny. His greed and stupidity have so far saved us from the worst outcomes but someone with his psychopathy but more savviness will mean the true end of our freedoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses
Going forward, the Dems are not likely to have power either, based on the projected safety of Repub Senate seats.
Like, they could easily have taken down Trump, either over Jan 6th or the Epstein files. They didn't.
They could have easily gained _millions_ of votes in the 2024 election just by promising not to keep helping murder tens of thousands of children. They didn't. They could have kicked up a fuss about some rather obvious election fraud; they didn't.
They could have fought harder for SC picks on multiple occasions. They could have leaked choice Epstein files at key times. They could have held proper primaries, instead of ramming a demented roomba warmonger and then his wildly unpopular warmonger sidekick down our throats (for like the third election in a row). They didn't.
At some point you need to realize that Dems have lots of power; and they choose to use it in very curious ways. Arming genocide and protecting billionaire blackmail pedo-rings aren't things that I'm willing to look past. Yes the Republicans are even worse, but at every point where Dems had all the power needed to hold them accountable they've gone to rather extreme lengths not to do that. For decades.
No more Merrick Garlands. No hand-wringing over appearances of weaponizing the DoJ. The next president needs to appoint an AG who enforces the law, and if they don't do it, they need be fired and replaced by someone who will.
Like his peanut farm would unduly sway government peanut policy.
There has most certainly been a major decline in values over time that corresponds quite strongly with the rise in the perceived importance of wealth.
In 1909, the US president made 75k - roughly 2.76 Million in today's dollars. This is in comparison to the current 400k dollar salary of the president. As the president is the highest paid government employee by law/custom - this applies downward pressure on the rest of the governments payroll.
I see no reason why the president shouldn't be modestly wealthy given the requirements or the role and the skill required to do it well. Cutting the payscale to less than some new grads seems like a recipe for corruption.
Nope[0]. He was a shameless grifter just like Trump.
This wasn't that big of a deal for the average person at a time when the median salary was somewhere around $3k, but for a person with significant overhead and large, but not enormous, income -- in other words, exactly like Truman -- it was devastating.
[1] - https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/
"Beginning in 1949, the president was also granted a $50,000 (equivalent to $677,000 in 2025) expense allowance, which was initially tax-free, and did not have to be accounted for."[0] That's 4 years of $677,000 tax-free which I make to be about $2.7M which lines up with "Truman embezzled about two and half million dollars, in 2025 money, from the White House expense account"[1] - "tax-free", "did not have to be accounted for" -> tax brackets are meaningless.
But, you say, "the allowance became taxable later in his presidency"[0], and I reply "Truman never reported it on his tax return"[0], "and also didn’t pay the taxes he owned on the money."[1] which also somewhat scuppers the "history of tax brackets" angle, no?
Further, "In February 1953, Truman signed a book deal for his memoirs, and in a draft will dated December of that year listed land worth $250,000 (equivalent to $3,008,000 in 2025), savings bonds of the same amount, and cash of $150,000 (equivalent to $1,805,000 in 2025)"[0] which I reckon comes to about $8M which, again, lines up with "Truman had a net worth of about $8 million in 2025 dollars when he left the White House"[1].
Further, further, "In January 1959, Truman calculated his net worth as $1,046,788.86 (equivalent to $11,561,000 in 2025)"[0] which, to be fair, is slightly lower than the "$14 million in 2025 dollars when he was successfully shaking his tin cup to Sam Rayburn and John McCormack in 1958"[1] but in the same "NOT AT ALL POOR GTFO" ballpark.
In summary - he embezzled $2.5M, got $8M for your memoirs, and ending up being worth $11-14M within 6 years of leaving the White House and thus I rate the claim "Truman who was rather broke, and ran into financial difficulties after leaving office" as 100 Pinocchios.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman (look at "Financial Situation")
That bias could indeed just be because he believes he's discovered a truth which most people don't know, completely contrary to the 'official narrative', which is indeed quite a frustrating place to find oneself. But it can also cause one to be blind in some ways. For instance assuming everything as written is accurate, the author simply then jumps to malice (like tax evasion), seemingly without consideration of issues such as inconsistent or flawed record keeping which I imagine was extremely common in the days prior to computers.
[1] - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-truman-show.html
Are you sure that people in the past viewed wealth as less important? If anything, the 1960s hippie movement would represent a shift away from a cultural emphasis on wealth, no?
I would suggest that internet commenter nihilism and politician nihilism form a self-reinforcing spiral. If commenters will take a nihilistic view of your actions no matter what you do, you might as well secure the bag. And if politicians are always securing the bag, you might as well write nihilistic internet comments about them.
There was a tremendous outpouring of grief and honor, and so much heartfelt condolences. From all over America and the whole world. Deep respect as fitting as can be for such a great human being, for the type of honest & compassionate leadership you could only get in the USA, and only from the cream that rises to the top.
Every single minute it invoked the feeling that Trump deserves nothing like this ever.
Red Hats will be crying in the street while sane and normal happy people dance like it's the rapture and kiss like they're falling in love for the first time all over again.
Trump is just good for circus, I would say the GOP can call themselves really lucky with him. His job is to successfully capture media attention, keeping what enables him out of the spotlight. He lacks all qualities, except that one ability to grab the mass media by their pussy. New craziness every day makes good headlines.
Problem is that his enablers are not aligned on all core issues. Yes, you have got the Heritage Foundation which mainly wants to go back to the gilded age with a vast christian lower class. But you also have a circle of people who believe that crashing the US, including the dollar, enables them to build a US like they want. Its a weird coalition of billionaires predating on the millionaires, grifters, christian nationalists, Neo-nazi's like Miller, tech-accelerationists etc.
You should fear the day when Trump isn't needed anymore. MAGA is Trump. GOP will have to shift up ideological gear after him, and it won't be as nice as Trump. Even if internal war breaks out in the GOP, it is too early for a party.
Yes, it's strange how dumb some rich/succesful people are. As I understand it, no civilization ever has done such a thing. If a civilization and its institutions crash, it remains failed/dysfunctional for a very long time. The only way to improve society is in small steps.
I hope the people who finance this all will wake up to the reality that it may well cost them everything, too.
Not having to hear "no" for decades breaks brains.
Nowhere near the respect was shown, not zero but more than was due.
People did question if that was too much honor at the time, too.
No hard core freedom-loving citizen from anywhere in the world questioned the extensive over-the-top memorial for Carter.
Nixon ruined things forever financially, but was not as dishonest as Trump.
But then, I have seen the same thing played out recently: Biden, a devout catholic is considered borderline evil by my fundagelical parents (mostly due to religious channels from the US, even though they're in Canada), while Trump is approaching sainthood.
Seems more likely the administration orders everyone to ignore the court.
> President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/us/politics/justice-department-minnesota-contempt.html
> Judge Provinzino, who spent years as a federal prosecutor, had ordered the government to release Mr. Soto Jimenez “from custody in Minnesota” by Feb. 13. An order she issued on Tuesday indicates that the government failed not only to return his documents, but also to release him in Minnesota as she had initially specified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_Garcia
> On April 10 [2025], the Supreme Court released an unsigned order with no public dissents. In reciting the facts of the case the court stated: "The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal." It ruled that the District Court "properly requires the Government to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador."
> During the [April 14 2025] meeting, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said that it was up to El Salvador, not the American government, whether Abrego Garcia would be released.
(That was, of course, a blatant lie.)
There's been lots of coverage of how government lawyers are overwhelmed because they have thousands of immigration cases being appealed and government lawyers keep quitting due to workload. So they have a giant backlog causing lots of administrative issues on following through with court orders.
https://newrepublic.com/post/206115/this-job-sucks-doj-attorney-judge-contempt-ice-court-orders
Sorry, is there a "you can ignore the courts if it's deportation" clause I missed somewhere?
> There's been lots of coverage of how government lawyers are overwhelmed because they have thousands of immigration cases being appealed…
That's their own fault.
You don't get to violate people's rights because you yourself fucked up the system beyond repair!
No, but you are arguing in a very annoying style.
Nobody is claiming it's good or okay that this is happening. What people are discussing is whether it's likely that Trump will order people to ignore the court in this case. This is just a question of predicting probabilities, not morality.
And, indeed, the administration has been dropping the ball on following rulings in low-level deportation cases, but hasn't really ignored, or ordered people to ignore, major big-ticket Supreme Court cases. You can't really use one as evidence for the other. This is what people were pointing out to you.
But you took them pointing out this factual distinction as somehow defending Trump, which it is not.
Imagine you said of a known thief: "that guy will surely murder someone, look at his long criminal record!" and someone responded "but all his crimes are petty theft, none involve violence". It'd be illogical for you to then get indignant that the other person was defending theft or claiming it's not bad.
They did exactly that in the Garcia case, which was a "big-ticket SCOTUS case". It became politically untenable and they eventually backed down, but the post-ruling response was initially "nuh uh!"
He sure is confirming his contempt for the court right now on live TV.
Trying to drum up support for his hate against anything sesible in his sight.
Edit: This just in . . . he is peeved, his face just turned so red it bled plum through the orange layer. People should review this on Youtube later if nothing else for this alone. The most meaningful thing in the rant :)
Edit2: And . . . he's announcing additional tarriffs in real time. You can't make this up.
Even if the executive branch's actions stop here, there's still a lot of arguing in court to do over refunds.
And unfortunately that extends to the metaphor as well. Society would like to see those responsible for the mess to also be responsible for the cleanup. However society expects that everybody but the mess maker will be left cleaning up.
In other words, Kavanaugh is lying: He doesn't actually care about legal clarity or mess-prevention. If he did we wouldn't even be in this situation in the first place.
The Supreme Court absolutely could have handled this much better, and is part of the reason there's so much to undo.
Basically we have a legal processes for courts going "this is weird and unlikely to stand and hard/impossible to fix afterwards, so do nothing until you get a green light", using temporary restraining orders and injunctions.
Yet Kavanaugh et al spent the last year repeatedly overriding lower-courts which did that, signaling that if someone said "let's figure this out first" to radical and irreparable Republican policies, the Supreme Court would not have their backs.
______________
> In case after case, dissenting justices have argued that the Court has “botched” this analysis and made rulings that are “as incomprehensible as [they are] inexcusable,” halting lower court injunctions without any showing that the government is facing harm and with grave consequences, including in some cases in which the plaintiffs are at risk of torture or death. The majority’s response to these serious claims? Silence.
For what it’s worth, I’ve personally been doing this. Not in meaningful dollar amounts. And largely to help regional businesses stay afloat. But I paid their tariffs and bought, in return, a limited power of attorney and claim to any refunds.
- https://www.newsweek.com/trump-doj-handling-pam-bondi-brother-cases-democrats-question-11221215
- https://abcnews.com/US/doj-drops-charges-client-ag-pam-bondis-brother/story?id=125073335
Always seems to be in the right place and the right time
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/30/new-epstein-files-howard-lutnick-island
What a profitable time for the Lutnicks, who are of course already fabulously wealthy. Our system really does reward the best people.
Now let's wait for the retaliation of 'Team Orange Dictatorship'
1) US customer pays huge import tax on imported goods in the form of higher prices.
2) Seller sends the collected tax to the US government
3) US government will refund all/most of that tax back to the seller after this ruling
4) Seller gets to keep the returned tax money as pure profit (no refund to customer)
That topic will surely go back to the courts, kicking and screaming
That's a good way to deter such acts in the future
And help to prosecute those who broke the law and raised illegal tax /s
Tariffs are like a national sales tax.
Strictly speaking it depends on the Incoterms agreed upon by the seller and buyer[1]. If the Incoterms are DDP, then the seller should pay import duties and taxes and as such is involved.
Of course sellers are typically trying to run a business, so they'll bake the taxes and import duties into the sales price. So effectively the buyer ends up paying for it, just indirectly.
This was relevant when the tariffs were introduced, as sellers with DDP goods in transit had committed to a sales price which included any tariffs and would have to swallow the extra costs when they got the bill from the freight forwarder.
The importer CAN be the seller, but other times the importer is a middleman in the supply chain.
I could see an argument that they don't have a legal obligation to pass the refunds on to their customers, any more than my local grocery store owes me 5 cents for the gallon of milk I bought last year if the store discovers that their wholesaler had been mistakenly overcharging them.
The difference this time is the scale is orders of magnitude larger. Will be interesting to see how they (importers and CBP) work through this.
The administration will just do nothing. They need 3 maneuvers for this to drag out longer than Trump 2.
There is no intention to follow the law here.
1. Claim to refund the money to each taxpayer with a Trump-signed check.
2. The number of checks will not total $200 B. Any reporting to the contrary will take up space from the truth about Epstein.
3. Before 2028, a loyal SuperPAC will form with hundreds of billions in dark money.
I've got receipts.
Literally. I have receipts for hundreds of dollars where the tariff is itemized (from JLCPCB, etc.)
The U.S. Treasury has a whole system for this, but in the other direction. If the government owes you money, and you owe the government money, the Treasury will deduct what you owe from whatever they are paying out.[1] But they're not set up for that in the other direction.
UPS didn't even deliver the product.
I'm suing them in small claims.
We'll see what happens.
I imagine that even after the ruling, our ass backwards legal system will somehow say this makes sense, even though the tariff rate was never near high enough for that bill to make any sense.
Further, they're going to get refunded the $10 it MIGHT have cost them.
There are going to be a raft of class action suits based on this.
As one of my lawyers once said, the only winners here are the lawyers.
Congress is full of lawyers do it’s pretty natural that they make rules that favor lawyers.
It's not the point, but why were you doing this? Surely internationally shipping a sack of sand is more painful than getting a local one?
It was interesting to see shops in the border towns of south & south east Switzerland buying & selling products from Italy, a relatively cheaper market.
Pre Brexit, I encounter a shop that did this in London and was surprised.
Having just been over there again, it's not hard to be entirely cashless, so the convenience isn’t missed.
Italians seem to like dealing in cash, with various taxis and hotels being cheaper if you pay cash. I guess that means it’s off the books?
Before: Importer pays China $10 for widget, pays $2 duty, sells to shop for $12 - profit zero, tax on that zero.
Now: Paid $10 for widget. Paid $2 duty, sold for $12, $2 refunded - profit $2, pays tax on the $2.
At least that's the normal way of doing accounting. There can be odd exceptions and complications in local laws.
I did what passes for research these days and concluded that if the claim is "probable and estimable," then it could be recorded as a "contingent liability" rather than other income. Relevant facts would include whether the tariff refund included a pass-through refund mandate (unlikely with this administration), or whether class actions for refunds against merchants were pending (inevitable).
That's what matters, don't care if it's the seller or a middleman that gets this money.
That's really a shame for american citizens, i'd be furious if i was american.
I can otherwise understand how people would agree on paying more for their stuff if it allows their fellow citizens to have a job.
After the liberation day tariffs were announced, 34% of the people thought they were good.
https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/national/article303399466.html
Even if you knew nothing of Project 2025 (somehow), you were warned.
He has long argued tariffs boost American manufacturing - but many in the business community, as well as Trump's political adversaries, say the costs are passed on to consumers
It’s reported as if someone still needs to figure out who pays the tariffs in the end. I’m aware that tariffs are a lever to potential move buying behavior and give incentives to move production locally. But in this instance and how it’s/ was implemented it’s clear who is the paying for it.
The tariff stuff is just a variation of the republican dream to replace income tax with a sales tax. Big tax cut for higher incomes while raising taxes for lower incomes.
Very few were on top during The Gilded Age and it has been EXTREMELY clear for quite a long time now that the "Great" in M.A.G.A. is a reference to the 1880s, not the 1950s.
And so on and so forth. In each case, vote for Trump was to harm someone you look down at and to dominate over another group.
They'd be too underpaid and exhausted to rule over their own dinner before falling asleep for the night.
When you vote, you vote for an entire platform and you especially vote for central campaign promises. You don’t get to say “I voted for a world where I’m on top” and then say “but not for the primary method the candidate promised to use!”
The rest of it was just gravy.
Trump claimed that Obama was "the founder of Isis" and claimed MANY times that he was not born in the United States. [1]
So yes, he is completely loony... and very blatantly a racist who sends dogwhistles to other racists regularly.
No, he is not friends with Obama or Biden. In fact, Trump is the first president in 150 years to refuse to attend the inauguration of his competitor after losing. [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_religion_conspiracy_theories
Let's see how many countries still likely to deal w/ US if she would be installed.
Such a kleptocracy.
If they do, that's another matter, but they definitely can.
So it matters how we’re interpreting “paying”. One way to look at it is that if the cost was passed on to the consumer, the consumer paid it. The importer simply handed over the money.
I think I'm kidding, but I'm not really sure anymore.
Indiana charges sales tax like a lot of states, but only on things sold in the state or from a company located in the state. If you ordered something from California or overseas, no sales tax was charged. The law required you to track these purchases and report it on your tax return so you can pay the required sales tax.
That said, enforcement wasn't good and I don't know a single person that actually did so. A common tax fraud for the average person, I guess.
And honestly, I think any emergency federal law would be similar: It wouldn't be for refunds for the masses, but for surveillance and extortion.
Though this is obviously a first so expect a billion lawsuits about this.
Is there a reason to believe, or evidence, that it's not a mixture of the two?
edit: I want to highlight esseph's reply has a link to evidence that last year's tarrifs were passed off 90% to consumers, which is exactly the type of info I was looking for.
That makes zero sense. You mean “by lowering the profit margin on the goods sold to the US by that specific company”.
Countries don’t pay tarrifs (bar state intervention), companies do.
But yes, it’s probably a mix of the two: raising prices and lowering profit margins.
I don't recall seeing a split between domestic consumers and domestic companies, but I'm fairly sure that consumers are paying more than the 10% that foreign entities are.
The businesses in the other countries are, you know, businesses. Even if it were Chinese companies that were paying the tariffs, that will be baked into the cost of the good.
This is literally first-day economics. No such thing as a free lunch. The cost of the item that the end user pays should reflect all costs associated with production and distribution to that end user.
I have no idea how the fuck the rumor that these tariffs will be “paid by other countries” started. If there are suspicions that the tariffs are temporary then they might be willing to eat the cost temporarily so it’s not passed onto the consumer immediately, but that’s inherently temporary and not sustainable especially if it would make it so these companies are losing money.
It's what POTUS was saying since day 1. That we've been getting ripped off and we're gonna make the other countries pay us etc etc etc.
It is, as I said in the post, obviously wrong - but that's where it comes from.
He ran on lowering grocery prices, and he was going to do this by making tariffs. So his plan boiled down to "I'm going to lower prices by raising prices".
With Trump it can be tough to tell if it's idiocy of malice but at some point I suppose it's a distinction without much of a difference.
Eh, standard business school logic these days is that if you want to maximize profits, you should charge what the market will bear, not your costs + some fixed profit.
So if you're already charging what the market will bear, there may be more wiggle room to absorb some of the hit of tariffs, so long as it still leaves you making enough profit or in a favorable position. It still comes down to what maximizes tariffs: at higher prices, demand drops, but at lower prices, your profit/item drops.
Still, yeah, from what I understand, the bulk of the tariff costs were passed along to customers.
A tariff or import tax is a duty imposed by a national government, customs territory, or supranational union on imports of goods and is paid by the importer. Exceptionally, an export tax may be levied on exports of goods or raw materials and is paid by the exporter.
The economic burden of tariffs falls on the importer, the exporter, and the consumer. [Wikipedia]
It doesn’t matter who sends the actual tariff payment, it gets priced into the cost of the product.
Trump started threatening anyone who was going to do that, because he doesn't want his face attached to price hikes.
See also: disinformation that "other countries charge us the same tariffs", which turns out to be either a plain lie, or they mean VAT (a sales tax, like we have in the US).
"But we found that Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariff rates weren’t based on tariffs that other countries charged on goods coming from the U.S. Instead, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative came up with the rates by dividing the size of a country’s trade imbalance with the U.S. in goods by how much America imports in goods from that nation. "
Products with inelastic or less elastic demand we can skip over because it's pretty self explanatory.
Products like the random cheap widgets a lot of us would buy from random Chinese sellers are often high volume low margin products with a lot of competition. Think about stuff like a USB->TTL serial board that's basically two connectors, one cloned chip, and a few supporting components on a single layer PCB. Hypothetically this is an ideal case for free market economics and these things should have already been basically as cheap as they can be at every step in the chain.
For less competitive items, particularly lower volume specialty items, a vendor may also decide that it's just not worth sacrificing profits in other markets by letting them know there's room to come down. A lot of the independent hardware designers I've been wanting to buy things from sell out every batch one way or another so they just don't care, demand exceeds supply even if demand from the US is reduced. Others have decided the volatility of the situation just isn't worth it with the risk of products getting delayed or additional charges added resulting in chargebacks and lost products and have simply stopped selling to the US altogether.
"Importers and consumers in the US bear 96 percent of the tariff burden."
It absolutely is a mix of the importer (e.d. manufacturer, producer, wholesaler, retailer, etc.) absorbing some in their margin and the consumer picking up the bill via price increases for the rest.
It's quite obviously not 96% being paid by the consumer across the board just from looking at the CPI numbers.
All this study states is the obvious: foreign producers didn't lower their cost by much in response to tariff burden. They largely charged the same rate to a buyer in the US vs. a buyer in Germany.
This isn't to defend the tariff situation - just that this study gets trotted out a whole lot in an extremely disingenuous manner. Other data that exists is better that measures direct consumer impact.
Profit margins can not always go down by 4% and in those cases goods and services would then not be available to US importers and consumers is only one example.
My assumption is that the 96% statistic does not fully encapsulate the negative costs to consumers. I have to to wonder how much higher the burden is over 96% when all second order effects are taken into account.
(I know the answer is practically ’no’, but it does still seem to me that the bureaucracy and companies that went along with this obviously illegal operation bear some culpability...)
I can see why you are mad, but it seems like the were fulfilling their legal obligation (at the time).
The good news is that having directly paid UPS and not a middleman makes it much more likely that you will receive the money back. If anybody does.
Rather, their illegal obligation (at the time)?
It was clear from the start these import tariffs are illegal. Only congress can set them. It says so in the constitution! Hand waving at some pretend emergency doesn't give you the right to ignore constitutional law.
The logistics companies should probably have fought these clearly illegal tariffs from the start. Instead they played along and collected the fees. There's probably some interesting legal precedence here to be made, should this argument hold in court.
I am certainly planning on seeking reimbursement from DHL and FedEx for the difference between the Trump rates, and the previous MFN rates. And if not, request charge backs via my credit card issuers.
You owe them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they withhold future packages to your address until you settle up.
If they’re smart, they set it up so you owe the government.
Elections have consequences.
e.g. In a different path, 1 and 2 are the same, but things then diverge.
3) To recoup some of those tariff costs, the company sells the rights to any potential future tariff refunds. They recoup a portion of what they paid immediately but hand away the right to a full refund to another party, such as Cantor Fitzgerald. The seller might use this to reduce prices for their customers, but probably won't. They'll set prices according to what the market will support.
4) US government will refund all/most of that tax back to companies, like Cantor Fitzgerald, that bought the rights to tariff refunds.
5) Seller doesn't get any extra money back, so there's no money to refund to consumers.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Cantor Fitzgerald, while just one of the companies doing this, was formerly headed by Howard Lutnick and is currently owned and operated by his sons.
Afaik, Byzantine (or reverse) and other private tax collection setups aren't illegal.
While a smaller role, this is a worse conflict of interest as the secretary of commerce is directly responsible for recommending tarriff actions to the President.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Lutnick#Secretary_of_commerce_(2025%E2%80%93present)
Or is there another source for this claim?
1. Trump enacts the tariff, despite knowing it will be struck down.
2. The tariff extracts hundreds of billions from the economy.
3. Finance firms buy the potential refund for pennies on the dollar, knowing that Trump has no plan to defend the tariff.
4. The Supreme Court strikes down the tariff, as planned.
5. The finance firms profit on the refunds.
6. We are all poorer, Trump's cronies are richer.Seller may not reduce the price as well. Thus, continues to keep the raised price due to tariffs as free profit.
And then not all tariff was absorbed by importer - some suppliers would have cut prices to compensate wholly or partly. We would never know as it is likely buried in various other discounts and contract terms not a line item that says "for tariff". Down the chain, others with margins could have done the same. That's probably why the inflation impact was less than scary scenarios painted by some economists.
I can see a situation where the courts find that a general price increase is simply they - an offer to sell at a price the buyer accepted regardless of the seller's motivation to increase pricing. However a line item that very clearly states that a charge is for duties paid might be treated differently?
Very curious to see what the legal minds have to say in this scenario. In a way it may punish companies for doing what many to most consumers feel was the "right" thing to do - add a surcharge that can easily be removed if the situation changed in the future vs. using a general increase as a new price anchor.
Seller sold forward contracts to recoup tariffs at a lower price and passed on the benefits to the consumers already. E.g. For every $1 seller paid as tariffs, seller sold a contract to someone for $0.25 saying if government ever refunds the buyer of the contract can keep it. The $0.25 already passed to consumers as benefits.
> Seller gets to keep the returned tax money as pure profit (no refund to customer)
Not to the specific customer but this benefits will now get passed to future customers as prices will be lowered than usual (lower than pre-tariff prices) due to competition.
Note that consumers who paid more were not necessarily paying the tariffs. Stores like Costco, Walmart increased prices across the board and socialized the impact of tariffs. Even if there was some mechanism to return tariff money to consumer, there is no way you could return it to someone who paid higher due to this socialized nature of price increase.
Not according to the current administration: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CODFD3j623E
According to them, China and others are paying the tariffs, so any refunds clearly have to go to China...
"Trump says China is paying for his tariffs" - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-check-trump-says-china-paying-his-tariffs-he-s-n1038751
"Trump Incorrectly Has Insisted ‘China’s Paying the Tariffs’" - https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000006661985/trump-china-tariffs.html
"Fact check: Trump and Vance keep falsely describing how tariffs work" - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/09/politics/fact-check-trump-vance-tariffs
They should’ve allowed an emergency injunction from the outset.
That wouldn't have given the opportunity for SCOTUS's financial backers to build up their profits first https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089443
If you really think this, you're a rube.
Right, and thus because the Constitution gives congress the authority to levy tariffs, and the administration was usurping that authority, they violated the Constitution.
They’re hands off so the president can clearly gather illegal taxes.
Then they change their mind. So what? The government gives the taxes back? Is that even possible?
Next step what? Trump does something else illegal and SCOTUS majority sits on their hands for a year or more?
SCOTUS majority’s deference to their guy has become absurd… the judicial branch is of no use…
The process takes time.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/29/court-strikes-down-trump-reciprocal-tariffs.html
2. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/29/trump-trade-tariffs-appeals-court-ieepa.html
Illegally taxing billions from we the people? Should be addressed immediately.
And they have done that before….
If we lived in a functional society, one might expect that tarriffs could be refunded through the normal income tax refund process hinged upon supplying recipts of tarriffs paid. I do not expect this to happen in the USA.
It's a 6-3 decision. Not close.
Here's the actual decision:
The judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in case No. 25–250 is affirmed. The judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in case No. 24–1287 is vacated, and the case is remanded with instructions to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.
So what does that mean in terms of action?
It means this decision [1] is now live. The vacated decision was a stay, and that's now dead.
So the live decision is now: We affirm the CIT’s holding that the Trafficking and Reciprocal Tariffs imposed by the Challenged Executive Orders exceed the authority delegated to the President by IEEPA’s text. We also affirm the CIT’s grant of declaratory relief that the orders are “invalid as contrary to law.”
"CIT" is the Court of International Trade. Their judgement [2], which was unanimous, is now live. It reads:
"The court holds for the foregoing reasons that IEEPA does not authorize any of the Worldwide, Retaliatory, or Trafficking Tariff Orders. The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs. The Trafficking Tariffs fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders. This conclusion entitles Plaintiffs to judgment as a matter of law; as the court further finds no genuine dispute as to any material fact, summary judgment will enter against the United States. See USCIT R. 56. The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined."
So that last line is the current state: "The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined." Immediately, it appears.
A useful question for companies owed a refund is whether they can use their credit against the United States for other debts to the United States, including taxes.
[1] https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINION.8-29-2025_2566151.pdf
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cit.17080/gov.uscourts.cit.17080.55.0.pdf
Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. ... But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.
When I came to the opinion from Jackson, J., I found it extremely compelling. He says this:
... But some of TWEA’s sections delegating this authority had lapsed, and “there [was] doubt as to the effectiveness of other sections.” Accordingly, Congress amended TWEA in 1941, adding the subsection that includes the “regulate ... importation” language on which the President relies today. The Reports explained Congress’s primary purpose for the 1941 amendment: shoring up the President’s ability to control foreign-owned property by maintaining and strengthening the “existing system of foreign property control (commonly known as freezing control).”
When Congress enacted IEEPA in 1977, limiting the circumstances under which the President could exercise his emergency authorities, it kept the “regulate ... importation” language from TWEA. The other two relevant pieces of legislative history—the Senate and House Reports that accompanied IEEPA—demonstrate that Congress’s intent regarding the scope of this statutory language remained the same. As the Senate Report explained, Congress’s sole objective for the “regulate ... importation” subsection was to grant the President the emergency authority “to control or freeze property transactions where a foreign interest is involved.” The House Report likewise described IEEPA as empowering the President to “regulate or freeze any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.”
However, then I read Kavanaugh, J. who writes the following:
In 1971, President Nixon imposed 10 percent tariffs on almost all foreign imports. He levied the tariffs under IEEPA’s predecessor statute, the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA), which similarly authorized the President to “regulate ... importation.” The Nixon tariffs were upheld in court.
When IEEPA was enacted in 1977 in the wake of the Nixon and Ford tariffs and the Algonquin decision, Congress and the public plainly would have understood that the power to “regulate ... importation” included tariffs. If Congress wanted to exclude tariffs from IEEPA, it surely would not have enacted the same broad “regulate ... importation” language that had just been used to justify major American tariffs on foreign imports.
And I also find this compelling.
To add onto this, Roberts, C. J. says: IEEPA’s grant of authority to “regulate ... importation” falls short. IEEPA contains no reference to tariffs or duties. The Government points to no statute in which Congress used the word “regulate” to authorize taxation. And until now no President has read IEEPA to confer such power.
This seems directly contradictory to Kavanaugh, J.'s dissent! Kavanaugh, J. claims that Nixon used the word “regulate” to impose tarrifs. And apparently the word isn't just in some random other statute — Nixon did so from TWEA, the predecessor of IEEPA: when Congress enacted IEEPA in 1977 it kept the “regulate ... importation” language from TWEA. (from Jackson, J.) So the point that no President has read IEEPA to confer such power seems pretty weak, when Nixon apparently did so from TWEA.
I have no conclusion from this, but IMO both Jackson, J. and Kavanaugh, J. have pretty strong points in opposing directions.
Zing! Surprisingly spicy writing for such a gravely serious body.
But unfortunately, there are other channels for them to effectively do the same thing, as discussed in oral arguments. So still not a major win for American manufacturers or consumers, I fear.
They've actually done so numerous times already and have several cases on the docket that look to be leaning against him as well. There's a reason why most serious pundits saw this ruling coming a mile away, because SCOTUS has proven to not be a puppet of the administration.
and still this current ruling was a 6-3 vote.
You can still technically bring charges against the president for things they do while in office.
Practically speaking, after that ruling, you cannot, short of hypothetical scenarios so incredibly unlikely and egregious that even the incredibly unlikely and egregious acts of this administration don't meet that bar.
Several justices are openly taking bribes
If you look a little closely you'll see their current project is to establish the "major questions doctrine," which ultimately reduces executive power by stopping Congress from giving it all to the executive. It looks pro-POTUS when it reduces the power of executive agencies, and it looks anti-POTUS when it reduces the power of executive orders. It's really about resetting what powers Congress can delegate.
And even this ruling had 3 of them objecting, claiming tariffs should stand.
"also proof" is a strawman, plain as day.
The president doing horribly fascist things with ICE like obliterating habeas corpus? Using the military to murder people in the ocean without trial? That's fine.
Screwing with the money? Not okay.
See also how the prez is allowed to screw with any congressional appointees except the federal reserve.
Actually they’re still doing it. I saw it not 2 minutes after seeing this post initially. The justifications for why they were “good, actually” has gotten increasingly vague though.
He further claimed that this ruling puts his tariffs on a more certain basis(?!) because now he'll use different statutes that have been solidly litigated already (... so why weren't you opting to use those in the first place, if it's truly better? You didn't need to wait on this ruling to do that!) and that the only effect this ruling will have is a brief drop to ~10% across-the-board tariffs while they do the paperwork to bump them back up again under these other statutes. He repeatedly characterized this is good news for his tariffs, while also complaining extensively about the court and insulting the justices in the majority.
Parliament froze it when Trump started threatening Greenland.
1. The EU would face higher tariffs on their exports to the USA. Now mostly struck down
2. The EU would not retaliate with tariffs of its own. Not really a big deal since the only US export to the EU that's worth worrying about are digital services, and those aren't subject to tariffs anyways.
3. The EU promised to buy lots of LNG and make investments in the USA to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. This was a bald-faced lie on the part of the EU negotiators. Even if the EU wanted to actually do this, they have no power or mechanism to make member states and companies within those member states buy more LNG or make more investments in the USA. This was just an empty promise.
___
So if the tariffs are struck down, we're more or less back to where we started.
The amounts named were also, ah, suspiciously similar to the amount of LNG Europe would generally buy, and the amount that would be invested in the US as a matter of course. It was kind of "well, the thing that would ordinarily happen will happen".
Sure, if there is a huge tariff on something, the user might look for an alternative, causing lower sales and, therefore, damaging the source company and economy, but for many products there isn't really a US-available substitute.
Even if you're still making the same money per unit, tarriffs mean you sell fewer units. So many less that it's an existential threat to many businesses.
As hackers here are very intelligent but also very unwise, they find great enjoyment in double-think exercises and the resentment it gives them.
Where were they before Trump?
Because US is a developed country. US should not be imposing tariffs and taxing its own citizens for zero gains.
> about punishment and such
Tariffs is like taking a battle-axe and hacking your own foot. So it is definitely a punishment for US Citizens. Who do you think was paying the exorbitant 40-50% import duties? It is not the exporting country. It is the US Citizen/Company, that was importing the product/raw material, which had to pay those duties. It is a massive tax on US Citizens apart from the tax they are already paying.
Steel tariffs are still a core part of the EU, and are aggressively used today.
The European Commission has all the information on tariffs you might be interested in at this page:
https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/customs/customs-tariff/eu-customs-tariff-taric_en
The European Council has a more general information page:
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-tariffs-explained/
The idea that the EU is high-tariff, while popular on the internet, is simply not supported by the facts.
> being the devil when the US implements them, and being double-plus-good when the European Union implements them (or China or South America).
You can also flip the argument and say that it is "double-plus-good" when USD is reserve currency but is the devil when Euro, Yen, Yuan, Rubles, Rupee et all want to be reserve currency too. Why does US admin go bananas when the topic of a BRICS currency is brought up?
Developed countries have levers. Developing countries have levers too. That's how balance has been maintained all these years since the World order was established post-WW2. Now if US wants to undo this World order (which it itself help setup) and wants to behave like a developing country, then developing countries will encroach on areas US holds dear to it: USD as reserve currency, cross-border transactions through SWIFT, imposing sanctions etc. Remember that it is not US alone that holds all the cards. Everyone else has their own cards as well.
Kavanaugh's dissent is particularly peculiar as he wrote 'refunding tariffs already collected could be a “mess” with “significant consequences for the U.S. Treasury.”'
So, the justification is that undoing an illegal act is going to be unwieldy for the govt, so presumably, as a corollary, the govt must be allowed to continue doing illegal acts. This honestly reads as a blanket support for Trump personally, than any reasoned legal argument.
In the end, the people who bought products that paid more won't get it back... and who will receive the difference is the middle-men who will just pocket the difference profiting from both ends.
The bigger issue I think is that that statute exists in the first place. "Emergency powers" that a president can grant himself just by "declaring an emergency" on any pretense with no checks or balances is a stupid idea.
That doesn't sound like "well, this would be too hard to undo" to me, and making that argument elsewhere doesn't diminish the main point.
> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C1-1-1/ALDE_00013387/
But yes it is basically eliminating parliament and rule by a monarch- making a mockery of 1776.
If giving the US President unlimited and arbitrary authority as long as they can claim it was useful for meeting a legal obligation created by Congress were the correct interpretation then we need look no further than the "Take Care" clause of the US Constitution, where the US President is given the obligation to take care that all laws are faithfully executed -- which, with this interpretation, would mean that any action would be under the purview of the US President as long as they could claim at doing that action resulted in the laws being faithfully executed.
As a counter-example, if the case was, say, "can a college use race as a factor in admissions"[0], you get 3 justices siding in favor using dogshit reasoning, just from the other side of the aisle. It's a bit ridiculous to think there aren't Democrat partisan judges on the Supreme Court.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._Harvard
Besides, conservatives including conservative justices are literally pro racial profiling and arresting people on race only.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_California_v._Bakke
When you need every vote to get legislature to pass, because you control 51% of a chamber, backbenchers on the ideological fringe of a party, (DINOs and RINOs) have a lot of power.
When you have a majority with comfortable margins, you can care a lot less about what the Sinemas and Manchins and McCains of a party think.
There are many reasons for why two-party FPTP sucks, but this phenomena is present in multi-party systems, too. And, of course, sometimes politicians end up crossing the aisle, much to the chagrin of the party whip.
"In fact, [proportional representation] robs him of personal responsibility; it makes of him a voting machine rather than a thinking and feeling person. In my view, this is by itself a sufficient argument against proportional representation. For what we need in politics are individuals who can judge on their own and who are prepared to carry personal responsibility."
[0] Unless that's power over the money (ie Federal Reserve) because that's a special and unique institution. (ie: they know giving the president the power over the money printer would be disastrous and they want to be racist and rich not racist and poor.)
The problem in this case is that Congress made such a mess of the law that the lower court judges didn't think the outcome obvious enough to grant the injunction.
The lower courts issued several such injunctions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/trump-tariffs-trade-strategy.html
"On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of International Trade dealt an early blow to that strategy. The bipartisan panel of judges, one of whom had been appointed by Mr. Trump, ruled that the law did not grant the president “unbounded authority” to impose tariffs on nearly every country, as Mr. Trump had sought. As a result, the president’s tariffs were declared illegal, and the court ordered a halt to their collection within the next 10 days."
"Just before she spoke, a federal judge in a separate case ordered another, temporary halt to many of Mr. Trump’s tariffs, ruling in favor of an educational toy company in Illinois, whose lawyers told the court it was harmed by Mr. Trump’s actions."
If multiple appeals courts thought this case was a winner for the administration, we have an even bigger problem.
(Also, no. They might, for example, disagree on immediate irreparable harm, but not the overall merits.)
> Cases going on the emergency docket are not common.
Sure. But some of them look clearly destined for it. Including this one.
Do we? The law here was a mess. Prediction markets didn't have the outcome at anything like a certainty and the relevant stocks are up on the decision, implying it wasn't already priced in -- and both of those are with the benefit of the transcripts once the case was already at the Supreme Court to feel out how the Justices were leaning, which the intermediary appellate court wouldn't have had at the time.
> Sure. But some of them look clearly destined for it.
It's not a thing anyone should be banking on in any case. And if that was actually their expectation then they could just as easily have not stayed the injunction and just let the Supreme Court do it if they were inclined to.
Predictable result, unpredictable timing.
> they could just as easily have not stayed the injunction and just let the Supreme Court do it if they were inclined to
Hindsight is, as always, 20/20.
That wouldn't explain the prediction markets thinking the administration had a double digit chance of winning. The sure things go 99:1.
> Hindsight is, as always, 20/20.
It's not a matter of knowing which docket would be used. Why stay the injunction at all if you think the Supreme Court is going to immediately reverse you?
I am not a believer in the accuracy of prediction markets.
> Why stay the injunction at all if you think the Supreme Court is going to immediately reverse you?
They didn't think that.
They thought SCOTUS would back them up faster.
Back in November: https://fortune.com/2025/11/07/trump-tariffs-supreme-court-ieepa-conservative-justices-alito-gorsuch-thomas-liberals/
"That suggests a potentially lopsided 7-2 vote against Trump, who appointed Gorsuch, Barrett and Kavanaugh during his first term."
We got 6-3.
"Though he normally aligns with Thomas and Alito, Gorsuch may be more likely to vote against Trump’s tariffs than Kavanaugh is, according to Prelogar. “It might actually be the chief, Barrett and Gorsuch who are in play,” she said."
"During the argument, several Justices expressed skepticism about the IEEPA expanding the President’s powers to encompass the ability to set tariffs."
This was the widespread conclusion back then; that the justices were clearly skeptical and that the government was struggling to figure out an effective argument.
They were the court removing the injunction, i.e. saying the tariffs had enough of a chance to be upheld.
And have fairly regularly to benefit this administration:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_docket#Second_Trump_presidency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.G.G._v._Trump was vacated within days.
"On Friday, March 14, 2025, Trump signed presidential proclamation 10903, invoking the Alien Enemies Act and asserting that Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization from Venezuela, had invaded the United States. The White House did not announce that the proclamation had been signed until the afternoon of the next day."
"Very early on Saturday, March 15, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Democracy Forward filed a class action suit in the District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of five Venezuelan men held in immigration detention… The suit was assigned to judge James Boasberg. That morning, noting the exigent circumstances, he approved a temporary restraining order for the five plaintiffs, and he ordered a 5 p.m. hearing to determine whether he would certify the class in the class action."
"On March 28, 2025, the Trump administration filed an emergency appeal with the US Supreme Court, asking it to vacate Boasberg's temporary restraining orders and to immediately allow the administration to resume deportations under the Alien Enemies Act while it considered the request to vacate. On April 7, in a per curiam decision, the court vacated Boasberg's orders…"
TL;DR: Trump signs executive order on March 14. Judge puts it on hold on March 15. Admin appeals on March 28. SCOTUS intervenes by April 7.
The emergency docket is whatever they want to treat as an emergency. The decision not to treat this as such - it's hard to imagine many clearer examples of "immediate irreprable harm" - was clearly partisan.
from the start of the "injury":
- 8 days to get to the supreme court
- 2 days arguing in court
- 5 days for the court to reach a decision
Similarly in the US, Watergate (Nixon impeachment) took only 16 days, and Bush v. Gore (contested election) took just 30 days to reach a Supreme Court judgement.
Oh look, Trump just declared a new, 10% global tariff because lol laws. Congress is busted. There are essentially zero real laws for the plutocrat class.
Are you should that would have been a good idea?
...would have been sentenced for his 34 felony convictions and probably never get reelected?
SCOTUS doesn't rule on criminal cases, sentencing for state level crimes is done at the state level and he could have still run for president in jail.
The fact that the conviction only made his polling go up should tell you what the result of jailing him would have been.
SCOTUS ruled that the President has immunity from criminal prosecution.
(And they very regularly rule on other, more mundane criminal cases. Where on earth did you get the idea they don't? https://oklahomavoice.com/2025/02/25/u-s-supreme-court-tosses-conviction-of-oklahoma-death-row-inmate-richard-glossip/ as a super random example.)
> sentencing for state level crimes is done at the state level
SCOTUS ruled that said immunity applies to state crimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States#Opinion_of_the_Court
This was... rather large news.
> “This court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land is a sentence of unconditional discharge,” Merchan said at the sentencing.
> The fact that the conviction only made his polling go up should tell you what the result of jailing him would have been.
We have precisely zero information on what a campaign by a jailed candidate who can't travel, campaign, or schmooze donors would result in.
And yet he was criminally prosecuted.
> And they very regularly rule on other, more mundane criminal cases.
Sorry, they don't convict in criminal cases.
> “This court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land is a sentence of unconditional discharge,” Merchan said at the sentencing.
You're conflating things again. He was not punished for his crimes. That doesn't mean he was not convicted. You can't be immune and convicted. If he was immune, the case would have been thrown out. He's still a felon and so, clearly, not immune.
The immunity granted by SCOTUS was far more limited in scope than news outlets would have you believe.
> We have precisely zero information on what a campaign by a jailed candidate who can't travel, campaign, or schmooze donors would result in.
This time it will be different, surely!
BEFORE THE RULING.
Come on.
Edit: Oh, maybe you’re thinking of things like the Colorado ballot eligibility case. Then if he hadn’t been electable, he would have been sentenced to serve time. Maybe, but are you arguing the Constitutional merits of Trump losing that case? Or are you okay with partisan hacks in the SC as long as they are Dems instead?
I don't think a Biden-packed SC would've found the President to be immune to criminal charges, no.
> And my understanding was he was sentenced for the felonies, to unconditional discharge, because he was days away from beginning his second term.
He was sentenced to nothing, directly because of the SCOTUS ruling. Per the judge: "the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land".
Pre-SCOTUS ruling, no such "encroachment" existed.
Again, at the actual sentencing, his ruling stated an unconditional discharge was "the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land".
"I can sentence you, but only to nothing" is functionally not being able to sentence him.
Anyway, in agreement with your larger point, the legal analyst at https://youtu.be/4tbaDI7ycrA?t=592 says he believe this SCOTUS would not have allowed a real sentence, so my nitpicking about the interaction of the 2024 decision with the lower court's sentencing doesn't matter much; SCOTUS would have let Trump go either way, and probably a Biden-packed court wouldn't have.
It's just another sign that modern Republicans aren't truly "Constitution-lovers" or textualists, that their leader is only safe because judicial activism invented immunity for him.
No, I'm thinking of the get-out-of-jail card they gave him in Trump v. US that immediately impacted NY v. Trump.
> Then if he hadn’t been electable, he would have been sentenced to serve time.
No, I think an electable person should still be able to be locked up for crimes.
> Or are you okay with partisan hacks in the SC as long as they are Dems instead?
I think the only chance of saving SCOTUS from partisan hackery is to stop surrendering.
Bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause
SCOTUS overturns state laws and convictions plenty.
State criminal case: https://oklahomavoice.com/2025/02/25/u-s-supreme-court-tosses-conviction-of-oklahoma-death-row-inmate-richard-glossip/
State laws held unconstitutional: https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/state-laws-held-unconstitutional.html
Part of the problem is it requires an amendment so you need a super majority.
Imo democrats are waiting until they have enough of a majority to tank the reputation hit court packing would bring, but then lock it to 15 after they do so.
Democrats are finally waking up to this, I think, given the recent retaliatory gerrymandering in CA and VA.
"Mom, he punched me back after I sucker-punched him!"
Nobody would have cared about Texas' gerrymandering except for Trump (stupidly) called for it - pretty much every political party has done it in their state over the years, but it's generally been gently putting their finger on the scale. But now that someone that half of the country have been convinced is literally Hitler had a part in it they feel like they can go absolutely wild with it. Everyone should be mad when gerrymandering happens, whether it helps your side or not. Representatives that feel absolutely secure in their seats are bad at their jobs, whether they're on your side or not. Going so hogwild in 'retribution' isn't virtuous.
I'm not defending what was done in Texas. Gerrymandering is gross. But I do hate how the discourse seems to be that Texas started it. They absolutely didn't. Neither party can be blamed for that, and this tit and tat back and forth is the wrong way to deal with it - so are so called "nonpartisan" committees, by the way. It's easy for a nonpartisan committee to quickly become quite partisan. What I wish would have happened is that there was a real dialogue about better fixes for the problem, but instead it became political mudslinging.
Easy part solution - put mathematical limits on the geometry. It wouldn't eliminate gerrymandering but it would certainly help.
The court is an expression of political power. Expressing political power through it is not stupid.
So you would get to pack the court for the rest of your current term before the other party gets back in and packs it the other way, and thereafter lose the courts as a check on the party in power forever because the first thing a party would do when they get into power is pack the courts.
It's a monumentally stupid idea.
It would need to come with a commitment to a package of difficult to undo (i.e. amendments) reforms. SCOTUS term limits, preventing the Senate from refusing to even consider nominees, bans on justices receiving gifts (https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-undisclosed-luxury-travel-gifts-crow), revocation of Presidential immunity, etc. You pack the court with an explicit promise to largely return to the old status quo when it's fixed.
On top of that, Clarence Thomas is the oldest person on the court and Alito is only two years younger. By the end of the next Presidential term they'll both be in their 80s. You don't have to pack the court, you just have to be in office for the term or two after this one.
I don't think it's 100% possible to stop a determined political movement in the US from doing A Holocaust, but I think it's worth at least trying to make it tough.
We can't 100% prevent anything; the Constitution could get amended to permit mass summary executions, with enough votes and public support. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying to make that tougher to accomplish.
That is what I describe as the "package" of reforms, yes.
> The thing that would help that is a constitutional amendment prohibiting court packing.
Good idea! Pack the court, and in that law, include a trigger provision that repeals it as soon as said amendment is passed.
(This has similarly been proposed in gerrymandering.)
Except then the other party just packs the court again instead of passing the amendment, whereas if you already have the votes to pass the amendment then you would just do that without packing the court.
The easiest time to reduce executive power is when your party is in the executive branch to sign the bill.
This has the exact same problem you're complaining my proposal has; it can be undone, quite easily. Probably more easily.
The best case scenario would be to somehow get both parties actually targeting the other's corruption instead of just trying to get the votes needed to be the ones sticking the money in their own pockets.
That's not what it looks like in most cases. In the first half of any term the next election can't gain you the Presidency but it could lose you the Senate. On top of that, when it isn't the deciding vote, e.g. the first of either Alito or Thomas to be replaced, a moderate is a much better hedge than the coin flip even in the second half of a term, because if you take the moderate and then lose the next election at least you have the moderate in the other party's majority, meanwhile if you win the next election then you keep the majority regardless.
Which is to say, that's only likely to happen in the next few years if it happens for the second of the two Justices in the second half of a Presidential term and the Democrats lose the subsequent Presidential election.
We form other courts by lot. Constitutionally, there just must be a Supreme Court. It doesn’t say how it should be composed.
Packing is a band-aid, and likely to be unpopular. This is a fix with a less nakedly-partisan result, so should be easier to sell.
We're already down that road; SCOTUS put us on it.
The question is now how much damage it'll do to the car to do a U-turn.
> would hopefully lead to immediate impeachment…
This describes like a hundred things in the Trump second term so far.
nope not true at all. go away troll
> Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court determined that presidential immunity from criminal prosecution presumptively extends to all of a president's "official acts" – with absolute immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate such as the pardon, command of the military, execution of laws, or control of the executive branch
Seems accurate.
Additionally, the law in this case isn’t ill defined whatsoever. Alito, Thomas, and to a lesser extent Kavanaugh are just partisan hacks. For many years I wanted to believe they had a consistent and defensible legal viewpoint, even if I thought it was misguided. However the past six years have destroyed that notion. They’re barely even trying to justify themselves in most of these rulings; and via the shadow docket frequently deny us even that barest explanation.
Very respectfully, there is no comparison between Trump and Biden in this respect. Indeed, the court adopted a new legal concept, the Major Questions Doctrine, to limit Biden continuing the Trump student loan forbearance.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine
I've read the Wikipedia page before and also reviewed it before posting, but thanks for your insightful analysis.
Care to share when it was used in the majority before the current Roberts court?
Basically the FDA tried to use its powers to regulate drugs and devices to regulate nicotine (drug) via cigarettes (device.) The conservatives on the court said, in effect, “look obviously congress didn’t intend to include cigarettes as a medical device, come on.”
Then Congress passed a specific law allowing the FDA to regulate cigarettes. This is how it should work. If congress means something that’s a stretch, they should say so specifically.
I don't have as much time to offer a similar assessment of the first two 'official' Major Questions Doctrine cases in the Biden administration, but neither was nearly as contentious as the FDA reversing its prior position.
For this reason, I see this decision as an argument against an agency changing course from an accepted previous (but not Congressionally defined) perspective. However, Chevron—at least according to interviews with lawmakers responding to the 'MQD' usage—ran counter to what the supposed understanding of how agency work would function. Again, I can find primary sources later.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/22/us/high-court-holds-fda-can-t-impose-rules-on-tobacco.html
You phrased something very poorly. Someone replied and you moved the goalposts; claiming that you were actually referring to the majority using a concept. And now you’ve moved the goalposts again.
I don’t know why you’re doing backflips to avoid admitting that you were wrong.
I wasn't wrong - the first time the concept was named in a decision was in the Biden administration. It sounds like you're not actually reading any of these, or aware of this issue?
I do agree that the idea that some agency actions should be used appeared in the case OP cited. But it's obvious that SCOTUS is using this concept much more broadly now.
This fake independence works so well, that most Hungarians lie themselves that judiciary is free.
He is all over the map, but not in a way that seems consistent or predictable.
Wasn't it JFK who said "We choose to Not do these things bc they're kinda hard actually"? /s
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh#Sexual_assault_allegations
If any justice deserves to be impeached it’s him. I can’t believe they approved him in the first place. Anita Hill sends her regards.
His patrons lavish him with gifts because they don't want him to retire, not because they want a specific ruling.
Keep doing exactly what we want you to do, or the money goes to someone who will.
Which is also a message to the rest.
You are correct compared to the $320k/year salary these empty nesters pull these things seem not that expensive. So why not just save up and buy them himself?
Yes, RED FLAG. Because apparently he likes nice things and spending money so much he can't seem to afford them himself or forgo the gifts and spare himself the scandal.
Watching from across the Atlantic, I was always fascinated by Scalia's opinions (especially his dissents). I usually vehemently disagreed with him on principle (and I do believe his opinions were principled), but I often found myself conceding to his points, from a "what is and what should be are different things" angle.
Despite the larger population and improved access, my guess is that the quality of Supreme Court Justices today is probably worse than in 1927 when it decided Buck v Bell (which says it's fine for states to have a policy where they sterilize "unfit" citizens, straight up Eugenics)
Ideally you'd want to reform this hierarchically, but supposing we can only fix that final court, you want say a committee consisting of roughly a couple of academics who've taught this stuff, a couple of real on-the-ground attorneys who've argued before this court, a couple of retired judges from this court (if it had age limits, but today it does not) or the courts below it who've done this job, and five otherwise unconnected citizens (no specific business before any court now or expected) chosen at random the way most countries pick their juries.
That committee is to deliver a list of several people best qualified to fill any vacancies on the court which arise before the next committee does the same, if such a vacancy arises you just go down the list.
How are these members of the committee chosen then? Seems like you're just moving the problem around, if choice of committee member is also subject to partisan incentives.
Eg., members of the Supreme Court of the UK are appointed by the King on the advice of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is required by law to recommend the person nominated by an independent commission.
The selection must be made on merit, in accordance with the qualification criteria of section 25 of the Act, of someone not a member of the commission, ensuring that the judges will have between them knowledge and experience of all three of the UK's distinct legal systems, having regard to any guidance given by the Lord Chancellor, and of one person only.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_Kingdom#Appointment
This seems to work fairly well and, although specific decisions are argued over as part of normal political discourse, it is generally seen as being non-partisan.
Ireland (which also has a common law legal system) has a similar setup, with the President appointing supreme court justices based on the recommendation of the government who, in turn, are advised by an independent panel. That advice is technically not legally binding, so this is in theory a less-strictly non-partisan system - but in practice it works out about the same.
Any country which struggles to appoint justices in a nonpartisan way will also struggle to assemble a panel in a nonpartisan way, I think.
Not totally immune to issues of partisanship, but at least somewhat insulated.
BTW, the original intent of the Electoral College in the United States was pretty similar to this. Electors were supposed to be independent actors exercising their independent judgement in selection of the president. It wasn't sustainable for long.
The electoral college is basically an appendix, except it was never a useful organ. It malfunctioned completely, right out of the gate.
Thomas wants to pretend he's the OG originalist, but I don't think he is anywhere near Barrett's peer.
Curious if others have different readings.
> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises
(which it does, and expounds upon)
OTOH enforcement of congressional policies is basically always the role of the executive, so the fact that the IRS exists and does things doesn't really impact delegation.
No, they do not delegate the power to lay (set) taxes to the executive, they do assign the executive the function of collecting the taxes laid by Congress.
> Congress doesn’t run the IRS themselves after all
The IRS doesn't freely set taxes, it collects the taxes set by Congress.
Now I'm generally of the opinion that Congress shouldn't be allowed to give the Executive discretion but seems no one agrees with that and Congress would rather let the Executive write "not quite laws" on their behalf.
The quote from the constitution is "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes," not for the executive to collect taxes. If they can delegate collecting to IRS in the executive branch, why not can they not delegate the "Power To lay" taxes?
Make stupid laws, win stupid prizes.
It's almost like the legal system is designed so that you can get away with murder if you can afford enough lawyers.
It's kind of like pointing at any major codebase and arguing that it's "stupid" to have millions of lines of code.
That is not how the Supreme Court works. SCOTUS is a political body. Justices do one thing: cast votes. For any reason.
If they write an opinion it is merely their post hoc justification for their vote. Otherwise they do not have to explain anything. And when they do write an opinion it does not necessarily reflect the real reason for the way they voted.
Edit: Not sure why anyone is downvoting this comment. I was a trial attorney for 40+ years. If you believe what I posted is legally inaccurate, then provide a comment. But downvoting without explaining is ... just ... I don't know ... cowardly?
Like I've said before, if you can't tell whether it's a bot or a real person voting, it doesn't matter anyway.
Might as well be a bot either way.
corrective upvote made
Ultimately no system can't stop that if there is a societal culture that tolerates the drumbeat of authoritarianism and centralization of power.
'can the President unilaterally impose tariffs on any country he wants anytime he wants'
No, he can't impost tariffs on any country. He can only impose tariffs on American companies willing to import from any country.
The fact that the administration of tariffs is so much better defined than really anything else shouldn’t be surprising because tariffs is the proximate cause of the Revolutionary war.
It’s embarrassing that the 3 justices put their partisanship ahead of the clear language of the constitution and explicitly stated intentions of the founders.
But I do think tariffs are an appropriate policy tool that should be used to protect US companies against overseas competitors that get government subsidies or other unfair advantages: Low wages, safety regulations, worker protection, environmental rules, etc.
That's aside from my position that most taxes should be at a point of trade/exchange.
I understand and even respect when someone says "I'm American so I wish to maintain the status quo where the US can undercut other nations but they can't undercut us". But if there's some rose tinted view of how the US is actually the morally aggrieved one, I just can't bear it.
The question wasn’t about American hypocrisy, it was can you imagine a situation where tariffs are potentially good.
Because Trump is so fixated on tariffs, it's centered tariffs in too many conversations on these trade topics. People have developed a kind of tunnel vision here.
There are other kinds of policy levers besides tariffs for securing supply chains, promoting domestic manufacturers, or cutting out businesses that rely on slave labor from international trade. Most of them are cheaper and more effective than tariffs.
The question is a good one, right to the heart of the claim. Without specific examples, especially ones that are not post selected (i.e., pick all tariffs at a point in time and see of that was beneficial), it is silly to claim tariffs are useful when there is ample evidence of when they cause significant harm to the economy.
So, have a case for a timepoint where the set of tariffs ended up being demonstrably beneficial for an economy?
Ultimately, this sort of protectionism tends to be expensive, and yield an inferior product.
You need such things for national security, so it's very likely "worth it" even all the way down to the American consumer level.
Look at the shipbuilding industry if you want to see what happens to that capacity without it. Due to the lack of commercial shipbuilding in the US, we can't even keep up with building for our Navy during peacetime. If a war ever were to attrit naval forces to any meaningful degree there would be zero hope of scaling up that supply chain in a relevant timeframe.
Arguments could of course be made if the auto manufacturing industry (and it's suppliers) are useful in an actual hot war, but I think without them we'd be in even heavier dire straights in that regard.
This does not mean there is zero hope of scaling up should wartime demand come into existence.
Although U.S. shipbuilding is greatly diminished today, it is not the national security concern many would lead us to believe. America’s rapid expansion of ship production during World War II serves as a reminder of what allowed America to increase its ship production historically. Orders surged from the US government and other allied nations for commercial ships. Companies converted capital and entered the ship building business to meet the orders; Henry Kaiser built a shipyard in Richmond and got it operational in 78 days.
Currently the demand for US military shipping is low, some suggest a change in organisational structure and siloing might be a path forward: The Next Great Era in U.S. Shipbuilding https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2025/february/next-great-era-us-shipbuilding
The large American manufacturers are able to keep on selling technologically outdated, overpriced vehicles in the US, because they have a captive market.
When the Chinese imposed protectionist measures in the auto industry, they were aimed at allowing Chinese domestic manufacturers time to catch up technologically, and they were scaled back as that happened. Any international car manufacturer can now set up shop in China and compete directly with the local brands on an even footing. But the US has imposed drastic protectionist measures with no end-game (worse than that: US policy is backwards-looking and intended to maintain an old technology). It's just a permanent state of affairs.
We could also do this without tariffs by simply taking money from some group and handing it to another.
It creates different incentives for the receiver.
US stumpage fees are set by the market, while Canada sets a below market fee.
Tariff adjusts cost of softwood lumbar from Canada to adjust for this.
Where is my prize?
Just because Congress is stuck doesn't mean the Executive gets to do whatever they want.
What happens when things aren't stuck, they change too much, in both frequency and magnitude. Kind of like when one person in the executive branch gets to make the rules. It's utter chaos and uncertainty on the business environment, even on the consumer environment, they have no idea what anything costs anymore. Am I paying double from a year ago because of tariffs or because it's easy for the seller to say tariffs, I'll never know. As a business, should I charge more now in anticipation for future uncertainty, has seemed simultaneously unfair and prudent. Now, should I reduce prices to go back to pre-tariff or just pocket it and call it inflation. Uncertainty is chaos, it's hard to plan for anything or make big decisions. This is why high(er) rates didn't hurt the housing market but all the Trump related uncertainty did.
The executive branch is less accountable than the legislative one. You elect only the top office, and only once every four years. With so much bundled into a single vote, it's nearly impossible to hold any specific action to account.
It doesn't work out great for the judicial branch, either. They often rule that a decision is based on the law as written, and it's up to the legislature to fix that -- while knowing full well that the legislature can't and won't. And they're not consistent about that; they'll also interpret a law to favor their ideology, and again Congress is in no position to clarify the intended interpretation.
Congress was deliberately set up to favor inaction, and not without reason. But that has reached the point where it practically doesn't even exist as a body, and its ability to serve as a check on the other branches has vanished, leading to even more abuses.
Vote the GOP out, and he'll be impeached.
That illustrates the structural problem. Congress was designed to have a high bar for action. But the bar is so high that it can't balance the other branches.
I'd argue that no system will work when so many voters are willing to overlook obvious crimes in order to remain in power. But even in less pathological circumstances, the legislative branch had too many internal checks to also participate in external ones.
In suggest: The can of worms was opened.
(i.e. subsequent us presidents, no matter which party, will use more freedom of movement in the office)
And I don’t think a multiparty system would have been able to stop the rise of Trump all else being equal equal.
So the number of parties did actually block Hitler, and Presidential powers to subvert democracy was the problem. In modern multi party democracies an inability to form a government will result in a new election, not installing a dictator.
Germany is the best argument multiple people in this thread made for how a multiparty system prevents the move towards extremism, but we are within living memory of Germany collapsing into what was arguably the worst case of extremism in history.
Of course there were special circumstances at play. Democracies don’t tend to collapse into dictatorship when things are going great. But the multiparty system did nothing to prevent it.
By the time Hindenburg agreed to dissolve the Reichstag, the SA was powerful enough compared to the German Military and he had enough popular support that he could likely have taken power by force.
If a charismatic demagogue gains enough popular support, no constitution, multi party system, or separation of powers etc can stop him.
You could maybe argue that a demagogue is less likely to rise in a multi party system, but I haven’t seen any empirical evidence to support that.
Of course there were special circumstances at play. Democracies don’t tend to collapse into dictatorship when things are going great. But the multiparty system did nothing to prevent it.
If a charismatic demagogue gains enough popular support, no constitution, multi party system, or separation of powers etc can stop him.
You could maybe argue that a demagogue is less likely to rise in a multi party system, but I haven’t seen any empirical evidence to support that.
Unless the money is fully accounted and restituted, I believe we can assume what the strategy is.
This specifically will happen when businesses request the legal refund and the "deep state" gets to decide whether they deserve a refund.
yep. For someone who claims to be draining the swamp, this sure as hell sounds like they're digging it in even deeper.
If we (countries) all are fully open, then we are fully globalised, and likely overall prices are lowest. (that is good)
But such system is fragile and very “shockable”, it entirely depends on stable shipping numbers and stable inter country agreements, both of which can be easily sabotaged (various motivations and agendas; just in 6 years: covid, Trump, Yemen Houthies)
Not implementable, but fun idea: protectionism based on distance, even within a country. E.g. supermarket must buy 10% of its apples from within 100km, 20% from within 1000km, 40% from within 10000km. (It does have numerous problems, feel free to identify them in comments)
If their laws allow their leaders to enact tariffs then sure, they're welcome to do it. Foreign relations is complicated partially because countries operate differently. In the US, Congress is supposed to levy taxes and impose tariffs. Not the president. This game of nibbling (now chomping) at the edges of that clearly outlined role needs to end.
>When for example US tech is better than the local alternative but the countries create unfair advantages to the local alternatives?
We can still enact tariffs and similar policies. We have the same mechanisms they do. I don’t understand what is so “unfair.” Trump just seems to call everything he doesn’t like “unfair.”
That is not what Trump has been doing, though. Using tariffs as retaliatory measures? As a threat because he didn’t get to "own" Greenland?
Let’s stop comparing sane political strategies to the actions of a narcissistic madman.
Yes, please! Maximally efficient is minimally robust.
We need robustness in the global economy more than some megajillionaire needs another half cent per customer in profit.
In addition, we need competition in a lot of areas where we have complete consolidation right now. The only way to get that is to give some protection to the little guys while they grow.
Industrial Policy
It has a very bad reputation in the West but in built Japan and Taiwan
In the West it meant "protect old industries" rather than grow new ones (e.g. British steel)
Exactly this.
Economies follow the same general principles of our distributed products. There’s good reasons you pay extra and lower efficiency (a bit) to have redundancy and resilience. We saw that we need more of it during COVID lockdown chaos.
Generally lowering tariffs has been a good thing overall, but there’s a point where it stops being beneficial.
Generally if you want stable and reliable local production of something, you subsidize that production or industry. You guarantee a certain amount of product will be bought/paid for even if a foreign supplier can or is willing to undercut that cost. That is why we have a large agricultural surplus in basically every western country, subsidized crops means there is money on the table for somebody to be in that industry which ensures surplus production even when other places are offering cheap food to trade.
Those can also be misapplied and corrupted, but it is still better than nothing at all or not extremely well planned and implemented tariffs which can sometimes hurt local production of other things still.
Have you considered all the advantages the US has over some of these countries? Is that not “unfair”? I would say the US’s relationship with the Internet is certainly an advantage even if we call it “fair.”
- always open arms for adoption (all govs prefer to use US software, although there have always been local alternatives). EU govs never really pushed adoption of their local software companies, they usually push for adoption of US tech
- extremely lax tax rules and enforcement towards US
- no protection of sales of local companies and startups (every successful EU tech company becomes US owned)
- lax enforcement of local laws towards US companies compared to EU ones. So many US businesses would be illegal but the companies do it anyway while EU alternatives have hard time existing (for example all consumer data gathering and sales but also companies like uber and airbnb)
All that is ok in eyes of EU politicians since there is “the silent deal”. But what do you do once one party doesn't keep their side of the bargain?
Tariffs in general have not been touched at all, those that Congress wishes to pass. This is a ruling that the President cannot use the 1970s act to be a one-person economic warfare machine to the entire world when he doesn't like something.
Trump's usage of tariffs is pretty damn dumb.
The difference is they have to go through administrative procedure, and are subject to more judicial review to ensure administrative process was followed. Even if its a fig leaf in this administrative, its a tad slower with higher judicial oversight.
What Trump wants to do is impose tariffs on a whim using emergency powers where administrative procedure laws don't apply.
So the hope here: we have at least more predictability / stability in the tariff regime. But tariffs aren't going away
When the US President commits crimes as the US President, he has absolute immunity from prosecution (otherwise, he might not be emboldened to break the law) so there is no judicial recourse, but the US Congress can still see the illegal activity and impeach and remove him from office to stop the execution of illegal activity. As our representatives within the US Government, they are responsible to us to enact our legislative outcomes. It appears they have determined that the illegal activity is what we wanted, or there would be articles of impeachment for these illegal acts.
The legislative branch can of course deliberately impose tariffs at any time for the reasons you listed.
Full stop. It really is only about whether or not the president could do it.
That's all.
Tariffs are the most expensive way to try to onshore manufacturing. The cost per "job created" is astronomical usually. They incentivize corruption and black markets.
Even regular old subsidies are usually easier, cheaper, and less problematic
“Correctly” means building consensus so capitalists can expect the new trade framework they're operating under to be reasonably stable, signaling what you’ll do well in advance, then phasing it in, ideally also with a guide to what a phase-out will look like and why or when you would begin doing that. Also, you’d usually avoid tariffing too widely at once. Focused is far more effective.
The stability is needed to get businesses to invest serious money in new buildings, machines, and training, when it won’t pay off for years.
You signal ahead of time and phase them in to minimize damage done. Gives companies time to adjust their stance before the pressure is on.
You focus them on specifically the goods you want to protect, so you don’t also raise the prices of inputs to those goods more than you have to.
You’ll notice zero of those key components were present in this scheme.
But even under the best regime, they still are not great, and probably more harmful than helpful
it's about if the executive can impose them
For countries that negotiated special treatment, they'll be stuck with a (now worse) deal?
For other countries, they'll return to the previous deal (non-tariff)?
Like with refunds, this is a mess of Trump's own making, and now we get to figure it out.
https://rollcall.com/2025/03/18/house-majority-rules-when-a-calendar-day-isnt-what-it-seems/
what's the cooldown of this ability?
Furious about the defeat, Trump said he will impose a global 10% tariff as an alternative while pressing his trade policies by other means. The new tariffs would come under a law that restricts them to 150 days.
Don't you americans have some kind of mechanism for removing a president from office when the trust is no longer there? I remember hearing a lot about it during the Clinton era in the 90s.
Both of these bodies are currently controlled by Trump's party. So .. it ain't happening. Trump's party supports his actions.
If Democrats win the house in the upcoming (November) elections, it is likely that they can pass an impeachment indictment for a number of causes. It is unlikely that the Senate finds the 2/3rds necessary to remove him from office, though.
Trump was impeached by the House twice in his first term (impeachment is rare in US history - it has happened 4 times and 2 of those are Trump); the Senate declined to remove him from office both times. Even after the January 6th riot, with MAGA literally storming through their offices threatening to hang their leader, only 7 Republican Senators voted to impeach. 43 Republicans voted No. With one of them, Susan Collins, famously saying she thought Trump had "learned his lesson." It's fair to say he did learn a lesson; but not the one Collins imagined.
Is it not the other way around? The party controls Trump?
As the sun downing continues the direction of influence may start flowing the other way.
At this point my guess is those physically closest to Trump have the most power. They control whom he speaks to last before opening his mouth.
...Right?
The food industries were seeing record profits at the same time of massive inflation, they were maximizing prices to see how much they could grow their wealth, while trying to minimize costs, decreasing quality and just absolutely abhorrent behavior all around.
I'm all for capitalism, but I strongly feel that the limitations granted to corporations by govt should come as part of a social contract that has largely been ignored completely. We should curtail a lot of the limitations granted and actually hold executives responsible for their decisions. We should also establish that "shareholder value" is not the only focus that companies should have. A corporation is not a person, that a corporation exists is fine, that they've been shielded from responsibility altogether in that limited liability now means you can literally destroy towns and executives and boards face no consequences is deplorable.
Governments should be limited, by extension the shields govt grants to corporations should similarly be limited. When the US constitution was written most corporations were formed around civil projects, then disbanded. Most companies were sole proprietorships or small partnerships. I think we need to get closer back to these types of arrangements.
That said, I'm still a proponent of having the bulk of the federal budget based on tariffs and excise taxes. I don't like income and property taxes in general. I'd be less opposed to income taxes if there was truly a way to fairly leverage them, there simply isn't. VAT is at least more fair IMO. I also wouldn't mind a tax as part of leveraged asset loans (including cars/homes) with maybe a single exclusion for a primary residence and vehicle under a given price.
It would fix most of my country economy that needs to pay food in USD
He’ll take credit for it too.
“This was the plan all along.”
The power to impose tariffs rests with the legislator, not the executive. Of course our congress is effectively useless - we can thank decades of Mitch McConnell's (and others) "not giving the other side anything" thinking for that.
This is something FDR did heavily in the 1930s to expand his own power and bully congress into passing the New Deal. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/purge-1938 He also used legally questionable executive orders like crazy.
Attacking FDR, someone who stood up against business interests to defend labor, kinda exposes the game here.
He borrowed just enough of the stuff socialists were promising, and bolted it onto the government to mollify the working class who'd been absolutely ravaged by oligarchs for the preceding decades. You only have to look at the rest of the world to see how things might've turned out without FDR's very reasonable interventions.
Congressional Republicans confirmed every single one of his cabinet members.
So perhaps he demands it, but does not give congress a pass. At all. They chose to let him.
The state of exception is the true test of sovereignty, and powers that crave sovereignty therefore seek out states of exception. The PATRIOT act created new institutions and authorities like the TSA. Just a few years ago local health departments were making business-shuttering decisions that ruined life for a lot of people over the common cold. Ukrainian war funding provides the EU with opportunities for exports and new experiments in joint funding (Eurobonds). Emergencies and exceptions are how power grows, so everything can become an emergency if you look at it in the right way.
The description of some of those emergencies is comedic: "Declared a bank holiday from March 6 through March 9, 1933, using the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 as a legal basis."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_in_the_United_States
It was to stave off a bank run at the beginning of the great depression, and it was only done as a temporary measure so that Congress had time to write the long term legislation which they did 4 days later on March 9th.
...raise taxes
Also I’m sure that companies will pass the savings on to consumers in the form of lower prices. Right?
…right?
It seriously feels like a scheme to ensure cheap labor.
Tariffs are totally a reasonable tool for protecting national security interests or leveling the playing field for the American worker. Unfortunately none of that was done in a coherent or legible way.
With all the global fallout and nothing to show for it I'm really not sure I could have come up with a better way to sabotage the United States.
I could imagine people being on board with it if they could get a tariff funded subsidy for things made in America. If the average person got an explicit discount on their Ford because some rich person paid extra taxes on their Audi, then tariffs wouldn't seem so bad. I just think the actual goal is to make them political suicide for decades.
and, i'll bet, just the first of many
https://www.cato.org/commentary/trump-has-many-options-supreme-court-strikes-down-tariffs
A step in the right direction, but there's a lot of progress yet to be made if we want to restrain the executive.
Congress is already completely in Trump's pocket. By doing it through Congress, Trump loses most of his bribery and bullying opportunities.
By the neo-royalist [1]interpretation of the current administrations policies, many countries have either decided to pay for the royalty fee to get tariff exemption in a way aristocats in pre-Westphalian Europe dealed with each other. While other stuck with the idea that it's stil the country you do deal with, not royals/aristocats.
All those countries (like the Swiss giving Trump golden rolexes for appeasement) that bent their knee: are they now gonna roll it back or are they thinking that the US system is so compromised, current administration will just find another way to play the neo-royalist game, creating new policies similar to the tariff so that each side lose, and then carve out an exemption for "the buddies" of the administration (and if you don't pay the tithe, you shall lose)
i don't
But no. The court pretty much says the president decides what's an emergency, leading us to having 51 active emergencies [0], with one starting back in 1979 (in response to the Iran hostage crisis) and with Trump leading the pack with 11 of such declarations. Congress didn't say "the president can just decide and that's it", but that's what's happening because of the SC's deferential posture.
Deferring so much to the political sphere (which is the reason behind this posture) is leading to a much less stable and more "swing-y" country.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_in_the_United_States
- why no one in America is being charged
- why the files were so heavily redacted in violation of congress
- why the redactions were tailored to protect the names of some powerful people and not victims
Trump started talking about aliens yesterday. If the tariffs and aliens can't get people distracted from the Epstein filed then we'll be bombing Iran in 2 weeks...
> Given that the phrase “adjust the imports”—again, in a statutory provision that did not use specific words such as “tariff ” or “duty”—was unanimously held by this Court in 1976 to include tariffs, and given that President Nixon had similarly relied on his statutory authority to “regulate . . . importation” to impose 10 percent tariffs on virtually all imports from all countries, could a rational citizen or Member of Congress in 1977 have understood “regulate . . . importation” in IEEPA not to encompass tariffs? I think not. Any citizens or Members of Congress in 1977 who somehow thought that the “regulate . . . importation” language in IEEPA excluded tariffs would have had their heads in the sand.
The roll-call vote for HB7738 (IEEPA) was not recorded [2], so we seemly can't confirm today how any sitting members voted at the time. But there are two members of Congress remaining today who were present for the original vote: Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ed Markey (D-Mass). They clearly both agree with the Court, while having different opinions on the tariffs themselves.
Statement by Grassley [3]:
> I’m one of the only sitting members of Congress who was in office during IEEPA’s passage. Since then, I’ve made clear Congress needs to reassert its constitutional role over commerce, which is why I introduced prospective legislation that would give Congress a say when tariffs are levied in the future. ... I appreciate the work [President Trump] and his administration are doing to restore fair, reciprocal trade agreements. I urge the Trump administration to keep negotiating, while also working with Congress to secure longer-term enforcement measures.
Statement by Markey after previous decision in August [4]:
> Today’s ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit makes it clear that President Trump’s chaotic tariff policy is illegal. ... Today’s ruling is an important step in ending the economic whiplash caused by Trump’s abusive tariff authority.
N=2 is scant evidence, but it seems like both sides of the aisle "had their head in the sand", or Justice Kavanaugh's historical interpretation is a bit off.
[1] p.127: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf
[2] g. 22478: https://www.congress.gov/95/crecb/1977/07/12/GPO-CRECB-1977-pt18-3-2.pdf
The dissenters were Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh, with Kavanaugh authoring the principal dissent.[1][2][3]
Citations: [1] Supreme Court strikes down tariffs - SCOTUSblog https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-down-tariffs/ [2] Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (Tariffs) - SCOTUSblog https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/learning-resources-inc-v-trump/ [3] Northwestern experts on SCOTUS decision in tariff case https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2026/02/northwestern-experts-on-scotus-decision-in-tariff-case?fj=1 [4] Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump: An Empirical Breakdown of the Court’s IEEPA Tariff Decision https://legalytics.substack.com/p/learning-resources-inc-v-trump-an [5] Live updates: Trump vows new tariffs after 'deeply disappointing' Supreme Court ruling https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/live-blog/-trump-tariffs-ruling-supreme-court-live-updates-rcna252655 [6] Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump | 607 U.S. - Justia Supreme Court https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/607/24-1287/ [7] [PDF] 24-1287 Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (02/20/2026) - Foxnews https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2026/02/supreme-court-opinion-trump-tariffs.pdf [8] Why a Republican Supreme Court struck down Trump's tariffs - Vox https://www.vox.com/politics/479919/supreme-court-trump-tariffs-learning-resources [9] Learning Resources v. Trump - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_Resources_v._Trump [10] The Supreme Court has struck down Trump administration's use of ... https://www.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/1r9y4z8/the_supreme_court_has_struck_down_trump/ [11] Supreme Court Strikes Down Use of Emergency Powers for Trump's ... https://www.agweb.com/news/supreme-court-strikes-down-use-emergency-powers-trumps-tariffs [12] Supreme Court strikes down Trump's tariffs - NPR https://www.npr.org/2026/02/20/nx-s1-5672383/supreme-court-tariffs [13] Supreme Court Invalidates Executive Tariffs Under IEEPA https://www.currentfederaltaxdevelopments.com/blog/2026/2/20/supreme-court-invalidates-executive-tariffs-under-ieepa-a-technical-analysis-of-learning-resources-inc-v-trump [14] Live updates: Trump pans tariffs ruling, warns he can impose ... https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5746060-live-updates-trump-supreme-court-governors/ [15] Supreme Court strikes down most of Trump's tariffs in a major blow ... https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-strikes-trumps-tariffs-major-blow-president-rcna244827
The new 10% will be effect I've from tuesday and he expects all deals he made with several countries to just continue without protest.
The Congress could solve this in a week. Impeachment and removal from office.
A populace with a functioning representative democracy deserves its leaders.
Promises were made, and as far as the deplorables are concerned, promises were kept. They continue to approve of his actions wholeheartedly.
There is probably no way back for us, unfortunately. Please keep in mind than a healthy majority of American voters either voted against Trump or chose to sit out the election. We are largely powerless, though, due to system-level weaknesses that have been present since the nation's founding but couldn't effectively be exploited until recently.
Let is a heavily loaded term here. The most an individual can reasonably do is cast their single vote in an election year. I could attempt to bring a lawsuit against a politician, but it would almost certainly be thrown out due to a lack of standing. Activism is certainly an option, but that is really just an effort to convince others to cast their single vote differently. Outside of those options, one would have to break some laws.
To put it another way, I have not participated in a federal election where I was excited about my options, ever. I have always been triage voting in federal elections ever since I was old enough to vote.
So yes, we do vote for our clowns, but only because we're not given any decent options to vote for.
Fortunately, the US giving a lot of power to states means that our more local elections are a lot more interesting to participate in and at least in my state, I have several decent options to vote in people who will make a real difference.
> SEC. 122. BALANCE-OF-PAYMENTS AUTHORITY.
> (a) Whenever fundamental international payments problems
> require special import measures to restrict imports—
> (1) to deal with large and serious United States balanceof-payments deficits,
> (2) to prevent an imminent and significant depreciation of
> the dollar in foreign exchange markets, or
> (3) to cooperate with other countries in correcting an international balance-> of-payments disequilibrium,
> the President shall proclaim, for a period not exceeding 150 days
> (unless such period is extended by Act of Congress)—
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-10384/pdf/COMPS-10384.pdf
search for "SEC. 122." to find it quickly.
None of these seem to apply and I am not a lawyer, but if they do not apply then, why would the president have the power of taxation when that is given to the legislative branch not executive branch.
Not clear to me why these new tariffs would be on better footing than the last and the last never seemed to be on good footing.
Trump is taking an law that says "You can do X if Y" and saying "I can do X"
150 days thing is just moving the goal posts.
> Trump is taking an law that says "You can do X if Y" and saying "I can do X"
I think it's more like going 70mph downtown because there's a sign saying "if onn an interstate you can do 70mph" -- the "if on an interstate" is pretty important there!
I am curious, what do you see as the benefit of this style of taxation?
https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-down-tariffs/
Allowing Trump to trash the US economy is one thing, but even a Republican congress may be a little unwilling to actively _do it themselves_. Trump won't last forever, and they need to get re-elected.
Economy does well? Take credit for shepherding the economy past a hostile court.
Remember, in his narcissistic mind, Trump can never fail he can only be failed.
Instead he's now insisting he'll restart the tariffs under some even more flimsy interpretation of executive power.
[1] https://www.tradecomplianceresourcehub.com/2026/02/20/trump-2-0-tariff-tracker/
What exactly are you saying?
For example, if your boss is very rude and disparaging, but then he gets fired, you would say, sarcastically, "It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy", implying there's some element of karma at work.
By analogy, GP is saying these tarrifs were an undeserving act of vengeance. I assume "undeserved" in the sense that it wasn't deserved by those on the receiving end.
You say the same thing when a complete moron fails to win the same prize.
Equal fairness to all ;)
Section 122: Implemented (effective Feb. 24, 2026) [1]
Amusingly, the new 10% tariff doesn't apply until Feb 24th, so you have a few days to avoid it. All this expires July 24th, because the law being invoked here has a time limit unless Congress extends it.
Like many similar US laws it probably has a time limit expressed in lapsed Congressional days.
Heavy emphasis on "Congressional days".
Catch me up here, has the Congressional "clock" (count of lapsed days) been restarted since the current admin shut it down as almost the first order of business for 2025?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43358343
Each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622) with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the President on February 1, 2025.
This other authority is different: it's limited within the law to 150 days and then has to be extended by Congress. So the same kind of strategy of just avoiding a vote doesn't work here. They could monkey with the deadline, but can't do so any more easily than just actually extending the tariff for real. Of course just like today you can have Trump jump to some new authority on day 151 instead.
Of the many articles on this matter written in the last 24 hours, a few that I read sketched out other sections of old never used law that Trump might land on after the current "new" 10% tariff expires its 150 day life.
While I'm not a fan .. credit to the Project 2025 people behind Trump that really put the effort into gaming out the overthrow of the established post war US order .. seemingly no loophole left unexplored.
Isn't that one also limited to targetted tariffs? He's applied it worldwide...
All in all, this seems like a major major blow to Trump. I'm more impressed that United State's laws are capable of gate keeping the president like this and despite people like Dalio dooming it up, it makes me more confident in America ironically.
No adults in the room to stop him.
The judicial has no say on this. The judicial branch is more and more pushing political agenda when it’s not their role. Tariffs were always part of the executive branch, it’s by itself an executive action in the spirit of the law. Still if the US decides that it should not be part of the executive branch anymore, it is not to the judicial branch to decide! But it is up to the legislative branch.
This is what I am saying. Plus the fact that the US is stripping more and more power from a branch called the "executive branch" making it less and less what it is supposed to do.
Also the power of the purse has always been with congress, the constitution is very clear on that.
Finally the notion that the US is stripping power from the executive is honestly farcical. The exact opposite has been happening for decades now.
If you are a US voter then the reason for the current political situation is becoming very clear to me right now.
For DOJ ya I meant the judicial branch.
Perhaps this is an overdue wakeup call, and a freak out is in order regarding this reality but unconstitutional tariffs alone were never going to solve this problem.
If only you knew how bad things really are.
You can be for tariffs all you want, I'm not here to argue their efficacy. But you absolutely cannot with any intellectual honesty still be on the fence about whether he abused his power given this ruling.
It is not "flip flopping policy" to break the bounds of your Constitutional power and be shut down by one of the branches meant to check you.
If Trump wanted a durable trade policy, work with the legislative majority to pass a real policy with deliberation - just like they should have done with immigration.
So who else could be to blame for the flip-flopping?
The executive is supposed to uphold laws made by Congress, not throw spaghetti at the Supreme Court’s wall and see if it sticks.
> I'm for the tarrifs
What makes you think they are good?