Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 568 posts

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#351

Post by worik »

rayiner wrote: post #255
wlesieutre wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the law list specific conditions in which the president can apply the law if the president can apply it for any reason he wants? Surely there's a mechanism through the courts for someone to challenge illegal tariffs on their imports if the president declares "There's a 50% tariff on everything because I woke up in a bad mood today and it's unfair of other countries to be doing that."

> Surely there's a mechanism through the courts for someone to challenge illegal tariffs What you're describing is the Marbury tail wagging the Article II dog. The focus of the Constitution is allocation of power . The focus isn't creating a system where courts micromanage how the other two branches of government exercise that power. Marbury therefore goes to great lengths to draw lines between an executive's "minist…

> Here, the President did make a finding

That is very interesting. It assumes that the president is truthful

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#352

Post by [deleted] »

growlNark wrote: post #220
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> entire premise of the private market is competition, or else it's just a blight on humanity. So the idea of a trade court seems a little silly at best You think private markets can exist without laws (and by corollary, venues in which to adjudicate them)?

Yes, they are the default. What do you think ancaps think about all day? It ain't fucking democracy.

[deleted]

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#353

Post by usefulcat »

erulabs wrote: post #306
forgotoldacc wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people really seem to think this is the end of everything. But there are two options here. One is that some other irrelevant and obscure law from 200 years ago is dug up and used to justify the tariffs and another long court battle begins. The other is that the ruling is simply ignored, just like many others, and half the country will cry that the courts are being ignored and justice will rain down soon, and…

Laws are laws and their age has no bearing nor does it make them irrelevant. The constitution is “from 200 years ago” too.

In theory, sure. In practice, it's only true when there is broad based respect for the law as a whole. I'm really not seeing evidence of that from this administration or its supporters. To put it very mildly.

For example, according to the highest law in the land, the Constitution, he can't be elected again. Do you really believe that's going to prevent him from running, much less remaining in office should he win, having previously tried to overturn a legitimate election?

The real question is, when he ignores the courts, what then? Normally that would be when Congress steps in. But even if Republicans didn't have a majority, impeachment would still require support from a decent number of them. Based on their behavior to date, how likely is that?

Strict partisanship appears to be a serious failure mode for this particular form of government. As Congress has become more partisan, they've gotten less and less done, both legislatively and in terms of serving as a check on the executive branch.

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#354

Post by hyperadvanced »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #332
hyperadvanced wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the reference here is that there are fairly protective trade policies in China, and they are similarly mercurial about what passes. See cases of IP theft, if you’re partial to IP as a concept (I’m not). They’re certainly not a laissez-faire paradise. Granted, merely terking our jerbs isn’t a good argument for slapping massive tariffs on them. There’s probably a different thread on this but, TACO and the dam…

You'd think, by this point, they'd realize if you don't want your IP stolen, don't send it to China. At least make them work for it, like everyone else.

It’s hard right? If you want market access, you fork over the designs so they can verify it’s not American spyware, then boom it’s stolen (message to be read by an AI made to sound exactly like a certain USA president)

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#355

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Aloisius wrote: post #349
blobbers wrote: post #326

Why is this country insisting on this ridiculous infighting? Why do you have a democracy if your bureaucracy is set up to resist the person the people elected? Didn't this exact sort of thing happen when a democrat was elected, the republicans basically stonewalled all progress? Now the dem bureaucracy is stonewalling the republicans? Is this how checks and balances is supposed to work? Am I being naive in thinking i…

Yes, it has always been like this. We elect Presidents to faithfully execute the law, not Dictators to ignore it. The courts have always ruled against executive for disobeying the law. Preventing any one branch from amassing too much power is the whole reason the system of checks and balances exists. The system, while sometimes aggravatingly slow to change, has allowed us as a country to continually operate under the…

Executive orders are shot down by courts all the time. And it always starts in lower courts, with appeals going up to higher courts (both sides can appeal!). This is true for any president, Democrat or Republican, the judicial system is a check on executive power, with the understanding that the executive gets to nominate judges and congress gets to approve them.

It is really weird how many people don't get this, and think Trump is getting special treatment! And an executive order with lofty legal reasoning will always be challenged. And judges on either side...they actually have some idealistic notion that law matters, not who nominated, so the 3 judges who unanimously decided against trump: one was a Trump appointee, one was an Obama appointee, and one was a Bush appointee. In an idea system, judges try to be impartial to law (they don't have to, and their only check is that they can be impeached by congress).

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#356

Post by roenxi »

growlNark wrote: post #148
rayiner wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn’t the point of our government structure to stop any one person from acting like a king. That isn’t the “point” of our government structure. The constitution deliberately mixes an electorally accountable deliberative body (Congress), an electorally accountable unitary executive (the President), and a judiciary insulated from elections. As explained in Federalist 70, the executive is unitary and “vigorous,” by de…

> What the constitution seeks to avoid is consolidation of all the government’s powers under a single entity Yes, wealthy inter-state individuals would be so much better. Right?

Exactly so. It is quite difficult to come up with a wealthy non-state actor who's wreaked the same sort of havoc as a Hitler or Mao. Let alone even relatively minor players on the international stage who're responsible for billions to trillions in actual damages to people's living standards.

The typical complaint against billionaires is stuff like their yacht is too big or people don't like one policy they took advantage of. It isn't really to the same scale. At their worst, wealthy non-state actors lobby powerful figures in government to act.

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#357

Post by growlNark »

growlNark wrote: post #344
growlNark wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they are the default. What do you think ancaps think about all day? It ain't fucking democracy.

Well, let me amend this. An ancap economy is certainly possible. Whether it looks anything like (neo)keynsian macro markets is another story—but economies are always possible. But yes, in general, stable societies should be extremely aggressive at paring down the wealth of successful people, or they will be subsumed by them. And let me re-emphasize, private markets are generally a terrible thing for most people who a…

Look you can take trade court seriously, but to me it will always be a sign of the inherent incompetence of states at approximating models of economies that represent how humans actually want to trade. So fuckem; what good do they really do anyone?

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#358

Post by growlNark »

roenxi wrote: post #356
growlNark wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the constitution seeks to avoid is consolidation of all the government’s powers under a single entity Yes, wealthy inter-state individuals would be so much better. Right?

Exactly so. It is quite difficult to come up with a wealthy non-state actor who's wreaked the same sort of havoc as a Hitler or Mao. Let alone even relatively minor players on the international stage who're responsible for billions to trillions in actual damages to people's living standards. The typical complaint against billionaires is stuff like their yacht is too big or people don't like one policy they took advan…

[flagged]

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#359

Post by [deleted] »

lovich wrote: post #178
curt15 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (other than being almost 100 years old) Age alone shouldn't disqualify a law. The law above all other laws, aka the Constitution, is more than 200 years old.

The Constitution as it stood 200 years ago is not the Constitution as it stands today. Comparing an unmodified law based on age is not the same as comparing a mutable documents original age

[deleted]

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#360

Post by Aloisius »

lovich wrote: post #178
curt15 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (other than being almost 100 years old) Age alone shouldn't disqualify a law. The law above all other laws, aka the Constitution, is more than 200 years old.

The Constitution as it stood 200 years ago is not the Constitution as it stands today. Comparing an unmodified law based on age is not the same as comparing a mutable documents original age

Unmodified law? The law in question has been amended many, many, many times in the last 100 years.

For goodness sake, the original law set specific tariffs for 20,000 different goods. Little of the original law still exists unmodified.

Post reply on HN