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US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

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Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#501

Post by hn_acker »

joshkel wrote: post #225
klipt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better hope this bill that house republicans have passed dies in the senate, since in effect it lets Trump override the courts: https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-hidden-provision-in-t...

I'm not sure how much difference that bill's clause makes in practice. As I understand it (courtesy of the "Advisory Opinions" legal podcast, but any misunderstandings are my own), the problem is that, if the executive branch is going to ignore the courts, then they're going to ignore the courts. A court can recommend prosecution for contempt, but prosecutors are part of the executive branch. A court could try and ap…

> And, since the administration at times seems to want a fig leaf of legality, maybe the bill would make a difference after all by giving them more coverage.

Justice Alito and Justice Thomas in particular latch on to any fig leaf of legality to excuse the administration's out-of-court admissions of intent to break the law [1]:

> If courts pay more attention to out-of-court presidential and Administration statements, that will be another example of how the “presumption of regularity”—”the courts’ baseline assumption that government officials act lawfully and in good faith,” as Alan Rozenshtein puts it—is in serious jeopardy. Justice Alito’s dissent to the A.A.R.P. order, in which Justice Thomas joined, shows that those two justices remain content to rely on the Government’s representation’s in court—and vexed that their colleagues apparently feel differently.

> I'm not sure how much difference that bill's clause makes in practice.

There are at least three massive problems aside from undermining the role of courts in enforcing their interpretations of the law.

- The clause applies to both government-associated defendants and non-governmental defendants. [2]

- Federal Rule 65(c) does not apply to final injunctions, but the wording of the clause might apply to final injunctions. [2]

- The clause applies retroactively.

[1] https://blog.dividedargument.com/p/in-the-trump-20-era-the-c...

[2] https://blog.dividedargument.com/p/the-house-judiciary-commi...

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#502

Post by insane_dreamer »

mrtksn wrote: post #466
siliconc0w wrote: post #180

I wonder if this means businesses can request the courts order the government to repay their unconstitutionally levied duties - especially when it meant it basically destroyed their ability to do business.

Apparently US collected a record amount of tariffs in April, about $16B. So someone definitely paid that. Maybe for most consumer goods the companies ate that and took a hit until they figure out how to price things because TACO.

Is that a verified figure? Or are they like the DOGE "savings" figures?

It's sad that it's come to the point of not being able to trust official government figures. That used to be a given, unlike some other countries (China being one).

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#503

Post by insane_dreamer »

adrianmonk wrote: post #42

So, since they were apparently never legal in the first place, will there be refunds for all the tariffs already paid? That could really help out small businesses that were hit with huge tariff bills. Common sense would say yes, but not sure how the law actually works. I also wonder about the effects on the budget bill currently being worked on by Congress. Were they factoring in tariff revenue that now won't exist?…

If this ruling is upheld (will probably be fought all the way to SCOTUS), then I would imagine that US businesses who paid the tariffs indirectly (i.e., the seller tacked it onto the price), will sue the US Gov to get that money back.

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#504

Post by ben_w »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #135
msie wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if some US marshals put Trump in jail for ignoring the court but we know nothing will come of it.

> some US marshals put Trump in jail for ignoring the court In chess you never capture the king. Similarly, the way to fight this is have arrested the lower rung players e.g. the tax collectors. (And ICE agents conducting illegal arrests.)

Given how often American "kings" leave the metaphorical playing board, this isn't chess: it is non-euclidian, real-time, penultima, on a continuous board, with hundreds of players and billions of pieces (and any given piece is under the control of potentially multiple players), and where the secret rules for every piece include self-playing behaviours and weird emergent dynamics.

And in penultima, sometimes the king isn't the real target, and attempting to capturing it destroys random other pieces instead.

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#506

Post by tptacek »

SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #490
tptacek wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Further, Congress can't delegate tariff power to the President absolutely; any such delegation would be unconstitutional.

Isn’t it actually more accurate to say that they _can_ delegate power and while unconstitutional, it remains in effect until challenged by the judicial branch?

You can make that argument about literally anything, so it's not especially meaningful or worth noodling on in a thread.

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#507

Post by insane_dreamer »

duxup wrote: post #9

The GOP controls the house and senate. Congress controls tariffs. If they followed the law congress could make the thing happen. But I don't think think independent thinking is allowed in the GOP, and it might force their hand if they had to actually put it to a vote ...

Most GOP senators don't want the tariffs. It's just they're too scared of retaliation hurting their re-election chances (exhibit A: Cheney) if they defy Trump. It's easier to not challenge an Executive Order, which also puts the blame on Trump if people are unhappy, which they are, than it is to vote on the Tariffs at which point the Senate/House is responsible for the fiasco.

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#508

Post by hn_acker »

MBCook wrote: post #80
whoisthemachine wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A plurality of Americans voted for this government, for better or worse. The courts are one of the primary avenues for the minority to express their will, but they move slowly, although slightly faster than congress.

That assumes a fair vote, which is arguable. Between Gerrymandering, purging voter roles, suits over who is allowed on the ballot, ID checks and associated issues I’m not sure it’s so clear cut. He won under the conditions the election was performed under. That’s clear. I’m not sure I could call those fair after years of attacks on people’s voting rights.

> I’m not sure I could call those fair after years of attacks on people’s voting rights.

Tangent: A new attack on voting rights just succeeded in the Eighth Circuit. An individual citizen or non-governmental group can no longer sue a state government for racial discrimination under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

> Until a few years ago, everyone agreed that private citizens and groups could bring Section 2 lawsuits.

...

> The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of voters in Section 2 cases numerous times, including just two years ago in Allen v. Milligan.

...

> However, some opponents of the Voting Rights Act have promoted a fringe notion that because Section 2 doesn’t say the words “private right of action” — the legal term for the ability of impacted individuals or groups to sue — such lawsuits cannot be filed. This is part of a pattern of attacking the procedures underlying Voting Rights Act litigation to make it virtually impossible to enforce the law’s important protections in court.

...

> The Department of Justice can still bring Section 2 cases, but that alone is not enough to prevent voting discrimination. Individuals and groups have brought nearly 93 percent of Section 2 cases over the last 40 years. Justice Department attorneys have explained that the department relies on citizen-led lawsuits because it doesn’t have the resources to handle all these cases on its own even if it wanted to.

> That desire is not present in the current administration’s Justice Department, which shed 70 percent of the Civil Rights Division staff and has already been ordered to dismiss almost all of its Section 2 cases.

[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/appe...

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#509

Post by comex »

rayiner wrote: post #402
heylook wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. This case is a specific example of exactly the opposite. Read the opinion. It's literally a panel of federal court judges, one a Trump appointee, going through each justification and calling bullshit on each one.

Lower courts get decisions wrong all the time.

More to the point, there’s a difference between the two statues. One of the points raised by the court in the current case is that IEEPA does not have that kind of “whenever the President shall find” language:

> That may be true of the NEA, whose Court Nos. 25-00066 & 25-00077 Page 41 operation requires only that the President “specifically declare[] a national emergency.” 50 U.S.C. § 1621(b); see also Yoshida II, 526 F.2d at 581 n.32. 13 But IEEPA requires more than just the fact of a presidential finding or declaration: “The authorities granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose.” 50 U.S.C. § 1701(b) (emphasis added). This language, importantly, does not commit the question of whether IEEPA authority “deal[s] with an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the President’s judgment. It does not grant IEEPA authority to the President simply when he “finds” or “determines” that an unusual and extraordinary threat exists.

Re: US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal

#510

Post by cwillu »

jmyeet wrote: post #242
wredcoll wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most notably, only Congress can declare war, which has been a real sticking point in the last century and why, for example, the Korean War wasn't technically a war (it was a "police action") and why the Vietnam War wasn't either. I keep seeing this brought up as some kind of "gotcha" point, but those wars involved conscription and billions of dollars of additonal military funding, all of which was presumably approv…

It's not a "gotcha". It's just objective fact. There were no war resolutions for Korea and Vietnam. If anything it demonstrates a more recent trend where the executive oversteps its authority to engage in military action and to bypass Congress. As for conscription, this was enabled by Congress in WW2 by "selective service" [1]. The administration maintains the authority to draft male citizens of a certain age into th…

The gotcha is that, given the thing is described as a war by more or less everyone in the world, clearly the power to declare a “war” has little to do with the power to start or join wars.
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