131–140 of 1001 posts
what happens to those billions of dollars already collected?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t see how constitutional changes would help. The constitution already creates separation of powers, limits on executive authority, and procedures for removing an unfit president or one who commits serious crimes. But these only matter to the extent that majorities of elected and appointed officials care, and today’s ruling notwithstanding, there’s no political will to enforce any of them. The plurality of Ameri…
> The majority of American voters in 2024 asked for this 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 contribution…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Constitutional changes Y'all have proven how worthless that piece of paper is.
What piece of paper is worth more to you?
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.
The global damage has been done. It took too long and it looks like it will only be partially reversed. Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.
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.
Howard Lutnick and his sons are surely happy about this. It’s almost like Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce , knew this would happen. His sons, at their firm Cantor Fitzgerald, have been offering a tariff refund product wherein they pay companies who are struggling with paying tariffs 20-30% of a potential refund, and if (as they did today) they get struck down, they pocket the 100% refund. https://www.financ…
I've wondered from the beginning if the whole tariff thing wasn't basically an insider operation for import/export insiders to profit off of rate arbitrage, if not outright black market operations. 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 so…
The global damage has been done. It took too long and it looks like it will only be partially reversed. Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.
I don’t see how constitutional changes would help. The constitution already creates separation of powers, limits on executive authority, and procedures for removing an unfit president or one who commits serious crimes. But these only matter to the extent that majorities of elected and appointed officials care, and today’s ruling notwithstanding, there’s no political will to enforce any of them. The plurality of Ameri…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many countries that have functioning constitutions that are regularly revised. It’s not impossible for the USA to get there one day.
We still haven't fixed things caused by putting chattel slavery into the Constitution almost 150 years after a civil war.
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.
Am I understanding this right? 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)