“When Trump imposed tariffs during his first term, he cited authority under other laws, like the Trade Act of 1974 and the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. At one point he threatened to invoke the IEEPA to impose tariffs on Mexican goods, but he never followed through, perhaps amid concern it would have been seen as legally dubious.
That’s because the IEEPA is typically used to impose sanctions — not tariffs — on other countries.
But Trump’s decision to use the IEEPA this time, when he’s aggressively flexing his executive authority, may be no accident: Unlike other trade laws, the IEEPA has the fewest procedural requirements and safeguards.
It gives the president the power to regulate or prohibit a broad swath of economic activity in order “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat” that is based largely outside the United States and concerns “the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” In the executive orders that announced the tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, Trump invoked the opioid crisis, as well as illegal immigration from Canada and Mexico.”
…
“No president has ever used the IEEPA to impose tariffs before. In fact, the IEEPA was passed as part of a broader effort by Congress in the 1970s to limit the president’s ability to exercise emergency economic powers. The framework ultimately created, however, completely fails to rein in the president, according to Timothy Meyer, a law professor and expert on international trade law. And Trump is taking advantage of that failure by pushing beyond what the Constitution intended.
“This strikes me as unconstitutional,” Meyer told me. “It’s very difficult to see how the framers would’ve thought that it was constitutional for the president to simply have the power on the drop of a hat to impose an across-the-board 25 percent tariff on our major trading partners.”
The Constitution gives Congress the authority to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” Between Trump’s tariffs and his unilateral effort to halt federal spending, he has now effectively claimed that he has both taxing and spending authority — a government all his own. Congress barely even needs to exist in this framework.”
“Vance’s most comprehensive statement of this radical position came in an interview I conducted with him in January 2023 for a profile in POLITICO Magazine. During the interview, I referred to comments that he had made on a conservative podcast in 2021 suggesting that Trump, if reelected, should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, [and] every civil servant in the administrative state … and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
I asked Vance if this was still his view.
“Yup,” he responded.”
…
“Vance’s rhetorical quibbling aside, his suggestion is radical. The course of action he is recommending — the president openly defying a Supreme Court order and then challenging the courts to enforce it — would amount to a full-fledged constitutional crisis of a different sort, one that would entirely upend the existing rules governing the separation of powers between the courts and the executive branch.”
“The arrival of Elon Musk’s allies at the Labor Department has sparked fears that the quality of the agency’s reports on everything from inflation to jobs could suffer at the hands of inexperienced outsiders — with global consequences.”
“The Office of Personnel Management has formally submitted draft regulations that would make it easier for agencies to fire career government officials who push back against presidential orders.
The move laid out in documents obtained by POLITICO on Tuesday is the latest step toward rekindling a plan initiated at the tail end of President Donald Trump’s first term to eliminate civil service protection for federal employees who play a role in policy development or advocacy.”
“Still, only the most naive legal analyst would conclude right now that the US constitutional system will survive Trump’s second term intact, or that the courts have definitively ruled that Trump’s agenda is in jeopardy. It is certainly possible that, when all of this litigation is over, Trump will face loss after unambiguous loss and be forced to give up many of his attempts to defy the Constitution. But it is far too soon to predict how all of these lawsuits will play out — or even if Trump will comply with any court orders against him.
To date, no appellate court — the mid-tier courts in the federal system — has weighed in on any of these cases, not to mention the Supreme Court. Similarly, while some federal trial courts have ordered Trump to stop some of his illegal actions, many of these decisions are temporary stopgap orders that expire quickly, and that are intended largely to maintain the status quo while the judges hearing these cases get up to speed on the legal issues that they present.
It’s a lot to keep track of. And, in many of these cases, there are likely to be months or even years more litigation before the legal issues presented by these cases are fully resolved.
It’s also worth noting that, as these cases make their way through the federal appellate process, they are more and more likely to be heard by judges who tend to be sympathetic to Trump — including a Supreme Court that has held that Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes.”
“In the initial days of the Trump administration, officials scoured federal websites for any mention of what they deemed “DEI” keywords — terms as generic as “diverse” and “historically” and even “women.” They soon identified reams of some of the country’s most valuable public health data containing some of the targeted words, including language about LGBTQ+ people, and quickly took down much of it — from surveys on obesity and suicide rates to real-time reports on immediate infectious disease threats like bird flu.
The removal elicited a swift response from public health experts who warned that without this data, the country risked being in the dark about important health trends that shape life-and-death public health decisions made in communities across the country.
Some of this data was restored in a matter of days, but much of it was incomplete. In some cases, the raw data sheets were posted again, but the reference documents that would allow most people to decipher them were not. Meanwhile, health data continues to be taken down: The New York Times reported last week that data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on bird flu transmission between humans and cats had been posted and then promptly removed.”
If Trump can act the way he is, breaking the law, taking powers clearly meant for Congress, and if he runs over the judiciary to do it, The United States will no longer be a Constitutional democracy.