“To argue that Riley’s murder, tragic though it was, justifies skirting due process fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of the doctrine. It is not to excuse criminal behavior, but to ensure that accusations—especially when they carry life-altering consequences—are publicly tested by evidence and judged fairly.
Homan’s logic would see due process abolished. It need not apply, he says, in the face of serious allegations or unsympathetic individuals, which is contrary to why the Founders demanded its inclusion in the Constitution. They knew the power of the state was dangerous. The government doesn’t always get it right. “Because we said so” isn’t sufficient reason to abrogate anyone’s liberty.
That the prisoners sent to CECOT were not citizens is irrelevant. The Supreme Court has repeatedly confirmed that even those suspected of being in the U.S. unlawfully are entitled to due process of law. And the people in question were not merely deported—they were sent without charge or conviction to a notorious megaprison, where Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has said she hopes the men are kept for life.”
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“A country that claims to value liberty cannot shed the process meant to protect it. If due process is no longer sacred, neither is justice; and if some of us do not have due process, then none of us do. Trump has defined himself as someone who fights for American values: “Make America Great Again.” You cannot do that by discarding one of the core values that made the U.S. exceptional.”
“Yoshida at first glance appeared to be quite helpful to the Trump administration.
The court concluded that the tariff was legally justified under the TWEA to address the trade imbalance and pointed to language in the statute that authorized the president to “regulate” the “importation” of foreign goods in the event of an emergency. That language was carried over into IEEPA as part of a much longer list of actions permitted by the president, though that list does not explicitly mention either tariffs or taxes (a point to which we will return).
In light of the parallel statutory language in TWEA and IEEPA, the Justice Department argued that Yoshida “continues to control today” and requires the Court of International Trade to rule in favor of the Trump administration.
As Wednesday’s decision makes clear, it was not so simple.
In several crucial respects, the Yoshida decision cut sharply against the administration’s position. That put the Justice Department in the awkward — and generally unenviable — position of having to pick and choose which parts of the decision that it likes, and which parts of the decision the courts should ignore.
For starters, the Yoshida decision rejected a key proposition that is at the heart of the government’s defense of Trump’s tariffs — the notion that courts have no power to review a president’s actions under IEEPA.
The court ruled in Yoshida that each presidential action under the statute “must be evaluated on its own facts and circumstances.” The court went on to emphasize that its ruling, while favorable to the Nixon administration, was not a blanket approval of “any future surcharge of a different nature, or any surcharge differently applied or any surcharge not reasonably related to the emergency declared;” that the president’s actions under the statute “must also bear a reasonable relation to the particular emergency confronted;” and that “emergencies are expected to be shortlived.”
In other words, the facts matter. But the facts then under Nixon — and the facts now under Trump — are markedly different.
Nixon’s tariff was fixed at 10 percent and in place for less than five months. Trump’s tariff framework is far more ambitious, open-ended and has been all over the place since his inauguration — with the effective dates and applicable countries, rates, exceptions and concessions under seemingly constant revision.
And if Trump and some of his advisors are to be believed, there would be no end in sight. “If President Trump succeeds like he wants to succeed,” Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro said earlier this year, “we are going to structurally shift the American economy from one over-reliant on income taxes and the Internal Revenue Service, to one which is also reliant on tariff revenue and the External Revenue Service.” That is a far cry from a five-month, supplemental 10 percent tariff like what Nixon imposed.
Two other, subtler points in the Yoshida decision made things worse for the administration.
First, Nixon’s tariff did not apply to all imports — only those that had been the subject of prior concessions under the government’s tariff schedule — and Nixon made clear in announcing the policy that the rates would nevertheless be capped at levels that Congress had previously set for the relevant goods. As a result, the court concluded in Yoshida that “the congressionally established rates remained untouched” and that Nixon was not claiming the power to simply impose “whatever tariff rates he deems desirable.”
Trump made no such concessions, which made it a relatively straightforward matter for the court on Wednesday to contrast Nixon’s “limited” tariffs with those imposed by Trump. Indeed, given the administration’s position that the courts cannot review Trump’s emergency declarations in support of the tariffs or circumscribe his authority to issue tariffs under IEEPA, he has effectively claimed the power not just to issue “whatever tariff rates he deems desirable” but to impose those tariffs whenever he wants, for any reason that he wants and for however long he wants.
Second, as a footnote in the Yoshida decision notes, Congress later enacted a specific statutory provision to address the problem that attracted the Nixon administration’s attention. That provision authorizes the president to impose tariffs in response to “large and serious … balance-of-payments deficits,” but it caps those tariffs at 15 percent and limits them to a duration of just 150 days unless Congress authorizes an extension.
Needless to say, the Trump administration did not invoke that statute, and Justice Department lawyers sought to downplay its significance given the fact that Congress kept the statutory language at issue in Yoshida on the books in IEEPA.
This argument also did not move the three judges on the Court of International Trade. They concluded that the existence of the statute demonstrated that “even ‘large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits’ do not necessitate the use of emergency powers” and that they “justify only the President’s imposition of limited remedies subject to enumerated procedural constraints.”
The argument was rooted in the conclusion in Yoshida that if a president wanted to impose a similar tariff in the future, he must “comply with the statute now governing such action.”
Trump, of course, had no interest in doing that.
There is no way to definitively predict how the appellate court — and eventually the Supreme Court”
“After President Donald Trump began penalizing major law firms that had offended him in one way or another last February, nine of them chose to surrender rather than fight. They agreed to humiliating concessions that included pro bono work, totaling nearly $1 billion, for causes favored by the president. But several firms stood their ground, arguing that Trump’s executive orders targeting them violated the First Amendment and undermined the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.”
“Trump had used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs on nearly all imports to the U.S., even though that law narrowly authorizes presidential actions only in response to “an unusual and extraordinary threat.”
International commerce is plainly neither of those things, as the court concluded in its ruling. “We do not read IEEPA to delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the President,” the judges wrote. “We instead read IEEPA’s provisions to impose meaningful limits on any such authority it confers.”
By reviewing the actions of the executive branch to ensure they comport with the underlying law, the Court of International Trade merely fulfilled the constitutional role of the judiciary. ”
Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security doesn’t know basic things about rights and abilities granted to Americans in the Constitution. She reaches for any bullshit she can to justify illegally expanding Trump’s power.
“Former Vice President Mike Pence said it’s a “bad idea” for President Donald Trump to receive a luxury jet from Qatar, arguing that accepting the gift could be unconstitutional and jeopardize national security.
“There are profound issues – the potential for intelligence gathering, the need to ensure the president of the United States is safe and secure as he travels around the world,” Pence told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview released on May 16.
Accepting the plane “is inconsistent with our security, with our intelligence needs,” he added. “My hope is the president reconsiders it.””
Trump repeatedly acts corruptly, and our institutions are not working properly to stop it.
The Congress should investigate and possibly impeach for such corruption, but the Speaker of the House dismisses it as false claims while saying that what the Biden crime family did was worse, even though those allegations are misleading bullshit.
“The writ of habeas corpus, a right deeply rooted in English common law and recognized by the U.S. Constitution, allows people nabbed by the government to challenge their detention in court. That complicates President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Last month, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that foreign nationals who allegedly are subject to immediate deportation as “alien enemies” have a right to contest that designation by filing habeas petitions.”
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“Although President Donald Trump views unauthorized immigration as an “invasion,” judges have been appropriately skeptical of that description. And while Trump might believe judicial review in this context is inconsistent with “the public safety,” that assessment is likewise controversial. Finally, the power to suspend habeas corpus has long been understood as belonging to Congress, not the president.”
“A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s sweeping layoffs at several agencies, including HHS, saying that cooperation of the legislative branch is required for large-scale reorganizations.
Kennedy eliminated thousands of jobs in early April, paralyzing programs across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and particularly in the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, that monitored health threats, researched cures and investigated everything from toxic fumes in fire stations to outbreaks of gonorrhea.
The layoffs at NIOSH have halted the National Firefighter Cancer Registry, Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program, Health Hazard Evaluation Program, Respirator Approval Program and Coal Workers’ Health Surveillance Program. All are required by law, but their government websites explain they are no longer operating because of the layoffs.
“If the law requires you, the executive, to do this work, you have, in a back door way, thumbed your nose at Congress by firing the people who are actually necessary to get that work done,” said Max Stier, the president and CEO of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, whose mission is supporting the federal workforce. “The executive branch is supposed to execute — the name says it all. It doesn’t have the right to determine where money is spent and how much money is spent. ”
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told POLITICO that “critical initiatives under NIOSH will remain intact.””
…
“while the administration has pledged that “essential services…will remain fully intact and uninterrupted,” and have repeatedly claimed that core programs will transfer to the yet-to-be-created Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA, interviews with staff and public notices on the CDC’s website show that the programs are no longer operational.”