Tag: legal

Trump Allegedly Misidentified a Colombian Fisherman as a Venezuelan ‘Narcoterrorist’

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Colombian President Gustavo Petro says one of the “narcoterrorists” recently killed by U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean was a “fisherman” who had “no ties to the drug trade.” That man’s death, one of at least 32 ordered by President Donald Trump, therefore qualified as “murder,” Petro declared on Saturday.

That much would be true even if the dead man, whom Petro identified as a Colombian citizen named Alejandro Carranza, really was smuggling drugs. Trump’s new policy of summarily executing drug suspects simultaneously corrupts the mission of the armed forces, erasing the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants, and violates long-standing principles of criminal justice, imposing the death penalty without statutory authorization or any semblance of due process.

On September 15, U.S. forces blew up a boat that Trump said was “in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics,” killing three men he described as “confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela.” But according to Petro, the attack that killed Carranza happened in Colombian waters, and the target was a “Colombian boat” that “was adrift and had its distress signal up due to an engine failure.”

Trump reacted angrily to that charge on Sunday, calling Petro “an illegal drug leader” who is “strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs…all over Colombia.” He said the U.S. government would punish Petro by ending all “payments and subsidies” to his country.

Notably, Trump did not actually contradict Petro’s claim that Carranza had been erroneously identified as a Venezuelan “narcoterrorist.” And Trump has repeatedly acknowledged that his bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy could threaten innocent fishermen.

After the first strike on an alleged drug boat in early September, Trump joked about the potential for lethal mistakes: “I think anybody that saw that is going to say, ‘I’ll take a pass.’ I don’t even know about fishermen. They may say, ‘I’m not getting on the boat. I’m not going to take a chance.'”

…

Trump claims drug traffickers are “murdering” Americans because some of their customers—about 82,000 last year—die after consuming their products. By the same logic, alcohol producers and distributors, who supply a product implicated in an estimated 178,000 deaths a year in the United States, likewise are guilty of murder.

…

The Trump administration also argues that the U.S. government is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which makes the boat strikes consistent with the law of war. That claim, Cardozo Law School professor Gabor Rona says, is “utterly without precedent in international law.”

Geoffrey Corn, formerly the U.S. Army’s senior adviser on the law of war, agrees. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he told The New York Times. “This is shredding it.”

Trump, in short, is killing people without a legal justification. There is a word for that.”

https://reason.com/2025/10/22/trump-allegedly-misidentified-a-colombian-fisherman-as-a-venezuelan-narcoterrorist/

After Another Delay, Trump’s China Tariffs Look Even Less Like a Legitimate ‘Emergency’

Posted on by Lone Candle

“To place huge new tariffs on imports from China, President Donald Trump claimed that those transactions are “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States.

It’s a threat that the White House now says it can put off addressing for another 90 days.

…

This is not just a rhetorical point but a question that’s central to the legality of the tariffs. In front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit last month, the Trump administration’s lawyer told skeptical judges that the president’s tariff powers rested upon the existence of an “unusual threat” that the president was taking action to “deal with.”

The latest delay in the China tariffs, then, seems to directly undermine that claim. If Trump wants to use the threat of tariffs to negotiate a new trade deal with China, fine, but then that’s not an emergency—and, as a result, those tariffs cannot be implemented with the emergency powers the president is currently claiming.”

https://reason.com/2025/08/12/after-another-delay-trumps-china-tariffs-look-even-less-like-a-legitimate-emergency/

How marijuana legalization played itself

Posted on by Lone Candle

“States’ efforts to create and then tightly regulate legal markets for pot have, ironically, made the black market for weed bigger than it’s ever been.”

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/379796/marijuana-legalization-black-market-drug-war-raids

Trump is using a nearly 50-year-old law to justify new tariffs. It may not be legal.

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The International Emergency Economic Powers Act, passed in 1977, grants the president broad authority over economic transactions, and a wide range of abilities to deal with “any unusual and extraordinary threat,” stemming in whole or in part from foreign sources.
Presidents, including Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden, have used the law to impose economic sanctions on other countries, including on Russia after it launched its 2022 war on Ukraine.

But the closest a president has come to citing a national emergency to impose tariffs was when President Richard Nixon used a different law — the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 — to levy a temporary universal tariff on all imports in 1971.

Trump justified his new tariffs Saturday by pointing to “the major threat of illegal aliens and deadly drugs killing our Citizens, including fentanyl,” which he claims Mexico, Canada and China are not doing enough to keep from coming into the United States.

But Bill Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Trump’s use of IEEPA to justify his trade actions “doesn’t really pass the red-face test,” setting the stage for a company or trade association whose members have been harmed by the action to sue.

“The question will be, can you find a judge who will write an injunction to stay the tariffs from going into effect,” Reinsch said. “And my prediction is that will be hard, because you’re asking a federal judge to essentially say, ‘I know more than the President does about what an emergency is.’ And I think judges are going to be reluctant to do that.”

That won’t stop a lawsuit from proceeding, most likely all the way to the Supreme Court, Reinsch said, but it could be years before there is a conclusion to the legal battle.

“The courts have historically upheld the president’s power to take emergency actions, especially when they are related to national security. But one important question is whether they will uphold the use of tariffs. In the past, [IEEPA] has only been used to impose sanctions,” said Tim Brightbill, a trade attorney at the law firm Wiley Rein in Washington, DC.

“While it is possible that companies or industry groups would seek an injunction, they probably face an uphill battle blocking the new tariffs,” Brightbill said.”

…

“the U.S. effectively killed the WTO Appellate Body during Trump’s first term by blocking the appointment of new judges, leaving it without the ability to adjudicate disputes. And there’s little to suggest the Trump administration would abide by a WTO ruling even if the organization were able to issue one.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/03/trump-tariffs-legal-00202063

Say goodbye to Trump’s legal cases

Posted on by Lone Candle

“his victory virtually guarantees that he will never face serious legal accountability for an avalanche of alleged wrongdoing.”

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“Even the civil cases against him will now face new obstacles. Presidents can, in some circumstances, be subject to civil penalties from private lawsuits, but Trump will surely try to use the cloak of the presidency to avoid paying the hundreds of millions of dollars he owes in judgments for sexual abuse, defamation and corporate fraud.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/06/trump-win-what-next-legal-cases-00187635

The entire Texas government is fighting over whether to save a man’s life

Posted on by Lone Candle

What’s wrong with Greg Abbott?

“the Texas Supreme Court handed down an extraordinary order saving Robert Roberson from execution — but potentially not for very long.
Roberson was convicted in 2003 of murdering his daughter on the theory that she died of “shaken baby syndrome.” However, in an extraordinary turn of events, it now appears likely that Roberson is innocent. Not only that, but it is far from clear that his daughter was even a victim of murder in the first place.

One reason to doubt the conviction is that modern science looks at shaken baby syndrome with increasing skepticism. More importantly, however, the evidence in Roberson’s case suggests that his poor girl actually died from a combination of pneumonia and medications that should never have been prescribed to such a young patient, and that the injuries that a 2003 jury attributed to child abuse may have resulted from a surgery.

Another reason why the order in In re Texas House of Representatives is so extraordinary is that it involves what may be an unprecedented conflict between the state’s legislature and its governor. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has the power to issue a 30-day pause on Roberson’s execution (although not to grant him permanent clemency) but has thus far refused to do so”

…

“a bipartisan group of state lawmakers issued a subpoena seeking Roberson’s testimony before a committee of the state’s House of Representatives. This hearing isn’t scheduled until Monday, and Roberson obviously could not comply with this subpoena if he had been killed Thursday night.

So Roberson’s case raises what may be a unique separation of powers issue under the Texas Constitution: Can Texas’s executive branch of government carry out an otherwise lawful execution if doing so would prevent its legislative branch from hearing testimony from a witness it has already subpoenaed?”

…

“The striking thing about this case, however, is that virtually everyone who has touched it wants Roberson to live except for the few people in Texas’s government (the Court of Criminal Appeals, the pardon board, and Abbott) who actually have the power to save him.”

https://www.vox.com/criminal-justice/378717/robert-roberson-execution-death-penalty-texas-supreme-court

Opinion | Why Is the Supreme Court Ignoring Its Own Rules?

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Amid mounting pressure for Supreme Court reform, Congress has before it one relatively straightforward option: enshrine Scalia’s “standing test” and legislate the basic requirements for who can sue over major issues of national importance.
Currently, the law concerning standing is governed by a series of Supreme Court cases that sort out which plaintiffs can bring cases in federal court in the first place. If it’s the wrong plaintiff, the case is thrown out. It also keeps federal judges out of the business of legislating under the pretense of legitimate litigation.

But so far, there is no general “standing” statute. The court has set its own standards for which cases it and lower courts can hear, pursuant to its reading of the Constitution. Congress should change that and set down its own marker. Although the current right-wing justices could decide to strike down standing legislation as impinging on their constitutional prerogatives, codification of standing law would send an important message that Congress is willing to impose reasonable checks and balances on the justices.

Standing comes from Article III of the Constitution, which gives federal judges the job description of deciding “cases.” The case law around standing amounts to the court’s working definition of the word “case”: At its core, it requires that plaintiffs have an injury that’s unique to them and not shared by the general population. Standing is central to the separation of powers because judges are supposed to only consider disputes between discrete parties that occurred in the past.

To grasp the distinction, imagine a case in which a city miscalculates the property tax liability owed by a homeowner for a single residence. She sues the government to get that particular financial injury redressed. Resolving that dispute is a job for the courts because it’s between two discrete parties and involves retroactive relief.

Legislatures, by contrast, make rules that are future-oriented and apply to the general population. If the homeowner wants the general property tax rate lowered, she must push legislators for action, not the courts. Standing holds judges within their constitutional lane by keeping sweeping policy disputes impacting the broader public out of courtrooms.

The Constitution does not define the word “case,” however, so the Supreme Court has had to fill in the blanks over the years by requiring, first and foremost, a concrete “injury” to make something a case. In cases between private parties, the injury is usually obvious — the defendant broke a contract or committed a tort that left the plaintiff worse off than they were before. In cases against the government, if the plaintiff is a corporation, it’s easy to show that a regulation or legislation causes harm to their business. But if a regular citizen wants the government to take action that affects the public — such as enforcing clean air standards or making mifepristone unavailable across the country — it’s harder to show an injury that’s particularized, or special, to the actual plaintiff bringing the suit.

For those cases, the court has long made clear that taxpayers cannot sue merely to vindicate their alleged “injury” in having their tax dollars misused by the government. That would allow angry taxpayers to turn the judiciary into the ultimate boss of the other two branches of government. Beyond that, what suffices as an injury can be hard to pin down, with the court adding a slew of adjectives to the test, requiring that an injury be imminent and not speculative or hypothetical, for example.

The governing standard, created by the Supreme Court over decades and refined at Scalia’s hand, requires three things: 1) that the plaintiff has an injury that is unique to them, 2) that the defendant caused it and 3) that if the court rules in their favor, that injury will be fixed. The aim is to find the equivalent of a “broken arm” — versus a generic policy gripe — that courts can remedy with an order.”

…

“The fact that the court can pick and choose which cases in which to recognize standing law, and which they prefer to overlook it, cries out for congressional intervention.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/25/supreme-court-reform-congress-00164740