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

“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

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

“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

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?

“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

Ohio becomes 24th state to embrace weed legalization

“The new law allows adults over 21 to possess up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana and grow up to six plants. The measure creates a Division of Cannabis Control, which is responsible for setting up and regulating the adult-use cannabis market.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/07/ohio-marijuana-legalization-vote-results-00125991

The Vast Majority of People Who Want To Immigrate to the U.S. Have No Legal Option

“Today’s legal immigration system is drastically different than what it was historically. Post-independence, the U.S. took a broadly liberal approach to welcoming newcomers. “Even when it finally adopted some rules in the late 19th century, immigrants were presumed eligible for permanent residence unless the government showed that they fell into specific and usually narrow ineligible categories,” writes Bier.
Now, would-be migrants have to prove their eligibility based on strict prerequisites that vanishingly few can fulfill. That shift hasn’t reduced demand for migration pathways—it’s just created a black market, much like other forms of prohibition. Rather than looking to a sensible, straightforward, and sanctioned visa application process, migrants of many stripes look to smugglers and illegal entry to reach American soil. This has made their journeys far more dangerous (and, in many cases, deadly).”

Rape Rates Go Down as Countries Legalize Prostitution, Rise With Sex Work Prohibition

“Overall, liberalizing prostitution laws was linked to a significant decrease in rape rates, while prohibition was linked to a significant increase—but the magnitude of these two shifts was far from equal. Rather, “the magnitude of prohibiting commercial sex is about four times as large as that of liberalizing it,” write Gao and Petrova.
The average rape rate in the sample countries was nine rapes per 100,000 people. Countries that liberalized prostitution laws saw a decrease of approximately three rapes per 100,000 people, relative to countries that did not change their prostitution laws. Meanwhile, countries that banned or further criminalized prostitution saw an increase of around 11 rapes per 100,000 people, relative to the control countries.”

“Gao and Petrova do offer the caveat that “changes in prostitution laws might not be random. It is possible that a country changes the laws as part of a general program to improve women’s social status and is thus instituting other policies that may affect rape rates,” and although they attempted to control for this in various ways, these techniques “may not fully address the possible nonrandomness of prostitution laws.””

“their findings are in line with a spate of previous research linking liberalized sex work laws to decreases in sexual violence. For instance, a 2018 study showed that rapes in Rhode Island decreased when the state temporarily decriminalized indoor prostitution. A 2017 study found fewer sexual assaults after legal street prostitution zones were opened in 25 Dutch cities. Another 2017 study linked the launch of Craigslist “erotic services” ads in various U.S. cities to decreases in female homicide rates.”

How strong is the legal case against Donald Trump?

“There is nothing inherently illegal about paying someone not to disclose a purported affair. But Trump is being accused of illegally plotting to falsify business records in an effort to hide the payment. Under New York law, that crime on its own is a misdemeanor, but it can be bumped up to a felony charge punishable by up to four years in prison if records were falsified with the specific intent to commit or cover up another crime. The indictment released Tuesday doesn’t specify what that second crime may be, but there are indications that Bragg may attempt to connect the payments to campaign finance violations or tax fraud.”

“there’s generally broad agreement that Bragg appears to have ample evidence to secure conviction on the misdemeanor counts of falsifying business records. There’s serious disagreement, however, on the most important issue: Will Bragg be able to successfully tie those minor violations to a secondary crime?
Skeptics from both sides of the political spectrum say the felony portion of the case is built on shaky and untested legal reasoning that will require ironclad evidence to prove — evidence many believe Bragg likely doesn’t have. There are also major technical issues that could derail the indictment, most notably the untested question of whether a federal crime like a campaign finance violation can count as a secondary crime under New York’s state-level business records law. Some doubters add that the strength of Bragg’s case is irrelevant if the trial isn’t completed in time for the 2024 election, a prospect they say is extremely unlikely.

But others argue that the case isn’t nearly as weak as skeptics make it out to be. They say Bragg and his team, who have jurisdiction over the beating heart of the U.S. financial system, are incredibly adept at litigating complex financial issues such as this one. The lack of details about how Bragg plans to connect critical dots in the case, they add, is a sign that the district attorney is merely saving his most potent ammunition for later, not that he doesn’t have it.

Finally, some legal commentators say the indictment is so short on details and the circumstances so unprecedented that it’s impossible at this early stage to make any real judgments about how the case might play out.”