“In 2024, Congress passed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which prohibited operating or hosting “a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok)” within the United States. The law required TikTok to find a buyer by January 19, 2025, or else shut down operations within the United States.
Ultimately, neither happened…Trump issued the executive order on his first day, “instructing the Attorney General not to take any action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today.” He has since issued two additional orders further extending the deadline
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“But no president has the authority to simply postpone the enforcement of a law passed by Congress. The fact that Congress seems content to let Trump decline to enforce it does not obviate the law itself. And for that reason, if Congress will not repeal the law, then it should insist Trump enforce it.”
The Constitution clearly puts the power of deciding to go to war in the hands of the Congress. The attack on Iran was a clear act of war. It was not authorized by Congress. The attack on Iran was unconstitutional.
“Under the War Powers Act of 1973, the law that governs presidential authority to order military strikes, there are three lawful ways for a commander-in-chief to order the bombing of another country. None of them appears to cover the strikes carried out on Saturday.
Here is the relevant section of the law (emphasis added): “The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”
The first two options provided by the law are clearly not involved here, as Congress did not declare war against Iran and did not pass an authorization for the use of military force (as was done to allow the invasion of Iraq in 2002).
The third circumstance also does not apply to Trump’s attack on Iran, which was not carried out in response to an attack on American troops and did not respond to a crisis threatening American soil.”
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“The War Powers Act should not be treated as a series of suggestions that can be discarded when they seem inconvenient. Indeed, limits on executive power are most essential at the moments when they are inconvenient—otherwise, they are meaningless. Trump’s attack on Iran was not just an assault on a suspected nuclear weapons program; it was yet another blow against the separation of powers and the fundamental structure of the American constitutional system.”
“Let’s start with the role of the courts. The idea that the judicial branch owes special deference to the elected branches of government was thoroughly rejected by the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution. “As to the constitutionality of laws,” Luther Martin told the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on July 21, 1787, “that point will come before the judges in their proper official character. In this character they will have a negative on the laws.” Federal judges, Martin explained, “could declare an unconstitutional law void,” thereby overruling the actions of the elected branches. None of the delegates disagreed with that.
“This Constitution defines the extent of the powers of the general government,” Oliver Ellsworth told the Connecticut Ratification Convention on January 7, 1788. “If the general legislature should at any time overleap their limits, the judicial department is a constitutional check. If the United States go beyond their powers, if they make a law which the Constitution does not authorize, it is void; and the judicial power, the national judges, who, to secure their impartiality, are to be made independent, will declare it to be void.”
James Madison, often called the “father of the Constitution,” made the same point in his June 8, 1789, speech to Congress introducing the Bill of Rights. The proper role of the courts, Madison said, was to act as “an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive.””
“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.””
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“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.”
“The Constitution vests Congress, not the president, with the power to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises.” Yet Trump has announced a dizzying array of “duties,” including punitive tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods, a 25 percent tax on imported cars and car parts, tariffs on Chinese goods as high as 145 percent, and a 10 percent general tax on imports that may rise further based on supposedly “reciprocal” rates that make no sense.
These levies amount to the largest tax hike since 1993 and raise tariffs more than the notorious Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, which deepened the Great Depression by setting off a trade war. The main authority that Trump cites for these far-reaching, commerce-disrupting, price-boosting tariffs is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that says nothing about tariffs.
The IEEPA—which was designed to constrain, not expand, the president’s powers—authorizes economic sanctions in response to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” to “the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States” after the president “declares a national emergency.” Although the law has been on the books for nearly half a century, no president until Trump has ever invoked it to impose a general tariff.
There are good reasons for that. The IEEPA mentions restrictions on transactions involving foreign-owned assets, but it never refers to taxes, tariffs, or any of their synonyms.”
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“The shortcut that Trump chose is inconsistent with the IEEPA in another crucial way. To justify his tariffs, he has cited two supposed “emergencies”: the influx of illicit fentanyl, which goes back a decade or more, and ongoing bilateral trade deficits, which Trump himself has been decrying since the 1980s.
Neither of those constitutes the sort of “unusual and extraordinary threat” that Congress contemplated. “A statute grounded in emergency cannot be stretched to support open-ended policymaking,” Calabresi et al. say, “especially where the alleged threat is neither imminent nor novel.”
Trump’s interpretation of the IEEPA amounts to an assault on the separation of powers. “If decades-old trade deficits now qualify as an ’emergency,'” Calabresi et al. warn, “then any President could invoke IEEPA at will to bypass Congress on matters of taxation, commerce, and industrial policy.”
That result, the brief argues, violates the “major questions” doctrine, which says any assertion of executive power involving matters of “vast political and economic consequence” must be based on “unmistakable legislative authority.” It also violates the “nondelegation” doctrine, which says Congress cannot surrender its legislative powers.”
Trump defying a Supreme Court order is a constitutional crisis. The crisis comes to a head with Congress derelict in its duty. The only one with the power to enforce limits on the president’s power is Congress through its power of impeachment and a little bit through passing legislation that restrains the president.
“Legally, the answer is complicated and untested. No Fed chair has ever been removed by a President.
The Federal Reserve Act allows for the dismissal of Board members, including the chair, “for cause.” But that has historically been interpreted as misconduct or incapacity, not policy disagreements. “The court would typically not see disagreements over interest rates settings as ‘for-cause,’” Binder says.”
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“Still, the Trump Administration appears to be laying the groundwork for a potential confrontation. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently told Bloomberg that he expects to begin interviewing possible replacements for Powell in the fall.”
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“At the heart of that debate is a nearly century-old legal precedent: Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 1935 Supreme Court ruling that limited the President’s ability to remove leaders of independent agencies without cause. The ruling has long shielded Fed chairs from political dismissal, but could soon be tested by a conservative Supreme Court.”
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“Trump has blamed Powell for failing to act aggressively enough to support economic growth, saying the Fed chair is “playing politics” by keeping interest rates steady. But central bankers—and many economists—argue the opposite: that an independent Fed is essential to managing inflation and stewarding the economy, and that caving to political demands could damage the economy and global trust in U.S. institutions.”
“My trepidation boils down to two things. First, for all the talk about cutting government waste and fraud, the DOGE-Trump team seems mostly animated by rooting out leftist culture politics and its practitioners in Washington. It feels that it is less about smaller government than it is about political transformation. While the two intersect, this strategy could fall short.
That’s in part—and this is my second point—because for those of us who care about permanently downsizing government and keeping it bound by constitutional rules to prevent the exercise of arbitrary power, DOGE is mixed. While there is a small probability the approach will succeed in reining in spending or the administrative state, it will be at the heavy cost of reinforcing the power of the executive branch and opening the door to the same abuse when the left is in power.
The probability may be higher, however, that they will fail to make a significant difference at all. If that is the case, we will be left with both a presidency on steroids and no meaningful reduction in government.”
“”Refusing to follow a court order crosses a very clear, very dangerous line…If Trump refuses to follow court orders, especially from the Supreme Court, we will have tipped from chaos into dire crisis.””