“Trump appointees who defy the president’s will are showing the courage of their convictions, applying the law as they understand it rather than reflexively deferring to the politician who gave them their jobs. But Trump, who takes it for granted that justices vote the way they do for political reasons, neither understands nor appreciates judicial independence.”
“These new tariffs are likely unlawful too.
Indeed, Trump’s own attorneys even admitted as much during the legal battle over the original tariffs.
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Trump is leaning on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974
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Section 122 allows presidents to impose tariffs of up to 15 percent for up to 150 days to “deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.”
What’s that? The Trump administration wants to pretend—or perhaps wrongly believes—that it’s the same thing as a trade deficit. It’s not.
A balance-of-payments deficit is an archaic problem that existed before the introduction of floating exchange rates for foreign currencies. Changes made to the international monetary system in the 1970s—changes that Milton Friedman advocated, it’s worth noting—eliminated the circumstances that could lead to a balance-of-payments deficit.
“The United States does not have an international payments problem, fundamental or otherwise, and has not had one since we adopted a floating exchange rate more than five decades ago,” explains Bryan Riley, director of the Free Trade Initiative at the National Taxpayers Union. “Therefore, Section 122 does not give President Trump the legal authority to impose tariffs.”
Just like with the IEEPA tariffs, Trump’s use of Section 122 ignores the plain language of the law and invokes a broad executive power where Congress clearly provided a narrow one.”
The Conservative Supreme Court justices can’t agree on what the major questions doctrine is and what exceptions to it should be.
The Supreme Court made a major change in how lower courts operate by limiting nationwide injunctions. Such injunctions could have prevented the US government from illegally taking all this money in the first place and avoided the issue of if, when, and to whom, the tariff money is paid back. This policy allows the president to act illegally for months or years until the Supreme Court finally resolves a case.
The FBI raided the wrong house and arrested an innocent family, and tried to resist paying out when that family sued. The Supreme Court ruled that they don’t have special protection in these circumstances, but the government is using similar arguments to still not pay out.
“It would appear that Kavanaugh has finally come to recognize what has been apparent to some of us all along. Namely, that Trump’s immigration crackdown actively imperils the rights of many U.S. citizens.
Good for Kavanaugh, right? Better late than never? Well, maybe. Because it is also worth noting that Kavanaugh’s December opinion makes no reference to his September opinion. How should we make sense of this mysterious and rather glaring absence or omission?
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It seems impossible that these two Kavanaugh opinions are unrelated to each other. So what are we left to conclude about their connection? What is Kavanaugh not saying about the link?
One conceivable conclusion is that Kavanaugh now seeks to walk back his unfortunate past statement without explicitly acknowledging his past misjudgment.
Another conceivable conclusion is that Kavanaugh now hopes to apologize for butchering the Fourth Amendment without doing any actual apologizing. Call it a mea culpa minus the mea.
Needless to say, none of this reflects well on Kavanaugh and his possible motivations. Perhaps we’ll get a more forthright account from him in a future case.”