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It's odd to me that something as fundamental as 'can the President unilaterally impose tariffs on any country he wants anytime he wants' is apparently so ill de

It's odd to me that something as fundamental as 'can the President unilaterally impose tariffs on any country he wants anytime he wants' is apparently so ill defined in law that 9 justices can't agree on it.

fuzzfactor 8mo ago
[flagged]
Ajedi32 8mo ago
Fully agree, but that's what happens when you keep piling laws on top of laws on top of laws and never go back and refactor. If I recall correctly, the case hinged on some vague wording in a semi-obscure law passed back in 1977.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- ssully 8mo ago
  Except that isn’t relevant at all. This Supreme Court is completely cooked. If the case was “can Trump dissolve New York as a state” you would still have 3 justices siding in his favor with some dog shit reasoning.
  - Ajedi32 8mo ago
    Read the opinions. Both are pretty reasonable. I think the dissent has a good point that a plain language interpretation of the term "regulate imports" would seem to include tariffs. The bigger issue I think is that that statute exists in the first place. "Emergency powers" that a president can grant himself just by "declaring an emergency" on any pretense with no checks or balances is a stupid idea.
    - joezydeco 8mo ago
      Kavanaugh's opinion seems to say "well, this would be too hard to undo, so we should just leave it alone and let Trump continue". That hardly seems 'reasonable'. Just lazy and/or partisan.
      - Ajedi32 8mo ago
        > The plaintiffs argue and the Court concludes that the President lacks authority under IEEPA to impose tariffs. I disagree. In accord with Judge Taranto’s careful and persuasive opinion in the Federal Circuit, I would conclude that the President’s power under IEEPA to “regulate . . . importation” encompasses tariffs. As a matter of ordinary meaning, including dictionary definitions and historical usage, the broad power to “regulate . . . importation” includes the traditional and common means to do so—in particular, quotas, embargoes, and tariffs. That doesn't sound like "well, this would be too hard to undo" to me, and making that argument elsewhere doesn't diminish the main point.
      - bickfordb 8mo ago
        It's hard for me to pay my taxes
    - stbede 8mo ago
      The original law (like many laws that delegated congressional authorities at the time) contained a legislative veto provision which gave the legislative final oversight of any administrative action. In the 80’s the Supreme Court found that legislative veto provisions were unconstitutional, but left all of those delegations standing. After that ruling, the administration can now do what it wanted without congressional oversight and the ability to veto any attempt to repeal the laws. In the oral arguments, Gorsuch raised the possibility that the law itself should have been found unconstitutional in the 80’s because the legislative veto was essential to its function. It looks like the court today took a minimalist approach, letting these delegations stand but minimizing the scope of the powers delegated.
    - twoodfin 8mo ago
      Indeed, if you want to case intuitional blame here, it’s far more Congress’ fault for forcing the court to split these linguistic hairs rather than address this issue head on themselves.
    - rtkwe 8mo ago
      Only if you ignore the explicit grant to Congress in Article 1 Section 8... You're trying to argue an implicit grant somehow trumps an explicit grant. > The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises [0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C1-1-1/ALDE_00013387/ https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C1-1-...
      - k1ko 8mo ago
        It's obviously not that simple. If we follow your logic then we would expect that no previous President was able to enact tariffs. We obviously know that to be false as Presidents in the past have enacted a wide range of tariffs.
        DangitBobby 8mo ago
        We also know that in the past the constitution has been violated for political expedience.
        rtkwe 8mo ago
        The argument the majority of the court went with in a few different forms is that a grant that goes against the constitutional grants needs to be explicit and IEEPA is not explicit.
    - PearlRiver 8mo ago
      In fairness Trump is the first guy who uses this cheatcode so blatantly. There used to be a kind of decorum. But yes it is basically eliminating parliament and rule by a monarch- making a mockery of 1776.
    - rkeene2 8mo ago
      Well, not really because that part doesn't grant the US President arbitrary powers to perform any action that would result in regulation (for example, he is not given the power to go around killing random people even if doing so would effectively regulate international trade; he can't declare war on another country even if doing so would be the best way to effectuate regulation of trade with another country) it gives him the OBLIGATION to perform regulation, using the powers delegated to him. If giving the US President unlimited and arbitrary authority as long as they can claim it was useful for meeting a legal obligation created by Congress were the correct interpretation then we need look no further than the "Take Care" clause of the US Constitution, where the US President is given the obligation to take care that all laws are faithfully executed -- which, with this interpretation, would mean that any action would be under the purview of the US President as long as they could claim at doing that action resulted in the laws being faithfully executed.
    - rainsford 8mo ago
      Not a lawyer, but I found the majority opinion's position on "regulate" much more compelling than the dissent. In particular, the majority's argument that "regulate" is a pretty common function of the executive branch that in no other context implies the authority to tax (tariff), which is a pretty clear Article I power. The majority also convincingly argued that it seems unreasonable to interpret a law to broadly delegate Congressional power to the Executive branch without Congress making that intent explicit in the law. The dissent not only didn't make good counter arguments even read by themselves, but the majority opinion did a pretty good job refuting those arguments specifically.
  - xienze 8mo ago
    > If the case was “can Trump dissolve New York as a state” you would still have 3 justices siding in his favor with some dog shit reasoning. As a counter-example, if the case was, say, "can a college use race as a factor in admissions"[0], you get 3 justices siding in favor using dogshit reasoning, just from the other side of the aisle. It's a bit ridiculous to think there aren't Democrat partisan judges on the Supreme Court. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._Harvard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
    - watwut 8mo ago
      That is not contraexample. It does not show conservative justices not being hacks. Besides, conservatives including conservative justices are literally pro racial profiling and arresting people on race only.
    - zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
      I guess there are “hacks” on both sides?
    - 5upplied_demand 8mo ago
      The Bakke decision in 1978 upheld that race could be used as a factor in admissions. Your counter-example is precedent from 50 years ago. Does that same precedent exist in this tariff case? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_California_v._Bakke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...
- philistine 8mo ago
  The whole legal apparatus of the US doesn't want to hear that but your laws suck. They're flawed because of the political system borne of compromise with parties incapable of whipping their members to just vote in favour of a law they don't fully agree with.
  - epolanski 8mo ago
    This is a global issue, laws aren't math formulas, law is interpreted, hence the need of judges.
  - vkou 8mo ago
    That's the case in any country where a parliamentary body is split so closely. When you need every vote to get legislature to pass, because you control 51% of a chamber, backbenchers on the ideological fringe of a party, (DINOs and RINOs) have a lot of power. When you have a majority with comfortable margins, you can care a lot less about what the Sinemas and Manchins and McCains of a party think.
    - philistine 8mo ago
      You're looking at the world with your American blinders on. The rest of the world's elected representatives vote with their party or they leave their party. What you're describing is a fundamentally American phenomenon.
      - 0xDEAFBEAD 8mo ago
        But parties typically have to compromise with other parties in their coalition, so it would seem to amount to the same thing (compromise is required to pass legislation)?
        vkou 8mo ago
        Correct. The difference between FPTP and PR systems (Or countries with very strong regional parties) is that in a multi-party PR system, the coalition happens between party, in a FPTP two-party system, the coalition happens within the big tentpole parties. There are many reasons for why two-party FPTP sucks, but this phenomena is present in multi-party systems, too. And, of course, sometimes politicians end up crossing the aisle, much to the chagrin of the party whip.
- rtkwe 8mo ago
  Old laws are often superseded or modified by newer legislation that's not novel or rare. This one wasn't because it hadn't been so roundly abused by previous presidents that it had been an issue worth taking up. It's the same with a lot of delegated powers, the flexibility and decreased response time is good when it's constrained by norms and the idea of independent agencies but a terrible idea when the supreme court has been slowly packed with little king makers in waiting wanting to invest all executive power in the President. [0] [0] Unless that's power over the money (ie Federal Reserve) because that's a special and unique institution. (ie: they know giving the president the power over the money printer would be disastrous and they want to be racist and rich not racist and poor.)
- Paradigma11 8mo ago
  An additional problem seems to be that this law had some congressional check that has been ruled unconstitutional since.
entuno 8mo ago
And that it took this long to get an answer to that question.
- loeg 8mo ago
  This is relatively fast for an issue to move through the courts.
  - kingofmen 8mo ago
    Yes. "Relatively". We really need a fast-track process for genuinely insane nonsense to get shot down in a matter of days, not months.
    - parineum 8mo ago
      The fast track is congress clarifying their own shit. Courts are slow, it's a feature not a bug.
    - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
      It takes a long time for something to get through all the appeals. Getting an injunction to put a stop to something during the appeals doesn't take that long. The problem in this case is that Congress made such a mess of the law that the lower court judges didn't think the outcome obvious enough to grant the injunction.
      - jeffbee 8mo ago
        As pointed out in other comments this process is entirely by choice of the court. In other cases where they just felt like ruling on something they have put things on their emergency docket and ruled on them immediately. Letting this situation ride for a year was a choice by the court.
        AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
        Not doing something you could have done is frequently less of a choice and more of a lack of bandwidth to simultaneously consider everything which is happening at the same time. The vast majority of cases don't make it onto the emergency docket.
karel-3d 8mo ago
The thing is he usually cannot but sometimes can. The issue is around "sometimes".
danlitt 8mo ago
[flagged]
loeg 8mo ago
Two of the justices would be happy to let Trump get away with murder. It's not that the law is ill-defined so much as a few justices are extremely partisan. Happily, a quorum of saner heads came about in this instance.
- irishcoffee 8mo ago
  It sure is interesting how different things might be if RBG and Biden had stepped down instead of doing... whatever it was they did instead.
  - ceejayoz 8mo ago
    It'd be interesting if Biden had taken the new doctrine of presidential immunity to heart in the last few months of his term.
    - idontwantthis 8mo ago
      A true hero would have done whatever it took to pack the SC and then resigned.
      - parineum 8mo ago
        "Whatever it took" is just appointing more judges. The president can do that. Unfortunately, the result would be that Trump would have just packed it the other direction and this case would have gone the opposite way. Are you should that would have been a good idea?
        ceejayoz 8mo ago
        > Unfortunately, the result would be that Trump… ...would have been sentenced for his 34 felony convictions and probably never get reelected?
        idontwantthis 8mo ago
mastax 8mo ago
It seems likely to me the ruling took this long because John Roberts wanted to get a more unanimous ruling. Additionally, the law in this case isn’t ill defined whatsoever. Alito, Thomas, and to a lesser extent Kavanaugh are just partisan hacks. For many years I wanted to believe they had a consistent and defensible legal viewpoint, even if I thought it was misguided. However the past six years have destroyed that notion. They’re barely even trying to justify themselves in most of these rulings; and via the shadow docket frequently deny us even that barest explanation.
- RetpolineDrama 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tyre 8mo ago
    It’s not an absurd scenario. The law was written specifically to allow blocking imports from a country. The nuance is that nothing Congress passed granted to right to tax. Additionally, they did grant the power to partially block imports. Nothing says you have to enact “no imports from Japan” vs. “no imports of networking equipment from Lichtenstein.”
    - RetpolineDrama 8mo ago
      >The law was written specifically to allow blocking imports from a country. The precise wording is regulate. The idea that "regulate" means you can turn it on or off with no in-between is beyond parody. Absurd. Hilarious. Farcical. That said the headline is misleading and should be renamed, nothing is changing from this ruling.
      - Starman_Jones 8mo ago
        The precise wording is "investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit..."
  - mexicocitinluez 8mo ago
nitwit005 8mo ago
They all agree. A couple of them just chose to pretend they didn't.
Sparkle-san 8mo ago
[flagged]
- zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
  Did you actually read it? Seems unlikely. I agree with the majority but I think the dissent does make some ok points.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
deleted 8mo ago
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duped 8mo ago
The opinion should merely read > The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises (which it does, and expounds upon)
- zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
  Yes but in practice they delegate this power to the executive. Congress doesn’t run the IRS themselves after all
  - joshuamorton 8mo ago
    They don't delegate the policymaking. Tax code is always congressionally approved, and I'm unaware of any even remote argument that changing tax policy is delegated to the executive. OTOH enforcement of congressional policies is basically always the role of the executive, so the fact that the IRS exists and does things doesn't really impact delegation.
  - dragonwriter 8mo ago
    > Yes but in practice they delegate this power to the executive. No, they do not delegate the power to lay (set) taxes to the executive, they do assign the executive the function of collecting the taxes laid by Congress. > Congress doesn’t run the IRS themselves after all The IRS doesn't freely set taxes, it collects the taxes set by Congress.
    - Spivak 8mo ago
      The moment Congress authorizes that the Executive may use discretion then the Executive can effectively levy taxes. They may be wielding a bat owned by someone else, but who swings it is ultimately what's important. Now I'm generally of the opinion that Congress shouldn't be allowed to give the Executive discretion but seems no one agrees with that and Congress would rather let the Executive write "not quite laws" on their behalf.
    - davorak 8mo ago
      > No, they do not delegate the power to lay (set) taxes to the executive, they do assign the executive the function of collecting the taxes laid by Congress. The quote from the constitution is "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes," not for the executive to collect taxes. If they can delegate collecting to IRS in the executive branch, why not can they not delegate the "Power To lay" taxes?
onlyrealcuzzo 8mo ago
Statutory Law is 50,000 pages, and that's just the beginning of everything you need to consider. Make stupid laws, win stupid prizes. It's almost like the legal system is designed so that you can get away with murder if you can afford enough lawyers.
- fwip 8mo ago
  Of which, only a small fraction will be relevant in any particular case. It's kind of like pointing at any major codebase and arguing that it's "stupid" to have millions of lines of code.
keernan 8mo ago
>apparently so ill defined in law that 9 justices can't agree on it That is not how the Supreme Court works. SCOTUS is a political body. Justices do one thing: cast votes. For any reason. If they write an opinion it is merely their post hoc justification for their vote. Otherwise they do not have to explain anything. And when they do write an opinion it does not necessarily reflect the real reason for the way they voted. Edit: Not sure why anyone is downvoting this comment. I was a trial attorney for 40+ years. If you believe what I posted is legally inaccurate, then provide a comment. But downvoting without explaining is ... just ... I don't know ... cowardly?
- fuzzfactor 8mo ago
  >downvoting without explaining is ... just ... Like I've said before, if you can't tell whether it's a bot or a real person voting, it doesn't matter anyway. Might as well be a bot either way. corrective upvote made
  - keernan 8mo ago
    It never occurred to me that bots are voting on threads. In the age of AI agents, that's pretty dumb of me.
tokai 8mo ago
In normal democracies you have multiple parties, so there is a much better chance of creating a coalition around the government and force election/impeachment if the leadership goes rouge. The US system turned out to be as fragile as it looks.
- dmix 8mo ago
  The failure of the US is not so much in judicial system (with some recent exceptions) mostly in how weak Congress has been for over a decade as executive power expands (arguably since Bush and including during Obama). The system was designed to prevent that from happening from the very beginning with various layers of checks on power, but the public keeps wanting a president to blame and fix everything. The judicial branch has been much more consistent on this matter with some recent exceptions with the Unitary executive theory becoming more popular in the courts. Ultimately no system can't stop that if there is a societal culture that tolerates the drumbeat of authoritarianism and centralization of power.
cael450 8mo ago
It really isn't ill-defined at all. Both the constitution and the law allowing the president to impose tariffs for national security reasons is clear. There are just some partisan hacks on the Supreme Court.
- tyre 8mo ago
  This specific law does not allow imposing tariffs, which is the whole point of the ruling. Roberts’s opinion says that a tariff is essentially a tax, which is not what Congress clearly delegated.
- nutjob2 8mo ago
  Wrong law. Trump chose not to use the "impose tariffs for national security reasons" law in this case.
deleted 8mo ago
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allywilson 8mo ago
But that's not the issue. 'can the President unilaterally impose tariffs on any country he wants anytime he wants' No, he can't impost tariffs on any country. He can only impose tariffs on American companies willing to import from any country.
shevy-java 8mo ago
It kind of shows that the USA does not have that strong means against becoming a dictatorship. George Washington probably did not think through the problem of the superrich bribing the whole system into their own use cases to be had.
hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
It’s one of the few things in the U.S. constitution that is not ill defined. Tariffs are very explicitly the prerogative of Congress. The fact that the administration of tariffs is so much better defined than really anything else shouldn’t be surprising because tariffs is the proximate cause of the Revolutionary war. It’s embarrassing that the 3 justices put their partisanship ahead of the clear language of the constitution and explicitly stated intentions of the founders.

fuzzfactor 8mo ago

[flagged]

Ajedi32 8mo ago

Fully agree, but that's what happens when you keep piling laws on top of laws on top of laws and never go back and refactor. If I recall correctly, the case hinged on some vague wording in a semi-obscure law passed back in 1977.

deleted 8mo ago
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ssully 8mo ago
Except that isn’t relevant at all. This Supreme Court is completely cooked. If the case was “can Trump dissolve New York as a state” you would still have 3 justices siding in his favor with some dog shit reasoning.
- Ajedi32 8mo ago
  Read the opinions. Both are pretty reasonable. I think the dissent has a good point that a plain language interpretation of the term "regulate imports" would seem to include tariffs. The bigger issue I think is that that statute exists in the first place. "Emergency powers" that a president can grant himself just by "declaring an emergency" on any pretense with no checks or balances is a stupid idea.
  - joezydeco 8mo ago
    Kavanaugh's opinion seems to say "well, this would be too hard to undo, so we should just leave it alone and let Trump continue". That hardly seems 'reasonable'. Just lazy and/or partisan.
    - Ajedi32 8mo ago
      > The plaintiffs argue and the Court concludes that the President lacks authority under IEEPA to impose tariffs. I disagree. In accord with Judge Taranto’s careful and persuasive opinion in the Federal Circuit, I would conclude that the President’s power under IEEPA to “regulate . . . importation” encompasses tariffs. As a matter of ordinary meaning, including dictionary definitions and historical usage, the broad power to “regulate . . . importation” includes the traditional and common means to do so—in particular, quotas, embargoes, and tariffs. That doesn't sound like "well, this would be too hard to undo" to me, and making that argument elsewhere doesn't diminish the main point.
    - bickfordb 8mo ago
      It's hard for me to pay my taxes
  - stbede 8mo ago
    The original law (like many laws that delegated congressional authorities at the time) contained a legislative veto provision which gave the legislative final oversight of any administrative action. In the 80’s the Supreme Court found that legislative veto provisions were unconstitutional, but left all of those delegations standing. After that ruling, the administration can now do what it wanted without congressional oversight and the ability to veto any attempt to repeal the laws. In the oral arguments, Gorsuch raised the possibility that the law itself should have been found unconstitutional in the 80’s because the legislative veto was essential to its function. It looks like the court today took a minimalist approach, letting these delegations stand but minimizing the scope of the powers delegated.
  - twoodfin 8mo ago
    Indeed, if you want to case intuitional blame here, it’s far more Congress’ fault for forcing the court to split these linguistic hairs rather than address this issue head on themselves.
  - rtkwe 8mo ago
    Only if you ignore the explicit grant to Congress in Article 1 Section 8... You're trying to argue an implicit grant somehow trumps an explicit grant. > The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises [0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C1-1-1/ALDE_00013387/ https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C1-1-...
    - k1ko 8mo ago
      It's obviously not that simple. If we follow your logic then we would expect that no previous President was able to enact tariffs. We obviously know that to be false as Presidents in the past have enacted a wide range of tariffs.
      - DangitBobby 8mo ago
        We also know that in the past the constitution has been violated for political expedience.
      - rtkwe 8mo ago
        The argument the majority of the court went with in a few different forms is that a grant that goes against the constitutional grants needs to be explicit and IEEPA is not explicit.
  - PearlRiver 8mo ago
    In fairness Trump is the first guy who uses this cheatcode so blatantly. There used to be a kind of decorum. But yes it is basically eliminating parliament and rule by a monarch- making a mockery of 1776.
  - rkeene2 8mo ago
    Well, not really because that part doesn't grant the US President arbitrary powers to perform any action that would result in regulation (for example, he is not given the power to go around killing random people even if doing so would effectively regulate international trade; he can't declare war on another country even if doing so would be the best way to effectuate regulation of trade with another country) it gives him the OBLIGATION to perform regulation, using the powers delegated to him. If giving the US President unlimited and arbitrary authority as long as they can claim it was useful for meeting a legal obligation created by Congress were the correct interpretation then we need look no further than the "Take Care" clause of the US Constitution, where the US President is given the obligation to take care that all laws are faithfully executed -- which, with this interpretation, would mean that any action would be under the purview of the US President as long as they could claim at doing that action resulted in the laws being faithfully executed.
  - rainsford 8mo ago
    Not a lawyer, but I found the majority opinion's position on "regulate" much more compelling than the dissent. In particular, the majority's argument that "regulate" is a pretty common function of the executive branch that in no other context implies the authority to tax (tariff), which is a pretty clear Article I power. The majority also convincingly argued that it seems unreasonable to interpret a law to broadly delegate Congressional power to the Executive branch without Congress making that intent explicit in the law. The dissent not only didn't make good counter arguments even read by themselves, but the majority opinion did a pretty good job refuting those arguments specifically.
- xienze 8mo ago
  > If the case was “can Trump dissolve New York as a state” you would still have 3 justices siding in his favor with some dog shit reasoning. As a counter-example, if the case was, say, "can a college use race as a factor in admissions"[0], you get 3 justices siding in favor using dogshit reasoning, just from the other side of the aisle. It's a bit ridiculous to think there aren't Democrat partisan judges on the Supreme Court. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._Harvard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
  - watwut 8mo ago
    That is not contraexample. It does not show conservative justices not being hacks. Besides, conservatives including conservative justices are literally pro racial profiling and arresting people on race only.
  - zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    I guess there are “hacks” on both sides?
  - 5upplied_demand 8mo ago
    The Bakke decision in 1978 upheld that race could be used as a factor in admissions. Your counter-example is precedent from 50 years ago. Does that same precedent exist in this tariff case? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_California_v._Bakke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...
philistine 8mo ago
The whole legal apparatus of the US doesn't want to hear that but your laws suck. They're flawed because of the political system borne of compromise with parties incapable of whipping their members to just vote in favour of a law they don't fully agree with.
- epolanski 8mo ago
  This is a global issue, laws aren't math formulas, law is interpreted, hence the need of judges.
- vkou 8mo ago
  That's the case in any country where a parliamentary body is split so closely. When you need every vote to get legislature to pass, because you control 51% of a chamber, backbenchers on the ideological fringe of a party, (DINOs and RINOs) have a lot of power. When you have a majority with comfortable margins, you can care a lot less about what the Sinemas and Manchins and McCains of a party think.
  - philistine 8mo ago
    You're looking at the world with your American blinders on. The rest of the world's elected representatives vote with their party or they leave their party. What you're describing is a fundamentally American phenomenon.
    - 0xDEAFBEAD 8mo ago
      But parties typically have to compromise with other parties in their coalition, so it would seem to amount to the same thing (compromise is required to pass legislation)?
      - vkou 8mo ago
        Correct. The difference between FPTP and PR systems (Or countries with very strong regional parties) is that in a multi-party PR system, the coalition happens between party, in a FPTP two-party system, the coalition happens within the big tentpole parties. There are many reasons for why two-party FPTP sucks, but this phenomena is present in multi-party systems, too. And, of course, sometimes politicians end up crossing the aisle, much to the chagrin of the party whip.
rtkwe 8mo ago
Old laws are often superseded or modified by newer legislation that's not novel or rare. This one wasn't because it hadn't been so roundly abused by previous presidents that it had been an issue worth taking up. It's the same with a lot of delegated powers, the flexibility and decreased response time is good when it's constrained by norms and the idea of independent agencies but a terrible idea when the supreme court has been slowly packed with little king makers in waiting wanting to invest all executive power in the President. [0] [0] Unless that's power over the money (ie Federal Reserve) because that's a special and unique institution. (ie: they know giving the president the power over the money printer would be disastrous and they want to be racist and rich not racist and poor.)
Paradigma11 8mo ago
An additional problem seems to be that this law had some congressional check that has been ruled unconstitutional since.

entuno 8mo ago

And that it took this long to get an answer to that question.

loeg 8mo ago
This is relatively fast for an issue to move through the courts.
- kingofmen 8mo ago
  Yes. "Relatively". We really need a fast-track process for genuinely insane nonsense to get shot down in a matter of days, not months.
  - parineum 8mo ago
    The fast track is congress clarifying their own shit. Courts are slow, it's a feature not a bug.
  - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
    It takes a long time for something to get through all the appeals. Getting an injunction to put a stop to something during the appeals doesn't take that long. The problem in this case is that Congress made such a mess of the law that the lower court judges didn't think the outcome obvious enough to grant the injunction.
    - jeffbee 8mo ago
      As pointed out in other comments this process is entirely by choice of the court. In other cases where they just felt like ruling on something they have put things on their emergency docket and ruled on them immediately. Letting this situation ride for a year was a choice by the court.
      - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
        Not doing something you could have done is frequently less of a choice and more of a lack of bandwidth to simultaneously consider everything which is happening at the same time. The vast majority of cases don't make it onto the emergency docket.

karel-3d 8mo ago

The thing is he usually cannot but sometimes can. The issue is around "sometimes".

danlitt 8mo ago

[flagged]

loeg 8mo ago

Two of the justices would be happy to let Trump get away with murder. It's not that the law is ill-defined so much as a few justices are extremely partisan. Happily, a quorum of saner heads came about in this instance.

irishcoffee 8mo ago
It sure is interesting how different things might be if RBG and Biden had stepped down instead of doing... whatever it was they did instead.
- ceejayoz 8mo ago
  It'd be interesting if Biden had taken the new doctrine of presidential immunity to heart in the last few months of his term.
  - idontwantthis 8mo ago
    A true hero would have done whatever it took to pack the SC and then resigned.
    - parineum 8mo ago
      "Whatever it took" is just appointing more judges. The president can do that. Unfortunately, the result would be that Trump would have just packed it the other direction and this case would have gone the opposite way. Are you should that would have been a good idea?
      - ceejayoz 8mo ago
        > Unfortunately, the result would be that Trump… ...would have been sentenced for his 34 felony convictions and probably never get reelected?
        idontwantthis 8mo ago

mastax 8mo ago

It seems likely to me the ruling took this long because John Roberts wanted to get a more unanimous ruling. Additionally, the law in this case isn’t ill defined whatsoever. Alito, Thomas, and to a lesser extent Kavanaugh are just partisan hacks. For many years I wanted to believe they had a consistent and defensible legal viewpoint, even if I thought it was misguided. However the past six years have destroyed that notion. They’re barely even trying to justify themselves in most of these rulings; and via the shadow docket frequently deny us even that barest explanation.

RetpolineDrama 8mo ago
[flagged]
- tyre 8mo ago
  It’s not an absurd scenario. The law was written specifically to allow blocking imports from a country. The nuance is that nothing Congress passed granted to right to tax. Additionally, they did grant the power to partially block imports. Nothing says you have to enact “no imports from Japan” vs. “no imports of networking equipment from Lichtenstein.”
  - RetpolineDrama 8mo ago
    >The law was written specifically to allow blocking imports from a country. The precise wording is regulate. The idea that "regulate" means you can turn it on or off with no in-between is beyond parody. Absurd. Hilarious. Farcical. That said the headline is misleading and should be renamed, nothing is changing from this ruling.
    - Starman_Jones 8mo ago
      The precise wording is "investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit..."
- mexicocitinluez 8mo ago

nitwit005 8mo ago

They all agree. A couple of them just chose to pretend they didn't.

Sparkle-san 8mo ago

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zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
Did you actually read it? Seems unlikely. I agree with the majority but I think the dissent does make some ok points.
- deleted 8mo ago
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deleted 8mo ago

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duped 8mo ago

The opinion should merely read > The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises (which it does, and expounds upon)

zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
Yes but in practice they delegate this power to the executive. Congress doesn’t run the IRS themselves after all
- joshuamorton 8mo ago
  They don't delegate the policymaking. Tax code is always congressionally approved, and I'm unaware of any even remote argument that changing tax policy is delegated to the executive. OTOH enforcement of congressional policies is basically always the role of the executive, so the fact that the IRS exists and does things doesn't really impact delegation.
- dragonwriter 8mo ago
  > Yes but in practice they delegate this power to the executive. No, they do not delegate the power to lay (set) taxes to the executive, they do assign the executive the function of collecting the taxes laid by Congress. > Congress doesn’t run the IRS themselves after all The IRS doesn't freely set taxes, it collects the taxes set by Congress.
  - Spivak 8mo ago
    The moment Congress authorizes that the Executive may use discretion then the Executive can effectively levy taxes. They may be wielding a bat owned by someone else, but who swings it is ultimately what's important. Now I'm generally of the opinion that Congress shouldn't be allowed to give the Executive discretion but seems no one agrees with that and Congress would rather let the Executive write "not quite laws" on their behalf.
  - davorak 8mo ago
    > No, they do not delegate the power to lay (set) taxes to the executive, they do assign the executive the function of collecting the taxes laid by Congress. The quote from the constitution is "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes," not for the executive to collect taxes. If they can delegate collecting to IRS in the executive branch, why not can they not delegate the "Power To lay" taxes?

onlyrealcuzzo 8mo ago

Statutory Law is 50,000 pages, and that's just the beginning of everything you need to consider. Make stupid laws, win stupid prizes. It's almost like the legal system is designed so that you can get away with murder if you can afford enough lawyers.

fwip 8mo ago
Of which, only a small fraction will be relevant in any particular case. It's kind of like pointing at any major codebase and arguing that it's "stupid" to have millions of lines of code.

keernan 8mo ago

>apparently so ill defined in law that 9 justices can't agree on it That is not how the Supreme Court works. SCOTUS is a political body. Justices do one thing: cast votes. For any reason. If they write an opinion it is merely their post hoc justification for their vote. Otherwise they do not have to explain anything. And when they do write an opinion it does not necessarily reflect the real reason for the way they voted. Edit: Not sure why anyone is downvoting this comment. I was a trial attorney for 40+ years. If you believe what I posted is legally inaccurate, then provide a comment. But downvoting without explaining is ... just ... I don't know ... cowardly?

fuzzfactor 8mo ago
>downvoting without explaining is ... just ... Like I've said before, if you can't tell whether it's a bot or a real person voting, it doesn't matter anyway. Might as well be a bot either way. corrective upvote made
- keernan 8mo ago
  It never occurred to me that bots are voting on threads. In the age of AI agents, that's pretty dumb of me.

tokai 8mo ago

In normal democracies you have multiple parties, so there is a much better chance of creating a coalition around the government and force election/impeachment if the leadership goes rouge. The US system turned out to be as fragile as it looks.

dmix 8mo ago
The failure of the US is not so much in judicial system (with some recent exceptions) mostly in how weak Congress has been for over a decade as executive power expands (arguably since Bush and including during Obama). The system was designed to prevent that from happening from the very beginning with various layers of checks on power, but the public keeps wanting a president to blame and fix everything. The judicial branch has been much more consistent on this matter with some recent exceptions with the Unitary executive theory becoming more popular in the courts. Ultimately no system can't stop that if there is a societal culture that tolerates the drumbeat of authoritarianism and centralization of power.

cael450 8mo ago

It really isn't ill-defined at all. Both the constitution and the law allowing the president to impose tariffs for national security reasons is clear. There are just some partisan hacks on the Supreme Court.

tyre 8mo ago
This specific law does not allow imposing tariffs, which is the whole point of the ruling. Roberts’s opinion says that a tariff is essentially a tax, which is not what Congress clearly delegated.
nutjob2 8mo ago
Wrong law. Trump chose not to use the "impose tariffs for national security reasons" law in this case.

deleted 8mo ago

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allywilson 8mo ago

But that's not the issue. 'can the President unilaterally impose tariffs on any country he wants anytime he wants' No, he can't impost tariffs on any country. He can only impose tariffs on American companies willing to import from any country.

shevy-java 8mo ago

It kind of shows that the USA does not have that strong means against becoming a dictatorship. George Washington probably did not think through the problem of the superrich bribing the whole system into their own use cases to be had.

hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago

It’s one of the few things in the U.S. constitution that is not ill defined. Tariffs are very explicitly the prerogative of Congress. The fact that the administration of tariffs is so much better defined than really anything else shouldn’t be surprising because tariffs is the proximate cause of the Revolutionary war. It’s embarrassing that the 3 justices put their partisanship ahead of the clear language of the constitution and explicitly stated intentions of the founders.