Useful site for daily tariff updates: Trade Compliance Resource Hub.[1]
They've marked which tariffs are now invalid and which are still valid.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.tradecomplianceresourcehub.com/2026/02/20/trump-2-0-tariff-tracker/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tradecomplianceresourcehub.com/2026/02/20/trump-...</a>
Am I understanding this right?<p>1) US customer pays huge import tax on imported goods in the form of higher prices.<p>2) Seller sends the collected tax to the US government<p>3) US government will refund all/most of that tax back to the seller after this ruling<p>4) Seller gets to keep the returned tax money as pure profit (no refund to customer)
This will be so in some cases, but there are extra steps in others.<p>e.g. In a different path, 1 and 2 are the same, but things then diverge.<p>3) To recoup some of those tariff costs, the company sells the rights to any potential future tariff refunds. They recoup a portion of what they paid immediately but hand away the right to a full refund to another party, such as Cantor Fitzgerald. The seller <i>might</i> use this to reduce prices for their customers, but probably won't. They'll set prices according to what the market will support.<p>4) US government will refund all/most of that tax back to companies, like Cantor Fitzgerald, that bought the rights to tariff refunds.<p>5) Seller doesn't get any extra money back, so there's no money to refund to consumers.<p>IMPORTANT NOTE: Cantor Fitzgerald, while just one of the companies doing this, was formerly headed by Howard Lutnick and is currently owned and operated by his sons.
The importer pays the tax and passes it on as higher prices to the consumer. So the importers are the one that had the tax collected from them and would be getting the refund.<p>The importer CAN be the seller, but other times the importer is a middleman in the supply chain.
To the CPAs among us: will the refunded import taxes be treated as extra profit for all the importers who paid them?<p>I could see an argument that they don't have a legal obligation to pass the refunds on to their customers, any more than my local grocery store owes me 5 cents for the gallon of milk I bought last year if the store discovers that their wholesaler had been mistakenly overcharging them.
The idea of getting a refund for mischaracterized tariffs is actually fairly common (it's called a duty drawback and there's a cottage industry around this). It's generally used when an importer incorrectly categorized their import under an HS code that has a higher duty than the correctly categorized HS code.<p>The difference this time is the scale is orders of magnitude larger. Will be interesting to see how they (importers and CBP) work through this.
Smart money is that they will make some token comment about "leave it up to the states" or lower courts and then do absolutely nothing about it
> The difference this time is the scale is orders of magnitude larger.<p>The administration will just do nothing. They need 3 maneuvers for this to drag out longer than Trump 2.<p>There is no intention to follow the law here.
I think the tax is basically on the profit made when you add up costs and expenses. Say:<p>Before: Importer pays China $10 for widget, pays $2 duty, sells to shop for $12 - profit zero, tax on that zero.<p>Now: Paid $10 for widget. Paid $2 duty, sold for $12, $2 refunded - profit $2, pays tax on the $2.<p>At least that's the normal way of doing accounting. There can be odd exceptions and complications in local laws.
Yes, I think that's the starting point. Another part of my question was whether a CPA applying GAAP would recommend recognizing the $2 as other income, or else as a liability against a future claim from the customer who bought the widget and is now seeking a partial refund.<p>I did what passes for research these days and concluded that if the claim is "probable and estimable," then it could be recorded as a "contingent liability" rather than other income. Relevant facts would include whether the tariff refund included a pass-through refund mandate (unlikely with this administration), or whether class actions for refunds against merchants were pending (inevitable).
I got charged a $600 tariff from UPS to ship a $30 25-pound sandbag into the US from Canada.<p>UPS didn't even deliver the product.<p>I'm suing them in small claims.<p>We'll see what happens.<p>I imagine that even after the ruling, our ass backwards legal system will somehow say this makes sense, even though the tariff rate was never near high enough for that bill to make any sense.<p>Further, they're going to get refunded the $10 it MIGHT have cost them.
Related question, unanswerable except maybe as a rough estimate: how much will it cost, in accountant/bookkeeper time, to do all the administrivia required to process all these refunds?
That's a great question. I would also love to know that answer. I agree with you that they're not going to share the refund if the importer was the middleman in the supply chain, and same thing if the importer was also the seller.
at the end of the day, it's average joe who bought his things more expensive, and he won't get back his money.<p>That's what matters, don't care if it's the seller or a middleman that gets this money.<p>That's really a shame for american citizens, i'd be furious if i was american.
Many are beyond furious
Many voted for this
Very few people voted for tariffs, specifically. They voted for a promise of a return to a world where they were on top.
These people are not necessary against tariff, they are against paying more for their stuff and having it benefit some middleman because the current government messed up badly.<p>I can otherwise understand how people would agree on paying more for their stuff if it allows their fellow citizens to have a job.
Yeah, I honestly have not been one of those "it's just a negotiating tactic" people and have instead been saying this whole time that I understand why tariffs (and the end of de minimis) are needed at the moment. Seeing Temu ads all over TV and the internet flouting word-for-word that I can "shop like a millionaire" to buy their cheap, disposable, polluting, unethically-produced junk, while I'm not making enough to actually live comfortably (with many worse off than me), comes across as a real and obvious problem to me that needs to be nipped in the bud despite whatever short-term dollars I might save by buying Temu knock-offs on a regular basis. (And I do import personal purchases from overseas a few times a year, and have put my money where my mouth is when it comes to paying tariffs on those.)<p>I obviously am not particularly happy about the tariffs being struck down like a lot of people are. And having paid those tariffs thinking they were at least legitimate tariffs, I'm also not super happy that I won't be seeing that money come back to me (neither in the form of services paid for by taxes, nor in the form of a refund). It's a crappy situation all around.<p>I won't sit here and claim the Supreme Court got it wrong, but it does make me wish the administration had worked more carefully to do it in a legal way the first time, for example, or that Congress had been involved to achieve it since the administration's party controlled them this whole time, anyway.
So they basically figured out how to bribe all these companies?<p>Such a kleptocracy.
i read that Costco could actually refund everyone, as they can know exactly who bought what.<p>If they do, that's another matter, but they definitely can.
Or maybe this is used to justify a new emergency federal law that all purchases must be reported on your tax return, just in case the government ever needs to refund any illegally collected import taxes.<p>I think I'm kidding, but I'm not really sure anymore.
There have been no decisions about refunds. The court avoided addressing that.<p>That topic will surely go back to the courts, kicking and screaming
In October, I bought a $250 product from a Canadian company + about $30 shipping & taxes and thought I was good. A few weeks later, FedEx sends me an $92 bill for the duty that they had to pay. I just ignored it since I was never given that notice up front. If they really wanted it, they could have had the vendor contact me. But at least they're not getting that bit of profit now.
I'm also ignoring a bill, from UPS, that is a few bucks of duty and a much larger $14 fee. Presumably the large fee is because UPS isn't meant to collect taxes, but they can suck it.
For what it’s worth, FedEx paid the tariff on your behalf .<p>You owe them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they withhold future packages to your address until you settle up.
Seller wasn’t involved in the tariffs. Rather the importer paid them, etc.
> Seller wasn’t involved in the tariffs. Rather the importer paid them<p>Strictly speaking it depends on the Incoterms agreed upon by the seller and buyer[1]. If the Incoterms are DDP, then the seller should pay import duties and taxes and as such is involved.<p>Of course sellers are typically trying to run a business, so they'll bake the taxes and import duties into the sales price. So effectively the buyer ends up paying for it, just indirectly.<p>This was relevant when the tariffs were introduced, as sellers with DDP goods in transit had committed to a sales price which included any tariffs and would have to swallow the extra costs when they got the bill from the freight forwarder.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoterms#Allocations_of_risks_to_buyer/seller_according_to_Incoterms_2020" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoterms#Allocations_of_risks...</a>
Who pays the importer?
Seller doing the importing, so they pay the foreign entity for their goods and sends the appropriate cut to the US Government. At that point, they either eat the additional cost of business or make their customers do so. Or something in between.<p>Tariffs are like a national sales tax.
I guess by seller parent means the US company who sold the product to the US customer not the seller who sold it to that company.
Sometimes the consumer (more) directly pays when buying from overseas, most of the time you're right it gets rolled into the price at checkout if the company is large enough or just in larger prices buying in the US. I've had a few packages I had to pay extra import duties on with the UPS/FedEx agent fees tacked on top mostly kickstarters.
Or the government will not refund, and add more illegal tariffs. That wouldn’t be surprising, unfortunately
Can I get compensation from UPS or FedEx for making me pay illegal tariffs - and making me pay a fee to them for processing it too?<p>(I know the answer is practically ’no’, but it does still seem to me that the bureaucracy and companies that went along with this obviously illegal operation bear some culpability...)
> Can I get compensation from UPS or FedEx for making me pay illegal tariffs - and making me pay a fee to them for processing it too?<p>I can see why you are mad, but it seems like the were fulfilling their legal obligation (at the time).<p>The good news is that having directly paid UPS and not a middleman makes it much more likely that you will receive the money back. If anybody does.
That's be nice, but I place more blame on the half of Congress that was OK with this.
If everyone sued them in small claims over it, there probably would be a whole lot of default judgments.
There are usually a few companies between the importer and the consumer. So the importers could only refund the business they sold it to and likely won't if nothing was specified in the purchase contract.<p>Though this is obviously a first so expect a billion lawsuits about this.
When I have bought things internationally, I have always been the one doing the importing. This means I paid some Trump taxes and I will get my money back.
I think people are getting ahead of themselves on the refund business. Refunds might be on the table, they also may not be. It may be a years long battle. Trump and co might put up enough resistance that many firms find it too costly to fight.
> Seller gets to keep the returned tax money as pure profit (no refund to customer)<p>Elections have consequences.
Most of the total tax collected seems to have been absorbed by the importers, lowering margins.
Where did you hear that? It is conclusively the opposite: <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tariffs-consumers-business-nearly-90-percent-new-york-federal-reserve/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tariffs-consumers-busines...</a>
The price of googs this last year bed to differ. Maybe for some bigger companies on certain products but what stores like Walmart did was spread the price increase across all products so it wasn’t as obvious. And that’s now where it’s going to suck the most, prices are not going to come down. Ends up being a free handout to them.
Why do we repeatedly say that tarrifs are passed off in full to the consumer in the form of higher prices? Isn't that as obviously wrong as the argument for them, that they're paid entirely by the other countries?<p>Is there a reason to believe, or evidence, that it's not a mixture of the two?<p>edit: I want to highlight esseph's reply has a link to evidence that last year's tarrifs were passed off 90% to consumers, which is exactly the type of info I was looking for.
For goods for which no domestic equivalent alternatives exist, why would the foreign suppliers lower their prices to compensate for the tariffs (which are paid by the importers to the government)? More generally, the cost of the tariffs will be split between foreign suppliers and local importers/consumers according to the competitiveness and availability of domestic suppliers, and according to market elasticity for the respective goods.
Well, they would likely have to lower their profit margin because the demand is reduced by the higher prices. Fewer purchasers will want to/be able to buy the item at the higher price. The supply and demand curve will find a new equilibrium, but it isn’t like the sellers are going to sell the exact same quantity of items with the price exactly increased by the tariff amount.
That assumes that demand is meaningfully elastic, that suppliers have room in their margins to absorb it, and that they're willing to. That is obviously not the case for a lot of things.<p>Products with inelastic or less elastic demand we can skip over because it's pretty self explanatory.<p>Products like the random cheap widgets a lot of us would buy from random Chinese sellers are often high volume low margin products with a lot of competition. Think about stuff like a USB->TTL serial board that's basically two connectors, one cloned chip, and a few supporting components on a single layer PCB. Hypothetically this is an ideal case for free market economics and these things should have already been basically as cheap as they can be at every step in the chain.<p>For less competitive items, particularly lower volume specialty items, a vendor may also decide that it's just not worth sacrificing profits in other markets by letting them know there's room to come down. A lot of the independent hardware designers I've been wanting to buy things from sell out every batch one way or another so they just don't care, demand exceeds supply even if demand from the US is reduced. Others have decided the volatility of the situation just isn't worth it with the risk of products getting delayed or additional charges added resulting in chargebacks and lost products and have simply stopped selling to the US altogether.
It is a mixture of the two. But my reading of various studies indicates that in this mixture, the majority was passed to consumers in the form of higher prices.
> by the other countries<p>That makes zero sense. You mean “by lowering the profit margin on the goods sold to the US by that specific company”.<p>Countries don’t pay tarrifs (bar state intervention), companies do.<p>But yes, it’s probably a mix of the two: raising prices and lowering profit margins.
Here's evidence : <a href="https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/news/americas-own-goal-americans-pay-almost-entirely-for-trumps-tariffs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/news/americas-own-g...</a><p>"Importers and consumers in the US bear 96 percent of the tariff burden."
"American consumers bore 90% of last year's nearly six-fold tariff increase, adding $1,000-$2,400 to average household budgets, despite overall inflation dropping to 2.4% in January 2026."<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2026/02/15/consumers-are-paying-more-in-tariffs-as-inflation-cools/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2026/02/15/consumers...</a>
What an odd thing to say.<p>The businesses in the other countries are, you know, businesses. Even if it were Chinese companies that were paying the tariffs, that will be baked into the cost of the good.<p>This is literally first-day economics. No such thing as a free lunch. The cost of the item that the end user pays should reflect <i>all</i> costs associated with production and distribution to that end user.<p>I have no idea how the fuck the rumor that these tariffs will be “paid by other countries” started. If there are suspicions that the tariffs are temporary then they might be willing to eat the cost temporarily so it’s not passed onto the consumer immediately, but that’s inherently temporary and not sustainable especially if it would make it so these companies are losing money.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff</a><p><pre><code> A tariff or import tax is a duty imposed by a national government, customs territory, or supranational union on imports of goods and is paid by the importer. Exceptionally, an export tax may be levied on exports of goods or raw materials and is paid by the exporter.
</code></pre>
If an analysis says that "domestic consumers are paying 90%" of a tariff then they are simplifying the process that others are describing here as "baked into the cost" and I would say, more accurately, "the cost of tariffs are recouped from consumers/businesses by those who paid them (the importer)"<p><pre><code> The economic burden of tariffs falls on the importer, the exporter, and the consumer. [Wikipedia]
</code></pre>
If economists are saying "consumers pay tariffs" then I would expect to see a notation on the price tags and a line-item on my receipts, but the cost of the tariff must be paid by the importer, or there won't be a consumer who can purchase the goods, let alone bear the costs of their tariffs.
The importer is the consumer...
I am just saying that it <i>eventually</i> is paid by the end user, regardless of the bureaucratic steps in between. We can try and figure out who is <i>directly</i> paying them but I feel like that detail is unnecessary to my overall point.
US Consumers pay in fungible dollars, and so if your company paid for three pizzas eaten by an AWS team, and I paid for 1 ounce of Maersk fuel oil, and our Starbucks venti latte purchases paid to rethatch Juan Valdez's hut, who can even trace the serial numbers on our $1 bills?
> then I would expect to see a notation on the price tags and a line-item on my receipts,<p>Trump started threatening anyone who was going to do that, because he doesn't want his face attached to price hikes.
> The cost of the item that the end user pays should reflect all costs associated with production and distribution to that end user.<p>Eh, standard business school logic these days is that if you want to maximize profits, you should charge what the market will bear, not your costs + some fixed profit.<p>So if you're already charging what the market will bear, there may be more wiggle room to absorb some of the hit of tariffs, so long as it still leaves you making enough profit or in a favorable position. It still comes down to what maximizes tariffs: at higher prices, demand drops, but at lower prices, your profit/item drops.<p>Still, yeah, from what I understand, the bulk of the tariff costs were passed along to customers.
Sure, there might be some wiggle room in <i>some</i> of the margins, and when tariffs were like 10% that might have been something close to “sustainable”, but that doesn’t extrapolate forever. When Trump enacted 125% tariffs on China, they by definition couldn’t eat the cost.
> I have no idea how the fuck the rumor that these tariffs will be “paid by other countries” started.<p>It's what POTUS was saying since day 1. That we've been getting ripped off and we're gonna make the other countries pay us etc etc etc.<p>It is, as I said in the post, obviously wrong - but that's where it comes from.
It wasn't a "rumor" it was explicit deliberate disinformation. Unfortunately many people in the US have insufficient education and accurate news feeds to realize.<p>See also: disinformation that "other countries charge us the same tariffs", which turns out to be either a plain lie, or they mean VAT (a sales tax, like we have in the US).
Here's Trump's claims debunked in detail: <a href="https://www.factcheck.org/2025/08/recapping-trumps-deceptive-tariff-claims/" rel="nofollow">https://www.factcheck.org/2025/08/recapping-trumps-deceptive...</a><p>"But we found that Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariff rates weren’t based on tariffs that other countries charged on goods coming from the U.S. Instead, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative came up with the rates by dividing the size of a country’s trade imbalance with the U.S. in goods by how much America imports in goods from that nation. "
Well, the analysis by the Federal Reserve said that domestic entities (consumers and companies) paid 90% of it. So, yes, saying that consumers pay it all is wrong, but it's <i>less</i> wrong than saying that foreign countries pay it all.<p>I don't recall seeing a split between domestic consumers and domestic companies, but I'm fairly sure that consumers are paying more than the 10% that foreign entities are.
It's much more true than saying that the foreign company pays it. Depends on how much slack there is in profit margins for both the exporter and importer, but the consumer does pay most of it, like 90%.
I don't think tariffs should be imposed capriciously at the President's whim.<p>But I do think tariffs are an appropriate policy tool that should be used to protect US companies against overseas competitors that get government subsidies or other unfair advantages: Low wages, safety regulations, worker protection, environmental rules, etc.
Yep, that's why you need to convince Congress of that fact, as has been done in the past. Tariffs absolutely make sense as a strategic tool. There is no strategy here.
> There is no strategy here.<p>Unless the money is fully accounted and restituted, I believe we can assume what the strategy is.
This ruling like most of the kleptocracy, will show the kleptocrats who is willing to lick boot and who will not. The goal, whether extrinsic or intrinsic, is to find the fascist threats and harm them.<p>This specifically will happen when businesses request the legal refund and the "deep state" gets to decide whether they deserve a refund.
Ever try to get Congress to agree on something without packaging in another thing?
I agree with the sentiment, but that is completely unrelated to the topic at hand.<p>Just because Congress is stuck doesn't mean the Executive gets to do whatever they want.
I think a lot of time Congress being stuck is a feature, not a bug.<p>What happens when things aren't stuck, they change too much, in both frequency and magnitude. Kind of like when one person in the executive branch gets to make the rules. It's utter chaos and uncertainty on the business environment, even on the consumer environment, they have no idea what anything costs anymore. Am I paying double from a year ago because of tariffs or because it's easy for the seller to say tariffs, I'll never know. As a business, should I charge more now in anticipation for future uncertainty, has seemed simultaneously unfair and prudent. Now, should I reduce prices to go back to pre-tariff or just pocket it and call it inflation. Uncertainty is chaos, it's hard to plan for anything or make big decisions. This is why high(er) rates didn't hurt the housing market but all the Trump related uncertainty did.
With Congress <i>completely</i> stuck, the executive branch takes over a lot of functions that probably belong to the legislature. I say "probably" because the Constitution isn't really explicit about it, but it's what most people would infer.<p>The executive branch is less accountable than the legislative one. You elect only the top office, and only once every four years. With so much bundled into a single vote, it's nearly impossible to hold any specific action to account.<p>It doesn't work out great for the judicial branch, either. They often rule that a decision is based on the law as written, and it's up to the legislature to fix that -- while knowing full well that the legislature can't and won't. And they're not consistent about that; they'll also interpret a law to favor their ideology, and again Congress is in no position to clarify the intended interpretation.<p>Congress was deliberately set up to favor inaction, and not without reason. But that has reached the point where it practically doesn't even exist as a body, and its ability to serve as a check on the other branches has vanished, leading to even more abuses.
Congress could stop this nonsense tomorrow. The problem is not the body's powers, the problem is that the GOP is happy with Trump doing whatever the hell he wants.<p>Vote the GOP out, and he'll be impeached.
It is because your congress and political system don't need coalition governments orvaby kind of agreements, winner takes it all. A true multy party system wpuld be mote flexible and less prone to catering to extremes on the left or right
The problem is we've kicked this can down the road for decades. We can't just let the president perform Congress's job, no matter how "stuck" they are.
I agree with this assessment. And I think that the way it's setup in the constitution is correct, that congress needs to ultimately create the tariffs rather than the president. Creating tariffs unilaterally should almost never happen.
I agree with you, but it's a tool that should only be used very sparingly because tariffs can be incredibly difficult to get rid of. See for example the "chicken tax" for light trucks which was instituted in 1964 (because the Europeans tariffed US chicken exports).
We have laws explicitly for imposing tariffs for these reasons (like Trade Expansion Act of 1962, Trade Act of 1974)<p>The difference is they have to go through administrative procedure, and are subject to more judicial review to ensure administrative process was followed. Even if its a fig leaf in this administrative, its a tad slower with higher judicial oversight.<p>What Trump wants to do is impose tariffs on a whim using emergency powers where administrative procedure laws don't apply.<p>So the hope here: we have at least more predictability / stability in the tariff regime. But tariffs aren't going away
These tariffs have no basis in rational economics.<p>Full stop. It really is only about whether or not the president could do it.<p>That's all.
Do you agree with countries doing the opposite to the US? When for example US tech is better than the local alternative but the countries create unfair advantages to the local alternatives?
I believe as a US citizen I have no say in how they make these decisions so this thought exercise is pointless. We all structure our governments differently and so compete globally with differing rules, I only care about how we do it here in the US. At times, <i>what we do</i> may be in reaction to others, but <i>how we do</i> it needs to be agreed upon here at home and for that we have a Constitution that gives this power to congress not the executive. I'm glad the court got it right, it's a glimmer of hope that the constitution still has some meaning.
This has nothing to do with tariffs and everything to do with us companies hsving an unfair advantage or justnot following EU regulations. Or musk trying to interfere in our politics and supporting extreme right wing parties. Also us government having access to our cloud data, etc.
All our advertising money goes to the US to google/fb, because everyone is using them, not because they are inherently better at anything, for example.
> Do you agree with countries doing the opposite to the US?<p>Yes, please! Maximally efficient is minimally robust.<p>We need <i>robustness</i> in the global economy more than some megajillionaire needs another half cent per customer in profit.<p>In addition, we need competition in a lot of areas where we have complete consolidation right now. The only way to get that is to give some protection to the little guys while they grow.
That is not an unfair advantage, but protecting their domestic industries for reasons unrelated to the quality of the tech, for example to keep people in active employment, prevent bankruptcies, allow an industry to get up to speed, or a lot of other reasons entirely unrelated to the USA. All of these are valid; any country gets to decide who they want to allow on their markets, and to what conditions.<p>That is not what Trump has been doing, though. Using tariffs as retaliatory measures? As a threat because he didn’t get to "own" Greenland?<p>Let’s stop comparing sane political strategies to the actions of a narcissistic madman.
Absolutely!
>Do you agree with countries doing the opposite to the US?<p>If their laws allow their leaders to enact tariffs then sure, they're welcome to do it. Foreign relations is complicated partially because countries operate differently. In the US, Congress is supposed to levy taxes and impose tariffs. Not the president. This game of nibbling (now chomping) at the edges of that clearly outlined role needs to end.<p>>When for example US tech is better than the local alternative but the countries create unfair advantages to the local alternatives?<p>We can still enact tariffs and similar policies. We have the same mechanisms they do. I don’t understand what is so “unfair.” Trump just seems to call everything he doesn’t like “unfair.”
Maybe in rare cases, but for each of the various policy goals tariffs are used for, there are other kinds of targeted industrial policy that work better and cost less.<p>Tariffs are the most expensive way to try to onshore manufacturing. The cost per "job created" is astronomical usually. They incentivize corruption and black markets.<p>Even regular old subsidies are usually easier, cheaper, and less problematic
They can be and are. The USA had tariffs on many products prior to Trump.
Good news ! It is against the law (i.e., illegal) for a US President to impose tariffs (on a whim or otherwise) -- a US President doing so is doing so illegally and without constitutional authority!<p>When the US President commits crimes as the US President, he has absolute immunity from prosecution (otherwise, he might not be emboldened to break the law) so there is no judicial recourse, but the US Congress can still see the illegal activity and impeach and remove him from office to stop the execution of illegal activity. As our representatives within the US Government, they are responsible to us to enact our legislative outcomes. It appears they have determined that the illegal activity is what we wanted, or there would be articles of impeachment for these illegal acts.<p>The legislative branch can of course deliberately impose tariffs at any time for the reasons you listed.
Agree, and it should be Congress decision.
That's the issue: He used an emergency act passed in the 1970s designed for rapid response to other countries' "first strike" of economic hardship like the oil embargo.<p>Tariffs in general have not been touched at all, those that Congress wishes to pass. This is a ruling that the President cannot use the 1970s act to be a one-person economic warfare machine to the entire world when he doesn't like something.
Or treaties or accords. All basically the same if squint. Sign something like the Paris Accord, you’re basically taxing consumers.
Thoughtful application of tariffs are good.<p>Trump's usage of tariffs is pretty damn dumb.
Great news for people who had to bend over backwards pretending this disruptive, nakedly corrupt behavior was "good, actually."<p>But unfortunately, there are other channels for them to effectively do the same thing, as discussed in oral arguments. So still not a major win for American manufacturers or consumers, I fear.
Sure, but now SCOTUS can say they are <i>not</i> a rubber stamp for POTUS. "See, we just ruled against him. Sure, it's a case that doesn't really solve anything and only causes more chaos, but we disagreed with him. This one time."
Yep.<p>The president doing horribly fascist things with ICE like obliterating habeas corpus? Using the military to murder people in the ocean without trial? That's fine.<p>Screwing with <i>the money</i>? Not okay.<p>See also how the prez is allowed to screw with any congressional appointees <i>except</i> the federal reserve.
When they rule for Trump it’s proof they are just a rubber stamp. When they rule against Trump it’s somehow also proof they are a rubber stamp?
How do you get that from what I wrote?
SCOTUS rules for the rich and powerful. Most of the time Trump is aligned with them. Sometimes he does dumb shit like tariffs, or things that upset the order the rich and powerful want to maintain, and they rule against him.
> ...but we disagreed with him. This one time.<p>They've actually done so numerous times already and have several cases on the docket that look to be leaning against him as well. There's a reason why most serious pundits saw this ruling coming a mile away, because SCOTUS has proven to not be a puppet of the administration.
>because SCOTUS has proven to not be a puppet of the administration.<p>Several justices are openly taking bribes
Except for the 3 that dissented
Except for all the other blatantly unconstitutional rulings in his favor. Presidential immunity one will go down in history as a black stain on America and the courts.<p>and still this current ruling was a 6-3 vote.
I was flabbergasted that SCOTUS actually said that the concept of no man being above the law had caveats.
Earnestly, I think you need to actually read that opinion. They said some things the president does, he is immune for. And they pushed it back down to the lower courts to define the categories of official acts they laid out.
A hallmark of the Roberts court is leaving something <i>technically</i> intact, but practically gutted and dead.<p>You can still <i>technically</i> bring charges against the president for things they do while in office.<p>Practically speaking, after that ruling, you cannot, short of hypothetical scenarios so incredibly unlikely and egregious that even the incredibly unlikely and egregious acts of this administration don't meet that bar.
The damage goes far beyond the wallets of business and consumers. The unilateral, arbitrary tariff setting has little do with money and everything to do with the power it gave Trump. And was one of the primary instruments used to destroy relationships with our foreign allies including our closes neighbor..
> Great news for people who had to bend over backwards pretending this disruptive, nakedly corrupt behavior was "good, actually."<p>Actually they’re still doing it. I saw it not 2 minutes after seeing this post initially. The justifications for why they were “good, actually” has gotten increasingly vague though.
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.
It seems likely to me the ruling took this long because John Roberts wanted to get a more unanimous ruling.<p>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.
> For many years I wanted to believe they had a consistent and defensible legal viewpoint, even if I thought it was misguided.<p>Watching from across the Atlantic, I was always fascinated by Scalia's opinions (especially his dissents). I usually vehemently disagreed with him on principle (and I do believe his opinions were principled), but I often found myself conceding to his points, from a "what is and what should be are different things" angle.
Scalia wrote some really interesting opinions for sure. Feel like the arguments are only going to get worse :(
Amy Coney Barrett has somewhat taken up the mantel, but her legal reasoning is probably superior.<p>Thomas wants to pretend he's the OG originalist, but I don't think he is anywhere near Barrett's peer.
Kavanaugh clearly isn’t in the same bucket. His votes go either way. I don’t recall seeing a single decision this administration where either Alito or Thomas wrote against a White House position. Not just in case opinions but even in an order. I don’t think we’ve seen a justice act as a stalking horse for the president in this way since Fortas.
Kavanaugh strikes me as principled, but in kind of a Type-A, "well, actually" sort of way where he will get pulled into rabbit holes and want to die on random textual hills.<p>He is all over the map, but not in a way that seems consistent or predictable.
You need to be cautious with the notion of “his votes go either way”. In Hungary, where I’m from, and a Trump kinda guy rules for 16 years, judges vote either way… but they vote against the government only when it doesn’t really matter for the ruling party. Either the government wants a scapegoat anyway why they cannot do something, or just simply nobody cares or even see the consequences. Like the propaganda newspapers are struck down routinely… but they don’t care because nobody, who they really care about, see the consequences of those. So judges can say happily that they are independent, yet they are not at all.<p>This fake independence works so well, that most Hungarians lie themselves that judiciary is free.
Kavanaugh votes either way, but I don't think this is out of principle... I just think he's just kind of an idiot and thinks he can write a justification for just about any of his biases without making those biases obvious. It's kind of apparent if you read his opinions; they tend to be very verbose (his dissent here is 63 pages!) without saying a whole lot, and he gets sloppy with citations, selectively citing precedent in some cases while others he simply hand-waves. Take his opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo (the "Kavanaugh stop" case): there's a reason why no one joined his concurrence.
His reputation will be forever tarnished by "Kavanaugh stops"
Weren’t Sotomator and Jackson the same with Biden? Kagan is much more principled.
In major case, sure. But every last emergency petition? I don’t think so.
> Weren’t Sotomator and Jackson the same with Biden? Kagan is much more principled<p>Very respectfully, there is no comparison between Trump and Biden in this respect. Indeed, the court adopted a new legal concept, the Major Questions Doctrine, to limit Biden continuing the Trump student loan forbearance.
Alito is one of the original proponents of the unitary executive theory (way before he was a Supreme Court justice). Everything he does should be looked at as an attempt to impose said theory and destroy America.
When all of your decisions can be predetermined without even knowing the context of the matter you are surely a hack. It goes like this.....'Does this matter benefit Trump, corporations, rich people or evangelicals?'. Yes? Alito and Thomas will argue its lawful. Every single time.
Extremely biased comment.<p>The SC ruling today:<p>1) Does not stop the president from enacting tariffs, at all. The dissents even spelled out that no actual change would come from this ruling.<p>2) The ruling creates the absurd scenario where the president can (under this specific law) totally ban ALL imports from a country on whim, but not partially via tariffs. It's akin to being able to turn the AC on or off, but not being allowed to set the temperature.<p>As usual, interesting discussion about the nuances of this ruling are happening on X. Reddit and HN comments are consistently low-signal like the above.
It’s not an absurd scenario. The law was written specifically to allow blocking imports from a country.<p>The nuance is that nothing Congress passed granted to right to <i>tax</i>. 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.”
>The law was written specifically to allow blocking imports from a country.<p>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.<p>That said the headline is misleading and should be renamed, nothing is changing from this ruling.
The precise wording is<p>"investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit..."
> discussion about the nuances of this ruling are happening on X<p>I'm sure they are lol.
Thomas isn’t a hack, he’s a shill. And he’s not even trying to be subtle about it. He’s somebody’s bitch and he literally drives around in the toys they bought for him as compensation.<p>If any justice deserves to be impeached it’s him. I can’t believe they approved him in the first place. Anita Hill sends her regards.
I remember being shocked, albeit not surprised, when I read that he had quite a lot of contact with Ron de Santis.<p><a href="https://americanoversight.org/email-suggests-that-supreme-court-justice-thomas-had-been-in-regular-contact-with-florida-gov-desantis/" rel="nofollow">https://americanoversight.org/email-suggests-that-supreme-co...</a>
But the toys are so cheap. It can’t possibly be just a matter of the money, there has to be some blackmail involved. Either that or he was always self hating.
Why would there need to be bribery or blackmail involved? He's ideologically aligned with the goals of the republican party.<p>His patrons lavish him with gifts because they don't want him to retire, not because they want a specific ruling.
Then why accept them and face the embarrassment of being found out not reporting them properly?<p>You are correct compared to the $320k/year salary these empty nesters pull these things seem not that expensive. So why not just save up and buy them himself?<p>Yes, RED FLAG. Because apparently he likes nice things and spending money so much he can't seem to afford them himself or forgo the gifts and spare himself the scandal.
He was gifted a motor coach worth $80,000, and that’s just one of the bigger things he can’t launder.
[flagged]
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.
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.
Wrong law. Trump chose not to use the "impose tariffs for national security reasons" law in this case.
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.
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.
This is a global issue, laws aren't math formulas, law is interpreted, hence the need of judges.
That's the case in any country where a parliamentary body is split so closely.<p>When you need <i>every</i> 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.<p>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.
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]<p>[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.)
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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises<p>[0] <a href="https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C1-1-1/ALDE_00013387/" rel="nofollow">https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C1-1-...</a>
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.
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.
> 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.<p>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.
It's hard for me to pay my taxes
In fairness Trump is the first guy who uses this cheatcode so blatantly. There used to be a kind of decorum.<p>But yes it is basically eliminating parliament and rule by a monarch- making a mockery of 1776.
> 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.<p>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.<p>0: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._Harvard" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...</a>
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?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_California_v._Bakke" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...</a>
I guess there are “hacks” on both sides?
That is not contraexample. It does not show conservative justices not being hacks.<p>Besides, conservatives including conservative justices are literally pro racial profiling and arresting people on race only.
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.
They all agree. A couple of them just chose to pretend they didn't.
And that it took this long to get an answer to that question.
in the UK a similar unconstitutional behaviour by the head of government took...<p>from the start of the "injury":<p><pre><code> - 8 days to get to the supreme court
- 2 days arguing in court
- 5 days for the court to reach a decision
</code></pre>
15 days to be ruled on<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_The_Prime_Minister_and_Cherry_v_Advocate_General_for_Scotland" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_The_Prime_Ministe...</a>
Ah,yes, british constitutional law. In a country where no parliaments can bind its successors it means there is no constitution and the constitutional law is a polite fiction poorly held together with tradition and precedent.
it's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than the US system
All systems have weaknesses, but the utter criminal farce the US system has been betrayed to be yields a situation where zero Americans should be gloating about their constitution or values any more.<p>Oh look, Trump just declared a new, 10% global tariff because lol laws. Congress is busted. There are essentially zero real laws for the plutocrat class.
That was the fastest Supreme Court ruling in UK history though...<p>Similarly in the US, Watergate (Nixon impeachment) took only 16 days, and Bush v. Gore (contested election) took just 30 days to reach a Supreme Court judgement.
This is relatively fast for an issue to move through the courts.
Yes. "Relatively". We really need a fast-track process for <i>genuinely insane nonsense</i> to get shot down in a matter of days, not months.
It takes a long time for something to get through all the appeals. Getting an injunction to put a stop to something <i>during</i> the appeals doesn't take that long.<p>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.
> 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.<p>The lower courts issued several such injunctions.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/trump-tariffs-trade-strategy.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/trump-tariffs...</a><p>"On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of International Trade dealt an early blow to that strategy. The bipartisan panel of judges, one of whom had been appointed by Mr. Trump, ruled that the law did not grant the president “unbounded authority” to impose tariffs on nearly every country, as Mr. Trump had sought. As a result, the president’s tariffs were declared illegal, and the court ordered a halt to their collection within the next 10 days."<p>"Just before she spoke, a federal judge in a separate case ordered another, temporary halt to many of Mr. Trump’s tariffs, ruling in favor of an educational toy company in Illinois, whose lawyers told the court it was harmed by Mr. Trump’s actions."
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.
The fast track is congress clarifying their own shit. Courts are slow, it's a feature not a bug.
SCOTUS can move much quicker than this when they want to.<p>And have fairly regularly to benefit this administration:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_docket#Second_Trump_presidency" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_docket#Second_Trump_pre...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.G.G._v._Trump" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.G.G._v._Trump</a> was vacated within days.<p>"On Friday, March 14, 2025, Trump signed presidential proclamation 10903, invoking the Alien Enemies Act and asserting that Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization from Venezuela, had invaded the United States. The White House did not announce that the proclamation had been signed until the afternoon of the next day."<p>"Very early on Saturday, March 15, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Democracy Forward filed a class action suit in the District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of five Venezuelan men held in immigration detention… The suit was assigned to judge James Boasberg. That morning, noting the exigent circumstances, he approved a temporary restraining order for the five plaintiffs, and he ordered a 5 p.m. hearing to determine whether he would certify the class in the class action."<p>"On March 28, 2025, the Trump administration filed an emergency appeal with the US Supreme Court, asking it to vacate Boasberg's temporary restraining orders and to immediately allow the administration to resume deportations under the Alien Enemies Act while it considered the request to vacate. On April 7, in a per curiam decision, the court vacated Boasberg's orders…"<p>TL;DR: Trump signs executive order on March 14. Judge puts it on hold on March 15. Admin appeals on March 28. SCOTUS intervenes by April 7.
But that's not the issue.<p>'can the President unilaterally impose tariffs on any country he wants anytime he wants'<p>No, he can't impost tariffs on any country. He can only impose tariffs on American companies willing to import from any country.
The opinion should merely read<p>> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises<p>(which it does, and expounds upon)
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 <i>a few</i> justices are extremely partisan. Happily, a quorum of saner heads came about in this instance.
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.
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.<p>Ultimately no system can't stop that if there is a societal culture that tolerates the drumbeat of authoritarianism and centralization of power.
The thing is he usually cannot but sometimes can. The issue is around "sometimes".
>apparently so ill defined in law that 9 justices can't agree on it<p>That is not how the Supreme Court works. SCOTUS is a political body. Justices do one thing: cast votes. For any reason.<p>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.<p>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?
>downvoting without explaining is ... just ...<p>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.<p>Might as well be a bot either way.<p><i>corrective upvote made</i>
Statutory Law is 50,000 pages, and that's just the beginning of everything you need to consider.<p>Make stupid laws, win stupid prizes.<p>It's almost like the legal system is designed so that you can get away with murder if you can afford enough lawyers.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
In response, POTUS just declared a global 10% tariff. Does anyone understand if this is legal?<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-orders-temporary-10-global-tariff-replace-duties-struck-down-by-us-supreme-2026-02-20/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-orders-temporary-1...</a>
Offhand, yes, this looks legal, under section 22 of the Trade Act of 1974. Such tariffs, however, are limited to 150 days and a maximum rate of 15%.
Aw shucks, I guess we'll have to wait another year to find out won't we?
The actual decision: <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf</a>
Right. Most of the news articles don't link to the decision, which is worth reading.<p>It's a 6-3 decision. Not close.<p>Here's the actual decision:<p><i>The judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for
the Federal Circuit in case No. 25–250 is affirmed. The
judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in case No. 24–1287 is vacated, and the
case is remanded with instructions to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.</i><p>So what does that mean in terms of action?<p>It means this decision [1] is now live. The vacated decision was a stay, and that's now dead.<p>So the live decision is now: <i>We affirm the CIT’s holding that the Trafficking and
Reciprocal Tariffs imposed by the Challenged Executive Orders exceed the authority delegated to the President by IEEPA’s text. We also affirm the CIT’s grant of declaratory
relief that the orders are “invalid as contrary to law.”</i><p>"CIT" is the Court of International Trade. Their judgement [2], which was unanimous, is now live.
It reads:<p><i>"The court holds for the foregoing reasons that IEEPA does not authorize any of the
Worldwide, Retaliatory, or Trafficking Tariff Orders. The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff
Orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means
of tariffs. The Trafficking Tariffs fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders. This conclusion entitles Plaintiffs to judgment as a matter of law; as the court further finds no genuine dispute as to any material fact, summary judgment will enter against the United States. See USCIT R. 56. The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined."</i><p>So that last line is the current state: "The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined." Immediately, it appears.<p>A useful question for companies owed a refund is whether they can use their credit against the United States for other debts to the United States, including taxes.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINION.8-29-2025_2566151.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINIO...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cit.17080/gov.uscourts.cit.17080.55.0.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cit.170...</a>
The Gorsuch concurring is quite the read, but wish more Americans internalized its final paragraph (excerpts below).<p><i>Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. ...
But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.</i>
I agree with Gorsuch, and I love this idea, but until the legislative branch abandons procedures that prevent the deliberation from happening in the first place, this will keep happening.
"The ruling applies to his so-called "Liberation Day" tariffs, but not individual tariffs he's imposed on specific countries or products " -- So what's gonna happen next?<p>For countries that negotiated special treatment, they'll be stuck with a (now worse) deal?<p>For other countries, they'll return to the previous deal (non-tariff)?
So I am far from an expert, but I saw that Capital Economics (a Macroeconomic analysis firm) put out a note saying that Trump still had power under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. But there are three catches for that. First, it only lasts for 150 days unless Congress votes to approve them. Second, that it has to apply to all countries equally: meaning that it can't be used to give some countries a break if they sign a deal, so all of the deals are going to be unenforcable on America's end. Third, it caps the tariff rate at 15%.<p>Like with refunds, this is a mess of Trump's own making, and now we get to figure it out.
As far as I know none of Trump's deals have been ratified by the Senate. None of them are valid.
Howard Lutnick and his sons are surely happy about this. It’s almost like Howard Lutnick, the <i>Secretary of Commerce</i>, knew this would happen. His sons, at their firm Cantor Fitzgerald, have been offering a tariff refund product wherein they pay companies who are struggling with paying tariffs 20-30% of a potential refund, and if (as they did today) they get struck down, they pocket the 100% refund.<p><a href="https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-warren-probe-lutnick-firms-potential-conflicts-of-interest-related-to-massive-tariff-bets" rel="nofollow">https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-wa...</a>
Meanwhile Pam Bondi's brother is a lawyer who's firm represents clients with cases against the justice department, and those cases keep getting dropped.<p>- <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/trump-doj-handling-pam-bondi-brother-cases-democrats-question-11221215" rel="nofollow">https://www.newsweek.com/trump-doj-handling-pam-bondi-brothe...</a><p>- <a href="https://abcnews.com/US/doj-drops-charges-client-ag-pam-bondis-brother/story?id=125073335" rel="nofollow">https://abcnews.com/US/doj-drops-charges-client-ag-pam-bondi...</a>
Yeah this is basically a thing everywhere. I was criminally charged in a certain mid-sized town, all I did was search through the court records to find the lawyer who always gets the charges dropped, hired them, and they went away for me too. Unfortunately that's the way the <i>just us</i> system works.
Ahh, Brad Bondi, who it is widely rumored to be attempting to join the Bar in DC for the convenient benefit of being able to wield influence in the event of anyone trying to push for disbarrment against Pam...
I wouldn’t put anything past them, but my impression is that they were just acting as a middleman for this transaction and taking a fee, rather than making a directional bet one way or another. Hedge funds have certainly been buying a lot of tariff claims, giving businesses guaranteed money upfront and betting on this outcome. But for an investment bank like Cantor Fitzgerald that would be atypical.
> they were just acting as a middleman<p>This is no excuse. If they knew this would be a business, being a broker of such deals would be sure to make them money.
> my impression is<p>not sure why you'd give them any benefit of the doubt. they haven't earned it.
That's what a bookie does. Middleman.
Ah yes, instead of applying the normal legal standard of “not even having the appearance of impropriety” we instead apply the monkey’s paw standard of waiting until they “no longer even have the appearance of propriety”.
It’s a tax on the US economy. A tax levied by individuals rather than the government itself. An ingenious scheme. Evil, but ingenious.
Refunds to business, but unless they have to refund to consumers it's free capital to importers
The stated intention was to replace income taxes with tariffs; and it came with a bonus feature of handing the President a cudgel with which to grant him personal powers and personal rewards.
It's not a legitimate tax.<p>That's why it <i>taxed</i> the economy much worse than a legitimate President would do.
maybe i lean too much in one direction, but what is a "legitimate tax"?<p>Once again, count on hn for the downvotes. Yep, those shall not speak of downvotes, or taxation.
> but what is a "legitimate tax"?<p>One that goes through all three branches of government, the way it's been since we decided "no taxation without representation" is how such things should be collectively implemented.<p>If a citizen's stance is there is no such thing as a legitimate tax, perhaps there should be a legal process for banishing them from <i>all</i> public services, including roads, electricity, telephone, fire and rescue services, etc. and make consuming them a crime. But I guess even that would be a problem because we need to pay for the justice system that would prosecute such a sovereign citizen that breaks the rules...<p>Basically an "opt-out" of modern life almost in its entirety. I think most people that subscribe to "no legitimate taxes" might be surprised how isolating that would be if they actually think it through.<p>To be clear, I don't think this is a good idea, it's simply a thought exercise.
In this context it simply means "legal".
One the usually friendly Supreme Court doesn't strike down as too blatantly illegal even for them?
Whatever society decides it is via a legal and consistent proccess?
Libertarians, please sit this one out. We can have the taxation is theft dialog some other comment section.
Excellent question.<p>I lean quite heavily myself.<p>In more ways than one though ;)<p>The most legitimate tax I see is one that citizens would cheerfully pay willingly under any economic conditions.
ALL citizens, or informed / educated citizens? There's a whole network of agitators in the US whose entire job / goal is to make sure there are people unhappy with any tax, no matter how great the benefits.
If you define legitimacy like that, excise taxes look like the only truly legitimate taxes. In my province, that’s things like gasoline, alcohol, tobacco and cannabis. Provincially owned casinos could even be considered a legitimate form of tax though they’re not really a tax.
Can you think of one? I was thinking infrastructure, but then I think about all the fraud and waste that goes along with it and it makes me sad.
Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution makes it the job of Congress, not the President, to levee taxes.<p>When Donald Trump didn't run his tariffs through Congress he blatantly violated separation of powers. In normal times this would be 9-0 ruling from the Supreme Court for being so open and shut and it would not have taken over a year for the decision, but those times have passed.
Often comments are sufficiently poorly reasoned or defecient that it makes more sense to downvote than reply.<p>For instance complaining about downvotes always draws more as does collectively insulting the community you are participating in.<p>As to the original question the problem is that it suggests confusion on a basic topic that was decided here centuries ago and taught in elementary school. If someone said what even is addition in an adult forum would you teach them addition or would you assume that they actually know addition and are arguing in bad faith because they feel math really ought to work differently?<p>Also when you can divide a particular topic into clearly delineated camps appearing to disagree or question the basic premises that one camp holds is oft taken for disagreement and alignment with the opposing camp even when you are just debating a side issue and may in fact be mostly or entirely aligned with the people who feel like you are opposed to them. This shortcut as far as identifying motive and perspective can misfire but it's often correct and "just asking questions" is often underhanded opposition.<p>Lastly a legitimate tax is one that is passed by Congress in the normal fashion and not overturned by the courts.
I've been on this site since 2009. The level of discourse has dropped dramatically in recent times, yet I still love it here. The way I see it, those who can't see through my statement to the true meaning with some form of EQ, are the ones downvoting.<p>As for talking about what shall not be talked about, how else shall we talk about it? Once I hit -4, it doesn't matter anyway so a few drops on what I have is not really a big deal. In reality, I'm not counting the numbers, I'm counting the people who have fundamentally lost the cognitive ability to reason about deeper meaning in a more philosophical sense and just click click click.<p>Legitimate from a cultural / legal sense, but not from a philosophical one.
usually one imposed by congress, from my distant memory of reading the us constitution.
Down votes because the supreme Court ruled it was illegal.<p>That's means its not a legitimate tax
> <i>a tariff refund product wherein they pay companies who are struggling with paying tariffs 20-30% of a potential refund</i><p>For what it’s worth, I’ve personally been doing this. Not in meaningful dollar amounts. And largely to help regional businesses stay afloat. But I paid their tariffs and bought, in return, a limited power of attorney and claim to any refunds.
Is a refund even likely?<p>Seems more likely the administration orders everyone to ignore the court.
If you read the opinions, it's even less clear. The majority does not make it at all clear whether or not refunds are due, and Kavanaugh's dissent specifically calls out this weakness in the majority opinion.<p>Even <i>if</i> the executive branch's actions stop here, there's still a lot of arguing in court to do over refunds.
It is not a "weakness" of the majority that the criminal activity has left a mess.
Meh, Kavanaugh indirectly <i>caused</i> the whole mess, and directly caused many related and similar ones. It's a bad-faith complaint, Kavanaugh's actual track record is "always let Trump move fast and if he breaks things then whatever."<p>Basically we have a legal processes for courts going "this is weird and unlikely to stand and hard/impossible to fix afterwards, so do nothing until you get a green light", using temporary restraining orders and injunctions.<p>Yet Kavanaugh <i>et al</i> spent the last year repeatedly overriding lower-courts which did that, signaling that if someone said "let's figure this out first" to radical and irreparable Republican policies, the Supreme Court would <i>not</i> have their backs.<p>______________<p>> In case after case, dissenting justices have argued that the Court has “botched” this analysis and made rulings that are “as incomprehensible as [they are] inexcusable,” halting lower court injunctions without any showing that the government is facing harm and with grave consequences, including in some cases in which the plaintiffs are at risk of torture or death. The majority’s response to these serious claims? Silence.<p><a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supreme-court-must-explain-why-it-keeps-ruling-trumps-favor" rel="nofollow">https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supr...</a>
The executive branch couldn't so much as order me drink a cup of tea unless it first drafted me into the army or declared martial law.
Why does that seem more likely? They haven't done that yet.
"Seem more likely to" usually refers to the future, but is based on past behaviour. Hope that clears it up!
Sure they have.<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/21/trump-court-orders-defy-noncompliance-marshals-judges/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/21/trump-cou...</a><p>> President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/us/politics/justice-department-minnesota-contempt.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/us/politics/justice-depar...</a><p>> Judge Provinzino, who spent years as a federal prosecutor, had ordered the government to release Mr. Soto Jimenez “from custody in Minnesota” by Feb. 13. An order she issued on Tuesday indicates that the government failed not only to return his documents, but also to release him in Minnesota as she had initially specified.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_Garcia" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_G...</a><p>> On April 10 [2025], the Supreme Court released an unsigned order with no public dissents. In reciting the facts of the case the court stated: "The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal." It ruled that the District Court "properly requires the Government to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador."<p>> During the [April 14 2025] meeting, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said that it was up to El Salvador, not the American government, whether Abrego Garcia would be released.<p>(That was, of course, a blatant lie.)
All of those are deportation cases, the NYTimes one for example is a $500/day fine on a government lawyer because they haven't returned a man's ID documents a week after he got bail.<p>There's been lots of coverage of how government lawyers are overwhelmed because they have thousands of immigration cases being appealed and government lawyers keep quitting due to workload. So they have a giant backlog causing lots of administrative issues on following through with court orders.<p><a href="https://newrepublic.com/post/206115/this-job-sucks-doj-attorney-judge-contempt-ice-court-orders" rel="nofollow">https://newrepublic.com/post/206115/this-job-sucks-doj-attor...</a>
> All of those are deportation cases…<p>Sorry, is there a "you can ignore the courts if it's deportation" clause I missed somewhere?<p>> There's been lots of coverage of how government lawyers are overwhelmed because they have thousands of immigration cases being appealed…<p>That's their own fault.<p>You don't get to violate people's rights because you yourself fucked up the system beyond repair!
> Sorry, is there a "you can ignore the courts if it's deportation" clause I missed somewhere?<p>No, but you are arguing in a very annoying style.<p>Nobody is claiming it's good or okay that this is happening. What people are discussing is whether it's <i>likely</i> that Trump will order people to ignore the court in this case. This is just a question of predicting probabilities, not morality.<p>And, indeed, the administration has been dropping the ball on following rulings in low-level deportation cases, but <i>hasn't</i> really ignored, or ordered people to ignore, major big-ticket Supreme Court cases. You can't really use one as evidence for the other. This is what people were pointing out to you.<p>But you took them pointing out this factual distinction as somehow <i>defending</i> Trump, which it is not.<p>Imagine you said of a known thief: "that guy will surely murder someone, look at his long criminal record!" and someone responded "but all his crimes are petty theft, none involve violence". It'd be illogical for you to then get indignant that the other person was defending theft or claiming it's not bad.
> And, indeed, the administration has been dropping the ball on following rulings in low-level deportation cases, but hasn't really ignored, or ordered people to ignore, major big-ticket Supreme Court cases.<p>They did exactly that in the Garcia case, which was a "big-ticket SCOTUS case". It became politically untenable and they eventually backed down, but the post-ruling response was initially "nuh uh!"
>it's likely that Trump will order people to ignore the court in this case.<p>He sure is confirming his contempt for the court right now on live TV.<p>Trying to drum up support for his hate against anything sesible in his sight.<p>Edit: This just in . . . he is peeved, his face just turned so red it bled plum through the orange layer. People should review this on Youtube later if nothing else for this alone. The most meaningful thing in the rant :)<p>Edit2: And . . . he's announcing additional tarriffs in real time. You can't make this up.
I get it, nuance isn't popular in political discussions. But the reality is these are all large flawed human systems with complex and competing motivations that rarely fit neatly into a box.
The Lutnick sons were also probably betting on the outcome of the case on Kalshi
A witness also reported to the FBI that Lutnick and CF are engaged in massive fraud: <a href="https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA01249207.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA012492...</a>
Oh and he bought his house from Epstein for $10. Nothing to see here just a criminal admin fleecing you without even shame enough to try to hide it well.
<i>> without even shame enough to try to hide it well.</i><p>Why would they bother hiding it when the populace is apparently powerless to do anything about it?
And took his wife, kids, and their nannies to have lunch with Epstein. Years after he'd said he wouldn't associate with Epstein anymore, and years after Epstein's conviction.<p>If that was me, I would have used my substantial wealth to have lunch <i>literally anywhere else in the world, with anyone else in the world</i>.
Remember when a conflict of interest was so important that Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm, because heaven forbid, he accidentally made some money while president.<p>Like his peanut farm would unduly sway government peanut policy.
An even more interesting one is that Ford was the <i>first</i> president to go on paid speaking tours after office. It's not like the 37 other presidents couldn't have also cashed in on the office in a similar fashion, but it was felt that such a thing would impugn the integrity of the office and also undermine the perception of somebody working as a genuine servant of the state.<p>There has most certainly been a major decline in values over time that corresponds quite strongly with the rise in the perceived importance of wealth.
Curious if part of this was the overall decline in government compensation relative to the private sector. The president makes roughly what the typical SV engineer makes after 5 years in big tech or as a fresh grad from a top PhD program. Meanwhile the people the president deals with have become unfathomably wealthy.<p>In 1909, the US president made 75k - roughly 2.76 Million in today's dollars. This is in comparison to the current 400k dollar salary of the president. As the president is the highest paid government employee by law/custom - this applies downward pressure on the rest of the governments payroll.<p>I see no reason why the president shouldn't be modestly wealthy given the requirements or the role and the skill required to do it well. Cutting the payscale to less than some new grads seems like a recipe for corruption.
Since 1958 with the Former Presidents Act [1] the Presidency guarantees you'll live very comfortably for the rest of your life with a lifetime pension (and even a small pension for your wife), funding for an office/staff, lifetime secret service protection, funded travel, and more. It was passed precisely because of the scenario you describe playing out with Truman who was rather broke, and ran into financial difficulties after leaving office.<p>[1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Former_Presidents_Act" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Former_Presidents_Act</a>
> Truman who was rather broke, and ran into financial difficulties after leaving office.<p>Nope[0]. He was a shameless grifter just like Trump.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/01/the-immortal-legend-of-harry-trumans-financial-rectitude" rel="nofollow">https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/01/the-immortal-le...</a>
Are most fresh grads from a top PhD program <i>really</i> making $400k/year? Sure, the ones hired by OpenAI are making at least that much, but the vast majority are not. However the broader point remains, that the president’s (and the rest of government’s) pay structure has not kept up with the private sector.
Remember when the late President Carter was being laid to rest?<p>There was a tremendous outpouring of grief and honor, and so much heartfelt condolences. From all over America and the whole world. Deep respect as fitting as can be for such a great human being, for the type of honest & compassionate leadership you could only get in the USA, and only from the cream that rises to the top.<p>Every single minute it invoked the feeling that Trump deserves nothing like this ever.
The older I get and the more I learn, the crazier it is that evangelicals abandoned / were conned into supporting Reagan over Carter, all the while claiming that Reagan was sent from God or something.<p>But then, I have seen the same thing played out recently: Biden, a devout catholic is considered borderline evil by my fundagelical parents (mostly due to religious channels from the US, even though they're in Canada), while Trump is approaching sainthood.
Remember when Richard M. Nixon was laid to rest?
Definitely. [1] (Use reader mode if the page misbehaves.)<p>[1] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260220083443/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260220083443/https://www.theat...</a>
Yes quite well.<p>Nowhere near the respect was shown, not zero but more than was due.<p>People did question if that was too much honor at the time, too.<p>No hard core freedom-loving citizen from anywhere in the world questioned the extensive over-the-top memorial for Carter.<p>Nixon ruined things forever financially, but was not as dishonest as Trump.
There will be a wild party across the globe when that man passes. Flags burning, fireworks, nude parades, more alcohol consumed than the day prohibition was lifted.<p>Red Hats will be crying in the street while sane and normal happy people dance like it's the rapture and kiss like they're falling in love for the first time all over again.
I wish everyone a nice party, but the problem isn't Trump. Its what behind him: the ideologues, the power brokers and their networks, the 0.001%. Plus the masses having been bathing in culture wars for years.<p>Trump is just good for circus, I would say the GOP can call themselves really lucky with him. His job is to successfully capture media attention, keeping what enables him out of the spotlight. He lacks all qualities, except that one ability to grab the mass media by their pussy. New craziness every day makes good headlines.<p>Problem is that his enablers are not aligned on all core issues. Yes, you have got the Heritage Foundation which mainly wants to go back to the gilded age with a vast christian lower class. But you also have a circle of people who believe that crashing the US, including the dollar, enables them to build a US like they want. Its a weird coalition of billionaires predating on the millionaires, grifters, christian nationalists, Neo-nazi's like Miller, tech-accelerationists etc.<p>You should fear the day when Trump isn't needed anymore. MAGA is Trump. GOP will have to shift up ideological gear after him, and it won't be as nice as Trump. Even if internal war breaks out in the GOP, it is too early for a party.
> people who believe that crashing the US, including the dollar, enables them to build a US like they want<p>Yes, it's strange how dumb some rich/succesful people are. As I understand it, no civilization ever has done such a thing. If a civilization and its institutions crash, it remains failed/dysfunctional for a very long time. The only way to improve society is in small steps.<p>I hope the people who finance this all will wake up to the reality that it may well cost them everything, too.
You're right. Trump does an excellent Zaphod Beeblebrox. He distracts from power, and I get that, but he's still a piece of crap, and a lot of people have died from his fumbling, bumbling, inept, failing upwards solely due to the fact that people associate him with having money and power, even though he's an tryannical, ineffectual, foppish, childraping manboy.
If the court establishes that this was a tax, how would they administer the refund considering it's impossible to disentangle absorbed tariffs by firms and those passed along to consumers?
Wait you don't mean the same Howard Lutnick who was sold a mansion for the sum of <i>ten dollars</i> by none other than Jeffrey Epstein himself? I'm <i>shocked</i>.
Yeah, he's gotta finance the payments to whoever the kiddie peddler du jour is somehow. Especially now that he can't just walk next door or steer his yacht towards a conveniently located island.
And this is the same Howard Lutnick who was just last week was caught blatantly lying about his relationship with Epstein?<p>[0] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/30/new-epstein-files-howard-lutnick-island" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/30/new-epstein-...</a>
Basically a bookie, eh? And the house never loses...
Most people knew this would happen, it was widely predicted.
Witkoffs profited off the UAE Spy Sheikh chips deal! Why can't Lutnicks make millions?! Come on guys. Unfair.<p><a href="https://archive.is/W6Gqy" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/W6Gqy</a>
There's no scam too big or too small, from Trumpcoin's open bribery, to Secret Service paying 5x the GSA per diem rate to stay at Trump properties on duty.
Holy crap, you couldn't make a story that is a more direct echo of the plot point in Wonderful Life if you tried.
What is this shit? 4D grifting?
That’s an insane conflict of interest. His sons took over the firm? It was already bad that Lutnick took over in the first place. As I recall he sued the widow of Cantor to steal control of the company after Cantor died.<p>But I guess this is not very surprising. I am sure every friend and family member of Trump administration people made trades leading all those tariff announcements over the last year, while the rest of us got rocked by the chaos in the stock market.
Lutnick is not a good man. There’s also this, from <a href="https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA01249207.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA012492...</a><p>“LUTNICK was a neighbor of JEFFREY EPSTEIN (EPSTEIN) in the adjoining
property at 11 E 71st Street, New York, New York. LUTNICK bought the
property for $10 through a trust. LES WEXNER (WEXNER) and EPSTEIN owned the building. LUTNICK bought it in a very roundabout way from EPSTEIN.”
This admin? Conflict of interest? Add it to the list.
> That’s an insane conflict of interest.<p>Welcome to America.<p>This isn't even in the top 10 of corrupt activities our government officials undertaken in the past year.
Serious question - what do you think the kids should do when their parents get political positions, not work?
Having control of a company is not exactly "work".
The responsibility is on the parent; the parent should recuse themselves from decisions or discussions where there could be a conflict of interest involving their family members.
Or better yet, the parent should not be appointed to the position in the first place. If members of your immediate family occupy important positions in the industry you'd be involved with, then you don't get the job. Very easy solution, if the people in power were willing to do it.
He is also surely happy the Trump administration no longer sees fit to investigate or pursue anyone with connections to Epstein. Previously Lutnick had lied about the extent of their relationship, yet even after the recent relevations he can simply wave them off.<p>What a profitable time for the Lutnicks, who are of course already fabulously wealthy. Our system really does reward the best people.
You think at some point america would get sick of having a billionaire gang of thieves in charge.<p>Trump just gave himself a $10 billion dollar slush fund from taxpayers. Who stopped him? No one. This amount of money will buy you one great den.<p>Noem wants luxury jets from the taxpayer.<p>So. Much. Winning.
America <i>is</i> pretty sick of both parties.<p>Had the Democrats ran a half decent candidate, they could easily have won. But they're just not capable of doing that.
Why do you guys have only two parties and the executive is made of a pseudo king that rules with no opposition?
They did run a half decent candidate. Trouble is, too many people insist on so much more. If it's not the zombie of JFK they're staying home.
Remember that first they ran a walking corpse who couldn't reliably form sentences!<p>Harris wasn't the worst possible replacement, sure. But the Democrats have several very competent governors who could have done a lot better, but that was not considered.
The whole process was botched, and there were better candidates they could have run, certainly. But their choice was OK, just not enough to overcome the ridiculous pull of Trump and Democrats' unreasonably high standards.
Right. So on one hand we have a gang of undisputable thieves (GOP), on the other hand we have honest but "not half decent" politicians (Dems). Tough choices all around!
Sort of a meta-observation, but consistently folks on the left have that take and then are confused when they lose.<p>“If only all those idiots on the right and in the center could see they should vote for the bumbling but well-intentioned candidate over the obvious liars and thieves” is an explanation that feels good to tell yourself, but also incredibly patronizing and prevents actually understanding why people vote the way they do.<p>I find the arrogance of the left pretty abhorrent. I also despise aspects of the right, but boy does the left rub me the wrong way.
If you find the arrogance abhorrent, I wonder how you characterize some of the actually bad stuff that politicians get up to.<p>Personally, I don't expect people on the right to come around. I am mystified by people on the center who looked at Trump and Harris and decided Trump was the way to go, or even just didn't care. If you'd like to enlighten me why they did that, I'd be interested.<p>My real confusion is people on the <i>left</i> who did this. They decided that Harris didn't say the right things about Israel, or they were upset at not having a primary, or they were still upset about Bernie, and decided to stay home. That is baffling.
I would characterize a lot of the behavior of politicians as despicable, antisocial, and un-American.<p>The short answer to your question is that the Democratic establishment in general and Harris in particular repeatedly lied throughout the Biden administration, culminating in the bald-faced lie that Joe Biden was completely competent. This was done with the attitude of “well what are you going to do? Vote for the other team? Don’t be ridiculous.” There were so, so many other things throughout the Biden administration, it felt (feels) like a race to the bottom.<p>So Trump, who is notorious for lying, won. To be fair to Republicans, Trumps lies are more like crazy exaggerations sprinkled with outright bullshit which somehow is more palatable than being gaslit.<p>If the defense of the Democrats is “Well look at how bad Trump is!” it should at least be acknowledged that is one of the worst defenses possible. And in general, if my options are to be stabbed by person A twice, or by person B once but person B expects me to be grateful, I might just go with person A.<p>The end result is we will keep toggling between the two parties until one of them decides to run using sane people. I sincerely hope that will be the Democrats this year.
We are sick of it, but despite being somewhat of a democracy, we have no real power in this two party, first past the post system when both parties always run establishment candidates, aka, billionaire thieves gang members.
There are more offices than just the president. Third parties often win in local elections (I don't know numbers, I doubt more than 5%). They win in state elections from time to time as well. If you get involved you can build a third party until it cannot be ignored.
When is the last time the Democrats ran a billionaire?
The irony is that Trump won on a message of "drain the swamp" which was supposed to address this issue. Instead it seems like it's more of just "replace the swamp" with his own guys.
I think the swamp has been expanded more than replaced.
Another point of irony: Elon was tasked with "draining" the swamp and the left immediately goes to burn Teslas.
For me, when someone promises to "drain the swamp", they reveal their ignorance and selfishness with their shallow anti-swamp ideology.<p>Swamps are rich ecosystems with incredible natural beauty and diversity. Draining a swamp is extraordinarily bad in general, even if good for wealthy property developers.<p>Ironically, it seems that "drain the swamp" turns out to be an apt metaphor for what Trump and that gang have been doing, as promised.
The message is just "swamp!" now.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
<i>Every</i> accusation from Republicans, without exception, is either a confession, a plan, or an unfulfilled wish.
The swamp has always been him and his buddies. Pure projection. Everything he spouts is always pure projection.
It’s not even ironic. Trump never genuinely intended to do so, and anybody with a brain never trusted them to do so either. Just another case of “every accusation an admission” in the case of the leaders, and “it’s only bad when it’s not our guy doing it” in the case of the followers.
> So. Much. Winning.<p>Like the man said, I'm definitely tired of all the winning. Emoluments clause be damned.
For the Fox News crowd, which is most of his supporters, they are likely not even aware of these transgressions, as they are not reported there. Or, if they are aware, they are happy to see Trump enriching himself, because, own the libs or something?
Trump has a long record of stealing from Joe Average and had been doing it since between 2016. Joe Average thinks he’s clever for doing it.
Joe Average will keep voting for them to pick his pocket, as long as they promise cruelty to the "Other Side".
Joe Average knows he is getting fucked over either way
Polling suggests Joe Average didn't expect <i>this</i> much fucking.
No offense, and you're not entirely wrong, but this is one of the big reasons we are in this situation politically. Millions of voters stayed home because they thought this way. The result: America is the embarrassment of the world, no longer to be trusted. We all must vote, even if we must hold our noses while doing it. We can't allow known thugs to be in command. (I was a life long GOP voter, to my shame, until 2004. How the American public didn't see the puke of a DJT presidency coming is beyond the pale.)
>because they thought this way.<p>Technically, no, they did not come up with this thought on their own. It's been heavily propagandized that 'voting does no good, so just stay home". I just want to point that out as it's an active attack on American voters.
It doesn't help that most Democrat politicians are happy to maintain status quo. Or they're completely feckless, like Chuck Schumer, who is the absolute King of bringing a strongly-worded letter to a gun fight.<p>People that are actually leftist don't vote because there's nobody that represents them. Most Democrat politicians are centrist.
Meaningful information shouldn't die just because the medium goes dark :\<p>Joe Average the Trump voter got to be the way they are from a "grooming" process of some kind.<p>Who would Trump have ever have picked up something like that from?
Most of the grooming came from Limbaugh, Rove and Gingrich. Then the entertainment "news" Fox network finished the job. At the core, though, was a large segment of the voting population that gave up on knowledge and reason.
[flagged]
I swear, if the dems aren't running on "here is all of the shit that Trump and his cronies stole from you" every single day for the next two years they are the dumbest political strategists alive.
[dead]
[flagged]
He had access to the entire legal team for one side of the case. He also had access to internal legal discussions when the tariffs were put in place, when the president was almost certainly advised that they were illegal and would likely be struck down.
Nah, with this administration I don’t believe a lack of impropriety without proof. It’s swampy all the way down.
Said with confidence, as if you actually know what's going on behind the scenes.
Oh, come on.<p>They spy on Congress (<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/lawmakers-demand-doj-stop-tracking-lawmakers-epstein-files-searches-rcna258721" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/lawmakers-demand-d...</a>).<p>They likely don't even need to <i>spy</i> on SCOTUS. They just have to chat with Ginni Thomas.<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/30/ginni-thomas-clarence-thomas-2020-election" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/30/ginni-thomas...</a><p>"The conservative activist Ginni Thomas has “no memory” of what she discussed with her husband, the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, during the heat of the battle to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to congressional testimony released on Friday."<p>"Thomas also claimed the justice was unaware of texts she exchanged with [White House Chief of Staff] Meadows and took a swipe at the committee for having “leaked them to the press while my husband was in a hospital bed fighting an infection”."
I look forward to the day we pull our heads out of the sand and stop excusing blatant corruption. It takes a naive view of the world to assume the Secretary of Commerce has access to the same limited information as you or I.<p>Let’s call all of this what it is: parasites leveraging their insider positions for profit. The ruling class is ripping the copper out of our walls and selling it for scrap while we all choose to look the other way.
The justices and all of their clerks don't live in a bubble. They regularly hang out and discuss god knows what with other political operatives. Thomas is particularly noteworthy for essentially taking bribes from a conservative billionaire. The idea that zero information on potential rulings would leak out to certain people is highly implausible.
I mean that's just a silly thing to assume with this administration.
[flagged]
I've wondered from the beginning if the whole tariff thing wasn't basically an insider operation for import/export insiders to profit off of rate arbitrage, if not outright black market operations.<p>That's more sadistic than I had guessed.<p>------ re: below due to throttling ----------<p>Lutnicks profit requires some 2nd order thinking. How Trump et al might profit off of import/export insider operations also requires some 2nd order thinking. My apologies for not spelling it out, although it should not take much imagination.
Not import/export insiders, the Trump family... always just follow the money, maybe along the way some "import/export" people get some crumbs but most of it ends up a Mar a Largo :-)
That Lutnik is always sooooo lucky. He didn’t go to the twin towers on 9/11 cause he finally took his kid to kindergarten.<p>Always seems to be in the right place and the right time
Finally some sanity. The administration has use laws about "national security" and other so call "emergencies" to impose tariffs. If everything is an emergency then nothing is, and that was clearly not congress' intention with those laws.<p>The power to impose tariffs rests with the legislator, not the executive.
Of course our congress is effectively useless - we can thank decades of Mitch McConnell's (and others) "not giving the other side anything" thinking for that.
We're currently in the midst of 51 ongoing "national emergencies" [1], dating back to at least Carter. I think something that the next great empire will learn from is to limit emergency powers as well as the ability to create emergency powers, because in spite of their name they inevitably end up becoming normalized and just used as regular powers.<p>The description of some of those emergencies is comedic: "Declared a bank holiday from March 6 through March 9, 1933, using the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 as a legal basis."<p>[1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...</a>
Most of these seem at least plausible to me given they almost all have to do with foreign conflicts, and given that they have to be renewed every year, they can't be too excessive since Trump has kept in place 8/9 of Biden's emergency declarations? and your description of the most comedic one was actually maybe the most important one?<p>It was to stave off a bank run at the beginning of the great depression, and it was only done as a temporary measure so that Congress had time to write the long term legislation which they did 4 days later on March 9th.
The most dangerous part of the current admin is the fealty he demands from congress and how exploits his popularity to be a kingmaker in local elections.<p>This is something FDR did heavily in the 1930s to expand his own power and bully congress into passing the New Deal. <a href="https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/purge-1938" rel="nofollow">https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/purge-1938</a> He also used legally questionable executive orders like crazy.
Can always count on HN to mindlessly equivocate.
lol you say FDR was bullying Congress, as if the New Deal coalition wasn't the most successful political movement that this country ever had (won nearly every Presidential election (only losing to the man that defeated Nazis in Europe), had control of the House from like 1932 to 1992, nearly controlled the Senate for just as long too).<p>Attacking FDR, someone who stood up against business interests to defend labor, kinda exposes the game here.
Honestly FDR doesn't get enough credit for probably saving capitalism.<p>He borrowed just enough of the stuff socialists were promising, and bolted it onto the government to mollify the working class who'd been absolutely ravaged by oligarchs for the preceding decades. You only have to look at the rest of the world to see how things might've turned out without FDR's very reasonable interventions.
There's nothing sane about it. All part of the plan. Next comes ignoring of this ruling (err, looks like that already happened) and they put another log on the fire under the pot.
Still find it kinda wild that it's the Republicans fighting tooth and nail against any balance of power to...<p>...<i>raise taxes</i>
> If everything is an emergency then nothing is, and that was clearly not congress' intention with those laws.<p>The state of exception is the true test of sovereignty, and powers that crave sovereignty therefore seek out states of exception. The PATRIOT act created new institutions and authorities like the TSA. Just a few years ago local health departments were making business-shuttering decisions that ruined life for a lot of people over the common cold. Ukrainian war funding provides the EU with opportunities for exports and new experiments in joint funding (Eurobonds). Emergencies and exceptions are how power grows, so everything can become an emergency if you look at it in the right way.
Are you equating covid to the common cold? If so, this comment is absurd.
I mean, you're right that a lot of liberties are taken with what constitutes an "emergency" these days, but when every other country on the planet is declaring the same emergency there might be some substance there.
Let the fun of returning hundreds of billions of the illegal tariff revenue back to importers through litigation begin!
Will I get back the $17 DHL charged to collect the $1 tariff on the cat toys I bought from China?<p><i>Actual event may not have occurred, but DHL flat fee is real.</i>
Send a letter requesting a full refund.<p>If they refuse, sue them in small claims court.
Sure, if you are ready to sue the US government for that. /s<p>I dunno if a class-action lawsuit is realistic or not in this case or how likely a court decision stating that all tariff revenue must be refunded.
Were cat toys not made in the US? Especially if you were to factor and $18 delta?<p>Sorry, but tariffs on aluminum or steel that is only made in China or microchips or components. I think that’s a valid discussion to have. … you’re complaining about disposable cat toys that were likely made in a sweat shop where the workers were not making a livable wage and then putting in a container on a ship burning crude oil and pushed around the world so you can have some junk that was a couple dollars cheaper than a domestic option?<p>Not the same thing.
"The ruling was silent on whether tariffs that have been paid under the higher rates will need to be refunded." - from CNBC
The tariffs were paid by the ultimate consumer. Importers that sue will have a difficult time proving actual damages.
Trillions even, according to some sources.
Unfortunately, I suspect that many platforms/outlets which were paying tariffs for us will continue their high prices. I’d love to see my startups cost of hardware go down but I can’t plan on it happening in my CapEx projections.
Yep. Same exact trick that happened during COVID. Prices ratchet up but never down.
To me this suggests that the problem is not cost, but lack of competition, either in production or in pricing. My understanding is that there are sufficient laws to ensure competition, but they are not widely enforced.
> My understanding is that there are sufficient laws to ensure competition, but they are not widely enforced.<p>That's correct, the laws exist but it's up to the executive to enforce them. The US has not meaningfully enforced any anti-trust laws since the Microsoft web browser bundling case in the 90s. There was a brief glimmer of anti-trust being resuscitated by FTC during the Biden admin, but the tech company monopolies got so spooked by that that they brought all their resources to bear in 2024 to ensure their guy won, and he did. Anti-trust remains dead in the US for at least another generation.
Plenty of supply-driven inflated prices did go back down after covid, or after the post-covid inflation shock. Gasoline is one example.<p>At the same time, USD M2 supply increased an unusual 40% from Jan 2020 to Jan 2022. It only fell a little after. So prices that were inflated for that reason, I wouldn't have expected to fall back down.<p>I do feel like some local businesses just price according to costs but keep that ratched up if costs fall, like you said.
Mouser (electronics parts distributor) just charges you an itemized tariff rate. They should go down immediately for those electronics parts.
Prices drop all the time. But no, they don't drop "automatically" as some kind of rules thing when regulations change. Prices drop when someone has extra inventory and needs to liquidate, or run a sale, or whatever.<p>Anthropomorphizing markets as evil cartels is 100% just as bad as the efficient market fetishization you see in libertarian circles. Markets are what markets do, and what they do is compete trying to sell you junk.
That's not clear exactly as a lot of companies were eating the cost in anticipation of a ruling like this. It was blatantly illegal to use the IEEPA to enact tariffs on the whole world so a lot of people called the bluff... and they were right.
Link to SCOTUSblog coverage, which has the link to the actual opinion. I tend to eschew early media coverage of things like this and just go to the source.<p><a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-down-tariffs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-dow...</a>
I wonder what this means for the EU. We made a new deal under pressure of the tariffs that is actually worse than the deal we had. If we had not bent the knee, we would have had that original deal back, or at least, so it seems? Now we seem to be properly shafted due to weak politicians.
The deal more or less had 3 'bad' things in it:<p>1. The EU would face higher tariffs on their exports to the USA. Now mostly struck down<p>2. The EU would not retaliate with tariffs of its own. Not really a big deal since the only US export to the EU that's worth worrying about are digital services, and those aren't subject to tariffs anyways.<p>3. The EU promised to buy lots of LNG and make investments in the USA to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. This was a bald-faced lie on the part of the EU negotiators. Even if the EU wanted to actually do this, they have no power or mechanism to make member states and companies within those member states buy more LNG or make more investments in the USA. This was just an empty promise.<p>___<p>So if the tariffs are struck down, we're more or less back to where we started.
We never actually ratified that deal.<p>Parliament froze it when Trump started threatening Greenland.
Should have been done sooner, I take issue with the 3 who dissented and how long it took there get there. The constitution is clear on this matter. Prices are insane already, we don't need fake emergencies to drive up prices even more.
<a href="https://apnews.com/live/supreme-court-tariff-ruling-updates" rel="nofollow">https://apnews.com/live/supreme-court-tariff-ruling-updates</a><p><i>Furious about the defeat, Trump said he will impose a global 10% tariff as an alternative while pressing his trade policies by other means. The new tariffs would come under a law that restricts them to 150 days.</i><p>Don't you americans have some kind of mechanism for removing a president from office when the trust is no longer there? I remember hearing a lot about it during the Clinton era in the 90s.
It feels like the US-Iran war is inevitable now.
10 days to go<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c86yjnw4x49o" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c86yjnw4x49o</a>
Trump said "Don't shoot the protestors or else." Iran shot the protestors. US military assets were out of position dealing with Venezuela. Now the assets are in position, the administration now feels obligated to impose "or else."<p>I doubt Trump's seriously seeking a nuclear deal as he (in)famously withdrew from the deal established by the Obama administration [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_the_Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Action" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_...</a>
It is, but not because of this decision.
A US-Iran conflict has been inevitable for decades.<p>A nuclear Iran would lead to a nuclear KSA, Turkiye, UAE, Egypt, Qatar, etc and would make the Middle East more unstable.<p>We don't need to put boots on the ground though. The reason why we had boots in Afghanistan and Iraq which led to it's unpopularity was due to our moral commitment to nation-building in the 1990s-2000s (especially after Yugoslavia). Americans no longer feel that moral compulsion.<p>If Iran shatters like Libya, the problem is solved and KSA, UAE, Qatar, Turkiye, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Russia, China, and India can fight over the carcass just like how ASEAN, China, Russia, and India are doing in now collapsed Myanmar (which had similar ambitions in the 2000s); how the Gulf, Med states, and Russia are meddling in Libya; and how the Gulf, Turkiye, Russia, China, and India are meddling in the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia).<p>This is why North Korea prioritized nuclear weapons - in order to gain strategic autonomy from the US <i>and</i> China [0], especially because China has constantly offered to forcibly denuclearize North Korea as a token to SK and Japan for a China-SK-Japan FTA [1]<p>Edit: can't reply<p>> How many more years will it remain inevitable, do you think?<p>As long as Iranian leadership remain committed to building a nuclear program.<p>Thus Iran either completely hands off it's nuclear program to the US or the EU, or it shatters.<p>The former is not happening because the key veto players in Iran (the clerics, the Bonyads, the IRGC, the Army, and regime-aligned oligarchs) are profiting from sanctions and substituting US/EU relations with Russia and China, and have an incentive to have a nuclear weapon in order to solidify their perpetual control in the same manner that North Korea did.<p>That only leaves the latter. The same thing happened to Libya and Myanmar.<p>The only reason the Obama administration went with the JCPOA was because the EU, Russia, and China lobbied the Obama admin that they could prevent Iran from nuclearizing. China+Russia are now indifferent to Iranian nuclear ambitions due to ONG (China) and technology (Russia) dependencies, and the EU does not have the power projection capacity nor the economic linkages to stop Iran.<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/six-party-talks-north-koreas-nuclear-program" rel="nofollow">https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/six-party-talks-north-kore...</a><p>[1] - <a href="https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/47844?device=smartphone&phrase=okinawa&words=" rel="nofollow">https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/47844?device=smartp...</a>
Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.
We truly don't need boots on the ground though.<p>The NATO campaign in Libya was similar with no American boots on the ground, with the Gulf and Turkiye largely stepping in. And unlike Libya, we don't have US citizens in a consulate in Iran.<p>"You break it, you buy it" doesn't hold in 2026 anymore.
Libya has a 10x lower population density than Iran, among other disparities. I'd be careful leaping to comparisons before anything has happened, considering how benign the Twelve Day War ended up being.<p>"Hands off the nuke or we kill you" is a great populist policy on paper, but difficult to implement in reality. Especially if your air campaign fails, necessitating a suicidal ground invasion.
> Libya has a 10x lower population density than Iran, among other disparities<p>Libya's population was overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of regions in the same manner as Iran.<p>Furthermore, Iran no longer has functional AD systems and the initial strikes were limited to nuclear sites and a handful of strategic site.<p>This time strikes are planned to be more generalized<p>> "Hands off the nuke or we kill you" is a great populist policy on paper, but difficult to implement in reality. Especially if your air campaign fails, necessitating a suicidal ground invasion<p>We can keep striking Iran indefinetly.<p>A nuclear program requires an industrial base, and with what is current being proposed, a scorched earth approach of targeting Iranian industrial [0], security [0], and leadership capacity [1] is being planned.<p>You truly do not need boots on the ground if you do not care about maintaining a functional country at the end of such strikes.<p>That is the approach the US is adopting now. For all this talk of "regime change", the answer is we don't care what happens after.<p>This is why I called out Libya - it was an industrialized country with an active nuclear and ballistics missile program with the capacity to harm much of Europe. The months of NATO strikes degraded their industrial capacity and the country collapsed into civil war, but it was no longer a major headache for Europe in the same manner that it was under Gaddafi.<p>Iran collapsing into a Libya or even Syrian style civil war is a good outcome for the US. It sucks for the region (and hence why the Gulf and Turkiye has been lobbying against it) but it is good enough for us in the USA.<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-military-preparing-potentially-weeks-long-iran-operations-2026-02-13/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-military-prepar...</a><p>[1] - <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-strikes-iran-could-target-individual-leaders-officials-say-2026-02-20/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-strikes-iran-co...</a>
How many more years will it remain inevitable, do you think?
Wag the dog, to distract us while pedo, grifting Trump family at work
Also, who thinks that striking this down now is too little, too late because the rest of the world has already imposed retaliatory tariffs? And what’s the guarantee that they will lower them?
I swear that whoever is advising trump is trying to purposefully give tariffs, and immigration enforcement a bad name.<p>It seriously feels like a scheme to ensure cheap labor.
This ruling impacts tariffs imposed by way of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which includes the reciprocal tariffs announced on April 2’s so-called “Liberation Day.” Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that roughly $170 billion in tariff revenues have been generated through February 20 via these policies. However, this ruling has no bearing on section 232 tariffs, which have been used to justify levies on the likes of steel and aluminum.<p>Trump administration officials had indicated that they developed contingency plans to attempt to reinstate levies in the event of this outcome. CNN reported that Trump called this ruling a “disgrace” and said he had a backup plan for tariffs.
It looks like there are several ways to reinstate these tarrifs at the Executive level <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/supreme-court-got-it-right-ieepa-dont-pop-champagne-yet" rel="nofollow">https://www.cato.org/blog/supreme-court-got-it-right-ieepa-d...</a>
It'd be cool if the backup plan was to get Congressional approval, per the US Constitution
That's just bluster. The IEEPA nonsense was <i>already</i> the creative trickery deployed in defense of a novel and prima facia unconstitutional policy. If they had a better argument, they would have made it.<p>And we know in practice that Trump TACOs out rather than pick real fights with established powers. Markets don't like it when regulatory agencies go rogue vs. the rule of law. They'll just shift gears to something else.
TACOs?
Trump always chickens out.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out</a><p>Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO) is a term that gained prominence in May 2025 after many threats and reversals during the trade war U.S. president Donald Trump initiated with his administration's "Liberation Day" tariffs.<p>The charitable explanation is that he chickens out when confronted with real backlash.The less charitable explanation is that he 'chickens' out after the appropriate bribe has been paid to him.
Trump
Always
Chickens
Out
Hmm. This is celebrated as a victory - I don't mind that, who likes
the crazy pro-russian orange man anyway. But I think it should be
pointed out that he went on to use an old law. So the supreme
court basically said that this was an unfit use case. Ok. They could
just come up with a new law that is tailor-made and may eventually be
approved. It may take some time but they could technically do so, right?
So I am not sure if that victory dance isn't just too early.
You do realize these tariffs aren't going away. They just used a different legal way to use them. Section 232, 301, 201, 122 and 338 will allow him put these right back on
The opinion: <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf</a>
The global damage has been done. It took too long and it looks like it will only be partially reversed.<p>Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.
I don’t see how constitutional changes would help. The constitution already creates separation of powers, limits on executive authority, and procedures for removing an unfit president or one who commits serious crimes. But these only matter to the extent that majorities of elected and appointed officials care, and today’s ruling notwithstanding, there’s no political will to enforce any of them. The plurality of American voters in 2024 asked for this, and unfortunately we are all now getting what they asked for and deserve.
I think you're misunderstanding at least a little bit here. The Constitution created separation of powers, but what it did not do is explicitly block a particular branch from either abdicating their duty or simply delegating their power back to the executive.<p>It's certainly an interesting situation that wasn't explicitly spelled out in the law. But as far as everything that's working, it's realistically all within the legal framework of the Constitution. There are procedures to remove an unfit President, sure; but there's no requirement baked into the Constitution that requires those parties to act upon those procedures.<p>In short, it's a whole lot of short-sightedness of the Constitution combined with willing participants across multiple branches of the government.<p>The problems unearthed and the damage being done will take decades to fix just our internal issues, and it's very likely we will never resolve our international problems.<p>I don't know what the future holds for the United States, but we are certainly going to be operating from a severe handicap for quite a while.
The basic fact that needs to be contended with is that the Constitution, however brilliantly it may be crafted or repaired, is a piece of paper. It has no agency to enforce or do anything else. It's always people who have to decide to do things, maybe under inspiration from this paper or another. So whether the Constitution say "Congress <i>must</i> impeach a President who is doing this or that" vs "<i>may</i> impeach", that would have 0 practical impact.<p>Consider that most totalitarian states have constitutions that explicitly forbid torture, discrimination, and many other forms of government suppression of people. This does little in the face of a police state bent on suppressing the people.
Worth mentioning, that goes the other way too... plenty of what should be executive power was delegated to congressional authority over the years as well. And it doesn't even begin to cover activist judicial practices.<p>The lines have definitely blurred a lot, especially since the early 1900's. And that's just between the branches, let alone the growth of govt in general.
"plenty of what should be executive power was delegated to congressional authority over the years as well"<p>Examples? The activist judges thing I can see, but I'm not so sure I'm concerned of a body with more singular authority (the president) delegating to a body with more democratic accountability and representation (congress), nor can I easily find any examples of it.
Can you give an example of a case where the executive branch has delegated power to the legislative or judicial branches?
Federal Reserve (Fed): While created by Congress to be independent, critics argue its regulatory powers and management of money are inherently executive functions that should be under Presidential control.<p>Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): As an independent regulatory commission, it oversees markets, yet some proponents of a unitary executive argue it should be subject to White House control.<p>Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC): A regulatory agency that, along with the Fed, has been subject to executive orders aiming to tighten oversight.<p>Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC): An independent agency that issues regulations and recalls, often cited in discussions regarding the scope of executive authority.
>>And it doesn't even begin to cover activist judicial practices.<p>The Constitution created SCOTUS as a political body.<p>The sole role of a Supreme Court Justice is to cast votes.<p>The constitution places zero restrictions on how a Justice decides which way to vote. The Justice is not bound by anything in deciding how to vote.<p>That includes bribery or other corruption. If bribery is proven, the Justice is subject to criminal prosecution. But conviction does not remove the Justice from office. And removal by impeachment does not undo the cases decided by the corrupt votes of the Justice.<p>Every vote of every Justice in US history was an "activist judicial practice" in the sense that each vote was made for personal reasons of the Justice that we will never know (opinions only reflect what a Justice chose to say, which in no way means it reflects the personal reasons for the Justice's vote).<p>Your comment is a political statement about a political body - although you seem to incorrectly believe you are making some type of legal statement.
I didn't say SCOTUS or Justices? Even then, even if they are making political decisions, there's still the illusion of something resembling reason behind those decisions... that's far from some of the activist decisions further down the line at the district level.
I should be more careful with my terminology. By saying the constitution made SCOTUS a political body, I meant that the design of the constitution is such that SCOTUS is free to interpret the Constitution (and laws) as it sees fit.<p>The Constitution is designed such that it defines no rules and places no restrictions upon how Justices are to interpret the Constitution. The original design of the Constitution is that the Justices are to interpret the laws of the United States as they see fit.<p>There is no such thing as an "activist" Supreme Court.<p>The suggestion there must be an "Originalist interpretation" of the Constitution (e.g. it must be interpreted as intended by the Founding Fathers) is pure hogwash. If that were so, then by an "Originalist interpretation" the Constitution would already say so (and of course it doesn't). Nevertheless political conservative Justices actually made that part of their opinions that now impose the concept of "originalism" when interpretating the Constitution. A pretty neat magical trick by which the conservative Justices violate the philosophy of "originalism" to impose "originalism".<p>And as for "further down the line at the district level", there is likewise no such thing as an "activist" court - in the sense that lower courts, unlike SCOTUS, are constrained by the Constitution and statutes passed by Congress. There cannot be "activist" district courts to the extent that if they overstep their bounds, SCOTUS will be called upon to address it.<p>The phrase "activist court" is nothing more than a fictional invention of The Federalist Society. If there are actual politics being played in SCOTUS (this time I mean Republican vs Democrat), it is the Republicans through The Federalist Society and appointments to SCOTUS of Federalist Society Members. But now I am chasing down a rabbit hole that is best avoided.
Seems rather unlikely to me that people who ignore the constitution for the sake of political advantage would start following the constitution if it were worded differently.
> There are procedures to remove an unfit President, sure; but there's no requirement baked into the Constitution that requires those parties to act upon those procedures.<p>This would be enforced how?
Well, you can’t force people to follow the constitution in the first place, if too few agree with it.
>>This would be enforced how<p>Bingo. The flaw in the constitution. The Executive holds the only enforcement mechanism in government: the FBI, military and other police forces.<p>Having majored in political science as an undergrad and then being a trial attorney for 40+ years, I would argue that my use of the word 'flaw' is probably misplaced. 'Flaw' implies it could (should) have been created differently.<p>Alas, I am unaware of ever reading a workable way to 'fix' our constitutional 'flaw'.
I'm not sure why Americans are so certain that their system of separation of powers is the right one. Most countries don't separate the executive and legislative like that. The executive is whoever can command the support of the legislative. If you think about the US system it makes no sense. An executive can just ignore the rules created by the legislative by just not enforcing it and the only means to stop that is a 2/3 majority in a body that by it's nature is not representative of the population but rather of States.<p>As far as I can tell the US system is designed for gridlock. Things like filibuster, lower house elections every two years, state elected upper body, electorate system are all designed to create girdlock.<p>While Americans as a whole are to blame for some of this they are working in a completely broken system. In tech we try not to blame a person when something goes wrong so we look at what process allowed this to happen. I think many of the US problems are explained by their underlying system which is basically a copy of the English one at the time of Independence with a monarch and a parliament. Unlike the English system though it barely evolved since then.
I think it's designed that way because it wasn't originally seen as one country, more as a federation.<p>Even by the time of the civil war, Robert E Lee decided he was Virginian ahead of his national identity.<p>If you have a bunch of sovereign states, then you need some state-level evening out. If everyone is a citizen of one large state, you can just go proportional.<p>On top of this, it was never going to be easy to gradually move from one to the other with the issue of slavery looming large, so they didn't fix it. This was still a huge issue in 1848 when a lot of Europe was grappling with how to do a constitution.<p>So it stayed broken and here we are.
The difference is in cases where the parliament chooses the executive is it leads to it's own collusion and corruption in terms of excessively growing govt... not that it's barely held the US from doing so. The point is to be in an adversarial context in order to resist overreach of govt.<p>For better or worse, our system today isn't quite what it was originally designed as... The Senate was originally selected by the state govts, not direct election... the Vice President was originally the runner-up, not a paired ticket and generally hamstrung as a result. The VP didn't originally participate in the Senate either, that came after WWII.<p>The good part about the constitution is there is a reasonable set of ground rules for changing said constitution with a minimum that should clearly represent the will of the majority of the population. (corrupt politicians not-withstanding)
> As far as I can tell the US system is designed for gridlock.<p>At the federal level the US system was designed for gridlock <i>on purpose</i>, with the premise that something shouldn't be federal policy without widespread consensus, and without that consensus it should be left to the states.<p>The problem is really that many of the gridlock-inducing measures have been <i>thwarted</i>, e.g. delegation of rulemaking power from Congress to the executive and direct election of Senators to prevent state-representing Senators from voting down federal overreach. But those things weren't just there to induce gridlock, they were also the accountability measures, so without them you put corruption on rails and here we are.
The structure of British government during the Hanoverian times was little different from what the UK has today. The monarch was effectively a powerless figurehead and executive decisions were made mostly by faceless very wealthy individuals in back rooms with the public face carried by a small set of charismatic figures who usually sat in parliament.<p>The US system was designed as a grand experiment. It made a certain amount of sense at the time: the country as a vast plantation steered by a benevolent master with policy set by wealthy landowners and businessmen who knew what was best for everyone. It was a system already in place in the Americas for generations and most national arguments could be hashed out at the club over some fine imported brandy or, for people like Franklin, some imported tea.<p>As far as it goes, there have been worse set-ups.
The filibuster isn't part of the system; it's not even part of the law. It's just part of the rules that the Senate chose for their own internal procedures.
Have a proper mature parliamentary democracy made of multiple parties, not just two, and a prime minister that is always one vote away from resigning.<p>Slower democracy, sure, but fits advanced economies that need consistent small refactors and never full rewrites every 4 years.
I'd like to see a change in voting system to make voting for smaller political parties more viable. My country did this in 1993[1] so I've seen to some extent that it works. A lot of other issues in the US seem downstream from that top-level issue.<p>But sometimes I think about the fact that you guys don't even have the metric system yet...<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_New_Zealand_electoral_reform_referendum" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_New_Zealand_electoral_ref...</a>
The problems are a product of the constitutional system. I think the main problem is the elected king presidential system nonsense. Parliamentary democracy is the way to go.
> I don’t see how constitutional changes would help.<p>At the very least, we need a clarification on presidential immunity.
The American constitution is riddled with problems that many later democracies managed to fix. In general, the founding fathers envisioned a system where amendments were far more common and they didn't realize they made the bar too high. And that doesn't even touch on the electoral college, first-past-the-post voting, vague descriptions of the role of the supreme court, and no method for no confidence votes. Of course, it would be next to impossible to fix these in America because it would require a significant rewrite of the constitution.<p>The only way this will change is if the rest of the world leaves America behind and the quality of life here becomes so bad that radical change becomes possible.<p>But you are right that Trump won the popular vote in 2024, so you can't blame that on the system. But a functioning democracy would have more constraints on him. Our legislative branch has been dead in the water for 20 years at this point.
> The majority of American voters in 2024 asked for this<p>It was 49.8%, which is not quite a majority.<p>It's also worth noting that Kamala Harris received precisely 0 votes in the 2024 Democratic primaries.<p>[EDIT:] I see that the parent comment has now changed "majority" to "plurality."<p>If I could make one Constitutional amendment, it would be this: publicly finance all election campaigns, and make private contributions illegal bribery, punished by imprisonment of both the candidate and briber.
Fixed the “majority” claim.<p>I think a competent opposition party would be great for the US. But regardless of the candidate, US voters had three clear choices in the 2024 Presidential election: (1) I support what Trump is going to do, (2) I am fine with what Trump is going to do (abstain/third-party), (3) Kamala Harris. I think it’s extremely clear 3 was the best choice, but it was the least popular of the three.
Option 4: I am <i>not</i> fine with what Trump is going to do, but I am <i>also</i> not fine with what Harris is going to do. And, since Harris said that she wouldn't do anything different than Biden, that could amount to "I am not fine with what Biden has been doing the last four years".<p>Was that less bad than what Trump has done in one year? Yes. But Trump in his first term was less bad than this, and recency bias means that what we didn't like about Biden was more prominent in our minds.<p>But my option 4 looks just like your option 2 in terms of how people voted. I'm just saying that the motive may have been different.
Oh man that hits the biggest nerve in me. Never again should we allow primaries to be skipped. I don't care if the incumbent is the most popular candidate in history - running a primary makes sure the best candidates will be picked and refusing to run an election and then having the gall to suddenly anoint a chosen candidate was an absolutely disastrous decision.<p>Democracy is a healthy process - I don't know why we buy the stupid line of "we need party unity" when what we need is an efficient expression of the voters will and having that expression is what best forms unity. There are some old Hillary quotes that make me absolutely rabid.
To be fair there were primaries, but the DNC only pushed Biden's candidacy. So there really wasn't any other candidates on all the ballots except uncommitted. When he dropped out in July their simply isn't enough time to run a functional primary and campaign for the vote in November. We can't really delay the election to have a primary. The delegates of the DNC do get to vote on who they want and by the time Kamala stepped in she did get the most votes.<p>It's really a problem of money though. The DNC really are the king makers when it comes to candidates. That and PAC money are the requirements to get a nomination. At least when it comes to presidency. Smaller elections you get more freedom to have a successful without such things. The whole system needs an overhaul unfortunately and I don't see any candidate from any party looking to fix that any time soon.
My first thought when I read the Biden resignation letter was - Harris endorsement is brilliant fuck you to the Dem insiders that are ousting him. I am still lowkey convinced that he voted for Trump out of pure spite.
Fix some of the ambiguities that allowed power to be concentrated in the executive branch. Automatically start elected officials so things like avoiding swearing in don't happen. Limit the power of these executive orders. Introduce recall votes. Switch to public funding for all elections.<p>Theres plenty we can do. That's off the top if my head. I'm sure if smart people sat down to think about it there are lots of practical and clever ideas.<p>The majority didn't ask for this. 49% of voters did.
Or hear me out - the congress should start doing their job. The main problem is the congress has been MIA for decades and outsources their power to the executive via regulatory bodies. And probably a good idea for SCOTUS to return some power to the states. There is too much power concentrated in washington, the congress refuses to yield it and the result is imperial presidency. Which is exalting when the president is from your faction and depressing when it is not.
Congress is largely the wrong people though. What sane person would build a system where getting elected requires you to be rich? Where a primary system ensures everyone elected is not roughly in the center of opinions?
I agree, I think recall votes, term limits, higher pay, fixing election funding would help with that.<p>We need changes that address the kind of people that are running for these spots and winning then go on to do a bad job. Congress isn't incentived to be effective.
The main problem is that Congress is not competitive. If you live somewhere outside of a few remaining swing areas, you can just skip voting entirely.<p>We need to do something to fix this: gerrymandering ban, increase the number of Reps, add more states for more Senate seats, etc.
sorry, but that is not it, unless you think politicians are fungible within parties. The problem is that there is no real feedback mechanism between a what a congress person votes for and their electibility (within or across parties) because of money in politics.<p>how is it possible that congress has consistent single digit approval ratings and they vote for things 90% of their constituents disagree with and still get elected? This is the core problem of American politics. Politicians are beholden to donors not voters.
> The problem is that there is no real feedback mechanism between a what a congress person votes for and their electibility<p>You would describe this as being different from competitive?<p>I doubt any amount of money would matter if we had 1 representative per 30k people as written in the constitution, NY State is about 20 M people so you'd need to bribe ~300 of the ~600 representatives in order to get your way (and also do that for every other state).
>><i>Switch to public funding for all elections.</i><p>><i>Or hear me out - the congress should start doing their job.</i><p>Well, we make them do their job by holding them accountable to the people rather than a billionaire donor class. <i>Citizens United</i> is at the root of all this.
The majority of American voters can be as dumb as they want - the two big failures here are the legislature and the judiciary. The judiciary let an obviously illegal thing sit for far too long while the legislature is too partisan to actually take actions against the administration (except in the case of the Epstein files which has been surprisingly admirable and a rare ray of light in the last year).<p>If the majority of American voters elect snoopy the dog snoopy can do all of the things snoopy wants to do within the bounds of the law. Snoopy can use his bully pulpit to fight against dog restrictions in restaurants and grant pardons to previous offenders. Snoopy can ensure efficient spending of money on public water fountains accessible to canines... but if snoopy starts issuing open hand-outs to the red baron (snoopy in a moustache) that's when the other branches of government are supposed to step in - we aren't supposed to need to wait four years for the next election to stop open corruption (especially since corruption is really good at funding more corruption so there's a vicious cycle that can begin if you let it fester @see the recent FBI raid on GA election offices).
Are you arguing voters in a democracy are not even a little responsible for the outcomes of their vote?
> If snoopy starts issuing open hand-outs to the red baron (snoopy in a moustache)<p>You mean like how President Trump just gave 10 billion USD of taxpayer money to a board operated by Private Citizen Trump?<p><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/trump-board-of-peace-first-meeting-gaza-un-israel-rcna259509" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/trump-board-of-peace-firs...</a>
Necessary changes, off the top of my head:<p>1. Ranked Pairs voting for national elections, including eliminating the electoral college. Break this two-party duopoly of bad-cop worse-cop.<p>2. Enshrining the concept of independent executive agencies, with scope created by Congress, with agency heads chosen by the same national elections. (repudiation of "Unitary Executive Theory", and a general partitioning of the executive power which is now being autocratically abused)<p>3. Repudiation of Citizens United and this whole nonsense that natural rights apply to government-created artificial legal entities (also goes to having a US equivalent of the GDPR to reign in the digital surveillance industry's parallel government)<p>4. State national guards are under sole exclusive authority of state governors while operating on American soil (repudiation of the so-called "Insurrection Act"). This could be done by Congress but at this point it needs to be in large print to avoid being sidestepped by illegal orders.<p>5. Drastically increase the number of senators. Maybe 6 or 8 from each state? We need to eliminate this dynamic where many states hate their specific moribund senators, yet keep voting them in to avoid losing the "experienced" person.<p>6. Recall elections by the People, for all executive offices, members of Congress, and Supreme Court justices. (I don't know the best way to square courts carrying out the "rule of law" rather than succumbing to "rule of the fickle mob", but right now we've got the worst of both worlds)
Statutorily reduce the power of a rogue president by reinforcing the right of the administrative state to exist with some independence for the rank and file. Reduce conviction threshold in the Senate to 60. Eliminate the electoral college to guarantee the winner of a popular vote is the winner.<p>Importantly, prosecute every member of the Trump administration for their blatant respective crimes.<p>I agree with you that the Republican party has failed the country by allowing this to happen. But I think we can still do better.<p>More "big picture" ideas would be to fundamentally alter the House and Senate, and implement score/ranked voting to allow a multiparty system.
> Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.<p>For sure. Question is what would be enough to regain trust? I don't really see it happening
Genuinely, I think the US is pretty doomed if the Trump family and administration cronies aren't stripped of their wealth, tarred and feathered. If it is known that being president is a great way to make a bunch of money through corruption and there are no consequences then we'll be in the same situation as the Roman Republic in the waning days before Caesar. Caesar himself was funded by Crassus to make sure Crassus wealth making tactics stayed legal and grant him a big payout in the form of a rich governorship. Towards the end of the republic that sort of quid pro quo was standard operating procedure and if it happens and goes unpunished - if those benefiting see any positive RoI - then it'll just happen more and more.
Dunno. More than half the country was either enthusiastically in favor of electing a convicted criminal pathological liar or too apathetic to do anything about it. How do you fix that?
Sounds like an enormous indictment of the Democrat party. Public views of their policies was so bad that the alternative you outlined was preferred.
Yes, America chose adjudicated rape, tax fraud, conspiracy theories, serial dishonesty, and a track record of being the worst President in living memory over Kamala’s “policies” of being non-white and a woman.<p>That’s the problem.
yes thats right, the rise of Hitler was probably justified because the Jews were admittedly very annoying...<p>I mean if I had to choose between being ok with Jews or supporting Hitler, i can understand why people would pick Hitler. The election of Hitler was really quite an indictment of the Jews.<p>(I am not saying Trump is Hitler)
You can't change or fix people who have their vote. Mental models are rigid, and people are, broadly speaking, emotional and irrational. They vote vibes, not facts. So, "what do?" as the kids would say. You keep folks who want to come to the US who might be vulnerable once in the US out of the US to protect them (which this administration is assisting with through their anti immigration efforts). The people who want to leave [1]? You help them leave for developed countries, which there are many. The people who will remain and should be protected? You protect them if you have the resources or network to do so. The global economy continues to reconfigure to decouple from the US [2]. Time marches on. These are harm reduction and risk mitigation mechanisms, perfect is not possible nor the target.<p>These are system problems. Think in systems. No different than having an abusive family you have to decouple from for self preservation, just at geopolitical scale. Capital, people, information are all mobile, and can relocate as needed. There is nothing on US soil that cannot be replaced or replicated elsewhere on the globe (besides perhaps national parks and other similar public goods, which can hopefully be protected until improved governance emerges). Please, challenge me on this if you think it's wrong, I've put much thought into it to provide guidance to others.<p>The only thing we had of value was trust (value of US treasuries and the dollar) in the rule of law and stability, and we burned it up. Humans are tricky. Get as far away as you can from harmful humans.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/697382/record-numbers-younger-women-leave.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://news.gallup.com/poll/697382/record-numbers-younger-w...</a> ("In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups.")<p>[2] <i>Global Trade Is Leaving the US Behind</i> - <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-02-12/on-trade-and-tariffs-the-world-is-moving-on-from-the-us" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-02-12/on-tra...</a> | <a href="https://archive.today/dsI9R" rel="nofollow">https://archive.today/dsI9R</a> - February 12th, 2026
It's going to take a Constitutional Convention just for the states in North America to be able to regain their trust in Washington any time soon.<p>States' Rights have been slaughtered by these false patriots.
For sure, massive damage has been done to Brand USA. Remember the 'Allegory of Good and Bad Government" in the Siena public palazzo since the 14th Century? Everyone knows USA is just a bunch of grifters
[flagged]
I disagree. Despite all the talk and grand announcements of independence, most of the world wants globalization and worked for more of it, but maybe without the US (openings to china/india/LatAm). Now it will most likely be WITH the US. While the US may feel that globalization has been bad for itself (it hasn't - just look at the spectacular US economy) , the rest of the developed world is not in a position to reverse it (due to demographics mostly) and will be happy to jump back in.
I think that a lot of people would disagree that the economy is spectacular. People can't even afford to buy a home in a decent part of the country.
Presumably congress could recreate the same tariffs, if they wanted.
The economy is not spectacular by any means. It's about average on paper, and without AI growth (which will surely slow down like the .com crash) and increased healthcare spending, it's been mildly slumping.
I'm guessing you're American?
> Constitutional changes<p>Y'all have proven how worthless that piece of paper is.
There are many countries that have functioning constitutions that are regularly revised.<p>It’s not impossible for the USA to get there one day.
We still haven't fixed things caused by putting chattel slavery into the Constitution almost 150 years after a civil war.
Well, that's why I wrote "not impossible" rather than "likely"...<p>These things can be fixed even though it's difficult. Sometimes the pressure just boils over. Americans are a lot more defeatist about their politics than in many other democratic countries.
Hell, we deliberately left it in.<p>> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, <i>except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted</i>, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
it is impossible and it is <i>great</i> that it is impossible because you need one party to basically run everything at the federal level and vast majority at the state level which means that any changes to the constitution would be heavily politically motivated to one side of the isle.
Looking at the results, it's obviously not great that there's no reasonable process to update the constitution. It's the most dysfunctional democracy in the West.<p>Change that seems inevitable in retrospect often feels like a surprise in the moment. France its on its fifth republic. A second American republic is not impossible.
Doesn’t this decision exactly prove the opposite?
What piece of paper is worth more to you?
The difference with many other countries -- I'm Australian -- is that we don't constantly bang on about how glorious our constitution is and how it's the be-all end-all. We just get on with it.<p>And I wouldn't mind if the American constitution <i>did</i> provide all of these tremendous benefits that everyone bangs on about all the time. That'd be great! But it turns out nobody's really tested that, until now.<p>And you get an F, my friend. Hard fail.
I mean, it was the world's first codified constitution, written after the world's first successful war of independence.<p>Which later constitutions do you grade higher? Who has stronger rights?
This is moving the goalposts, but I'll entertain this. What does the time / date of the original document have to do with the fact that it's rarely updated and that there's seemingly a constitutional crisis every week for the last year and a bit? No one is arguing here about the strength of rights or the 'grade' of the constitution.
The problem with the US Constitution and its religious status in the US is that it contains both fundamental rights and protections for citizens, AND the mundane details of implementing the government.<p>If you put 500 mock Constitutional conventions together at universities and cities across the country, I would polymarket my 401k that none of them would come up with the same structure we have today in the US. Many republics founded since 1791 have far better democratic structures than the US does. I call the US a semi-democracy because of our Senate, Electoral college, gerrymandered House districts and first-past-the-post voting.<p>Edit: I got "danged" so here is my response to the person below -<p>Consider the bill of rights and federal limits separately from the structure of government.<p>I believe France and Australia have better "democratic infrastructure" and I'm sure they aren't the only ones.
> Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.<p>I don't know about trust but the constitution isn't what enabled this type of behavior, it's the legislature. They've been abdicating their duties to executive controlled bodies (FCC, FDA, FTC, EPA, etc.) and allowing the president to rule through executive action unchallenged. They could have stopped these tariffs on day one. SCOTUS isn't supposed to be reactionary, congress is.<p>The constitution has all the mechanisms in place to control the president, they just aren't being used by the legislature.<p>It's a tricky problem that has a number of proposed solutions. I'm not going to act like it's a silver bullet but I think open primaries in federal elections would go a _long_ way towards normalizing (in the scientific meaning) the legislature and allowing people who want to do the job, rather than grandstand, into the offices.
I think the root of the problem is our two party system and the polarization of our culture. Congress and the president often act as a single partisan unit, not a collection of independent thinkers with their own ideas about how the country should be run. That makes it very hard for congress to serve as an effective check on presidential powers.
That's really the achilles heel of a checks and balances system. Should an ideology gain control of all of them then the system doesn't work and it immediately sinks into authoritarianism. The Supreme Court acting on this just unfortunately gives the illusion of things working when it's a game of blitzkrieg. Make an obvious illegal action and get as much done as possible then when you are eventually checked, move on to the next thing. Just keep pushing in different directions until you cover the board.
Good luck ratifying any constitutional amendments that are in any way a response to MAGA.
This is probably true. Even before this ruling Trump and Bessent and Lutnick have spoken about how they would react to such a ruling. And it looks like they’re going to do the same thing Democrats do when they don’t like a SCOTUS ruling, and try to implement the same tariffs in a slightly different way to effectively ignore the ruling. We have to fix this. The Supreme Court’s rulings and the US Constitution have to matter. There must be consequences for ignoring them - like the president or lawmakers going to jail.<p>Even if part of the tariffs are rolled back, we may see other ones remain. And I bet they will not make it easy for people to get their money back, and force them into courts. Not that it matters. If people get their money back, it will effectively increase the national debt which hurts citizens anyways.<p>And let’s not forget the long-term damage of hurting all of the relationships America had with other countries. If Trump wanted to use tariffs as a tool for emergency purposes, he should have just taken action against China and made a case around that (pointing to Taiwan, IP theft, cyber attacks, etc). Instead he implemented blanket tariffs on the whole world, including close allies like Canada.<p>In the end, my guess is China and India gained from this saga. And the Trump administration’s family and friends gained by trading ahead of every tariff announcement. Americans lost.
> And it looks like they’re going to do the same thing Democrats do when they don’t like a SCOTUS ruling, and try to implement the same tariffs in a slightly different way to effectively ignore the ruling<p>This is kind of a bizarre whataboutism to throw in there. The current administration (with the full support of Congressional majorities in both houses that have largely abdicated any pretense of having their own policy goals) has been flouting constitutional norms pretty much nonstop for a year now and literally ignoring court orders in a way that probably no administration has ever done before, and yet the playbook they're following for extrajudicial activity apparently is from the Democrats? Just because there's bad behavior on both sides doesn't mean that the magnitude of it is equal, and in terms of respect for the rule of law the behavior of the current administration really has no comparison.
There is a serious problem in our present constitution and laws that lets both parties ignore the law. Just yesterday we had discussions here about Everytown sponsored legislation that will restrict 3D printers. Do you think California has adhered to constitutional norms with their laws? Do you think they have flouted SCOTUS rulings? Have they done so consistently? What about when Biden was backdooring censorship through big tech?<p>You can answer these questions for yourself and decide. But for me it’s clear that Democrats have repeatedly violated the first and second amendments and normalized those practices. They’ve played a part in creating the norms that now are exploited by the Trump administration. I consider these amendments to be way more important and consequential than a misuse of IEEPA.<p>I guess what I’m saying is the two sides are indeed comparable, even if I agree the Trump administration is a greater violator of laws and norms than anything before. And we shouldn’t ignore the rot on either side but instead strengthen the constitution to avoid these abuses.
> If Trump wanted to use tariffs as a tool for emergency purposes, he should have just taken action against China.<p>What is the emergency with China?
I love how it’s “global damage” when the US tariffs counties that are already tariffing them. But no, unfortunately the rest of the world knows the US’s value.
Like Switzerland that basically has zero tariffs on export to the US but was initially slapped with 39% because trump can't stand women in power? What about Brasil where trump stated the 50% tariff is punishment for putting Bolsonaro in prison?
the "global damage" is largely because these tariffs were arbitrary, lacking strategic planning, and highly inflationary creating a turbulence tax. The frequent reversals and selective granting of exemptions showed that its another tool to enrich the Trump family, cabinet and their business associates. In other worlds the rest of the world stopped trusting the US and started making trade deals on their own.
Doesn't seem like the market has priced the implication of this yet?<p>All in all, this seems like a major major blow to Trump. I'm more impressed that United State's laws are capable of gate keeping the president like this and despite people like Dalio dooming it up, it makes me more confident in America ironically.
The damage has been done, and probably can't be undone. Not sure you can convince me that they didn't think it wouldn't be struck down. It has destroyed a part of the underclass economy and probably some smaller to medium-sized businesses. Pretty sure some people figure they have had a good run with it until now.
My first reaction to this was: Matt Levine will need to cut his vacation short. Again.
The damage is done though. Other countries have imposed their own tariffs along with the strained relations with all of our allies.
I wonder how this will be interpreted outside US? realistically there's no way countries affected will get any "sorry" out of this, legally or from the administration.<p>By the neo-royalist [1]interpretation of the current administrations policies, many countries have either decided to pay for the royalty fee to get tariff exemption in a way aristocats in pre-Westphalian Europe dealed with each other.
While other stuck with the idea that it's stil the country you do deal with, not royals/aristocats.<p>All those countries (like the Swiss giving Trump golden rolexes for appeasement) that bent their knee: are they now gonna roll it back or are they thinking that the US system is so compromised, current administration will just find another way to play the neo-royalist game, creating new policies similar to the tariff so that each side lose, and then carve out an exemption for "the buddies" of the administration (and if you don't pay the tithe, you shall lose)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organization/article/further-back-to-the-future-neoroyalism-the-trump-administration-and-the-emerging-international-system/ABB12906CA345BBCA5049B544363D391" rel="nofollow">https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organi...</a>
Since tariffs apparently brought in about $200 billion I guess you can add another 0.66% to the 2025 deficit.
Just a thought.... I would think that "refunds" in the form of US Bonds with varying rates of maturity would probably be appropriate so as not to "shock" the system so to speak.<p>That said, I'm still a proponent of having the bulk of the federal budget based on tariffs and excise taxes. I don't like income and property taxes in general. I'd be less opposed to income taxes if there was truly a way to fairly leverage them, there simply isn't. VAT is at least more fair IMO. I also wouldn't mind a tax as part of leveraged asset loans (including cars/homes) with maybe a single exclusion for a primary residence and vehicle under a given price.
So, are they gonna be reversed tomorrow? What happens?
Justice delayed is justice denied.
Because of thw tariffs, it has not been possible to send small packages from Asia to the US. I wonder now how long it will take for service to be restored.
That's unfortunate - it was mostly a tax on the rich!
A total mess of an opinion, should have gone all the way, as always only the lawyers win.
So this means all prices are finally coming down soon, right? RIGHT?
No... because most conventional pricing increases exceeded the economic demands... at least in terms of groceries, which is one of the bigger areas of growth along with insurance rates (looking at auto insurance, required by govt in most states).<p>The food industries were seeing record profits at the same time of massive inflation, they were maximizing prices to see how much they could grow their wealth, while trying to minimize costs, decreasing quality and just absolutely abhorrent behavior all around.<p>I'm all for capitalism, but I strongly feel that the limitations granted to corporations by govt should come as part of a social contract that has largely been ignored completely. We should curtail a lot of the limitations granted and actually hold executives responsible for their decisions. We should also establish that "shareholder value" is not the only focus that companies should have. A corporation is not a person, that a corporation exists is fine, that they've been shielded from responsibility altogether in that limited liability now means you can literally destroy towns and executives and boards face no consequences is deplorable.<p>Governments should be limited, by extension the shields govt grants to corporations should similarly be limited. When the US constitution was written most corporations were formed around civil projects, then disbanded. Most companies were sole proprietorships or small partnerships. I think we need to get closer back to these types of arrangements.
Glad the Tariffs are back on! Good shit trump!
Surprised that in all the comments so far, no one has noted that Trump has many fallback options, which he said he'd use to re-create the tariffs, when this happens:<p><a href="https://www.cato.org/commentary/trump-has-many-options-supreme-court-strikes-down-tariffs" rel="nofollow">https://www.cato.org/commentary/trump-has-many-options-supre...</a><p><a href="https://www.myplainview.com/news/politics/article/trump-has-other-tariff-options-after-supreme-21369397.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.myplainview.com/news/politics/article/trump-has-...</a><p>A step in the right direction, but there's a lot of progress yet to be made if we want to restrain the executive.
Look I hate Trump as much as the next guy and don't want him power for a multitude of reasons, but there is a big difference between "a government does things I don't like but basically follows the rules to do them" and "a government can act completely unrestrained from the rules". The Trump administration having to do more work to justify their actions in a legal manner is good, and the checks and balances working to maintain the law is good.
This is what I've been complaining about as much as the tariffs themselves: the president does not levy taxes and should not be levying tariffs except for the very narrow authority that has been used in the past through explicit congressional delegation.<p>Congress is already completely in Trump's pocket. By doing it through Congress, Trump loses most of his bribery and bullying opportunities.
Is the US a country or a market?
Does this mean that Make in America subsidies will have to double? Make in America only made sense when offset by high tariffs.
The real issue is emergency powers. Trump defines an emergency as something congress doesn't agree with him on. There has not been any use of emergency powers in recent years that is remotely appropriate.
what happens to those billions of dollars already collected?
The importers would get the refunds, and any of their customers they charged more for would simply keep the refund. If you paid it directly (like international product order) you probably won't ever get repaid, as they probably deleted the transaction or otherwise failed to record it. Refunds even for importers might be caught up in lawsuits which might never resolve. It's a mess, and SCOTUS did not address the mess.
Trump addressed the press a little while ago on this topic and claims he's not issuing any refunds until courts force him to. He chastised the Supreme Court for not telling him what to do about refunds, and essentially pleaded helplessness to do anything about it until he fights more lawsuits and rulings demanding specific action are issued, musing something to the effect of "I guess that will take another couple years".<p>He further claimed that this ruling puts his tariffs on a <i>more</i> certain basis(?!) because now he'll use different statutes that have been solidly litigated already (... so why weren't you opting to use those in the first place, if it's truly better? You didn't need to wait on this ruling to do that!) and that the only effect this ruling will have is a brief drop to ~10% across-the-board tariffs while they do the paperwork to bump them back up again under these other statutes. He repeatedly characterized this is <i>good</i> news for his tariffs, while also complaining extensively about the court and insulting the justices in the majority.
this is a classic example of fuck around and find out.
I am still baffled by the notion that Trump and co. managed to spread the 'other countries are paying for the tariffs' narrative into mainstream and having so many world leaders bend over just to have them not imposed. Knowing they are short-lived, unpredictable, illegal, and in the end hurting the US consumers primarily.<p>Sure, if there is a huge tariff on something, the user might look for an alternative, causing lower sales and, therefore, damaging the source company and economy, but for many products there isn't really a US-available substitute.
The reality is that even though foreign sellers aren't paying the tarriffs directly, they do experience a direct decrease in demand because one of the largest markets on the planet has made your goods artificially more expensive.<p>Even if you're still making the same money per unit, tarriffs mean you sell fewer units. So many less that it's an existential threat to many businesses.
British reporting on American news is barf retarded.
Someone needs to track all the investment "promises" Trump touted he gained through negotiation with foreign countries. I got to imagine foreign countries had no plans on making good on those deals.
It's okay. When foreign companies fleece the US and jobs continue to be outsourced with no penalty, in addition to rising costs of everything, you can ease your mind because 'Trump bad'.
Sometimes how you do things is important. And tariffs by executive decree is bad policy.
"thank god for tariffs lowering prices"<p>sure man
Trump <i>is</i> bad.
As an individual:
I'm as-far-as-possible boycotting a lot of US goods (including <i>not</i> using amazon) - even down to the NOT coca-cola cola i now drink.
I'll not be visiting the US ever again (regardless of dems or repubs in charge).
I'm not alone, either.<p>So yes, i would say he's bad, and terrible for your country, both short, long, and very long term. Let alone the paedo stuff, the grifting, obama on the brain, tarrifs, ice...the economic jeopardy he's playing with the US is astounding to watch.<p>However, i am interested, as i am sure others are - in what way could he be considered 'good'?
does anybody think prices will fall after this?<p>i don't
Is it all speculation still at this point for what happens next? Like are they immediately void, does the govt have to repay importers the now illegal loss?<p>Or is this just another "trump did illegal thing but nothing will happen" kind of scenario?
I have not read the ruling, but….<p>A typical pattern is the appeals court (of which scotus is one) clarifies the legal issues and send the case back to the trial court to clean up and issue specific orders.
Trump govt will find another way to circumvent this and keep the tariff.<p><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/cnbc-daily-open-trump-administration-has-backup-plans-for-tariffs.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/cnbc-daily-open-trump-admini...</a>
Any further action to end-around the Supreme Court decision and re-impose the tariffs will almost certainly require broad Congressional approval. And this is a very bad time to try to do that since nearly half of those seats are up for re-election this year.<p>I think this issue is effectively dead at least until we see how the new majority shakes out in November.
You can't get around the Supreme Court. Full stop. They can try, fail, and declare victory but they cannot find another way. They would literally be right back in the courts fighting their own consequences and punishment.
they'll get buried in lawsuits for refunds if they don't obey the order
Relieved to see checks and balances in action, and a largely Trump-appointed Supreme Court enforcing limits set by law
What a collosal missed opportunity for Trump. His supreme court was about to save him from himself and his ruinous tariffs. He could have continued to insist that his tariffs were genius while letting someone else take responsibility for bad outcomes.
Economy does poorly? Blame the supreme court for striking down his beautiful tariffs.<p>Economy does well? Take credit for shepherding the economy past a hostile court.<p>Remember, in his narcissistic mind, Trump can never fail he can only be failed.<p>Instead he's now insisting he'll restart the tariffs under some even more flimsy interpretation of executive power.
Will the collected tariffs now have to be repaid? If so how. According to the Fed 90% were paid for by the consumers.
<a href="https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is-paying-for-the-2025-u-s-tariffs/" rel="nofollow">https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is...</a>
So, the majority decision makes sense to me, but I'm annoyed that they're unwilling to tackle whether there was an actual emergency or not. The was no "unusual and extraordinary" situation that happened to warrant this emergency declaration and judging what's "unusual and extraordinary" seems like something that falls pretty squarely in the Supreme Court's purview.<p>But no. The court pretty much says the president decides what's an emergency, leading us to having 51 active emergencies [0], with one starting back in 1979 (in response to the Iran hostage crisis) and with Trump leading the pack with 11 of such declarations. Congress didn't say "the president can just decide and that's it", but that's what's happening because of the SC's deferential posture.<p>Deferring so much to the political sphere (which is the reason behind this posture) is leading to a much less stable and more "swing-y" country.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...</a>
The ruling was 6-3 with Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh dissenting.<p>Kavanaugh's dissent is particularly peculiar as he wrote 'refunding tariffs already collected could be a “mess” with “significant consequences for the U.S. Treasury.”'<p>So, the justification is that undoing an illegal act is going to be unwieldy for the govt, so presumably, as a corollary, the govt must be allowed to continue doing illegal acts. This honestly reads as a blanket support for Trump personally, than any reasoned legal argument.
I think it was more that they felt that the judgement should include instructions to dismiss any remedial action, not that the actions should continue. Without reading the dissent(s), I can't really say...<p>In the end, the people who bought products that paid more won't get it back... and who will receive the difference is the middle-men who will just pocket the difference profiting from both ends.
I think this is normal for the supreme court, I've heard that they largely upheld abortion in the 1992 case because they thought it would be a mess to undo, even though they thought the original ruling was unconstitutional.
That's Kavanaugh for you.
what a mess<p>and, i'll bet, just the first of many
I’m tired of the blackpilled redditors who kept saying this was never gonna happen, the court was just going to do whatever Trump wants. I really need to stop visiting that site.
Semi-related - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088609">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088609</a>
Politics is always a sh!t show on both sides we humans constantly think the next one will better. It will never be better maybe unless AI destroys society and we all go back to living on the land cause money/greed/power always drives the madness!
Well, the good news for Trump and other elites is that we will all take a day off from discussing the Epstein files and wondering<p>- why no one in America is being charged<p>- why the files were so heavily redacted in violation of congress<p>- why the redactions were tailored to protect the names of some powerful people and not victims<p>Trump started talking about aliens yesterday. If the tariffs and aliens can't get people distracted from the Epstein filed then we'll be bombing Iran in 2 weeks...
Great, no more tariffs...which means that all those corporations who raised prices to compensate, will willingly drop prices back down to normal levels...right?<p>...Right?
I don’t get what SCOTUS is up to as far as a practical matter goes.<p>They’re hands off so the president can clearly gather illegal taxes.<p>Then they change their mind. So what? The government gives the taxes back? Is that even possible?<p>Next step what? Trump does something else illegal and SCOTUS majority sits on their hands for a year or more?<p>SCOTUS majority’s deference to their guy has become absurd… the judicial branch is of no use…
I am not a lawyer. But I think cases need to work their way up to SC. Before today's ruling a Federal Trade Court ruled the tariffs illegal [1]. And later, a Federal Appeals Court did the same [2]<p>The process takes time.<p>1. <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/29/court-strikes-down-trump-reciprocal-tariffs.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/29/court-strikes-down-trump-rec...</a><p>2. <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/29/trump-trade-tariffs-appeals-court-ieepa.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/29/trump-trade-tariffs-appeals-...</a>
The government gives back overpaid taxes every year, and there are long-established mechanisms to deduct qualifying purchases from your tax burden.<p>If we lived in a functional society, one might expect that tarriffs could be refunded through the normal income tax refund process hinged upon supplying recipts of tarriffs paid. I do not expect this to happen in the USA.
Now let's see what will happen.After all J.D.Vance (US VP)famously said:" The judiciary has decided. Now let them enforce it".
Ahem. The line is widely attributed to President Andrew Jackson, usually quoted as:
“John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”<p>He probably didn't say it either, its first appearance is in an 1860s book by Horace Greeley.
In his dissent [1], Justice Kavanaugh states:<p>> Given that the phrase “adjust the imports”—again, in a statutory
provision that did not use specific words such as “tariff ” or
“duty”—was unanimously held by this Court in 1976 to
include tariffs, and given that President Nixon had
similarly relied on his statutory authority to “regulate . . .
importation” to impose 10 percent tariffs on virtually all
imports from all countries, could a rational citizen or
Member of Congress in 1977 have understood “regulate . . .
importation” in IEEPA not to encompass tariffs? I think
not. Any citizens or Members of Congress in 1977 who
somehow thought that the “regulate . . . importation”
language in IEEPA excluded tariffs would have had their
heads in the sand.<p>The roll-call vote for HB7738 (IEEPA) was not recorded [2], so we seemly can't confirm today how any sitting members voted at the time. But there are two members of Congress remaining today who were present for the original vote: Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ed Markey (D-Mass). They clearly both agree with the Court, while having different opinions on the tariffs themselves.<p>Statement by Grassley [3]:<p>> I’m one of the only sitting members of Congress who was in office during IEEPA’s passage. Since then, I’ve made clear Congress needs to reassert its constitutional role over commerce, which is why I introduced prospective legislation that would give Congress a say when tariffs are levied in the future. ... I appreciate the work [President Trump] and his administration are doing to restore fair, reciprocal trade agreements. I urge the Trump administration to keep negotiating, while also working with Congress to secure longer-term enforcement measures.<p>Statement by Markey after previous decision in August [4]:<p>> Today’s ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit makes it clear that President Trump’s chaotic tariff policy is illegal. ... Today’s ruling is an important step in ending the economic whiplash caused by Trump’s abusive tariff authority.<p>N=2 is scant evidence, but it seems like both sides of the aisle "had their head in the sand", or Justice Kavanaugh's historical interpretation is a bit off.<p>[1] p.127: <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf</a><p>[2] g. 22478: <a href="https://www.congress.gov/95/crecb/1977/07/12/GPO-CRECB-1977-pt18-3-2.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.congress.gov/95/crecb/1977/07/12/GPO-CRECB-1977-...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.ketv.com/article/lawmakers-from-nebraska-iowa-respond-to-us-supreme-court-tariff-decision/70434921" rel="nofollow">https://www.ketv.com/article/lawmakers-from-nebraska-iowa-re...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.sbc.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2025/8/ranking-member-markey-applauds-appeals-court-ruling-that-trump-s-liberation-day-tariffs-are-illegal-calls-on-trump-administration-to-provide-immediate-relief-to-small-businesses" rel="nofollow">https://www.sbc.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2025/8/ranking-m...</a>
[dead]
[dead]
All of that pain for nothing. The Trump administration's signature policy achievements involve the DJT ticker and actual meme coins. I hope no republican sits in the oval office for 50 years, they're all responsible for enabling this madness and self-destruction.
Memecoins especially are so funny it's worth putting out some numbers:<p>- $TRUMP meme coin, down 87% from ATH<p>- $MELANIA meme coin, down 98% from ATH<p>- $WLFI, down 50% from ATH, with 4 Trump co-founders<p>The first two coins were actually hyped up so hard at launch that they drained liquidity from most of the crypto market because of people dumping everything to buy in
Finally some good fucking food
Wait wait wasn't it wholly on Trump's payroll as the dems say?
Who dissented in the Supreme Court tariff ruling?<p>The dissenters were Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh, with Kavanaugh authoring the principal dissent.[1][2][3]<p>Citations:
[1] Supreme Court strikes down tariffs - SCOTUSblog <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-down-tariffs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-dow...</a>
[2] Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (Tariffs) - SCOTUSblog <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/learning-resources-inc-v-trump/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/learning-resourc...</a>
[3] Northwestern experts on SCOTUS decision in tariff case <a href="https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2026/02/northwestern-experts-on-scotus-decision-in-tariff-case?fj=1" rel="nofollow">https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2026/02/northwestern-e...</a>
[4] Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump: An Empirical Breakdown of the Court’s IEEPA Tariff Decision <a href="https://legalytics.substack.com/p/learning-resources-inc-v-trump-an" rel="nofollow">https://legalytics.substack.com/p/learning-resources-inc-v-t...</a>
[5] Live updates: Trump vows new tariffs after 'deeply disappointing' Supreme Court ruling <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/live-blog/-trump-tariffs-ruling-supreme-court-live-updates-rcna252655" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/live-blog/-tr...</a>
[6] Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump | 607 U.S. - Justia Supreme Court <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/607/24-1287/" rel="nofollow">https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/607/24-1287/</a>
[7] [PDF] 24-1287 Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (02/20/2026) - Foxnews <a href="https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2026/02/supreme-court-opinion-trump-tariffs.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2026/...</a>
[8] Why a Republican Supreme Court struck down Trump's tariffs - Vox <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/479919/supreme-court-trump-tariffs-learning-resources" rel="nofollow">https://www.vox.com/politics/479919/supreme-court-trump-tari...</a>
[9] Learning Resources v. Trump - Wikipedia <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_Resources_v._Trump" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_Resources_v._Trump</a>
[10] The Supreme Court has struck down Trump administration's use of ... <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/1r9y4z8/the_supreme_court_has_struck_down_trump/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/1r9y4z8/the_supr...</a>
[11] Supreme Court Strikes Down Use of Emergency Powers for Trump's ... <a href="https://www.agweb.com/news/supreme-court-strikes-down-use-emergency-powers-trumps-tariffs" rel="nofollow">https://www.agweb.com/news/supreme-court-strikes-down-use-em...</a>
[12] Supreme Court strikes down Trump's tariffs - NPR <a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/02/20/nx-s1-5672383/supreme-court-tariffs" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2026/02/20/nx-s1-5672383/supreme-court-t...</a>
[13] Supreme Court Invalidates Executive Tariffs Under IEEPA <a href="https://www.currentfederaltaxdevelopments.com/blog/2026/2/20/supreme-court-invalidates-executive-tariffs-under-ieepa-a-technical-analysis-of-learning-resources-inc-v-trump" rel="nofollow">https://www.currentfederaltaxdevelopments.com/blog/2026/2/20...</a>
[14] Live updates: Trump pans tariffs ruling, warns he can impose ... <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5746060-live-updates-trump-supreme-court-governors/" rel="nofollow">https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5746060-live-upd...</a>
[15] Supreme Court strikes down most of Trump's tariffs in a major blow ... <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-strikes-trumps-tariffs-major-blow-president-rcna244827" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court...</a>
> Trump said without tariffs, "everybody would be bankrupt".<p>Always useful to have a grasp on reality.
First victory in more than a year for 'Team Checks and Balances'<p>Now let's wait for the retaliation of 'Team Orange Dictatorship'
So Trump will now see the economy grow despite his preferences.<p>He’ll take credit for it too.<p>“This was the plan all along.”
It’s disappointing but not surprising that the SC left the administration to illegally bilk US taxpayers for billions upon billions of dollars for something that was facially unconstitutional.<p>They should’ve allowed an emergency injunction from the outset.
> They should’ve allowed an emergency injunction from the outset.<p>That wouldn't have given the opportunity for SCOTUS's financial backers to build up their profits first <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089443">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089443</a>
You think corporations and the elite .01% support tariffs? It obviously was very unpopular with that class of society. The policy was aimed to help the working class of the country. You can argue that it was a piss poor way of doing so, but it's certainly not something that the elite class advocated for and getting rich off of.,
They didn't rule it unconstitutional - it's not. They ruled that the specific statute Trump was using that allows him to "regulate imports" doesn't include regulating imports with tariffs.
> They ruled that the specific statute Trump was using that allows him to "regulate imports" doesn't include regulating imports with tariffs.<p>Right, and thus because the Constitution gives <i>congress</i> the authority to levy tariffs, and the administration was usurping that authority, they violated the Constitution.
Given the current members of SC, as you said, disappointing but not surprising. Who knew that confirming Kavanaugh and people with similar moral compass would have such grave consequences.
Iran is f-ed!
Intercooler
I'm just here to enjoy the endlessly fractal spiraling double-think of tariffs being the devil when the US implements them, and being double-plus-good when the European Union implements them (or China or South America).<p>As hackers here are very intelligent but also very unwise, they find great enjoyment in double-think exercises and the resentment it gives them.
Can't say one way or another whether the power of the president was abused in this case but its a sad state for businesses who can't get started because of flip flopping policy. I'm for the tarrifs, its absolutely ridiculous to think only Wall Street matters.
The power to impose tariffs is given to Congress in the Constitution. Exceptions are allowed but in rare and specific situations. The fact that SCOTUS struck it down means the tariffs as imposed were unconstitutional.<p>You can be for tariffs all you want, I'm not here to argue their efficacy. But you absolutely cannot with any intellectual honesty still be on the fence about whether he abused his power given this ruling.<p>It is not "flip flopping policy" to break the bounds of your Constitutional power and be shut down by one of the branches meant to check you.
I don't think the administration cares about the appearance of impropriety.
It is flip flopping policy as far as it was here one day and struck down the next. That's what matters to people attempting to start something here. I should have stated I was not interested in arguing the actual rule process, you have 6-3 vote from the Supreme Court in your favor.
It was absurd to think this was valid policy in the first place. The IEEPA clearly didn’t delegate unilateral tariff authority to the president, especially on the flimsy basis of a “trade emergency”.<p>If Trump wanted a durable trade policy, work with the legislative majority to pass a real policy with deliberation - just like they should have done with immigration.
Almost all legal experts said from the start the Trump’s approach to tariffs was unconstitutional.<p>So who else could be to blame for the flip-flopping?<p>The executive is supposed to uphold laws made by Congress, not throw spaghetti at the Supreme Court’s wall and see if it sticks.
Just because businesses / wall street doesn't like something doesn't mean it's necessarily good for every day Americans. The tariff vision of on-shoring manufacturing and reliving the glory days of the post WW2 era was rooted in fantasy. The US simply cannot compete given its labor costs and actual manufacturing know-how.<p>Perhaps this is an overdue wakeup call, and a freak out is in order regarding this reality but unconstitutional tariffs alone were never going to solve this problem.
If the US really wanted to make a durable shift to manufacturing, presidential tariffs by fiat aren’t a good strategy anyway. Tariffs could be a small part of that strategy but they should be targeted, not broad, and enacted by congress so businesses have the kind of decades-long stability required to invest in factories that take years to pay off.
I was watching the Olympics. They have these really cool drones that follow the skiers down the slope at 80 kph. Chinese drones...<p>If only you knew how bad things really are.
The tariffs have been flip flopping all year due to the admin. That’s why it’s not smart for it to be up to executive discretion
If you don’t think the president did anything wrong, then whose fault is it that those businesses are suffering from flip-flopping policy?
The tariffs have been absolute hell on small businesses and manufacturing businesses of any size.
Could you elaborate on this:<p>> I'm for the tarrifs<p>What makes you think they are good?
This is the first semblance of policy certainty. The ruling is a good thing for everyone, Republicans and Trump included, even if they're not intelligent enough to understand why.
It is almost like the flip-flopping policy was never meant to boost US manufacturing, but to secure kickbacks and deals from big companies and countries to get favored treatment.
The damage is done. Nobody will trust USA ever again
He better dusts off the good old auto pen.<p>The man has a lot of cheques to write for the 175 billion he stole illegally from foreign countries.
"stole from foreign countries" is not how tariffs work.
You are not wrong. But you’re also not fully right.
I think you don’t see the full scale of the economic tail those tariffs had.<p>He raised tariffs illegally by 10% for most countries immediately, which triggered a bunch of negative economic effects around the globe in those countries directly tied to the illegal raise of those tariffs by who represents the United States of America.<p>Damages have to be paid to those countries and their companies.<p>Because those costs occurred from an illegal action. We do agree that if you do something the highest court has deemed illegal, if it caused damages to any party as direct result of that illegal action, the entity who suffered those damages should be entitled to claim damages, right?<p>A lot of companies had to deal with the same problems.<p>You can’t really plan exporting into a country that raises different amounts of tariffs basically over night depending on how his majesty, the king of the free world has slept the night before.<p>Someone needs to plan with the new realities, workers need to put in more hours, external expertise needs to be hired, all costs have to be evaluated, partners in the US might no longer be able to clear their inventory, new business terms need to be negotiated.<p>Don’t get me started about the Logistics troubles, but all of the above are costs which wouldn’t occur if the president had gotten legal advise from the Supreme Court about his economic plans before he did something illegal. Right?<p>So do you follow the law?<p>If yes, your conclusion needs to be that the president needs to write a lot of Cheques and probably needs the autopen. Because it weren’t only us importers and customers suffering from the presidents illegal action.
Americans pay the tariffs
.gov can write the check back to Americans then, and disband ICE, CBP, the DEA, and the ATF to pay for it.
“Stole illegally from foreign countries” ????!!!<p>American citizens and American importers are not foreigner countries.<p>Don’t propagate or fall for trumps repeated blatant LIE that foreign countries pay tariffs.<p>They are direct taxes on Americans and American importers, the exporter does not pay it.
The sad part is that the $175B was already spent because the tariffs didn't generate a budget surplus so we literally just set it on fire and will need to turn on the money printer to give it back to Americans who paid the taxes.
s/tariff/import tax/
What? You mean from American importers and therefore consumers? Foreign countries do not pay tariffs. This lie needs to stop.
You really believe that the incidence of taxation falls 100% on the buyer and never the seller? And you think those who have a more accurate view are "lying"?<p>Please learn a bit about the incidence of taxation:
<a href="https://stantcheva.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum7746/files/stantcheva/files/lecture3_1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://stantcheva.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum...</a>
The main models supporting your view is where consumer income is exogenous and all firm profits are redistributed to the representative consumer as a lump sum transfer:
<a href="https://www.ief.es/docs/destacados/publicaciones/revistas/hpe/216_Art2.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.ief.es/docs/destacados/publicaciones/revistas/hp...</a><p>Please avoid simplistic beliefs and moral outrage for things as complex as trade policy. The people who say that the incidence of taxation falls heavily on sellers may just be better informed, particularly when listening to wall street earnings calls while simultaneously looking at the consumer price data.<p><a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL</a>
Fry_Shocked.gif<p>Also I’m sure that companies will pass the savings on to consumers in the form of lower prices. Right?<p>…right?
As a foreigner, I approve the increase of taxes in US.<p>It would fix most of my country economy that needs to pay food in USD