Howard Lutnick and his sons are surely happy about this. It’s almost like Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, 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.
https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-wa...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He is all over the map, but not in a way that seems consistent or predictable.
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.
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.
This fake independence works so well, that most Hungarians lie themselves that judiciary is free.
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.
The Major Questions Doctrine has been a thing for decades:
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.
its truly bizarre that anyone with this view could get approved by congress. its so antithetical to the entire american political system. just blows my mind how spineless congress as an institution has been for decades.
Extremely biased comment.
The SC ruling today:
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.
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.
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.
The nuance is that nothing Congress passed granted to right to tax. Additionally, they did grant the power to partially block imports. Nothing says you have to enact “no imports from Japan” vs. “no imports of networking equipment from Lichtenstein.”
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What liberal justices do has no bearing on OP's argument at all. You must be able to recognize the fallacy?
Why are conservatives always so angry?
Constant fear.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only if you ignore the explicit grant to Congress in Article 1 Section 8... You're trying to argue an implicit grant somehow trumps an explicit grant.
> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C1-1-...
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.
> The plaintiffs argue and the Court concludes that the President lacks authority under IEEPA to impose tariffs. I disagree. In accord with Judge Taranto’s careful and persuasive opinion in the Federal Circuit, I would conclude that the President’s power under IEEPA to “regulate . . . importation” encompasses tariffs. As a matter of ordinary meaning, including dictionary definitions and historical usage, the broad power to “regulate . . . importation” includes the traditional and common means to do so—in particular, quotas, embargoes, and tariffs.
That doesn't sound like "well, this would be too hard to undo" to me, and making that argument elsewhere doesn't diminish the main point.
It's hard for me to pay my taxes
> If the case was “can Trump dissolve New York as a state” you would still have 3 justices siding in his favor with some dog shit reasoning.
As a counter-example, if the case was, say, "can a college use race as a factor in admissions"[0], you get 3 justices siding in favor using dogshit reasoning, just from the other side of the aisle. It's a bit ridiculous to think there aren't Democrat partisan judges on the Supreme Court.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
The Bakke decision in 1978 upheld that race could be used as a factor in admissions. Your counter-example is precedent from 50 years ago. Does that same precedent exist in this tariff case?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...
I guess there are “hacks” on both sides?
That is not contraexample. It does not show conservative justices not being hacks.
Besides, conservatives including conservative justices are literally pro racial profiling and arresting people on race only.
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...
from the start of the "injury":
- 8 days to get to the supreme court
- 2 days arguing in court
- 5 days for the court to reach a decision
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_The_Prime_Ministe...
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.
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...
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 genuinely insane nonsense to get shot down in a matter of days, not months.
> 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 lower courts issued several such injunctions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/trump-tariffs...
"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."
"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.
And have fairly regularly to benefit this administration:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_docket#Second_Trump_pre...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.G.G._v._Trump was vacated within days.
"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."
"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."
"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…"
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.
That's a distinction entirely invented by the court, and under their control.
The emergency docket is whatever they want to treat as an emergency. The decision not to treat this as such - it's hard to imagine many clearer examples of "immediate irreprable harm" - was clearly partisan.
The thing is he usually cannot but sometimes can. The issue is around "sometimes".
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.
Ultimately no system can't stop that if there is a societal culture that tolerates the drumbeat of authoritarianism and centralization of power.
Well, 3 of them are bought and paid for so...
The opinion should merely read
> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises
(which it does, and expounds upon)
Yes but in practice they delegate this power to the executive. Congress doesn’t run the IRS themselves after all
Statutory Law is 50,000 pages, and that's just the beginning of everything you need to consider.
Make stupid laws, win stupid prizes.
It's almost like the legal system is designed so that you can get away with murder if you can afford enough lawyers.
The argument from the dissent is even more pathetic and boils down to "well, cleaning this mess up sure would be a lot of work, so we should just let him do it."
Did you actually read it? Seems unlikely. I agree with the majority but I think the dissent does make some ok points.
Two of the justices would be happy to let Trump get away with murder. It's not that the law is ill-defined so much as a few justices are extremely partisan. Happily, a quorum of saner heads came about in this instance.
It sure is interesting how different things might be if RBG and Biden had stepped down instead of doing... whatever it was they did instead.
Yeah, in an alternative universe RBG and Sotomayor both stepped down and got replaced under a Dem admin.
It'd be interesting if Biden had taken the new doctrine of presidential immunity to heart in the last few months of his term.
How would those confirmations have worked exactly?
The most stupid idea ever. Biden, despite his frailties, was conscious enough not to do this.
"Whatever it took" is just appointing more judges. The president can do that. Unfortunately, the result would be that Trump would have just packed it the other direction and this case would have gone the opposite way.
Are you should that would have been a good idea?
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>apparently so ill defined in law that 9 justices can't agree on it
That is not how the Supreme Court works. SCOTUS is a political body. Justices do one thing: cast votes. For any reason.
If they write an opinion it is merely their post hoc justification for their vote. Otherwise they do not have to explain anything. And when they do write an opinion it does not necessarily reflect the real reason for the way they voted.
Edit: Not sure why anyone is downvoting this comment. I was a trial attorney for 40+ years. If you believe what I posted is legally inaccurate, then provide a comment. But downvoting because you don't like my post for reasons other than legal reasons is ... just ... I don't know ... cowardly?
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.
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.
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.
This is something FDR did heavily in the 1930s to expand his own power and bully congress into passing the New Deal. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/purge-1938 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).
Attacking FDR, someone who stood up against business interests to defend labor, kinda exposes the game here.
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.
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."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...
> If everything is an emergency then nothing is, and that was clearly not congress' intention with those laws.
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.
Am I understanding this right?
1) US customer pays huge import tax on imported goods in the form of higher prices.
2) Seller sends the collected tax to the US government
3) US government will refund all/most of that tax back to the seller after this ruling
4) Seller gets to keep the returned tax money as pure profit (no refund to customer)
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.
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?
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.
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.
I got charged a $600 tariff from UPS to ship a $30 25-pound sandbag into the US from Canada.
UPS didn't even deliver the product.
I'm suing them in small claims.
We'll see what happens.
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.
Further, they're going to get refunded the $10 it MIGHT have cost them.
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.
There is a 1099 specifically for money received from the government.
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.
I think I'm kidding, but I'm not really sure anymore.
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.
There have been no decisions about refunds. The court avoided addressing that.
That topic will surely go back to the courts, kicking and screaming
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?
(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...)
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.
Seller wasn’t involved in the tariffs. Rather the importer paid them, etc.
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.
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.
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.
Though this is obviously a first so expect a billion lawsuits about this.
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: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tariffs-consumers-busines...
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?
Is there a reason to believe, or evidence, that it's not a mixture of the two?
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.
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
That makes zero sense. You mean “by lowering the profit margin on the goods sold to the US by that specific company”.
Countries don’t pay tarrifs (bar state intervention), companies do.
But yes, it’s probably a mix of the two: raising prices and lowering profit margins.
Here's evidence : https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/news/americas-own-g...
"Importers and consumers in the US bear 96 percent of the tariff burden."
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 less wrong than saying that foreign countries pay it all.
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.
What an odd thing to say.
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.
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 all costs associated with production and distribution to that end user.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff
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.
The economic burden of tariffs falls on the importer, the exporter, and the consumer. [Wikipedia]
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?
> I have no idea how the fuck the rumor that these tariffs will be “paid by other countries” started.
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.
It is, as I said in the post, obviously wrong - but that's where it comes from.
> The cost of the item that the end user pays should reflect all costs associated with production and distribution to that end user.
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.
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.
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 some 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.
"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."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2026/02/15/consumers...
Exactly the type of info I was hoping for, thank you.
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%.
The global damage has been done. It took too long and it looks like it will only be partially reversed.
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.
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.
In short, it's a whole lot of short-sightedness of the Constitution combined with willing participants across multiple branches of the government.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Federal Reserve itself would be the biggest example.
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.
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.
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC): A regulatory agency that, along with the Fed, has been subject to executive orders aiming to tighten oversight.
Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC): An independent agency that issues regulations and recalls, often cited in discussions regarding the scope of executive authority.
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.
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.
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
Bingo. The flaw in the constitution. The Executive holds the only enforcement mechanism in government: the FBI, military and other police forces.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As far as it goes, there have been worse set-ups.
I think it's designed that way because it wasn't originally seen as one country, more as a federation.
Even by the time of the civil war, Robert E Lee decided he was Virginian ahead of his national identity.
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.
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.
So it stayed broken and here we are.
> What I don't understand is why so many Americans think that it was perfect.
because theres no example in history that has worked better. Its unclear how much of the success of the US should be attributed to the Constitution (what history would have looked like if the US had a canadian constitution for example), but what cant be argued is that the US is the most successful political body in world history and it is the oldest continuous Constitution in the world.
Under that lens it makes sense that Americans are fairly conservative about changing the constitution and why the founders are so revered. Its just fucking worked out great for us until now. Its really a miracle in many ways.
Heh, the separation isn't even the worst part.
The fact that the US Constitution is basically more sacred that the Bible when you talk to the average American is even weirder. The Founding Fathers are the Original Gods (Gangsters?).
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.
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.
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)
I include legislative anti-liberties as corruption. If you can be jailed for reposting a meme on twitter, for example... If you post a picture of your dog with a paw up, and make a nazi joke about it and risk winding up in prison as a more specific example.
There are clearly delegated responsibilities to the states... the 10th amendment specifies as much... that the govt has grown beyond this wouldn't have been stopped by a parliament any more than the current system.
> As far as I can tell the US system is designed for gridlock.
At the federal level the US system was designed for gridlock on purpose, with the premise that something shouldn't be federal policy without widespread consensus, and without that consensus it should be left to the states.
The problem is really that many of the gridlock-inducing measures have been thwarted, 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.
> Any system designed for gridlock will lead to increasing anger and pressure that will eventually break out in bad ways.
Only if there is no other way to address the issues, but the system provides one. You adopt the policy at the state level instead.
> I'm not sure why Americans think that the creation of agencies is the problem when other well governed countries do the same.
The US at the federal level is larger than nearly all other countries. North Carolina has more people and a higher GDP than Sweden. California has almost as many people as Canada and a higher GDP. The US has the same order of magnitude in size and population as the whole EU.
Bureaucracies have diseconomies of scale. There is a point past which "larger" is no longer getting you significantly better amortization of fixed costs and is instead just increasing communication costs, adding layers of middle management, exacerbating the principal-agent problem and making you a more attractive target for corruption.
The US federal government is well past the optimal size for solving most problems; probably even California is too big.
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.
It's just another thing that means people don't face the consequences of their own actions. If the extremeness of the elected party is blocked by the filibuster then people are angry at things not changing and so go even more extreme.
A similar problem in the United States is the excessive amount of law making by the Judiciary. In most countries the Judicary doesn't' make law it just tells Parliament that they need to change the law. This again means the consequences of who you voted for are not faced.
The pressure builds till there's a breaking point.
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.
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.
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.
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
It was 49.8%, which is not quite a majority.
It's also worth noting that Kamala Harris received precisely 0 votes in the 2024 Democratic primaries.
[EDIT:] I see that the parent comment has now changed "majority" to "plurality."
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.
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 not fine with what Trump is going to do, but I am also 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".
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.
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.
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.
> When he dropped out in July their simply isn't enough time to run a functional primary and campaign for the vote in November.
That's only problem in the USA. Other western democracies are able to have snap elections done in two months.
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.
Biden's hail mary would have been to pick Haley as his running mate, who already had 19% of the Republicans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
they are not accountable to anyone right now because they flat out refuse to pass any legislation.
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).
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?
Oh, they're absolutely responsible and will suffer a fair amount of consequences for their votes. But the legislature should have stopped the bleeding a long time ago.
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> If snoopy starts issuing open hand-outs to the red baron (snoopy in a moustache)
You mean like how President Trump just gave 10 billion USD of taxpayer money to a board operated by Private Citizen Trump?
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/trump-board-of-peace-firs...
The legislature is made up of representatives voted in.
Republicans who wanted to prevent Trump from doing this kind of shit were voted out.
This is what the voters want.
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.
Importantly, prosecute every member of the Trump administration for their blatant respective crimes.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/697382/record-numbers-younger-w... ("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.")
[2] Global Trade Is Leaving the US Behind - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-02-12/on-tra... | https://archive.today/dsI9R - 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.
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
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>In 2021 the US had the its best opportunity to date to assemble a military tribunal to try and then execute a President
It's completely foreign to the US or the Anglo-Saxon world in general. The military as the final guarantor of state security is a continental European thing (and removing this has been the goal of many army reforms in Europe since the end of WW2).
I agree with you - I should've caveated that the Anglo-Saxon aversion to military coups comes precisely from Cromwell IMO.
Well if you want the possibility of military tribunals you have to accept the risks of something like the 1962 Algiers coup, the 27 May revolution or (if you want a more recent example) the Wagner rebellion. I'm not certain that would be palatable to Americans but I'm not American myself so wouldn't know.
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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.
Presumably congress could recreate the same tariffs, if they wanted.
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.
>People can't even afford to buy a home in a decent part of the country.
Is that because of scarcity? We’re manipulation? Or something else?
I'm guessing you're American?
> Constitutional changes
Y'all have proven how worthless that piece of paper is.
There are many countries that have functioning constitutions that are regularly revised.
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"...
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.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
it is impossible and it is great 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.
>there's no reasonable process to update the constitution.
Au contraire, a Constitutional Convention of the states to define the way they can all agree to be united.
Just like the first time.
There weren't that many states back then anyway.
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.
And I wouldn't mind if the American constitution did 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.
And you get an F, my friend. Hard fail.
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.
Which later republics, specifically? Who has stronger rights?
> Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.
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.
The constitution has all the mechanisms in place to control the president, they just aren't being used by the legislature.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> If Trump wanted to use tariffs as a tool for emergency purposes, he should have just taken action against China.
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?
Ah, yes, just like he hates Japan and Italy for being run by women.
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.
I don't think tariffs should be imposed capriciously at the President's whim.
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.
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.
Just because Congress is stuck doesn't mean the Executive gets to do whatever they want.
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.
Or treaties or accords. All basically the same if squint. Sign something like the Paris Accord, you’re basically taxing consumers.
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?
Absolutely!
We have laws explicitly for imposing tariffs for these reasons (like Trade Expansion Act of 1962, Trade Act of 1974)
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.
What Trump wants to do is impose tariffs on a whim using emergency powers where administrative procedure laws don't apply.
So the hope here: we have at least more predictability / stability in the tariff regime. But tariffs aren't going away
They can be and are. The USA had tariffs on many products prior to Trump.
I think GPs point was that Tariffs are legitimate as a practice and that some people have been led to believe that they shouldn't exist at all.
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.
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.
Thoughtful application of tariffs are good.
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."
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 not 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."
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.
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.
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.
and still this current ruling was a 6-3 vote.
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.
I was flabbergasted that SCOTUS actually said that the concept of no man being above the law had caveats.
> Great news for people who had to bend over backwards pretending this disruptive, nakedly corrupt behavior was "good, actually."
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.
"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?
For countries that negotiated special treatment, they'll be stuck with a (now worse) deal?
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%.
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.
The actual decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf
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?
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?
Actual event may not have occurred, but DHL flat fee is real.
Sure, if you are ready to sue the US government for that. /s
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?
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?
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
This is why I mentioned "litigation" in my comment, i.e. you probably would need to separately sue the government if you want to refund the tariffs.
That's not how it works.
There is a normal process in place for importers/brokers to request refunds if a specific tariff was overpaid or a tariff was ruled to be illegal.
But if you imported through DHL and you were not the broker, that is more complicated, you might need to ask DHL for it, and they might not want to do it for you (as they don't have a standard process in place).
Drawback claims (assuming this is the correct thing to use) are quite difficult to do. Requires a customs broker. You used to be able to file them manually as a normal person but they ended that when the first 25% tariffs on China went into play. You need to be a customs broker to get access to the software you need to file the claim...
I spent a bit of time attempting to find a broker [1] to handle this for our project (since we had a large amount of eligible refunds due to importing then sending out of country after QA) but in the long run gave up...which is what they hope for.
Keeping an eye on all this to see how it plays out.
[1] Not only did I look for a broker but I debated becoming one myself due to this.
You assume that the executive branch would willingly follow the court decision. I think it's naive (doubly so for the current administration) and it's more likely that the tariffs will be re-introduced under a different sauce and that refund requests will not be processed using some flimsy excuses.
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.
Don't worry, DOGE saved us so much money it won't even matter /s.
The national debt went up by $2.5T since Feb 2025, keep up the DOGE work
But without DOGE it would have gone up $2.51T
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
1. The EU would face higher tariffs on their exports to the USA. Now mostly struck down
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.
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.
___
So if the tariffs are struck down, we're more or less back to where we started.
We never actually ratified that deal.
Parliament froze it when Trump started threatening Greenland.
Great! Then the next step would be to simply pull out.
Yup. EU institutional slowness working out in our favour once again heh.
I do think that was by design. They of course knew that there would be a big chance of it being struck down.
A total mess of an opinion, should have gone all the way, as always only the lawyers win.
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.
It feels like the US-Iran war is inevitable now.
10 days to go
Most likely this weekend.
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."
I doubt Trump's seriously seeking a nuclear deal as he (in)famously withdrew from the deal established by the Obama administration [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_...
Wag the dog, to distract us while pedo, grifting Trump family at work
A US-Iran conflict has been inevitable for decades.
A nuclear Iran would lead to a nuclear KSA, Turkiye, UAE, Egypt, Qatar, etc and would make the Middle East more unstable.
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.
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).
This is why North Korea prioritized nuclear weapons - in order to gain strategic autonomy from the US and 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]
Edit: can't reply
> How many more years will it remain inevitable, do you think?
As long as Iranian leadership remain committed to building a nuclear program.
Thus Iran either completely hands off it's nuclear program to the US or the EU, or it shatters.
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.
That only leaves the latter. The same thing happened to Libya and Myanmar.
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.
[0] - https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/six-party-talks-north-kore...
[1] - https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/47844?device=smartp...
Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.
We truly don't need boots on the ground though.
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.
"You break it, you buy it" doesn't hold in 2026 anymore.
> Libya has a 10x lower population density than Iran, among other disparities
Libya's population was overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of regions in the same manner as Iran.
Furthermore, Iran no longer has functional AD systems and the initial strikes were limited to nuclear sites and a handful of strategic site.
This time strikes are planned to be more generalized
> "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
We can keep striking Iran indefinetly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-military-prepar...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-strikes-iran-co...
How many more years will it remain inevitable, do you think?
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.
I swear that whoever is advising trump is trying to purposefully give tariffs, and immigration enforcement a bad name.
It seriously feels like a scheme to ensure cheap labor.
Yeah the resulting stigma on tariffs is a bit unfortunate. You could imagine a system of tariffs that was intended to set a sort of globalized minimum wage in certain segments. The US could even have foreign entities to distribute the tariff income to the workers in those countries for example.
Tariffs are totally a reasonable tool for protecting national security interests or leveling the playing field for the American worker. Unfortunately none of that was done in a coherent or legible way.
With all the global fallout and nothing to show for it I'm really not sure I could have come up with a better way to sabotage the United States.
I definitely think we should highly tax, or completely ban imports from countries that basically allow slavery of their working class. Though, if anyone were to bring that up now, it would incite all kinds of emotional attacks.
I could imagine people being on board with it if they could get a tariff funded subsidy for things made in America. If the average person got an explicit discount on their Ford because some rich person paid extra taxes on their Audi, then tariffs wouldn't seem so bad. I just think the actual goal is to make them political suicide for decades.
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.
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 https://www.cato.org/blog/supreme-court-got-it-right-ieepa-d...
The important thing is that Trump can't do the tariffs beyond 15% on a whim anymore though. Like imposing tariffs on Canada because of an ad displayed in Toronto.
It'd be cool if the backup plan was to get Congressional approval, per the US Constitution
Trump aside. Congress is clearly not interested in setting budgets or tax policy.
That's just bluster. The IEEPA nonsense was already 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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out
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.
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.
Good grief.
1. That's transparently NOT what the white house said the tariffs were for.
2. There has been NO significant change (via negotiation or not) in non-tariff trade policy under this administration. Essentially all those "announcements" of "deals" were, were just the acts of rolling back the tariffs themselves. No one caved. We didn't get any advantage.
It's just absolutely amazing to me the degree of epistemological isolation the right has created for it in the modern US.
Trump always chickens out.
Trump Always Chickens Out
Justice delayed is justice denied.
Does this mean that Make in America subsidies will have to double? Make in America only made sense when offset by high tariffs.
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.
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.
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)
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organi...
The damage is done though. Other countries have imposed their own tariffs along with the strained relations with all of our allies.
As a foreigner, I approve the increase of taxes in US.
It would fix most of my country economy that needs to pay food in USD
Since tariffs apparently brought in about $200 billion I guess you can add another 0.66% to the 2025 deficit.
Hence my (somewhat downvoted) comment in that I think the refunds should probably just be issued aa Treasury Bonds with varying maturity dates. Cashing out all t once can only lead to more chaos/disruption to the broader economy.
It's going to be nearly impossible for it to happen at once anyway, it's going to take a long time to unravel this mess
The sad thing is the "paid" back will be to parties that likely already passed on these fees and won't be passing on the returns as pure profit instead... and to middle-men companies who don't really add much value in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
I believe this is due to the USPS loophole being closed, tariffs only play a small part.
It may also have been because of the end of the de minimis ($800) tariff exemption. Without that exemption, even something valued at one cent would have to go through the import-tax collection process, which meant that small packages were no longer economical to send. That exemption is still gone.
Fry_Shocked.gif
Also I’m sure that companies will pass the savings on to consumers in the form of lower prices. Right?
…right?
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.
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:
https://www.cato.org/commentary/trump-has-many-options-supre...
https://www.myplainview.com/news/politics/article/trump-has-...
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.
Congress is already completely in Trump's pocket. By doing it through Congress, Trump loses most of his bribery and bullying opportunities.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
does anybody think prices will fall after this?
i don't
The average effect of tariffs on prices was less than 1% so it would be hard to notice
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.
The damage is done. Nobody will trust USA ever again
"ever" is a long time. But for years/decades indeed. Certainly the case where I live.
So Trump will now see the economy grow despite his preferences.
He’ll take credit for it too.
“This was the plan all along.”
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"
sure man
Intercooler
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
- why no one in America is being charged
- why the files were so heavily redacted in violation of congress
- why the redactions were tailored to protect the names of some powerful people and not victims
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...
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...
Relieved to see checks and balances in action, and a largely Trump-appointed Supreme Court enforcing limits set by law
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?
Or is this just another "trump did illegal thing but nothing will happen" kind of scenario?
I have not read the ruling, but….
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.
they'll get buried in lawsuits for refunds if they don't obey the order
Trump govt will find another way to circumvent this and keep the tariff.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/cnbc-daily-open-trump-admini...
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.
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.
I think this issue is effectively dead at least until we see how the new majority shakes out in November.
Will the collected tariffs now have to be repaid? If so how. According to the Fed 90% were paid for by the consumers. https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is...
Likely the middlemen will pocket the difference depending on how the contracts between the shippers/distributers worked... "the people" who paid more at the market(s) for products won't be reimbursed.
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.
> Trump said without tariffs, "everybody would be bankrupt".
Always useful to have a grasp on reality.
what a mess
and, i'll bet, just the first of many
The ruling was 6-3 with Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh dissenting.
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.”'
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 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.
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...
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.
That's Kavanaugh for you.
Semi-related - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088609
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!
And all that at the reasonable costs of a few billion lives. What a bargain!
Finally some good fucking food
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?
...Right?
Not likely... most of the inflation pricing increases were just exercises in maximizing profits during emergency circumstances started during COVID and carrying into today. Actually starting in the later 2010's if you look at say fast-food pricing that was dramatically outpacing inflation... like a massive conspiratorial experiment to see how much you could squeeze out of the population in terms of pricing.
I don’t get what SCOTUS is up to as far as a practical matter goes.
They’re hands off so the president can clearly gather illegal taxes.
Then they change their mind. So what? The government gives the taxes back? Is that even possible?
Next step what? Trump does something else illegal and SCOTUS majority sits on their hands for a year or more?
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]
The process takes time.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/29/court-strikes-down-trump-rec...
2. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/29/trump-trade-tariffs-appeals-...
I know how that works but the speed and process should reflect the severity of the issue.
Illegally taxing billions from we the people? Should be addressed immediately.
And they have done that before….
There are faster paths to the Supreme court, but it takes Congress, the President or multiple states to do so, generally.
SCOTUS can do so if they wish.
The government gives back overpaid taxes every year, and there are long-established mechanisms to deduct qualifying purchases from your tax burden.
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.
Individual tax refunds are far different than this.
In his dissent [1], Justice Kavanaugh states:
> 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.
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.
Statement by Grassley [3]:
> 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.
Statement by Markey after previous decision in August [4]:
> 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.
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.
[1] p.127: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf
[2] g. 22478: https://www.congress.gov/95/crecb/1977/07/12/GPO-CRECB-1977-...
[3] https://www.ketv.com/article/lawmakers-from-nebraska-iowa-re...
[4] https://www.sbc.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2025/8/ranking-m...
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.”
He probably didn't say it either, its first appearance is in an 1860s book by Horace Greeley.
From the guy that invaded Florida... I wouldn't be surprised if it was Andrew Jackson though.
[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:
- $TRUMP meme coin, down 87% from ATH
- $MELANIA meme coin, down 98% from ATH
- $WLFI, down 50% from ATH, with 4 Trump co-founders
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
None of these were intended to be long term investments for anyone.
They exist as a way for money to be given to the Trump family in an legally obfuscated way. Most of that happens/happened right after launch.
Wait wait wasn't it wholly on Trump's payroll as the dems say?
First victory in more than a year for 'Team Checks and Balances'
Now let's wait for the retaliation of 'Team Orange Dictatorship'
Iran is f-ed!
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.
They should’ve allowed an emergency injunction from the outset.
> They should’ve allowed an emergency injunction from the outset.
That wouldn't have given the opportunity for SCOTUS's financial backers to build up their profits first https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089443
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.
Right, and thus because the Constitution gives congress 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.
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).
As hackers here are very intelligent but also very unwise, they find great enjoyment in double-think exercises and the resentment it gives them.
Tariffs are bad, there's no double think.
Then where are the hackers in this comment section calling out for the European Council to strike down European tariffs like the US supreme court did?
Where were they before Trump?
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
So who else could be to blame for the flip-flopping?
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.
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...
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:
> I'm for the tarrifs
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.
He better dusts off the good old auto pen.
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.
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.
Damages have to be paid to those countries and their companies.
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?
A lot of companies had to deal with the same problems.
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.
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.
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?
So do you follow the law?
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.
Better yet, dissolve ICE and DHS and send stimulus checks to folks with what used to be their budget.
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.
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"?
Please learn a bit about the incidence of taxation: https://stantcheva.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum... 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: https://www.ief.es/docs/destacados/publicaciones/revistas/hp...
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.
s/tariff/import tax/
“Stole illegally from foreign countries” ????!!!
American citizens and American importers are not foreigner countries.
Don’t propagate or fall for trumps repeated blatant LIE that foreign countries pay tariffs.
They are direct taxes on Americans and American importers, the exporter does not pay it.
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.
- https://www.newsweek.com/trump-doj-handling-pam-bondi-brothe...
- https://abcnews.com/US/doj-drops-charges-client-ag-pam-bondi...
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 just us system works.
Well what you're describing could just be finding the most skilled lawyer in town. What the other person is describing is bribery and nepotism.
It is, however, in the interest of the American public not to have a corrupt justice system. Thus, we should not rely on far fetched assumptions instead of investigating corruption where it appears.
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
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.
It’s not really excusing anything, just pointing out that Cantor Fitzgerald would be making money whether this Supreme Court ruling went for or against the Trump tariffs. So it’s not like they had to have any inside knowledge to be making money.
It's true that a volatile environment in general is good for certain types of investment banking business, including this trade. I nevertheless think it's unlikely - honestly, a galaxy brain take - that Cantor Fitzgerald or other investment banks with influence in the Trump administration would push for policies like unconstitutional tariffs just to drive trading revenue. Maybe the strongest reason is that other, frankly more lucrative investment banking activities, like fundraising and M&A, benefit from a growing economy and a stable economic and regulatory environment.
> my impression is
not sure why you'd give them any benefit of the doubt. they haven't earned it.
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”.
That's what a bookie does. Middleman.
If you are the risk and the insurance for that risk you aren’t a middle man you are the mob.
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
It is a return of their capital illegally acquired by the federal government.
"Vote better next time I suppose" is the message to the electorate, because it would be impossible to return the funds to them due to diffusion.
The best you could do is perhaps model the additional per household cost (which has been done) and issue them checks from the Treasury (stimulus check style), but who is going to pay for it? The taxpayer! There is no way to incur this economic cost on the people who incurred the harm (this administration). You could potentially get the funds back from companies through higher corp taxes. Is Congress going to pass that? Certainly not. Them the breaks of electing Tariff Man. Does exactly what it says on the tin.
> ....I am a Tariff Man. When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so. It will always be the best way to max out our economic power. We are right now taking in $billions in Tariffs. MAKE AMERICA RICH AGAIN 9:03 AM · Dec 4, 2018
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1069970500535902208 | https://archive.today/BBEmH
Historical lesson in governance failure. Can't change history, the outcome is regrettable, we can only try to do better in the future. Onward. Let the lesson not be for naught.
Prices will keep increasing, as US consumer spending was resilient in 2025 and kept going up irrespective of tariffs. Consumers can be charged even more than previously assumed.
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.
That's why it taxed the economy much worse than a legitimate President would do.
maybe i lean too much in one direction, but what is a "legitimate tax"?
Once again, count on hn for the downvotes. Yep, those shall not speak of downvotes, or taxation.
Exactly great response. The point of my post to be a thought exercise, but apparently struck downvote nerve. Heh. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As in only Congress can create new taxes and regulate commerce.
I don't really think I'm a libertarian.
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?
Well I get the idea that latchkey doesn't think any tax is legitimate.
Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution makes it the job of Congress, not the President, to levee taxes.
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.
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.
usually one imposed by congress, from my distant memory of reading the us constitution.
Is a refund even likely?
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.
Even if 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.
In society, isn't it generally accepted that the person shitting on the floor be the one responsible for cleaning up after himself?
Meh, Kavanaugh and friends caused that very problem in the first place, so I'm not falling for his crocodile-tears.
We already had a legal processes for courts going "this is weird and probably won't stand and will be impossible to fix afterwards, so do nothing until you get a green light", in the form of temporary restraining orders and injunctions.
But Kavanaugh et al spent the last year repeatedly overriding lower courts which did that, signaling that if someone said "let's figure this out first" to radical Republican policies, the Supreme Court would not have their backs.
______________
> 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.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supr...
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.
Irrelevant. The people who would send the money for refunds are people who do take such orders.
With that attitude you will be shot on the spot for resisting.
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/21/trump-cou...
> 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/us/politics/justice-depar...
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_G...
> 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."
> 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.
(That was, of course, a blatant lie.)
> All of those are deportation cases…
Sorry, is there a "you can ignore the courts if it's deportation" clause I missed somewhere?
> There's been lots of coverage of how government lawyers are overwhelmed because they have thousands of immigration cases being appealed…
That's their own fault.
You don't get to violate people's rights because you yourself fucked up the system beyond repair!
The Lutnick sons were also probably betting on the outcome of the case on Kalshi
> a tariff refund product wherein they pay companies who are struggling with paying tariffs 20-30% of a potential refund
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.
Presumably you're not a admin cabinet member or related to one or have inside info from those in the cabinet, which is the key differentiator.
A witness also reported to the FBI that Lutnick and CF are engaged in massive fraud: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA012492... 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.
> without even shame enough to try to hide it well.
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.
If that was me, I would have used my substantial wealth to have lunch literally anywhere else in the world, with anyone else in the world.
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Don't be so disparaging with your terminology.
These are persons of Trump-like character, not just your average booster :\
Basically a bookie, eh? And the house never loses...
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.
Like his peanut farm would unduly sway government peanut policy.
An even more interesting one is that Ford was the first 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.
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.
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.
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.
> Truman who was rather broke, and ran into financial difficulties after leaving office.
Nope[0]. He was a shameless grifter just like Trump.
[0] https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/01/the-immortal-le...
Are most fresh grads from a top PhD program really 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?
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.
Every single minute it invoked the feeling that Trump deserves nothing like this ever.
Remember when Richard M. Nixon was laid to rest?
Definitely. [1] (Use reader mode if the page misbehaves.)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260220083443/https://www.theat...
Yes quite well.
Nowhere near the respect was shown, not zero but more than was due.
People did question if that was too much honor at the time, too.
No hard core freedom-loving citizen from anywhere in the world questioned the extensive over-the-top memorial for Carter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don't think there's already a replacement island?
I'm not even convinced that the first one has been decommissioned yet.
Most people knew this would happen, it was widely predicted.
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.
Wait you don't mean the same Howard Lutnick who was sold a mansion for the sum of ten dollars by none other than Jeffrey Epstein himself? I'm shocked.
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.
Always seems to be in the right place and the right time
Holy crap, you couldn't make a story that is a more direct echo of the plot point in Wonderful Life if you tried.
If whoever runs in 2028 does not have a concrete plan for investigating & prosecuting every single person who worked under this admin from top to bottom, they are wasting everyone's time. We need to see hundreds of life-in-prison sentences by the end of 2029.
I can tell you what will happen instead.
If a dem wins in 2028, the big push will be one of reconciliation and acceptance. Let bygones be bygones. And it'll happen. And then for the next 4 years conservative media will absolutely pound that person's backside over made up and/or exaggerated corruption claims. Then in 2032 the GOP candidate will claim they're going to look into these claims.
Yep. Remember when people were expecting Obama to prosecute Bush for war crimes? He should have, but chickened out and decided he would instead carry on Bush's transgressions as the new status quo.
"Defeated" is an interesting way to look at it. My perception is that the administration was just using the Twin Cities as a distraction, like they do for basically everything. In the mean time, the higher ups get their business deals done while the commoners are busy wasting energy cleaning up the mess. In which case, they succeeded. Now, onto the next distraction, and then the next one, and so on and so forth.
Minnesota has a very high probability of sending 2 Democrat senators and all their electoral votes to the Democrat presidential candidate. Minnesota and the Twin Cities are of zero consequence to this administration, so why not use them as a distraction?
The primary goal of the administration, sweeping tax cuts, was already accomplished in Jul 2025, so even Congress is of limited value now until after the next presidential election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone
It wasn't just Biden. This is how it played out with Obama as well, except that Romney lost in 2012.
Heck, Obama won the peace prize for no other reason than he wasn't George W Bush
I blame Garland for much of the mess we are in. If the DOJ had done their job regarding the Jan 6 insurrection we wouldn't be here talking about stupid tarrifs that caused a year of turbulence for US businesses and contributed to inflation, for no good reason (and this might be the least of the problems caused by the Trump admin).
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We’ll be dependent on New York for that, as potus will pardon everyone save for a few suckers at the end, assuming he leaves office in an orderly manner.
The purge of DOJ (They can’t even find confirmable US Attorneys at this point.) and the military officer corps makes that not a certainty.
He didn't pardon anyone involved with January 6th until he was re-elected. There is a documentary where Roger Stone acts psychotic with anger because Trump refused to issue a pardon for him or anyone else after Jan. 6. Trump is a selfish person, and if he thinks he is going to be vulnerable, he isn't going to protect anyone else for no other than reason than he thinks they should go down with him.
> We’ll be dependent on New York for that
do you mean because POTUS can't forgive State convictions? But why NY?
Unfortunately, SCOTUS has already absolved Trump of anything he does in office
Nationalize the entire trump family fortune with RICO. Impoverishment is the perfect moral hazard to reign in hubristic and corrupt business practices.
I think the precedent has been set - proactive pardons for all, every administration from now on
> We need to see hundreds of life-in-prison sentences by the end of 2029
Best we can do is a couple dozen golden parachutes.
Nope. Parachutes are too expensive to waste on these losers. Give them all backpacks. Tell them the backpacks are parachutes.
Merrick Garland is tanned, rested, and ready to not do jack until 2040.
We've let criminal administrations get away with too much for too long. Nixon, Reagan, Bush Jr., and Trump 1 were all allowed to disregard the law and it got worse every time. We cannot move forward without purging crime and corruption from our system. Everyone from the top down to Billy-Bod ICE agent.
No more Merrick Garlands. No hand-wringing over appearances of weaponizing the DoJ. The next president needs to appoint an AG who enforces the law, and if they don't do it, they need be fired and replaced by someone who will.
How many cops/prosecutors/judges/prison guards/government employees support this administration?
Doesn’t seem like a trivial task, given the Nov 2024 election results.
Whoever takes over DOJ has to come in with a ready-to-go team they already know; a state AG who can draft their whole staff or something. They'll be entering a deliberately fucked, hollowed-out, booby-trapped organization they have to rebuild from the ground up. Speed will matter enormously.
Hence why when Trump said he doesn't want future elections, we should take him seriously.
The Biden Pardon immunizes everyone from future prosecution. The Trump Pardon allows sale. Together, an impressive combination of powers. Game breaking.
And there's a pretty huge precedent for that; the preemptive pardon of Nixon.
Unfortunately, we have a two party system, and neither side is going to do anything about it. One side is complicit and actively participating in the fraud and grift. The other side is all talk and no action. If they win, they'll spend four years making excuses about why they can't actually do anything. They had four years to prosecute and imprison Trump 1.0 and just... talked and sat on their hands doing performance art.
Yep. Biden's "well I bet he will just go away naturally" approach to Trump's crimes will be a historic error. It remains to be seen if this is quite at the level of walking back Reconstruction, but if the US descends further into fascism then it will be up there.
Biden is gone, but Schumer and Jeffries aren't exactly looking any different.
I'm currently livid at the dem leadership that doesn't have the guts to do anything hard. Dem leadership needs to go and we need a serious response here. South Korea just jailed their criminal president for life. Just imagine.
I feel very strongly that's what should happen, and equally strongly that there's zero chance a democratic president will actually do that in a meaningful way. Dems sometimes talk a big game when they're out of power but when they're in power they actually quite enjoy the expanded powers and reduced accountability that's come about. That plus their usual ineffectual bumbling will combine to mean they basically doing nothing.
At this point I think I'm most scared of the next fascist president. Trump has opened up a lot of avenues for blatant corruption and tyranny. His greed and stupidity have so far saved us from the worst outcomes but someone with his psychopathy but more savviness will mean the true end of our freedoms.
The last time Dems had power was before Jan 2015. And even then it was tenuous, because the Dems have had a few Senators that do not vote lockstep with the Dems (Manchin, Lieberman, Sinema, etc), but the Repubs maybe have had 1 defector (McCain?).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...
Going forward, the Dems are not likely to have power either, based on the projected safety of Repub Senate seats.
https://www.270towin.com/2026-senate-election/
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This kind of vitriolic discourse has no place here and I hope, for our sake, you get banned or, at least, mass flagged.
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He absolutely won the popular vote, and won every single swing state.
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And do you not see how those sort of investigations failing to turn up anything is precisely what makes people think the entire system is brokenly corrupt? You can't in good faith argue you think he was in that position on merit. He was (and is) a drug addict with no relevant skills, and he's making millions working on the board of directors for a Ukrainian gas company?
You can, for instance, make your same argument about Dick Cheney and his relations with Halliburton which were equally obviously corrupt. Yet lo and behold, plenty of showy investigations, and the political establishment finds that the political establishment did nothing wrong, well at least nothing deserving of anything worse than a few very gentle taps on the wrist.
The DNC had nothing to do with it. Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts--that was the justice system working. He was then gifted complete freedom from consequences--that was the justice system not working.
There are other falsehoods in your comment as well.
The first thing on the agenda is to impeach & convict, if there were enough patriotic Americans in Congress it should be possible this afternoon.
Then they can take their time to reverse all immunity granted by this President so all snakes can be rooted out.
> Presidential pardon immunity is unreversable
But presidents are also immune against prosecution for official acts. Could a president just disregard pardons from a prior administration? Immovable object, irresistible force kinda situation right?
>>the prohibition on ex post facto laws would only affect pardons going forward.
That is plainly wrong. A constitutional amendment can say anything. There are no prohibitions.
Wrong.
American patriots have never had anything in common with anybody like Trump.
Take your racist attitude somewhere else and it would not be so embarrassing.
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.
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 https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA012492...
“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.
Welcome to America.
This isn't even in the top 10 of corrupt activities our government officials undertaken in the past year.
Suffer from a downvote-a-bot much?
Corrective upvote applied.
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.
You think at some point america would get sick of having a billionaire gang of thieves in charge.
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.
Noem wants luxury jets from the taxpayer.
So. Much. Winning.
America is pretty sick of both parties.
Had the Democrats ran a half decent candidate, they could easily have won. But they're just not capable of doing that.
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!
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.
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!
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?
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?
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.
The message is just "swamp!" now.
Every accusation from Republicans, without exception, is either a confession, a plan, or an unfulfilled wish.
“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.”
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.
Like the man said, I'm definitely tired of all the winning. Emoluments clause be damned.
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
They knew, they just figured it would be against people who didn’t look quite like them or have the same accent as them.
>because they thought this way.
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.
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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.
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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.
They spy on Congress (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/lawmakers-demand-d...).
They likely don't even need to spy on SCOTUS. They just have to chat with Ginni Thomas.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/30/ginni-thomas...
"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."
"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”."
Sadly people don’t have to remember. They have to be proven guilty.
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.
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.
Thomas is also married to such an operative.
I mean that's just a silly thing to assume with this administration.
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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.
That's more sadistic than I had guessed.
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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 :-)