Other Sources
The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a major blow to President Donald Trump’s trade agenda Friday, ruling the tariffs he issued under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act are illegal.
In a 6-3 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court said Congress alone holds the power to tax in almost all circumstances. The Trump administration’s argument that trade deficits and illegal drug imports granted it emergency power to levy tariffs was not justified, the court said. Tariffs are taxes on imported goods.
The Trump administration had argued that a provision in the law, known as IEEPA, that said the executive branch could “regulate” imports empowered the president to levy tariffs.
“Based on two words separated by 16 others (in the law)—‘regulate’ and ‘importation’—the President asserts the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,” Roberts wrote. “Those words cannot bear such weight.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Roberts’ opinion.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh filed dissenting opinions. Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito joined Kavanaugh’s.
Kavanaugh’s dissent accepted the administration’s reading of the law and said it was not the justices’ role to decide a policy matter that has “generated vigorous” debate.
“The sole legal question here is whether, under IEEPA, tariffs are a means to ‘regulate . . . importation,’” he wrote. “Statutory text, history, and precedent demonstrate that the answer is clearly yes: Like quotas and embargoes, tariffs are a traditional and common tool to regulate importation.”
It’s too bad the president has given tariffs a bad name, it’s a labor movement issue to want tariffs on goods from countries that undercut us on labor and the environment. It’s created a race to the bottom, exported all of our tech, and built factories for repressive regimes, and has enslaved entire populations, forcing them to work 6-12s for starvation wages, 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. No protections, retirement, health care to speak of usually, no workers comp. Toxins are dumped in the ditch. All to make cheap and sell expensive, to undercut our own gains made by labor, and our gains fighting for a clean environment where we don’t (didn’t) allow companies to poison us and every living animal in entire aquifers to save a buck on waste disposal, as much.
Those countries should see tariffs to make up for the advantages of undercutting our standards by exploiting their workers under dictatorial systems that brutally repress their exploited workforces. But the president while getting support from the America First crowd that didn’t know better than to support him on this, and on his promise of ending foreign wars to benefit the rich and connected, was never going to do this well. He is too mean, too corrupt, and whatever else, to do anything well, and constitutionally against improving the lot of people.
It’s a cudgel for him to influence other countries, and a protection racket, he’s been trying to turn it into a global protection racket, probably taking under the table pay offs to shell companies in tax shelters to exempt industries and from countries even.