ts5641 said:
It's amazing federal judges are still making the decisions on how the country should be run.
Didn't the USSC rule on this a couple months ago saying random federal judges can't do this unilaterally for nationwide issues?
This is different. A business impacted by the tariffs sued Trump claiming he didn't have authority under the law he cited to implement such sweeping tariffs. The case went to the International Court of Trade in Wash, DC before a panel of nine judges. They agreed with the plaintiff but stayed their decision to allow Trump to appeal.
He did, and this latest verdict is from the DC Court of Appeals, a panel of eleven judges, who agreed with the lower court in a 7-4 decision. They also stayed their decision to allow Trump to appeal to the Supreme Court, which he surely will do.
So far, the case has been heard before 20 judges and the majority of them agreed Trump exceeded his authority with these massive, sweeping tariffs where he's trying to reorder global trade.
I would bet the Supreme Court upholds the appeals court verdict on the "big questions" principle, meaning when the president tries to do something that's a stretch from how the law was written, the Court usually reins in the president and says issues of major significance to the country need to be decided by Congress, a body of 535 elected representatives, instead of one person in the White House.
They did this to Biden when he tried to stretch existing laws to forgive student loans on a massive scale. The Court said "not so fast"... a decision of that magnitude needs to come from Congress. If the law clearly gave Biden or Trump the authority to implement their decisions, the courts would have upheld them. But in this case, the law that Trump referenced for his authority didn't even mention tariffs.
He tried using general language about "regulating trade" during an emergency as his justification. It's a bit of a stretch to classify our current global trade as an "emergency," as well as interpreting "regulating trade" to mean massive tariffs applied against the rest of the world that are disrupting the US economy on a large scale... some good and some bad, but nonetheless massive disruption.
In their ruling, the DC Court of Appeals claimed that tariffs are a tax, and the Constitution exclusively grants taxing power to Congress, not the president.
