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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.

at the end of the day, it's average joe who bought his things more expensive, and he won't get back his money.

That's what matters, don't care if it's the seller or a middleman that gets this money.

That's really a shame for american citizens, i'd be furious if i was american.

Many are beyond furious

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.

Smart money is that they will make some token comment about "leave it up to the states" or lower courts and then do absolutely nothing about it

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.

https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-1099-g

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.

A federal law has to be approved by Congress, that isn’t happening. An executive order maybe?

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.

Understandable. With the intentional chaos since last year, tariffs were changing mid-shipment without any prior notice.

It's less that and more that the sender just didn't arrange to prepay it for the receiver rather than it being in flux. A lot of shippers do handle it to avoid the surprise for customers but some didn't have the setup to do the prepayment.

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...)

> 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 can see why you are mad, but it seems like the were fulfilling their legal obligation (at the time).

The good news is that having directly paid UPS and not a middleman makes it much more likely that you will receive the money back. If anybody does.

That's be nice, but I place more blame on the half of Congress that was OK with this.

If everyone sued them in small claims over it, there probably would be a whole lot of default judgments.

Seller wasn’t involved in the tariffs. Rather the importer paid them, etc.

> Seller wasn’t involved in the tariffs. Rather the importer paid them

Strictly speaking it depends on the Incoterms agreed upon by the seller and buyer[1]. If the Incoterms are DDP, then the seller should pay import duties and taxes and as such is involved.

Of course sellers are typically trying to run a business, so they'll bake the taxes and import duties into the sales price. So effectively the buyer ends up paying for it, just indirectly.

This was relevant when the tariffs were introduced, as sellers with DDP goods in transit had committed to a sales price which included any tariffs and would have to swallow the extra costs when they got the bill from the freight forwarder.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoterms#Allocations_of_risks...

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."

"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.

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]

I am just saying that it eventually is paid by the end user, regardless of the bureaucratic steps in between. We can try and figure out who is directly paying them but I feel like that detail is unnecessary to my overall point.

US Consumers pay in fungible dollars, and so if your company paid for three pizzas eaten by an AWS team, and I paid for 1 ounce of Maersk fuel oil, and our Starbucks venti latte purchases paid to rethatch Juan Valdez's hut, who can even trace the serial numbers on our $1 bills?

A tariff is included in the cost of a product by the final seller. The final buyer ultimately pays the tariff.

It doesn’t matter who sends the actual tariff payment, it gets priced into the cost of the product.

> 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.

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.

It's much more true than saying that the foreign company pays it. Depends on how much slack there is in profit margins for both the exporter and importer, but the consumer does pay most of it, like 90%.

I recommend that commenters shell out and pony up for a thesaurus before its import duty is magnified sixfold.

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.

> There is no strategy here.

Unless the money is fully accounted and restituted, I believe we can assume what the strategy is.

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 think a lot of time Congress being stuck is a feature, not a bug.

What happens when things aren't stuck, they change too much, in both frequency and magnitude. Kind of like when one person in the executive branch gets to make the rules. It's utter chaos and uncertainty on the business environment, even on the consumer environment, they have no idea what anything costs anymore. Am I paying double from a year ago because of tariffs or because it's easy for the seller to say tariffs, I'll never know. As a business, should I charge more now in anticipation for future uncertainty, has seemed simultaneously unfair and prudent. Now, should I reduce prices to go back to pre-tariff or just pocket it and call it inflation. Uncertainty is chaos, it's hard to plan for anything or make big decisions. This is why high(er) rates didn't hurt the housing market but all the Trump related uncertainty did.

The problem is we've kicked this can down the road for decades. We can't just let the president perform Congress's job, no matter how "stuck" they are.

I agree with this assessment. And I think that the way it's setup in the constitution is correct, that congress needs to ultimately create the tariffs rather than the president. Creating tariffs unilaterally should almost never happen.

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

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?

>Do you agree with countries doing the opposite to the US?

If their laws allow their leaders to enact tariffs then sure, they're welcome to do it. Foreign relations is complicated. Different countries operate differently. In the US, Congress is supposed to levy taxes and impose tariffs. Not the president. This game of nibbling (now chomping) at the edges of that clearly outlined role needs to end.

>When for example US tech is better than the local alternative but the countries create unfair advantages to the local alternatives?

We can still enact tariffs and similar policies. This just says the President can't just called everything a national emergency and go to town. We have the same mechanisms they do.

I believe as a US citizen I have no say in how they make these decisions so this thought exercise is pointless. We all structure our governments differently and so compete globally with differing rules, I only care about how we do it here in the US. At times, what we do may be in reaction to others, but how we do it needs to be agreed upon here at home and for that we have a Constitution that gives this power to congress not the executive. I'm glad the court got it right, it's a glimmer of hope that the constitution still has some meaning.

Absolutely!

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.

Can you make an example of a tariff from the last 100 years that definitely benefitted the US in a long-lasting way?

How do you feel about allowing the import of goods from nations using slavery to create those goods? Would you be okay with a foreign nation undercutting domestic production as a strategy to destroy your industry to control a market?

That's aside from my position that most taxes should be at a point of trade/exchange.

Agree, and it should be Congress decision.

Or treaties or accords. All basically the same if squint. Sign something like the Paris Accord, you’re basically taxing consumers.

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.

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.

Scalia wrote some really interesting opinions for sure. Feel like the arguments are only going to get worse :(

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.

His dissent in this case was basically "Don't over turn the tariffs because it will be too hard to make everyone whole" Which doesn't strike me as "principled" at all.

Wasn't it JFK who said "We choose to Not do these things bc they're kinda hard actually"? /s

His reputation will be forever tarnished by "Kavanaugh stops"

That the the four sexual assault allegations (Thomas had "only" one during his nomination):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh#Sexual_assault...

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.

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.

Weren’t Sotomator and Jackson the same with Biden? Kagan is much more principled.

In major case, sure. But every last emergency petition? I don’t think so.

> Weren’t Sotomator and Jackson the same with Biden? Kagan is much more principled

Very respectfully, there is no comparison between Trump and Biden in this respect. Indeed, the court adopted a new legal concept, the Major Questions Doctrine, to limit Biden continuing the Trump student loan forbearance.

The Major Questions Doctrine has been a thing for decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine

> The Major Questions Doctrine has been a thing for decades:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine

I've read the Wikipedia page before and also reviewed it before posting, but thanks for your insightful analysis.

Care to share when it was used in the majority before the current Roberts court?

FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. is an example of the same principle without the name (afaik it wasn’t named that until later.)

Basically the FDA tried to use its powers to regulate drugs and devices to regulate nicotine (drug) via cigarettes (device.) The conservatives on the court said, in effect, “look obviously congress didn’t intend to include cigarettes as a medical device, come on.”

Then Congress passed a specific law allowing the FDA to regulate cigarettes. This is how it should work. If congress means something that’s a stretch, they should say so specifically.

I think that's a fair example but it had the wrinkle that an FDA commissioner explicitly changed what the Agency's position on tobacco regulation was [1].

I don't have as much time to offer a similar assessment of the first two 'official' Major Questions Doctrine cases in the Biden administration, but neither was nearly as contentious as the FDA reversing its prior position.

For this reason, I see this decision as an argument against an agency changing course from an accepted previous (but not Congressionally defined) perspective. However, Chevron—at least according to interviews with lawmakers responding to the 'MQD' usage—ran counter to what the supposed understanding of how agency work would function. Again, I can find primary sources later.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/22/us/high-court-holds-fda-c...

> the court adopted a new legal concept

You phrased something very poorly. Someone replied and you moved the goalposts; claiming that you were actually referring to the majority using a concept. And now you’ve moved the goalposts again.

I don’t know why you’re doing backflips to avoid admitting that you were wrong.

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.

When all of your decisions can be predetermined without even knowing the context of the matter you are surely a hack. It goes like this.....'Does this matter benefit Trump, corporations, rich people or evangelicals?'. Yes? Alito and Thomas will argue its lawful. Every single time.

Extremely biased comment.

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.”

>The law was written specifically to allow blocking imports from a country.

The precise wording is regulate. The idea that "regulate" means you can turn it on or off with no in-between is beyond parody. Absurd. Hilarious. Farcical.

That said the headline is misleading and should be renamed, nothing is changing from this ruling.

> discussion about the nuances of this ruling are happening on X

I'm sure they are lol.

Thomas isn’t a hack, he’s a shill. And he’s not even trying to be subtle about it. He’s somebody’s bitch and he literally drives around in the toys they bought for him as compensation.

If any justice deserves to be impeached it’s him. I can’t believe they approved him in the first place. Anita Hill sends her regards.

I remember being shocked, albeit not surprised, when I read that he had quite a lot of contact with Ron de Santis.

https://americanoversight.org/email-suggests-that-supreme-co...

But the toys are so cheap. It can’t possibly be just a matter of the money, there has to be some blackmail involved. Either that or he was always self hating.

Why would there need to be bribery or blackmail involved? He's ideologically aligned with the goals of the republican party.

His patrons lavish him with gifts because they don't want him to retire, not because they want a specific ruling.

[flagged]

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.

Wrong law. Trump chose not to use the "impose tariffs for national security reasons" law in this case.

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

The whole legal apparatus of the US doesn't want to hear that but your laws suck. They're flawed because of the political system borne of compromise with parties incapable of whipping their members to just vote in favour of a law they don't fully agree with.

This is a global issue, laws aren't math formulas, law is interpreted, hence the need of judges.

Old laws are often superseded or modified by newer legislation that's not novel or rare. This one wasn't because it hadn't been so roundly abused by previous presidents that it had been an issue worth taking up. It's the same with a lot of delegated powers, the flexibility and decreased response time is good when it's constrained by norms and the idea of independent agencies but a terrible idea when the supreme court has been slowly packed with little king makers in waiting wanting to invest all executive power in the President. [0]

[0] Unless that's power over the money (ie Federal Reserve) because that's a special and unique institution. (ie: they know giving the president the power over the money printer would be disastrous and they want to be racist and rich not racist and poor.)

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-...

It's obviously not that simple. If we follow your logic then we would expect that no previous President was able to enact tariffs. We obviously know that to be false as Presidents in the past have enacted a wide range of tariffs.

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.

In fairness Trump is the first guy who uses this cheatcode so blatantly. There used to be a kind of decorum.

But yes it is basically eliminating parliament and rule by a monarch- making a mockery of 1776.

Kavanaugh's opinion seems to say "well, this would be too hard to undo, so we should just leave it alone and let Trump continue". That hardly seems 'reasonable'. Just lazy and/or partisan.

> The plaintiffs argue and the Court concludes that the President lacks authority under IEEPA to impose tariffs. I disagree. In accord with Judge Taranto’s careful and persuasive opinion in the Federal Circuit, I would conclude that the President’s power under IEEPA to “regulate . . . importation” encompasses tariffs. As a matter of ordinary meaning, including dictionary definitions and historical usage, the broad power to “regulate . . . importation” includes the traditional and common means to do so—in particular, quotas, embargoes, and tariffs.

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.

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

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

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

in the UK a similar unconstitutional behaviour by the head of government took...

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.

It takes a long time for something to get through all the appeals. Getting an injunction to put a stop to something during the appeals doesn't take that long.

The problem in this case is that Congress made such a mess of the law that the lower court judges didn't think the outcome obvious enough to grant the injunction.

> 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."

There were presumably lower court judges who didn't issue injunctions, or what are people objecting to?

The appeals level stayed the injunctions temporarily, probably expecting a quick emergency docket ruling rather than a long delay.

The appellate court decides whether to stay the injunction based on how likely they think you are to win more than which docket they think the Supreme Court is going to use. Cases going on the emergency docket are not common.

> The appellate court decides whether to stay the injunction based on how likely they think you are to win…

If multiple appeals courts thought this case was a winner for the administration, we have an even bigger problem.

(Also, no. They might, for example, disagree on immediate irreparable harm, but not the overall merits.)

> Cases going on the emergency docket are not common.

Sure. But some of them look clearly destined for it. Including this one.

> If multiple appeals courts thought this case was a winner for the administration, we have an even bigger problem.

Do we? The law here was a mess. Prediction markets didn't have the outcome at anything like a certainty and the relevant stocks are up on the decision, implying it wasn't already priced in -- and both of those are with the benefit of the transcripts once the case was already at the Supreme Court to feel out how the Justices were leaning, which the intermediary appellate court wouldn't have had at the time.

> Sure. But some of them look clearly destined for it.

It's not a thing anyone should be banking on in any case. And if that was actually their expectation then they could just as easily have not stayed the injunction and just let the Supreme Court do it if they were inclined to.

> the relevant stocks are up on the decision

Predictable result, unpredictable timing.

> they could just as easily have not stayed the injunction and just let the Supreme Court do it if they were inclined to

Hindsight is, as always, 20/20.

> Predictable result, unpredictable timing.

That wouldn't explain the prediction markets thinking the administration had a double digit chance of winning. The sure things go 99:1.

> Hindsight is, as always, 20/20.

It's not a matter of knowing which docket would be used. Why stay the injunction at all if you think the Supreme Court is going to immediately reverse you?

> That wouldn't explain the prediction markets thinking the administration had a double digit chance of winning.

I am not a believer in the accuracy of prediction markets.

> Why stay the injunction at all if you think the Supreme Court is going to immediately reverse you?

They didn't think that.

They thought SCOTUS would back them up faster.

Back in November: https://fortune.com/2025/11/07/trump-tariffs-supreme-court-i...

"That suggests a potentially lopsided 7-2 vote against Trump, who appointed Gorsuch, Barrett and Kavanaugh during his first term."

We got 6-3.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/international-trade/trump-tari...

"Though he normally aligns with Thomas and Alito, Gorsuch may be more likely to vote against Trump’s tariffs than Kavanaugh is, according to Prelogar. “It might actually be the chief, Barrett and Gorsuch who are in play,” she said."

https://www.quarles.com/newsroom/publications/oral-arguments...

"During the argument, several Justices expressed skepticism about the IEEPA expanding the President’s powers to encompass the ability to set tariffs."

This was the widespread conclusion back then; that the justices were clearly skeptical and that the government was struggling to figure out an effective argument.

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.

Not doing something you could have done is frequently less of a choice and more of a lack of bandwidth to simultaneously consider everything which is happening at the same time. The vast majority of cases don't make it onto the emergency docket.

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 was on the emergency docket. This decision was the merits docket, which always takes much longer.

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.

But that's not the issue.

'can the President unilaterally impose tariffs on any country he wants anytime he wants'

No, he can't impost tariffs on any country. He can only impose tariffs on American companies willing to import from any country.

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

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.

A true hero would have done whatever it took to pack the SC and then resigned.

How would those confirmations have worked exactly?

The president is immune to prosecution for official acts. He could have "officially" arrested republican senators, if necessary.

You realize that would be an utterly insane road to go down and would hopefully lead to immediate impeachment, right?

> You realize that would be an utterly insane road to go down

We're already down that road; SCOTUS put us on it.

The question is now how much damage it'll do to the car to do a U-turn.

> would hopefully lead to immediate impeachment…

This describes like a hundred things in the Trump second term so far.

This is how actual insurrections happen, not just unguided tours of the Capitol.

The most stupid idea ever. Biden, despite his frailties, was conscious enough not to do this.

I think they were just overly confident that they would be re-elected. Why throw the baby out when the bathwater is still warm?

Packing the court just means passing legislation. It isn't some criminal thing.

The court is an expression of political power. Expressing political power through it is not stupid.

Packing the court is unprecedented, and as soon as anyone did it, they would both do it continuously. It would also outrage the other party and make the first to do it more likely to lose the next election.

So you would get to pack the court for the rest of your current term before the other party gets back in and packs it the other way, and thereafter lose the courts as a check on the party in power forever because the first thing a party would do when they get into power is pack the courts.

It's a monumentally stupid idea.

As with partisan gerrymandering, packing the court cannot be the only step.

It would need to come with a commitment to a package of difficult to undo (i.e. amendments) reforms. SCOTUS term limits, preventing the Senate from refusing to even consider nominees, bans on justices receiving gifts (https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...), revocation of Presidential immunity, etc. You pack the court with an explicit promise to largely return to the old status quo when it's fixed.

Do you really think that if you packed the court, there is anything you could do to prevent the other party from doing the same thing the next time they're in power? Your plan would have to be to prevent them from ever getting back into power, and that's a civil war.

On top of that, Clarence Thomas is the oldest person on the court and Alito is only two years younger. By the end of the next Presidential term they'll both be in their 80s. You don't have to pack the court, you just have to be in office for the term or two after this one.

You also need to control congress or they'll just block you till they get their guy in.

That's when you give them a moderate because you'd both rather that than flip a coin for who gets control of both branches at once first.

Nope, Obama tried that and McConnell still refused.

> Do you really think that if you packed the court, there is anything you could do to prevent the other party from doing the same thing the next time they're in power?

I don't think it's 100% possible to stop a determined political movement in the US from doing A Holocaust, but I think it's worth at least trying to make it tough.

And that's a good reason not to do a Holocaust of your own, seeing as you likely don't want to kick start a chain of Holocausts.

We can distinguish between packing the court in response to the other party doing it and doing A Holocaust, right?

The point is your objection also applies to A Holocaust.

We can't 100% prevent anything; the Constitution could get amended to permit mass summary executions, with enough votes and public support. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying to make that tougher to accomplish.

The way you make that tougher to accomplish is by adding more checks and balances or repealing laws granting excessive authority to the executive. Packing the court would de facto remove an important one. The thing that would help that is a constitutional amendment prohibiting court packing.

> But the way you make that tougher to accomplish is by adding more checks and balances or repealing laws granting excessive authority to the executive.

That is what I describe as the "package" of reforms, yes.

> The thing that would help that is a constitutional amendment prohibiting court packing.

Good idea! Pack the court, and in that law, include a trigger provision that repeals it as soon as said amendment is passed.

(This has similarly been proposed in gerrymandering.)

> Good idea! Pack the court, and in that law, include a trigger provision that repeals it as soon as said amendment is passed.

Except then the other party just packs the court again instead of passing the amendment, whereas if you already have the votes to pass the amendment then you would just do that without packing the court.

The idea is to establish a "we can keep the everyone-loses war going, or we can fix it for both of us". It's hardly unprecedented; you're seeing it right now with the decision to reopen the government except DHS.

The real way you do this is by thinking ahead for five minutes. We consistently have the problem that everybody realizes checks and balances are important when the other party is in power but that's when they don't have the ability to institute them, and then they forget all about it the next time they're in power.

The easiest time to reduce executive power is when your party is in the executive branch to sign the bill.

> The easiest time to reduce executive power is when your party is in the executive branch to sign the bill.

This has the exact same problem you're complaining my proposal has; it can be undone, quite easily. Probably more easily.

Except that court packing is a purely partisan play where they gain nothing from not reciprocating in kind, whereas they benefit symmetrically from a reduction in executive power for the same reason as you -- it helps them the next time they're in the minority. And the symmetrical move wouldn't be to re-grant those powers to the executive, it would be to further limit the executive from unilaterally doing some things the other party doesn't think it should be doing.

The best case scenario would be to somehow get both parties actually targeting the other's corruption instead of just trying to get the votes needed to be the ones sticking the money in their own pockets.

Biden shared a delusion with Schumer and first-term Obama, that the Republicans have a behavioral floor they won't gleefully take a jackhammer to.

Democrats are finally waking up to this, I think, given the recent retaliatory gerrymandering in CA and VA.

Both of which (especially Virginia) are much more egregious than what happened in Texas, and it’s not like gerrymandering is new to either side. I’m not sure which side you think has a “behavioral floor,” but the answer is neither other than what we hold them to, so don’t excuse “your side.”

> Both of which (especially Virginia) are much more egregious than what happened in Texas…

"Mom, he punched me back after I sucker-punched him!"

How is the citizen-voted CA response - contingent entirely on Texas actually implementing - "much more egregious than what happened in Texas"?

"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?

Yes. Eventually people would get tired of the court getting packed every 4 to 8 years and maybe fix the core weaknesses in the system.

Bills have gotten introduced to keep it at 9, but are generally shot down by democrats. Most recent one (I think, this isn't the easiest to research) is here. See all the sponsors are Rs[1]

Part of the problem is it requires an amendment so you need a super majority.

Imo democrats are waiting until they have enough of a majority to tank the reputation hit court packing would bring, but then lock it to 15 after they do so.

[1] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/grassley...

> Unfortunately, the result would be that Trump…

...would have been sentenced for his 34 felony convictions and probably never get reelected?

Are you saying a Biden-packed SC would have directly resulted in Trump being jailed? How? And my understanding was he was sentenced for the felonies, to unconditional discharge, because he was days away from beginning his second term. So how would that have gone differently just because the SC was packed?

Edit: Oh, maybe you’re thinking of things like the Colorado ballot eligibility case. Then if he hadn’t been electable, he would have been sentenced to serve time. Maybe, but are you arguing the Constitutional merits of Trump losing that case? Or are you okay with partisan hacks in the SC as long as they are Dems instead?

> Edit: Oh, maybe you’re thinking of things like the Colorado ballot eligibility case.

No, I'm thinking of the get-out-of-jail card they gave him in Trump v. US that immediately impacted NY v. Trump.

> Then if he hadn’t been electable, he would have been sentenced to serve time.

No, I think an electable person should still be able to be locked up for crimes.

> Or are you okay with partisan hacks in the SC as long as they are Dems instead?

I think the only chance of saving SCOTUS from partisan hackery is to stop surrendering.

> Are you saying a Biden-packed SC would have directly resulted in Trump being jailed?

I don't think a Biden-packed SC would've found the President to be immune to criminal charges, no.

> And my understanding was he was sentenced for the felonies, to unconditional discharge, because he was days away from beginning his second term.

He was sentenced to nothing, directly because of the SCOTUS ruling. Per the judge: "the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land".

Pre-SCOTUS ruling, no such "encroachment" existed.

His felony convictions came from crimes committed in the 2016 campaign. The judge “subsequently ruled that Trump's conviction related "entirely to unofficial conduct" and "poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the Executive Branch."” (https://abcnews.com/US/judge-trumps-hush-money-case-expected...) so I don’t think it relates to SCOTUS’s immunity ruling.

> Merchan subsequently ruled that Trump's conviction related "entirely to unofficial conduct" and "poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the Executive Branch."

Again, at the actual sentencing, his ruling stated an unconditional discharge was "the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land".

"I can sentence you, but only to nothing" is functionally not being able to sentence him.

None of these three things are related.

SCOTUS doesn't rule on criminal cases, sentencing for state level crimes is done at the state level and he could have still run for president in jail.

The fact that the conviction only made his polling go up should tell you what the result of jailing him would have been.

> SCOTUS doesn't rule on criminal cases…

SCOTUS ruled that the President has immunity from criminal prosecution.

(And they very regularly rule on other, more mundane criminal cases. Where on earth did you get the idea they don't? https://oklahomavoice.com/2025/02/25/u-s-supreme-court-tosse... as a super random example.)

> sentencing for state level crimes is done at the state level

SCOTUS ruled that said immunity applies to state crimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States#Opinion...

This was... rather large news.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/10/trump-unconditional...

> “This court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land is a sentence of unconditional discharge,” Merchan said at the sentencing.

> The fact that the conviction only made his polling go up should tell you what the result of jailing him would have been.

We have precisely zero information on what a campaign by a jailed candidate who can't travel, campaign, or schmooze donors would result in.

> SCOTUS ruled that the President has immunity from criminal prosecution. > SCOTUS ruled that said immunity applies to state crimes.

And yet he was criminally prosecuted.

> And they very regularly rule on other, more mundane criminal cases.

Sorry, they don't convict in criminal cases.

> “This court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land is a sentence of unconditional discharge,” Merchan said at the sentencing.

You're conflating things again. He was not punished for his crimes. That doesn't mean he was not convicted. You can't be immune and convicted. If he was immune, the case would have been thrown out. He's still a felon and so, clearly, not immune.

The immunity granted by SCOTUS was far more limited in scope than news outlets would have you believe.

> We have precisely zero information on what a campaign by a jailed candidate who can't travel, campaign, or schmooze donors would result in.

This time it will be different, surely!

> And yet he was criminally prosecuted.

BEFORE THE RULING.

Come on.

NY v Trump was a state criminal case. The Supreme Court would not have been involved.

> NY v Trump was a state criminal case. The Supreme Court would not have been involved.

Bullshit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause

SCOTUS overturns state laws and convictions plenty.

State criminal case: https://oklahomavoice.com/2025/02/25/u-s-supreme-court-tosse...

State laws held unconstitutional: https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/state-laws-held-uncon...

Exactly.

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.

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

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.

Of which, only a small fraction will be relevant in any particular case.

It's kind of like pointing at any major codebase and arguing that it's "stupid" to have millions of lines of code.

>apparently so ill defined in law that 9 justices can't agree on it

That is not how the Supreme Court works. SCOTUS is a political body. Justices do one thing: cast votes. For any reason.

If they write an opinion it is merely their post hoc justification for their vote. Otherwise they do not have to explain anything. And when they do write an opinion it does not necessarily reflect the real reason for the way they voted.

Edit: Not sure why anyone is downvoting this comment. I was a trial attorney for 40+ years. If you believe what I posted is legally inaccurate, then provide a comment. But downvoting without explaining is ... just ... I don't know ... cowardly?

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Did you actually read it? Seems unlikely. I agree with the majority but I think the dissent does make some ok points.

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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.

Except for the 3 that dissented

>because SCOTUS has proven to not be a puppet of the administration.

Several justices are openly taking bribes

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.

I was flabbergasted that SCOTUS actually said that the concept of no man being above the law had caveats.

Earnestly, I think you need to actually read that opinion. They said some things the president does, he is immune for. And they pushed it back down to the lower courts to define the categories of official acts they laid out.

A hallmark of the Roberts court is leaving something technically intact, but practically gutted and dead.

You can still technically bring charges against the president for things they do while in office.

Practically speaking, after that ruling, you cannot, short of hypothetical scenarios so incredibly unlikely and egregious that even the incredibly unlikely and egregious acts of this administration don't meet that bar.

> 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 actual decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf

Right. Most of the news articles don't link to the decision, which is worth reading.

It's a 6-3 decision. Not close.

Here's the actual decision:

The judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in case No. 25–250 is affirmed. The judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in case No. 24–1287 is vacated, and the case is remanded with instructions to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.

So what does that mean in terms of action?

It means this decision [1] is now live. The vacated decision was a stay, and that's now dead.

So the live decision is now: We affirm the CIT’s holding that the Trafficking and Reciprocal Tariffs imposed by the Challenged Executive Orders exceed the authority delegated to the President by IEEPA’s text. We also affirm the CIT’s grant of declaratory relief that the orders are “invalid as contrary to law.”

"CIT" is the Court of International Trade. Their judgement [2], which was unanimous, is now live. It reads:

"The court holds for the foregoing reasons that IEEPA does not authorize any of the Worldwide, Retaliatory, or Trafficking Tariff Orders. The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs. The Trafficking Tariffs fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders. This conclusion entitles Plaintiffs to judgment as a matter of law; as the court further finds no genuine dispute as to any material fact, summary judgment will enter against the United States. See USCIT R. 56. The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined."

So that last line is the current state: "The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined." Immediately, it appears.

A useful question for companies owed a refund is whether they can use their credit against the United States for other debts to the United States, including taxes.

[1] https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINIO...

[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cit.170...

The Gorsuch concurring is quite the read, but wish more Americans internalized its final paragraph (excerpts below).

Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. ... But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.

"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.

They've already voted once that a day isn't a day to avoid having to maintain some of his emergency declarations so I don't think that 150 day timer will actually end up running.

https://rollcall.com/2025/03/18/house-majority-rules-when-a-...

As far as I know none of Trump's deals have been ratified by the Senate. None of them are valid.

Howard Lutnick and his sons are surely happy about this. It’s almost like Howard Lutnick, the 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...

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.

That might actually be a pretty genius strategy.

Spoiler, that attorney supplies the list of people to charge.

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 likely is nepotism (and maybe bribery depending on your definition, but very unlikely to meet the legal bar of bribery), but I'm not sure what about the GP's comment makes it so obviously clear to you that it is both of those things.

is it doesn't meet the legal bar for bribery, it's only because the supreme Court has made most forms of bribary legal (presumably to prevent Thomas from being arrested for taking lots of bribes)

Maybe Brad Bondi is the most skilled lawyer in town. It's certainly not in the interest of the clients to have any material knowledge otherwise, nor for it to be revealed to them.

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.

The lack of the later leads to the former.

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.

They do make more money the more pervasive tariffs are though as more people would buy tariff related financial products.

It's true that a volatile environment in general is good for certain types of investment banking business, including facilitating 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.

It stretches your imagination to conceive of a financier chasing short term gains over the long term stability of the investment bank they are part of? I seem to recall an event back in the late '00s that you may want to look into.

> my impression is

not sure why you'd give them any benefit of the doubt. they haven't earned it.

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.

Ah yes, instead of applying the normal legal standard of “not even having the appearance of impropriety” we instead apply the monkey’s paw standard of waiting until they “no longer even have the appearance of propriety”.

It’s a tax on the US economy. A tax levied by individuals rather than the government itself. An ingenious scheme. Evil, but ingenious.

Refunds to business, but unless they have to refund to consumers it's free capital to importers

It is a return of their capital illegally acquired by the federal government.

No the consumers paid the price of the tariffs. These refunds are going to businesses who just passed the price along

You don't think Target is going to send me a check? I had assumed it would arrive by mail in the next few days.

With Donald Trump's signature right across the bottom, right?

There must be a mind boggling amount of profit going to these importers to get basically all of the tariff proceeds back on already completed transaction with zero expectation that it be paid back to the people bearing the cost.

I can't imagine their margins are usually very high, the tariff rates are astronomical compared to their usual margins. Hopefully someone here has more information than me because to my naive mind this basically absolutely explodes the free cash reserves of importers from high volume high tariff countries creating a lottery winnings for a business sector of epic proportions rarely seen.

> the consumers paid the price of the tariffs. These refunds are going to businesses who just passed the price along

This story is often repeated, especially by businesses advocating against taxes, but transparently false if you think about it: Taxes and tariffs are costs for a business, no different than an increase in the cost of hops for Budweizer, or an increase wholesale cost of M&M's for the corner store.

When hops' cost increases, Budweizer doesn't just pass it along to consumers; the corner store also doesn't just raise the price of M&Ms. Everyone knows that if you raise the price, fewer people buy your beer/candy and your profits may drop overall, while your scarce assets (money) will be sunk in products sitting on the shelves when you need those assets elsewhere. They can't just raise prices arbitrarily: if Budweizer charged $20/can they'd have zero profit.

As we know well, some companies even sell products at a loss because that is the best outcome for their profits - e.g., car manufacturers, rather than have a hundred million in assets 'lost' indefinitely to unsold cars, and having no pricing that is more profitable, will sell at a loss to get what they can out of it. The clothing store puts last season's unsold clothes on sale around now.

In economics the tradeoff between price and quantity sold is called the demand curve. There's a theoretical point on the curve, hard to identify precisely in reality, which maximizes your profit.

So when costs increase, businesses still want to maximize profits: They decide how much of extra cost to pay directly out of their profits, and how much to raise the price and have consumers 'pay' for it. The consumers don't always go along with the plan: For products that are easy to forgo, such as M&Ms, consumers won't pay much more and businesses tend to eat cost increases. For products that are more unavoidable, such as gas for your car, consumers are compelled to pay more (until they buy more fuel efficient cars, or take a bus or ride a bicycle).

The CBO estimates [1] that foreign exporters bear 5% of the burden of the tariffs, with American consumers bearing the remaining 95%:

> [T]he net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)

This is a serious document written by a bunch of serious economists. You can find a list of them at the bottom of the page. That you have written their conclusion off as "transparently false" should give you pause.

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62105#_idTextAnchor050

I ordered a soccer team jersey from UK which cost $100. I had to shell out $75 in tariffs. So yes while what you are saying might apply to businesses, there is a real cost paid by consumers as well.

Both can be true. On competitive environments it's harder to pass along costs to consumers, but when a supply pressure is unilaterally applied the competitive pressure to eat the increased costs goes away and is more easily passed along to consumers.

There's a bit of truth to what you say, but also truth in the fact ultimately the consumer pays for everything. You're right that in effect the business might absorb the loss to profit, but ultimately ~100% of the revenue is from receipts from customers in the business model you proposes of things like selling a simple business of merely producing and selling M&Ms.

Thus both of you are really right. The tariff is paid 100% by consumer receipts if you track the flow of money, but this might also still be reflected in reduced profits. The actual flow of money might be $X revenue from customers, out of the $X paid from customers $Y is taken out for tariffs. $Y comes from the dollars received from customers but still reflects lowered potential profit if $X rose by less than $Y after tariffs started.

"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.

> it would be impossible to return the funds to them due to diffusion.

It's very much possible if money isn't (or only partially) returned to the companies and used for targeted investment benefiting the public. Of course this won't help much if government spending priories and legislative objectives aren't revised, but that's unlikely because there's nobody in government or academia with anything close to a good idea about it.

That allows the illegal tax to continue. The tax has to be returned to the people it was collected from, and that’s the importers.

Otherwise it’s the same as just leaving the illegal tax in effect.

> Otherwise it’s the same as just leaving the illegal tax in effect.

The SCOTUS didn't say that in their decision. No matter how you call it, the tariffs were found in breach with simple law passed by Congress - that is, the undoing of tariffs can be legislated by Congress and it can take any shape they like - it will be legal. Anyway, fine-tuning this is a waste of time, the big problems are elsewhere.

Without these tariffs Trump and his advisors' already legislated and approved agenda adds 2 trillion dollars to our national debt. Step one is the Republican Congress rolling back the big beautiful bill that is no longer funded, if they truly are the fiscally responsible political party.

But we all know they are actually the party of unsustainable debt (with the political agenda of it blowing up the country as they lay out in their 40+ years of starve the beast policy). They then come to threads like this and talk about...the unsustainable debt that their 40+ years of policymaking has created and how government doesn't work (because of their 40+ years of policy making) and we need to get rid of it. 40+ years of destroying the country via starve the beast policy and placing the country in unsustainable financial peril all for a political agenda they can't reach any other way.

If there was a functioning DOJ, they could bring RICO charges against the whole administration, their business associates and involved family members, all of whom are co-conspirators to corruption of government and bribery. But that would never happen, of course, because Americans don't riot en masse and demand accountability for corrupt government officials.

It's the job of the Congress to hold the executive branch accountable, with the ultimate endpoint being impeachment and removal if necessary. Unfortunately, the Senate republicans are completely sold out to the cult of Trump so there will be no relief from that quarter.

Some of them are lawyers, some even with law enforcement background.

They should be well aware of what extortion is.

If Trump did it on his own that's one thing if not it's a conspiracy.

They’re aware.

And that fee was likely passed almost directly onto the consumer. I think I read... 90%?

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.

But I was certain that now that the tariffs were overturned the merchants would voluntarily lower their prices to pre-tariff level and not just hope the consumer doesn't notice that the only direction prices go is up.

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.

There were something like six different stated intentions, most of which were entirely mutually-exclusive. Replacing income taxes was always the least credible of them.

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.

> but what is a "legitimate tax"?

One that goes through all three branches of government, the way it's been since we decided "no taxation without representation" is how such things should be collectively implemented.

If a citizen's stance is there is no such thing as a legitimate tax, perhaps there should be a legal process for banishing them from all public services, including roads, electricity, telephone, fire and rescue services, etc. and make consuming them a crime. But I guess even that would be a problem because we need to pay for the justice system that would prosecute such a sovereign citizen that breaks the rules...

Basically an "opt-out" of modern life almost in its entirety. I think most people that subscribe to "no legitimate taxes" might be surprised how isolating that would be if they actually think it through.

To be clear, I don't think this is a good idea, it's simply a thought exercise.

Exactly great response. The point of my post to be a thought exercise, but apparently struck downvote nerve. Heh. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In this context it simply means "legal".

As in only Congress can create new taxes and regulate commerce.

One the usually friendly Supreme Court doesn't strike down as too blatantly illegal even for them?

Whatever society decides it is via a legal and consistent proccess?

Libertarians, please sit this one out. We can have the taxation is theft dialog some other comment section.

I don't really think I'm a libertarian.

Often comments are sufficiently poorly reasoned or defecient that it makes more sense to downvote than reply.

For instance complaining about downvotes always draws more as does collectively insulting the community you are participating in.

As to the original question the problem is that it suggests confusion on a basic topic that was decided here centuries ago and taught in elementary school. If someone said what even is addition in an adult forum would you teach them addition or would you assume that they actually know addition and are arguing in bad faith because they feel math really ought to work differently?

Also when you can divide a particular topic into clearly delineated camps appearing to disagree or question the basic premises that one camp holds is oft taken for disagreement and alignment with the opposing camp even when you are just debating a side issue and may in fact be mostly or entirely aligned with the people who feel like you are opposed to them. This shortcut as far as identifying motive and perspective can misfire but it's often correct and "just asking questions" is often underhanded opposition.

Lastly a legitimate tax is one that is passed by Congress in the normal fashion and not overturned by the courts.

I've been on this site since 2009. The level of discourse has dropped dramatically in recent times, yet I still love it here. The way I see it, those who can't see through my statement to the true meaning with some form of EQ, are the ones downvoting.

As for talking about what shall not be talked about, how else shall we talk about it? Once I hit -4, it doesn't matter anyway so a few drops on what I have is not really a big deal. In reality, I'm not counting the numbers, I'm counting the people who have fundamentally lost the cognitive ability to reason about deeper meaning in a more philosophical sense and just click click click.

Legitimate from a cultural / legal sense, but not from a philosophical one.

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.

Excellent question.

I lean quite heavily myself.

In more ways than one though ;)

The most legitimate tax I see is one that citizens would cheerfully pay willingly under any economic conditions.

ALL citizens, or informed / educated citizens? There's a whole network of agitators in the US whose entire job / goal is to make sure there are people unhappy with any tax, no matter how great the benefits.

If you define legitimacy like that, excise taxes look like the only truly legitimate taxes. In my province, that’s things like gasoline, alcohol, tobacco and cannabis. Provincially owned casinos could even be considered a legitimate form of tax though they’re not really a tax.

Can you think of one? I was thinking infrastructure, but then I think about all the fraud and waste that goes along with it and it makes me sad.

You don’t really see a lot of positive in the world and that’s an issue.

But that’s irrelevant - excise taxes are the classic example of taxes people pay willingly.

Oh come on, I didn't say anything like that. sunsets at the beach every night are amazing, and don't cost anything.

excise taxes are hidden taxes, so I wouldn't agree with "willingly"

usually one imposed by congress, from my distant memory of reading the us constitution.

Down votes because the supreme Court ruled it was illegal.

That's means its not a legitimate tax

Well I get the idea that latchkey doesn't think any tax is legitimate.

Not true at all.

> 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.

If the court establishes that this was a tax, how would they administer the refund considering it's impossible to disentangle absorbed tariffs by firms and those passed along to consumers?

SCOTUS left it unspecified, but the refund would go to the payer, legally.

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.

No, but it is a weakness that they have neglected to provide the clarity that would be required to clean it up.

All rulings can be better, but Kavanaugh contributed to making the mess in the first place, as he and conservative members of the court spent 2025 voiding lower-court injunctions against similar radical policies, essentially telling lower-courts to "let Trump move fast and break things."

In other words, Kavanaugh is lying: He doesn't actually care about legal clarity or mess-prevention. If he did we wouldn't even be in this situation in the first place.

I agree with your first point (and I wasn't trying to defend Kavanaugh, just pointing out that the dissent calls something out), but I disagree with your second. Kavanaugh isn't lying - this ruling causes some chaos and uncertainty and I think that one of the reasons Kavanaugh doesn't like it is because it causes some chaos and uncertainty - but, to your first point, he doesn't appear to be acting in good faith.

The Supreme Court absolutely could have handled this much better, and is part of the reason there's so much to undo.

In society, isn't it generally accepted that the person shitting on the floor be the one responsible for cleaning up after himself?

Anybody who has worked a service/retail job can tell you that the person literally shitting on the floor rarely is the one to clean it up.

And unfortunately that extends to the metaphor as well. Society would like to see those responsible for the mess to also be responsible for the cleanup. However society expects that everybody but the mess maker will be left cleaning up.

Meh, Kavanaugh indirectly caused the whole mess, and directly caused many related and similar ones. It's a bad-faith complaint, Kavanaugh's actual track record is "always let Trump move fast and if he breaks things then whatever."

Basically we have a legal processes for courts going "this is weird and unlikely to stand and hard/impossible to fix afterwards, so do nothing until you get a green light", using temporary restraining orders and injunctions.

Yet 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 and irreparable 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, the NYTimes one for example is a $500/day fine on a government lawyer because they haven't returned a man's ID documents a week after he got bail.

There's been lots of coverage of how government lawyers are overwhelmed because they have thousands of immigration cases being appealed and government lawyers keep quitting due to workload. So they have a giant backlog causing lots of administrative issues on following through with court orders.

https://newrepublic.com/post/206115/this-job-sucks-doj-attor...

> 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!

> Sorry, is there a "you can ignore the courts if it's deportation" clause I missed somewhere?

No, but you are arguing in a very annoying style.

Nobody is claiming it's good or okay that this is happening. What people are discussing is whether it's likely that Trump will order people to ignore the court in this case. This is just a question of predicting probabilities, not morality.

And, indeed, the administration has been dropping the ball on following rulings in low-level deportation cases, but hasn't really ignored, or ordered people to ignore, major big-ticket Supreme Court cases. You can't really use one as evidence for the other. This is what people were pointing out to you.

But you took them pointing out this factual distinction as somehow defending Trump, which it is not.

Imagine you said of a known thief: "that guy will surely murder someone, look at his long criminal record!" and someone responded "but all his crimes are petty theft, none involve violence". It'd be illogical for you to then get indignant that the other person was defending theft or claiming it's not bad.

> And, indeed, the administration has been dropping the ball on following rulings in low-level deportation cases, but hasn't really ignored, or ordered people to ignore, major big-ticket Supreme Court cases.

They did exactly that in the Garcia case, which was a "big-ticket SCOTUS case". It became politically untenable and they eventually backed down, but the post-ruling response was initially "nuh uh!"

They didn’t ignore it, at most they bullshitted for a while about how they couldn’t bring Garcia back because he was in the hands of the El Salvador and then ultimately did bring him back.

>it's likely that Trump will order people to ignore the court in this case.

He sure is confirming his contempt for the court right now on live TV.

Trying to drum up support for his hate against anything sesible in his sight.

Edit: This just in . . . he is peeved, his face just turned so red it bled plum through the orange layer. People should review this on Youtube later if nothing else for this alone. The most meaningful thing in the rant :)

Edit2: And . . . he's announcing additional tarriffs in real time. You can't make this up.

I get it, nuance isn't popular in political discussions. But the reality is these are all large flawed human systems with complex and competing motivations that rarely fit neatly into a box.

The Lutnick sons were also probably betting on the outcome of the case on Kalshi

A witness also reported to the FBI that Lutnick and CF are engaged in massive fraud: 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?

It's not just powerless, I see that Republicans seem to not care a yota about this type of fraud.

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.

[flagged]

Don't be so disparaging with your terminology.

These are persons of Trump-like character, not just your average booster :\

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.

Since 1958 with the Former Presidents Act [1] the Presidency guarantees you'll live very comfortably for the rest of your life with a lifetime pension (and even a small pension for your wife), funding for an office/staff, lifetime secret service protection, funded travel, and more. It was passed precisely because of the scenario you describe playing out with Truman who was rather broke, and ran into financial difficulties after leaving office.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Former_Presidents_Act

> 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.

The older I get and the more I learn, the crazier it is that evangelicals abandoned / were conned into supporting Reagan over Carter, all the while claiming that Reagan was sent from God or something.

But then, I have seen the same thing played out recently: Biden, a devout catholic is considered borderline evil by my fundagelical parents (mostly due to religious channels from the US, even though they're in Canada), while Trump is approaching sainthood.

Religion does weird things with the brain. I don't understand it either.

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.

I wish everyone a nice party, but the problem isn't Trump. Its what behind him: the ideologues, the power brokers and their networks, the 0.001%. Plus the masses having been bathing in culture wars for years.

Trump is just good for circus, I would say the GOP can call themselves really lucky with him. His job is to successfully capture media attention, keeping what enables him out of the spotlight. He lacks all qualities, except that one ability to grab the mass media by their pussy. New craziness every day makes good headlines.

Problem is that his enablers are not aligned on all core issues. Yes, you have got the Heritage Foundation which mainly wants to go back to the gilded age with a vast christian lower class. But you also have a circle of people who believe that crashing the US, including the dollar, enables them to build a US like they want. Its a weird coalition of billionaires predating on the millionaires, grifters, christian nationalists, Neo-nazi's like Miller, tech-accelerationists etc.

You should fear the day when Trump isn't needed anymore. MAGA is Trump. GOP will have to shift up ideological gear after him, and it won't be as nice as Trump. Even if internal war breaks out in the GOP, it is too early for a party.

> people who believe that crashing the US, including the dollar, enables them to build a US like they want

Yes, it's strange how dumb some rich/succesful people are. As I understand it, no civilization ever has done such a thing. If a civilization and its institutions crash, it remains failed/dysfunctional for a very long time. The only way to improve society is in small steps.

I hope the people who finance this all will wake up to the reality that it may well cost them everything, too.

It's not strange; they can just afford to weed out the people who say "no" from their lives. Everyone around them is either in the same situation, or depends on them for their cushy livelihood.

Not having to hear "no" for decades breaks brains.

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.

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.

Basically a bookie, eh? And the house never loses...

Witkoffs profited off the UAE Spy Sheikh chips deal! Why can't Lutnicks make millions?! Come on guys. Unfair.

https://archive.is/W6Gqy

And this is the same Howard Lutnick who was just last week was caught blatantly lying about his relationship with Epstein?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/30/new-epstein-...

Most people knew this would happen, it was widely predicted.

What is this shit? 4D grifting?

There's no scam too big or too small, from Trumpcoin's open bribery, to Secret Service paying 5x the GSA per diem rate to stay at Trump properties on duty.

Holy crap, you couldn't make a story that is a more direct echo of the plot point in Wonderful Life if you tried.

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.

> He should have, but chickened out and decided he would instead carry on Bush's transgressions as the new status quo.

With hindsight, it's pretty hard to believe that wasn't always the plan.

It was a pretty clever plan too, because everyone calling Obama out for [mass surveillance, illegal wars, promoting the '08 crash bankers, torture, funding ICE, bombing a wedding/s, assassinating US citizens without trial, attacking whistleblowers, using his supermajority to implement a Heritage Foundation healthcare plan, etc] was dismissed as a racist.

To this day I see people talk about the tan suit and the dijon mustard thing as if those fake outrage stories were the worst things he did. 'Wasn't it nice to have a President who could talk in complete sentences'.

To be fair, it was nice to have a president that could speak in complete sentences. But yes, I agree that people go way too easy on Obama and present fake controversies as his worst. It should be possible to simultaneously recognize a president's strengths while also being critical of his flaws, but unfortunately American culture seems to have a growing personality cult problem, and it's generally just assumed that if you're not glazing a politician, you're an extremist from the other side doing false flag rhetoric or something inane like that.

Your scepticism is well warranted. That's exactly the playbook Biden chose to follow, and I agree the most likely outcome is the next admin will follow it again.

However, I am unfortunately an incurable optimist, and sometimes we Americans really do pull off amazing feats. I live in the Twin Cities and we actually defeated DHS/CBP/ICE here. It was an amazing thing to witness, and maybe there is enough outrage at this admin's looting of the US that we can build the support nationally to do that kind of thing again.

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

"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

They certainly liked the distraction, but the invasion of MN allowed them to 1) catch some illegal immigrants, 2) intimidate legal immigrants, encouraging them to "self deport", 3) flex their power and demonstrate the ability to cause pain and harm to political enemies, and 4) give agents practice and training for the next city they invade. So far they have had these "surges" in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and Minneapolis. There are plenty more cities in blue states and plenty of money left in their budget, and almost 3 years left in this administration.

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).

It seemed like the Democrats selected Garland just so they could poke the Republicans in the eye. "You blocked him from SCOTUS so now we're going to make him Attorney General, how you like them apples?" Without really considering whether he'd actually do a good job.

An alternative view is his personality used to be what you want (in theory) as both AG and SCOTUS justice - slow, deliberate, non-partisan.

I agree; but different times called for different measures. There was also too much of a feeling of "whew, that was close, but now we can get back to normal" instead of "let's make sure that never happens again".

If you care to read a bit more about it [0], then the Garland pick looks a lot more sinister.

That's Sarah Kendzior, one of the few journalists who was talking about Epstein long before all that started to became well known.

'Fun' fact: The Attorney General is able to unseal court documents at will. And for four years Garland didn't do that with the Epstein files. It was beyond clear that the SC were slow rolling Ghislaine Maxwell's appeal, and still nothing even leaked.

0 - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-of-the-mafia-s...

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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.

> 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.

Sure, give them the golden parachutes. Put a few holes in them, then make them jump.

Nope. Parachutes are too expensive to waste on these losers. Give them all backpacks. Tell them the backpacks are parachutes.

EDIT: Link to old but good joke [0] provided for context.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/16imt2f/long_an_old_...

I think the precedent has been set - proactive pardons for all, every administration from now on

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.

How many high-ranking Department of Justice officials got canned for made-up reasons and maybe are looking for revenge

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 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. There could potentially be a constitutional amendment on this, which is a super high bar, but even then the prohibition on ex post facto laws would only affect pardons going forward. It will be up to the states.

> 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?

Yes, but the courts would dismiss the case. If not the appeals court would. If not the Supreme Court would.

And then you use presidential immunity to Maduro a few justices.

At least 3 members of the Supreme Court are among those working under the current admin who need to be serving life sentences in prison.

If at least two-thirds of the Senate doesn't agree, then that doesn't matter.

>>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.

Well, no, it’s in the US Constitution. So I suppose congress could add a constitutional amendment to remove the prohibition on ex post facto laws. But that’s so unthinkable it might as well be a fantasy. Far from “plainly wrong,” which seems unnecessarily aggressive verbiage.

An amendment can’t violate the constitution. It is the constitution. You can do anything.

Why couldn't the amendment just say, "The presidential power pardon is revoked, and all prior pardons are null and void"? You have to amend the Constitution to remove the pardon power regardless, why would it be so difficult to put in a clause saying that it's retroactive?

Whatever it takes would be worth it.

An example needs to be set.

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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.

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.

I 100% agree. I will never forgive Biden for not putting these traitors behind bars in his first 6 months. He failed at one of his most important sworn duties, protecting the US from its enemies.

But, sometimes a groundswell movement really can build momentum and drive the conversation regardless of what the leaders think about it. Write to your state & national representatives demanding that they publicly support prosecution for the incredible crimes we're seeing committed by this admin. Try to make it a policy platform for your state party. Maybe we can build enough support from the bottom up to get popular momentum behind it. Holding criminals accountable for their crimes is not really a controversial position, we have to demand that they actually do it.

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/

Maybe Dems only don't have power because they don't want too much of it. It fucks with the plausible deniability.

Like, they could easily have taken down Trump, either over Jan 6th or the Epstein files. They didn't.

They could have easily gained _millions_ of votes in the 2024 election just by promising not to keep helping murder tens of thousands of children. They didn't. They could have kicked up a fuss about some rather obvious election fraud; they didn't.

They could have fought harder for SC picks on multiple occasions. They could have leaked choice Epstein files at key times. They could have held proper primaries, instead of ramming a demented roomba warmonger and then his wildly unpopular warmonger sidekick down our throats (for like the third election in a row). They didn't.

At some point you need to realize that Dems have lots of power; and they choose to use it in very curious ways. Arming genocide and protecting billionaire blackmail pedo-rings aren't things that I'm willing to look past. Yes the Republicans are even worse, but at every point where Dems had all the power needed to hold them accountable they've gone to rather extreme lengths not to do that. For decades.

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  "The Biden Pardon immunizes everyone from future prosecution"

And there's a pretty huge precedent for that; the preemptive pardon of Nixon.

You're making an argument for why its use is defensible. I find it not unconvincing, especially since it's pretty much just Analects 13:18. But Trump can use the Biden Pardon (shorthand for broad large-period pre-emptive pardon) too, and he's pioneered the use of the Trump Pardon (shorthand for plausibly deniable pay-to-pardon). The combination of the two pardon techniques signals the end of Rule of Law for sufficiently well-connected individuals in the US. Plausibly Jeffrey Epstein was just caught a decade early. He wouldn't be in trouble today.

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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.

> the will of the majority

Trump didn't even get a majority of the votes, let alone a majority in current polling.

He absolutely won the popular vote, and won every single swing state.

Cool, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...

Trump: 49.8%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality_(voting)

> A plurality vote (in North American English) or relative majority (in British English) describes the circumstance when a party, candidate, or proposition polls more votes than any other but does not receive a majority or more than half of all votes cast.

What he does have a very clear majority on currently is disapproval of his actions: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-appro...

Just because they promise illegal shit on the campaign trail doesn't mean they get a pass for implementing it.

And do you remember when he promised to illegally raise taxes without the consent of congress? Me neither.

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> the fascistic left

Immediate signal that you can ignore whatever comes next.

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Hunter Biden and the Biden family were investigated for years by Congress. They came up with tax and gun form charges. Why would that stop Dems from prosecuting all the corruption and treason happening under this administration?

I'm not following the reasoning in your comment. So because fishing expeditions are possible we shouldn't ever go after political opponents for actual crimes?

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.

Somehow, the "Everything is Corrupt" folks always end up supporting the most corrupt president in our history.

Maybe you have to say "everything is corrupt" in order to not be morally required to condemn the current administration.

Yes, other administrations were corrupt, going back at least to Andrew Jackson. No, from what I can tell, they weren't this corrupt (with the possible exception of Grant).

What was Hunter Bidens official job and what corrupt official acts did he commit? Some private third party hires some washed up relative of someone in power is looking decidedly quaint if you look at the brazenness and dimensions of the current administration.

I'm completely lost on what your position is here. You think the fishing expedition against the Bidens was actually kinda good but the Republicans were secretly positioning to only charge him with a gun-form thing that almost no one gets charged for standalone and for taxes that he paid back?

What crime did you want him found guilty of exactly?

I can in good faith completely reject your comments, which are totally lacking in good faith.

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.

He is also surely happy the Trump administration no longer sees fit to investigate or pursue anyone with connections to Epstein. Previously Lutnick had lied about the extent of their relationship, yet even after the recent relevations he can simply wave them off.

What a profitable time for the Lutnicks, who are of course already fabulously wealthy. Our system really does reward the best people.

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.

Why do you guys have only two parties and the executive is made of a pseudo king that rules with no opposition?

They did run a half decent candidate. Trouble is, too many people insist on so much more. If it's not the zombie of JFK they're staying home.

Remember that first they ran a walking corpse who couldn't reliably form sentences!

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!

Sort of a meta-observation, but consistently folks on the left have that take and then are confused when they lose.

“If only all those idiots on the right and in the center could see they should vote for the bumbling but well-intentioned candidate over the obvious liars and thieves” is an explanation that feels good to tell yourself, but also incredibly patronizing and prevents actually understanding why people vote the way they do.

I find the arrogance of the left pretty abhorrent. I also despise aspects of the right, but boy does the left rub me the wrong way.

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?

One of the greatest Dems ever was FDR and he was old elite. Curiously in the history of socialism quite a few were "traitors" of their own class!

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.

“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.”

Every accusation from Republicans, without exception, is either a confession, a plan, or an unfulfilled wish.

The swamp has always been him and his buddies. Pure projection. Everything he spouts is always pure projection.

It’s not even ironic. Trump never genuinely intended to do so, and anybody with a brain never trusted them to do so either. Just another case of “every accusation an admission” in the case of the leaders, and “it’s only bad when it’s not our guy doing it” in the case of the followers.

> So. Much. Winning.

Like the man said, I'm definitely tired of all the winning. Emoluments clause be damned.

For the Fox News crowd, which is most of his supporters, they are likely not even aware of these transgressions, as they are not reported there. Or, if they are aware, they are happy to see Trump enriching himself, because, own the libs or something?

Trump has a long record of stealing from Joe Average and had been doing it since between 2016. Joe Average thinks he’s clever for doing it.

Joe Average will keep voting for them to pick his pocket, as long as they promise cruelty to the "Other Side".

Joe Average knows he is getting fucked over either way

Polling suggests Joe Average didn't expect this much fucking.

They knew, they just figured it would be against people who didn’t look quite like them or have the same accent as them.

No offense, and you're not entirely wrong, but this is one of the big reasons we are in this situation politically. Millions of voters stayed home because they thought this way. The result: America is the embarrassment of the world, no longer to be trusted. We all must vote, even if we must hold our noses while doing it. We can't allow known thugs to be in command. (I was a life long GOP voter, to my shame, until 2004. How the American public didn't see the puke of a DJT presidency coming is beyond the pale.)

>because they thought this way.

Technically, no, they did not come up with this thought on their own. It's been heavily propagandized that 'voting does no good, so just stay home". I just want to point that out as it's an active attack on American voters.

It doesn't help that most Democrat politicians are happy to maintain status quo. Or they're completely feckless, like Chuck Schumer, who is the absolute King of bringing a strongly-worded letter to a gun fight.

People that are actually leftist don't vote because there's nobody that represents them. Most Democrat politicians are centrist.

Meaningful information shouldn't die just because the medium goes dark :\

Joe Average the Trump voter got to be the way they are from a "grooming" process of some kind.

Who would Trump have ever have picked up something like that from?

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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.

------ re: below due to throttling ----------

Lutnicks profit requires some 2nd order thinking. How Trump et al might profit off of import/export insider operations also requires some 2nd order thinking. My apologies for not spelling it out, although it should not take much imagination.

Not import/export insiders, the Trump family... always just follow the money, maybe along the way some "import/export" people get some crumbs but most of it ends up a Mar a Largo :-)

That Lutnik is always sooooo lucky. He didn’t go to the twin towers on 9/11 cause he finally took his kid to kindergarten.

Always seems to be in the right place and the right time

Finally some sanity. The administration has use laws about "national security" and other so call "emergencies" to impose tariffs. If everything is an emergency then nothing is, and that was clearly not congress' intention with those laws.

The power to impose tariffs rests with the legislator, not the executive. Of course our congress is effectively useless - we can thank decades of Mitch McConnell's (and others) "not giving the other side anything" thinking for that.

We're currently in the midst of 51 ongoing "national emergencies" [1], dating back to at least Carter. I think something that the next great empire will learn from is to limit emergency powers as well as the ability to create emergency powers, because in spite of their name they inevitably end up becoming normalized and just used as regular powers.

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...

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.

Honestly FDR doesn't get enough credit for probably saving capitalism.

He borrowed just enough of the stuff socialists were promising, and bolted it onto the government to mollify the working class who'd been absolutely ravaged by oligarchs for the preceding decades. You only have to look at the rest of the world to see how things might've turned out without FDR's very reasonable interventions.

Still find it kinda wild that it's the Republicans fighting tooth and nail against any balance of power to...

...raise taxes

> 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.

Link to SCOTUSblog coverage, which has the link to the actual opinion. I tend to eschew early media coverage of things like this and just go to the source.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-dow...

In response, POTUS just declared a global 10% tariff. Does anyone understand if this is legal?

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-orders-temporary-1...

Aw shucks, I guess we'll have to wait another year to find out won't we?

In a sense this is the correct level of punishment for all. The courts are slow and deliberative.

The Congress could solve this in a week. Impeachment and removal from office.

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.

Send a letter requesting a full refund.

If they refuse, sue them in small claims court.

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.

I would love for a self-service broker to materialize.

i.e. Where you upload your paperwork, fill in and certify the forms online, make a payment, and the broker just feeds all that through. You do the work, they're just your gateway to the system.

I've used courier's internal brokers (like DHL/UPS offer, at their ripoff rate), professional private brokers, etc. and seen all of them make stupid mistakes costing me money/time (eg. including the shipping cost in value for duties, transposing the wrong currency at face value, etc). I could do a better job myself, and frankly with a decent portal it would take me less time. Heck I bet I could build a fairly automated system that is more efficient (higher-margin) and accurate.

Here in Canada there's new legislation that even if you use a third party broker, you still need to post a security or bond with CBSA (see CARM) maintained on an annual basis. It boggles my mind they made the infrastructure to deal with money from all the individual buyers, but not a self-service portal to deal with the forms. Self-clearing here still entails a physical visit to a CBSA office.

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.

Hmm. This is celebrated as a victory - I don't mind that, who likes the crazy pro-russian orange man anyway. But I think it should be pointed out that he went on to use an old law. So the supreme court basically said that this was an unfit use case. Ok. They could just come up with a new law that is tailor-made and may eventually be approved. It may take some time but they could technically do so, right? So I am not sure if that victory dance isn't just too early.

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.

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?

It feels like the US-Iran war is inevitable now.

10 days to go

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c86yjnw4x49o

Most likely this weekend.

Second carrier's not arriving in-theater until tomorrow at the earliest, and the latest report I saw on its position made it look more like Monday or so.

They might go without it, but if they're waiting on the Ford, they'll be cutting it close to fit the opening strike into this weekend.

It is, but not because of this decision.

Correct, because of the Epstein files.

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_...

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. I'd be careful leaping to comparisons before anything has happened, considering how benign the Twelve Day War ended up being.

"Hands off the nuke or we kill you" is a great populist policy on paper, but difficult to implement in reality. Especially if your air campaign fails, necessitating a suicidal ground invasion.

> Libya has a 10x lower population density than Iran, among other disparities

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...

> We can keep striking Iran indefinetly.

People said that in the Twelve Day War, and it was entirely unclear at the end whether or not the key OKRs had been achieved. It seems silly to suggest that they can expand their target list and receive more clear results.

> the Twelve Day War

The US only conducted limited strikes on Iran's nuclear program. The rest of the conflict was unilaterally led by Israel.

> whether or not the key OKRs had been achieved.

Iranian nuclear capacity was degraded [0] setting the program back by 2 years [1].

For a short term conflict, it met the limited OKR of preventing an Iranian nuclear breakthrough in 2025-26.

But this game of cat-and-mouse will continue as long as Iran maintains industrial capacity. The only solution at this point is generalized strikes degrading Iran's industrial capacity indefinitely.

If that also means Iran collapses into a Libyan style civil war, so be it. You put boots on the ground if you care about controlling strategic points and reducing civilian casualties - a generalized airstrike to kill one high value target and killing 200-300 civilians is easier than risking a strike force to extract that target.

We don't care if the Bagh-e-Chehel Sotoun becomes a bagh-e-chehel hazar jamajmeh, if Tehran's urban infrastructure collapses, and Khorasan, Sistan-ve-Balochistan, Kurdistan, Iranian Azerbaijan, and Khuzestan collapse into ethnic and communal violence.

This is what we did to Imperial Japan in WW2, Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and Libya in 2011, but unlike Japan and much of Yugoslavia, we have no appetite or interest in deploying a Marshall Plan or Dayton Plan.

That said, there is an offramp - give up the entire nuclear program and place it under American or EU control.

Those are the options.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-is-status-ira...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-strikes-destroy...

How many more years will it remain inevitable, do you think?

Wag the dog, to distract us while pedo, grifting Trump family at work

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?

Trump always chickens out.

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.

I think that the tariffs are what he said they were... a starting point for pushing (re)negotiation, and that has largely been successful. This ruling doesn't roll back all those trade deals.

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

The opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf

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.

The damage has been done, and probably can't be undone. Not sure you can convince me that they didn't think it wouldn't be struck down. It has destroyed a part of the underclass economy and probably some smaller to medium-sized businesses. Pretty sure some people figure they have had a good run with it until now.

My first reaction to this was: Matt Levine will need to cut his vacation short. Again.

The 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.

The basic fact that needs to be contended with is that the Constitution, however brilliantly it may be crafted or repaired, is a piece of paper. It has no agency to enforce or do anything else. It's always people who have to decide to do things, maybe under inspiration from this paper or another. So whether the Constitution say "Congress must impeach a President who is doing this or that" vs "may impeach", that would have 0 practical impact.

Consider that most totalitarian states have constitutions that explicitly forbid torture, discrimination, and many other forms of government suppression of people. This does little in the face of a police state bent on suppressing the people.

Worth mentioning, that goes the other way too... plenty of what should be executive power was delegated to congressional authority over the years as well. And it doesn't even begin to cover activist judicial practices.

The lines have definitely blurred a lot, especially since the early 1900's. And that's just between the branches, let alone the growth of govt in general.

"plenty of what should be executive power was delegated to congressional authority over the years as well"

Examples? The activist judges thing I can see, but I'm not so sure I'm concerned of a body with more singular authority (the president) delegating to a body with more democratic accountability and representation (congress), nor can I easily find any examples of it.

The Federal Reserve itself would be the biggest example.

> The Federal Reserve itself would be the biggest example.

Can you expand? The Constitution gave the Executive powers that were then transferred to Congress and are now performed by the Federal Reserve?

Paste from another reply: The fact that these "independent" bodies even exist outside executive control in the first place. The fact that a President signed the legislation that created these bodies is an example of passing executive power to the legislative.

Can you give an example of a case where the executive branch has delegated power to the legislative or judicial branches?

Federal Reserve (Fed): While created by Congress to be independent, critics argue its regulatory powers and management of money are inherently executive functions that should be under Presidential control.

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.

These are good examples of congressional power as defined in the Constitution. In each case the legislative branch created new agencies and delegated some power to the executive branch. But not the reverse.

Can you give any example of the opposite? A case where the executive has delegated power to the legislative or judicial branches?

The fact that these "independent" bodies even exist outside executive control in the first place. The fact that a President signed the legislation that created these bodies is an example of passing executive power to the legislative.

>>And it doesn't even begin to cover activist judicial practices.

The Constitution created SCOTUS as a political body.

The sole role of a Supreme Court Justice is to cast votes.

The constitution places zero restrictions on how a Justice decides which way to vote. The Justice is not bound by anything in deciding how to vote.

That includes bribery or other corruption. If bribery is proven, the Justice is subject to criminal prosecution. But conviction does not remove the Justice from office. And removal by impeachment does not undo the cases decided by the corrupt votes of the Justice.

Every vote of every Justice in US history was an "activist judicial practice" in the sense that each vote was made for personal reasons of the Justice that we will never know (opinions only reflect what a Justice chose to say, which in no way means it reflects the personal reasons for the Justice's vote).

Your comment is a political statement about a political body - although you seem to incorrectly believe you are making some type of legal statement.

I didn't say SCOTUS or Justices? Even then, even if they are making political decisions, there's still the illusion of something resembling reason behind those decisions... that's far from some of the activist decisions further down the line at the district level.

I should be more careful with my terminology. By saying the constitution made SCOTUS a political body, I meant that the design of the constitution is such that SCOTUS is free to interpret the Constitution (and laws) as it sees fit.

The Constitution is designed such that it defines no rules and places no restrictions upon how Justices are to interpret the Constitution. The original design of the Constitution is that the Justices are to interpret the laws of the United States as they see fit.

There is no such thing as an "activist" Supreme Court.

The suggestion there must be an "Originalist interpretation" of the Constitution (e.g. it must be interpreted as intended by the Founding Fathers) is pure hogwash. If that were so, then by an "Originalist interpretation" the Constitution would already say so (and of course it doesn't). Nevertheless political conservative Justices actually made that part of their opinions that now impose the concept of "originalism" when interpretating the Constitution. A pretty neat magical trick by which the conservative Justices violate the philosophy of "originalism" to impose "originalism".

And as for "further down the line at the district level", there is likewise no such thing as an "activist" court - in the sense that lower courts, unlike SCOTUS, are constrained by the Constitution and statutes passed by Congress. There cannot be "activist" district courts to the extent that if they overstep their bounds, SCOTUS will be called upon to address it.

The phrase "activist court" is nothing more than a fictional invention of The Federalist Society. If there are actual politics being played in SCOTUS (this time I mean Republican vs Democrat), it is the Republicans through The Federalist Society and appointments to SCOTUS of Federalist Society Members. But now I am chasing down a rabbit hole that is best avoided.

Seems rather unlikely to me that people who ignore the constitution for the sake of political advantage would start following the constitution if it were worded differently.

> There are procedures to remove an unfit President, sure; but there's no requirement baked into the Constitution that requires those parties to act upon those procedures.

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.

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.

Yes I understand it was designed that way 250 years ago. What I don't understand is why so many Americans think that it was perfect. Why aren't Americans open to the idea that their system of "separation of powers" is fundamentally flawed. I went to an American school and separation of powers is talked about is as if it's the only possible right answer.

The US quickly realized that the loose federation wasn't going to work and centralized a lot of power. It should continue to evolve it's system.

It's worth noting that even the US doesn't think it's system is a good idea. When it imposes a new government on countries (like Iraq) it chooses a parliamentary system.

> 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.

There are plenty of examples from history and now of better governed countries. I don't know how anyone can look at the US and think it's success is because of constitution and not from being the 3rd largest country on earth with a land empire full of abundant resources that it's never given up and successfully assimilated via imported populations.

why would you muck with one of the most complicated systems humans have ever created on the off chance you fuck everything up when the current system has made you the most successful civilization in human history and has done so for 250 years.

i mean is it really hard to imagine why Americans might be wary to change things? maintaining a stable civilization is a pretty precarious undertaking.

> why would you muck with one of the most complicated systems humans have ever created

That system explicitly encourages mucking with it. We have elections every 2/4/6 years. It has an amendment process. Parts of it, like judicial review and qualified immunity, were just plain invented.

Per Jefferson:

“On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, & what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, & consequently may govern them as they please. But persons & property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course, with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, & no longer. Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.”

so youre appealing to Jefferson to support your argument that we shouldnt revere the founders?

All im doing is explaining why Americans in the current moment are conservative about the constitution. Why are you failing to acknowledge this? Im not making a value judgement im explaining why people think this way.

I'm noting that the Founders weren't deluded or egotistical enough to think themselves as perfect as American conservatives treat them today. We should not revere them, and I think they'd agree with that.

> what cant be argued is that the US is the most successful political body in world history

You can very much argue about this.

If you've ever had the task of writing an essay about the nature of success, I don't think you would offer a sweeping statement like this.

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 issues are intertwined. The Constitution is sacred so therefor the system of government it's setup is sacred and so on.

A sola scriptura republic

responded the same to the person you responsed to but perhaps this is a decent explanation.

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 old continuous Constitution in the world.

Under that lense 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.

> what cant be argued is that the US is the most successful political body in world history and it is the old continuous Constitution in the world

That’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_San_Marino.

sigh... ty for the irrelevant and useless pedantry. inescapable on this forum

It’s a factually incorrect claim.

The other bit, “the most successful political body in world history”, isn’t even a falsifiable claim; it’s pure opinion.

The Pope might disagree on it, for example.

i will note your continued pedantry and wish you a nice day

> 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. If people see the results of their own actions then they are not going to end up so extreme.

I'm not sure why Americans think that the creation of agencies is the problem when other well governed countries do the same. The idea that a legislative body could possible create appropriate regulation in a modern complex world is crazy. That's what a parliamentary system solves. It keeps the executive accountable to the legislative at all times.

> 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.

>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.

You write this as a self evident truth but it isn't. In what way is having a single trucking standard for the entire country less efficient than having 50? In what way is having a single currency across the entire country less efficient than having 50? In what way is having a single standard for approval of medication less efficient than having 50?

The US's advantage is precisely because of it's scale. It provides a massive addressable market allowing companies to scale rapidly.

> In what way is having a single trucking standard for the entire country less efficient than having 50? In what way is having a single currency across the entire country less efficient than having 50?

This is why issuing currency and interstate commerce (meaning actually crossing state lines, not the modern interpretation of anything that affects commerce anywhere) are among the explicitly enumerated powers of the federal government.

> In what way is having a single standard for approval of medication less efficient than having 50?

It allows large states to set their own standards and smaller states to choose which of the standards to apply, e.g. Arizona says you can sell anything in Arizona that you can sell in Texas, without requiring everyone to agree on how the trade offs should be made, e.g. California can have more stringent rules than Texas. Meanwhile people in Texas could still choose not to consume anything if it hasn't been approved in California and people in California could go to Arizona to get things they think California is being too reserved by prohibiting.

> The US's advantage is precisely because of it's scale. It provides a massive addressable market allowing companies to scale rapidly.

Which in itself has the tendency to promote megacorps and market consolidation over competitive markets with larger numbers of smaller companies, and consolidated markets themselves have significant inefficiencies and costs.

Meanwhile why would that require the federal government to insert itself into local education policy or be issuing subsidies to oil companies etc.?

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.

It's quite different. The House of Lords was much more powerful well into the 19th century. The monarch was hardly a powerless figure in those times. The Bill of Rights 1689 probably shifted the power more towards Parliament than before but the monarch was still very powerful. The UK system continues to evolve with notable precedents being set very recently like requiring a consultation of Parliament before embarking on military action and the limitation of prorogation powers.

The setup isn't the problem. The refusal to evolve is the problem.

I'd argue that it wasn't really the system in place. The system in place was one of states governing themselves. Before independence the states didn't really deal much with each other.

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)

Almost every country ranked for having the least corruption is a parliamentary system. Actually proportional parliamentary seem to be even better in terms of little corruption.

The reasonable set of ground rules seem to favor states over the will of the majority of the population. It is possible to change the constitution with states representing only 25% of the population. And remember you'd only need a majority in each of those states so could be way less of the population.

Overall the system seems flawed in that instead of having clearly delegated areas of responsibility to states and then doing the federal system as based on the population of the whole country it muddled areas and then made a federal system that couldn't respond to the population.

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.

I can understand your point in terms of negative liberty but I tend to hold positive liberty to be just as important. It is not sufficient to me that there is no law preventing me from having healthcare, I expect that the government should ensure I have the ability to have a healthy life.

The 10th amendment isn't clear. Too many areas are dual responsibility. That's never going to be clear.

So if there is nobody willing to be a doctor for the pay rate the govt is offering, what happens? Does your "right" to healthcare extend to literal slavery?

I'm being a bit hyperbolic only to make the point... I don't think anyone's "rights" should include forced labor of anyone else. So certain things, even food cannot be a right... I would think that public lands and a right to hunt/gather or even some level cooperative gardening/farming might be okay as a middle ground though.

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.

Have a proper mature parliamentary democracy made of multiple parties, not just two, and a prime minister that is always one vote away from resigning.

Slower democracy, sure, but fits advanced economies that need consistent small refactors and never full rewrites every 4 years.

I'd like to see a change in voting system to make voting for smaller political parties more viable. My country did this in 1993[1] so I've seen to some extent that it works. A lot of other issues in the US seem downstream from that top-level issue.

But sometimes I think about the fact that you guys don't even have the metric system yet...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_New_Zealand_electoral_ref...

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.

To be fair there were primaries, but the DNC only pushed Biden's candidacy. So there really wasn't any other candidates on all the ballots except uncommitted. When he dropped out in July their simply isn't enough time to run a functional primary and campaign for the vote in November. We can't really delay the election to have a primary. The delegates of the DNC do get to vote on who they want and by the time Kamala stepped in she did get the most votes.

It's really a problem of money though. The DNC really are the king makers when it comes to candidates. That and PAC money are the requirements to get a nomination. At least when it comes to presidency. Smaller elections you get more freedom to have a successful without such things. The whole system needs an overhaul unfortunately and I don't see any candidate from any party looking to fix that any time soon.

> 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.

Other western democracies are much smaller or have much more uniform systems than the US as well. Not to say it's impossible, but it would take reworking the system. Right now the only elections that are highly publicized and known about are the ones every 4 years for president. Next is every two years election for congress and that's a big drop off in participation. Things like primaries you really have to go out of your way to know about them happening and when and where.

The first couple states really end up determining who usually wins the nomination and financial backing. It takes time to move a candidate between places and set up multiple events and fundraisers. Now in state and city elections the US can do those quickly as well. Smaller area to cover and campaign and the community stays informed. It doesn't help that national elections involve institutions like the electoral college instead of a popular vote. That's a different problem though.

Or less, in Denmark the average time from election announcement to voting is 20 days.

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?

The main problem is that Congress is not competitive. If you live somewhere outside of a few remaining swing areas, you can just skip voting entirely.

We need to do something to fix this: gerrymandering ban, increase the number of Reps, add more states for more Senate seats, etc.

sorry, but that is not it, unless you think politicians are fungible within parties. The problem is that there is no real feedback mechanism between a what a congress person votes for and their electibility (within or across parties) because of money in politics.

how is it possible that congress has consistent single digit approval ratings and they vote for things 90% of their constituents disagree with and still get elected? This is the core problem of American politics. Politicians are beholden to donors not voters.

> The problem is that there is no real feedback mechanism between a what a congress person votes for and their electibility

You would describe this as being different from competitive?

I doubt any amount of money would matter if we had 1 representative per 30k people as written in the constitution, NY State is about 20 M people so you'd need to bribe ~300 of the ~600 representatives in order to get your way (and also do that for every other state).