Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court
bbc.com1089 points by blackguardx 7 hours ago
1089 points by blackguardx 7 hours ago
Useful site for daily tariff updates: Trade Compliance Resource Hub.[1] They've marked which tariffs are now invalid and which are still valid.
[1] https://www.tradecomplianceresourcehub.com/2026/02/20/trump-...
Am I understanding this right?
1) US customer pays huge import tax on imported goods in the form of higher prices.
2) Seller sends the collected tax to the US government
3) US government will refund all/most of that tax back to the seller after this ruling
4) Seller gets to keep the returned tax money as pure profit (no refund to customer)
The importer pays the tax and passes it on as higher prices to the consumer. So the importers are the one that had the tax collected from them and would be getting the refund.
The importer CAN be the seller, but other times the importer is a middleman in the supply chain.
To the CPAs among us: will the refunded import taxes be treated as extra profit for all the importers who paid them?
I could see an argument that they don't have a legal obligation to pass the refunds on to their customers, any more than my local grocery store owes me 5 cents for the gallon of milk I bought last year if the store discovers that their wholesaler had been mistakenly overcharging them.
The idea of getting a refund for mischaracterized tariffs is actually fairly common (it's called a duty drawback and there's a cottage industry around this). It's generally used when an importer incorrectly categorized their import under an HS code that has a higher duty than the correctly categorized HS code.
The difference this time is the scale is orders of magnitude larger. Will be interesting to see how they (importers and CBP) work through this.
> The difference this time is the scale is orders of magnitude larger.
The administration will just do nothing. They need 3 maneuvers for this to drag out longer than Trump 2.
There is no intention to follow the law here.
Smart money is that they will make some token comment about "leave it up to the states" or lower courts and then do absolutely nothing about it
The feds are the ones that control import duties, not the states. The courts will decide two years from now what to do.
I think the tax is basically on the profit made when you add up costs and expenses. Say:
Before: Importer pays China $10 for widget, pays $2 duty, sells to shop for $12 - profit zero, tax on that zero.
Now: Paid $10 for widget. Paid $2 duty, sold for $12, $2 refunded - profit $2, pays tax on the $2.
At least that's the normal way of doing accounting. There can be odd exceptions and complications in local laws.
Yes, I think that's the starting point. Another part of my question was whether a CPA applying GAAP would recommend recognizing the $2 as other income, or else as a liability against a future claim from the customer who bought the widget and is now seeking a partial refund.
I did what passes for research these days and concluded that if the claim is "probable and estimable," then it could be recorded as a "contingent liability" rather than other income. Relevant facts would include whether the tariff refund included a pass-through refund mandate (unlikely with this administration), or whether class actions for refunds against merchants were pending (inevitable).
Related question, unanswerable except maybe as a rough estimate: how much will it cost, in accountant/bookkeeper time, to do all the administrivia required to process all these refunds?
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.
Huh? In what world was the tariff on sand 2000%?
It wasn't the tariff. UPS has been tacking on a ridiculously high paperwork fee for the service of processing tariff payments. Other shipping companies have also had fees, but UPS is the main one that's made it exorbitant and disproportionately higher than the tariff itself.
That's a great question. I would also love to know that answer. I agree with you that they're not going to share the refund if the importer was the middleman in the supply chain, and same thing if the importer was also the seller.
at the end of the day, it's average joe who bought his things more expensive, and he won't get back his money.
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
Many voted for this
These people are not necessary against tariff, they are against paying more for their stuff and having it benefit some middleman because the current government messed up badly.
I can otherwise understand how people would agree on paying more for their stuff if it allows their fellow citizens to have a job.
Yeah, I honestly have not been one of those "it's just a negotiating tactic" people and have instead been saying this whole time that I understand why tariffs (and the end of de minimis) are needed at the moment. Seeing Temu ads all over TV and the internet flouting word-for-word that I can "shop like a millionaire" to buy their cheap, disposable, polluting, unethically-produced junk, while I'm not making enough to actually live comfortably (with many worse off than me), comes across as a real and obvious problem to me that needs to be nipped in the bud despite whatever short-term dollars I might save by buying Temu knock-offs on a regular basis. (And I do import personal purchases from overseas a few times a year, and have put my money where my mouth is when it comes to paying tariffs on those.)
I obviously am not particularly happy about the tariffs being struck down like a lot of people are. And having paid those tariffs thinking they were at least legitimate tariffs, I'm also not super happy that I won't be seeing that money come back to me (neither in the form of services paid for by taxes, nor in the form of a refund). It's a crappy situation all around.
I won't sit here and claim the Supreme Court got it wrong, but it does make me wish the administration had worked more carefully to do it in a legal way the first time, for example, or that Congress had been involved to achieve it since the administration's party controlled them this whole time, anyway.
Very few people voted for tariffs, specifically. They voted for a promise of a return to a world where they were on top.
So they basically figured out how to bribe all these companies?
Such a kleptocracy.
i read that Costco could actually refund everyone, as they can know exactly who bought what.
If they do, that's another matter, but they definitely can.
Or maybe this is used to justify a new emergency federal law that all purchases must be reported on your tax return, just in case the government ever needs to refund any illegally collected import taxes.
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?
In October, I bought a $250 product from a Canadian company + about $30 shipping & taxes and thought I was good. A few weeks later, FedEx sends me an $92 bill for the duty that they had to pay. I just ignored it since I was never given that notice up front. If they really wanted it, they could have had the vendor contact me. But at least they're not getting that bit of profit now.
I'm also ignoring a bill, from UPS, that is a few bucks of duty and a much larger $14 fee. Presumably the large fee is because UPS isn't meant to collect taxes, but they can suck it.
There have been no decisions about refunds. The court avoided addressing that.
That topic will surely go back to the courts, kicking and screaming
Or the government will not refund, and add more illegal tariffs. That wouldn’t be surprising, unfortunately
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I have bought things internationally, I have always been the one doing the importing. This means I paid some Trump taxes and I will get my money back.
I think people are getting ahead of themselves on the refund business. Refunds might be on the table, they also may not be. It may be a years long battle. Trump and co might put up enough resistance that many firms find it too costly to fight.
> Seller gets to keep the returned tax money as pure profit (no refund to customer)
Elections have consequences.
Most of the total tax collected seems to have been absorbed by the importers, lowering margins.
Where did you hear that? It is conclusively the opposite: 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.
Well, they would likely have to lower their profit margin because the demand is reduced by the higher prices. Fewer purchasers will want to/be able to buy the item at the higher price. The supply and demand curve will find a new equilibrium, but it isn’t like the sellers are going to sell the exact same quantity of items with the price exactly increased by the tariff amount.
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...
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.
> then I would expect to see a notation on the price tags and a line-item on my receipts,
Trump started threatening anyone who was going to do that, because he doesn't want his face attached to price hikes.
> The cost of the item that the end user pays should reflect all costs associated with production and distribution to that end user.
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.
> 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.
Well its completely wrong. Tariffs are regressive consumer taxes that hurt people who make <$200k/year the most while enriching the inner circle of crony capitalism. Corrupt and should be prosecuted for such criminal robbery of the American people
It wasn't a "rumor" it was explicit deliberate disinformation. Unfortunately many people in the US have insufficient education and accurate news feeds to realize.
See also: disinformation that "other countries charge us the same tariffs", which turns out to be either a plain lie, or they mean VAT (a sales tax, like we have in the US).
Here's Trump's claims debunked in detail: https://www.factcheck.org/2025/08/recapping-trumps-deceptive...
"But we found that Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariff rates weren’t based on tariffs that other countries charged on goods coming from the U.S. Instead, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative came up with the rates by dividing the size of a country’s trade imbalance with the U.S. in goods by how much America imports in goods from that nation. "
Well, the analysis by the Federal Reserve said that domestic entities (consumers and companies) paid 90% of it. So, yes, saying that consumers pay it all is wrong, but it's 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.
This ruling like most of the kleptocracy, will show the kleptocrats who is willing to lick boot and who will not. The goal, whether extrinsic or intrinsic, is to find the fascist threats and harm them.
This specifically will happen when businesses request the legal refund and the "deep state" gets to decide whether they deserve a refund.
Ever try to get Congress to agree on something without packaging in another thing?
I agree with the sentiment, but that is completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
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.
With Congress completely stuck, the executive branch takes over a lot of functions that probably belong to the legislature. I say "probably" because the Constitution isn't really explicit about it, but it's what most people would infer.
The executive branch is less accountable than the legislative one. You elect only the top office, and only once every four years. With so much bundled into a single vote, it's nearly impossible to hold any specific action to account.
It doesn't work out great for the judicial branch, either. They often rule that a decision is based on the law as written, and it's up to the legislature to fix that -- while knowing full well that the legislature can't and won't. And they're not consistent about that; they'll also interpret a law to favor their ideology, and again Congress is in no position to clarify the intended interpretation.
Congress was deliberately set up to favor inaction, and not without reason. But that has reached the point where it practically doesn't even exist as a body, and its ability to serve as a check on the other branches has vanished, leading to even more abuses.
Congress could stop this nonsense tomorrow. The problem is not the body's powers, the problem is that the GOP is happy with Trump doing whatever the hell he wants.
Vote the GOP out, and he'll be impeached.
It is because your congress and political system don't need coalition governments orvaby kind of agreements, winner takes it all. A true multy party system wpuld be mote flexible and less prone to catering to extremes on the left or right
A multiparty systems has some advantages. But it also has flaws and it wasn’t able to stop Brexit.
And I don’t think a multiparty system would have been able to stop the rise of Trump all else being equal equal.
The UK Parliament was by all means a two-party system, with Labour in one side and the Tories in the other. If anything it has become more diverse post-Brexit. Compare that with the Bundestag, where no party has more than a quarter of the seats.
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 you, but it's a tool that should only be used very sparingly because tariffs can be incredibly difficult to get rid of. See for example the "chicken tax" for light trucks which was instituted in 1964 (because the Europeans tariffed US chicken exports).
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.
Do you agree with countries doing the opposite to the US? When for example US tech is better than the local alternative but the countries create unfair advantages to the local alternatives?
I believe as a US citizen I have no say in how they make these decisions so this thought exercise is pointless. We all structure our governments differently and so compete globally with differing rules, I only care about how we do it here in the US. At times, 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.
> Do you agree with countries doing the opposite to the US?
Yes, please! Maximally efficient is minimally robust.
We need robustness in the global economy more than some megajillionaire needs another half cent per customer in profit.
In addition, we need competition in a lot of areas where we have complete consolidation right now. The only way to get that is to give some protection to the little guys while they grow.
That is not an unfair advantage, but protecting their domestic industries for reasons unrelated to the quality of the tech, for example to keep people in active employment, prevent bankruptcies, allow an industry to get up to speed, or a lot of other reasons entirely unrelated to the USA. All of these are valid; any country gets to decide who they want to allow on their markets, and to what conditions.
That is not what Trump has been doing, though. Using tariffs as retaliatory measures? As a threat because he didn’t get to "own" Greenland?
Let’s stop comparing sane political strategies to the actions of a narcissistic madman.
>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 partially because countries operate differently. In the US, Congress is supposed to levy taxes and impose tariffs. Not the president. This game of nibbling (now chomping) at the edges of that clearly outlined role needs to end.
>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. We have the same mechanisms they do. I don’t understand what is so “unfair.” Trump just seems to call everything he doesn’t like “unfair.”
Maybe in rare cases, but for each of the various policy goals tariffs are used for, there are other kinds of targeted industrial policy that work better and cost less.
Tariffs are the most expensive way to try to onshore manufacturing. The cost per "job created" is astronomical usually. They incentivize corruption and black markets.
Even regular old subsidies are usually easier, cheaper, and less problematic
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
These tariffs have no basis in rational economics.
Full stop. It really is only about whether or not the president could do it.
That's all.
Good news ! It is against the law (i.e., illegal) for a US President to impose tariffs (on a whim or otherwise) -- a US President doing so is doing so illegally and without constitutional authority!
When the US President commits crimes as the US President, he has absolute immunity from prosecution (otherwise, he might not be emboldened to break the law) so there is no judicial recourse, but the US Congress can still see the illegal activity and impeach and remove him from office to stop the execution of illegal activity. As our representatives within the US Government, they are responsible to us to enact our legislative outcomes. It appears they have determined that the illegal activity is what we wanted, or there would be articles of impeachment for these illegal acts.
The legislative branch can of course deliberately impose tariffs at any time for the reasons you listed.
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?
Auto tariffs have kept Detroit producing automobiles despite various other entrants, while still being low enough for foreign competition.
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.
You have to see there's a hefty dose of hypocrisy in this, right? American might has been used, quite extensively, to impose unfavorable conditions to local companies in their own soil in favor of American companies. Multiple American multi national corporations have used exploitative labor conditions in underdeveloped countries to prop up their own margins. The American government has used multiple coercive tools to de-industrialize many nations and has, in the 21st century, an explicitly paternalistic attitude towards the Western Hemisphere with literal stealing of their resources.
I understand and even respect when someone says "I'm American so I wish to maintain the status quo where the US can undercut other nations but they can't undercut us". But if there's some rose tinted view of how the US is actually the morally aggrieved one, I just can't bear it.
You’re responding to a different question than what was asked.
The question wasn’t about American hypocrisy, it was can you imagine a situation where tariffs are potentially good.
There's a tarriff on sugar that means we have to use HFCS in processed foods and beverages. Oh wait...
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.
Or treaties or accords. All basically the same if squint. Sign something like the Paris Accord, you’re basically taxing consumers.
Thoughtful application of tariffs are good.
Trump's usage of tariffs is pretty damn dumb.
Great news for people who had to bend over backwards pretending this disruptive, nakedly corrupt behavior was "good, actually."
But unfortunately, there are other channels for them to effectively do the same thing, as discussed in oral arguments. So still not a major win for American manufacturers or consumers, I fear.
Sure, but now SCOTUS can say they are not a rubber stamp for POTUS. "See, we just ruled against him. Sure, it's a case that doesn't really solve anything and only causes more chaos, but we disagreed with him. This one time."
Yep.
The president doing horribly fascist things with ICE like obliterating habeas corpus? Using the military to murder people in the ocean without trial? That's fine.
Screwing with the money? Not okay.
See also how the prez is allowed to screw with any congressional appointees except the federal reserve.
When they rule for Trump it’s proof they are just a rubber stamp. When they rule against Trump it’s somehow also proof they are a rubber stamp?
SCOTUS rules for the rich and powerful. Most of the time Trump is aligned with them. Sometimes he does dumb shit like tariffs, or things that upset the order the rich and powerful want to maintain, and they rule against him.
> ...but we disagreed with him. This one time.
They've actually done so numerous times already and have several cases on the docket that look to be leaning against him as well. There's a reason why most serious pundits saw this ruling coming a mile away, because SCOTUS has proven to not be a puppet of the administration.
>because SCOTUS has proven to not be a puppet of the administration.
Several justices are openly taking bribes
Except for 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.
The damage goes far beyond the wallets of business and consumers. The unilateral, arbitrary tariff setting has little do with money and everything to do with the power it gave Trump. And was one of the primary instruments used to destroy relationships with our foreign allies including our closes neighbor..
> Great news for people who had to bend over backwards pretending this disruptive, nakedly corrupt behavior was "good, actually."
Actually they’re still doing it. I saw it not 2 minutes after seeing this post initially. The justifications for why they were “good, actually” has gotten increasingly vague though.
It's odd to me that something as fundamental as 'can the President unilaterally impose tariffs on any country he wants anytime he wants' is apparently so ill defined in law that 9 justices can't agree on it.
It seems likely to me the ruling took this long because John Roberts wanted to get a more unanimous ruling.
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 :(
Amy Coney Barrett has somewhat taken up the mantel, but her legal reasoning is probably superior.
Thomas wants to pretend he's the OG originalist, but I don't think he is anywhere near Barrett's peer.
Kavanaugh clearly isn’t in the same bucket. His votes go either way. I don’t recall seeing a single decision this administration where either Alito or Thomas wrote against a White House position. Not just in case opinions but even in an order. I don’t think we’ve seen a justice act as a stalking horse for the president in this way since Fortas.
Kavanaugh strikes me as principled, but in kind of a Type-A, "well, actually" sort of way where he will get pulled into rabbit holes and want to die on random textual hills.
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
That is not the thrust of his argument; he believes they were legal. I don't think we need people spreading this uninformed meme all over HN.
This is nonsense, and the same nonsense as we heard in the insurrectionist ruling. Allowing fascism "Because it's inconvenient to do otherwise" is bonkers.
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.
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...
Weren’t Sotomator and Jackson the same with Biden? Kagan is much more principled.
> 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:
> 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...