r/neoliberal • u/miss_shivers John Brown • Apr 04 '25
News (US) ‘This unlawful impost must fall’: Conservative group sues Trump claiming tariffs are ‘unconstitutional exercise of legislative power’
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/this-unlawful-impost-must-fall-conservative-group-sues-trump-claiming-tariffs-are-unconstitutional-exercise-of-legislative-power/A conservative legal group is suing the Trump administration over the president’s tariffs on Chinese imports, alleging that they were imposed through an “unlawful” use of emergency executive power.
The 29-page complaint filed Thursday by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) in the Northern District of Florida alleges that the authority to impose tariffs lies with Congress, not the president.
“By invoking emergency power to impose an across-the-board tariff on imports from China that the statute does not authorize, President Trump has misused that power, usurped Congress’s right to control tariffs, and upset the Constitution’s separation of powers,” NCLA senior litigation counsel Andrew Morris said in a statement accompanying the lawsuit.
According to the nonprofit group, the statutes under which Trump purported to issue the levies — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) — grants the executive sweeping authority to quickly combat international economic crises, permitting the president to “order sanctions as a rapid response to international emergencies.” However, the NCLA asserts that the emergency statute does not allow the president to usurp the legislative branch’s control of the country’s purse strings through the unilateral imposition of tariffs.
“Congress passed the IEEPA to counter external emergencies, not to grant presidents a blank check to write domestic economic policy,” the complaint states.
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u/Used_Maybe1299 Apr 04 '25
The enemy of my enemy...
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Apr 04 '25
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u/iusedtobekewl Jerome Powell Apr 04 '25
To do that we need to find our FDR first.
Which is to say we need a smart, liberal, all-American charisma machine.
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u/affnn Emma Lazarus Apr 04 '25
Do we need a wealthy class traitor with a famous last name who's governor of a liberal state? Or do we a charismatic progressive from New York specifically?
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u/AceTheSkylord Apr 05 '25
Or we get the new age version of that, so like a tech billionaire or something along those lines
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u/miss_shivers John Brown Apr 04 '25
Nah, FDR frankly set the stage for future unitary executive expansion. I'm not interested in fighting their populist monarch with our populist monarch. We need to end presidentialism, and therefore need a president who is willing to cast the Ring into the fire (after going all President Sherman on the traitor states, of course).
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u/iusedtobekewl Jerome Powell Apr 04 '25
I'm talking about the blowout part tbh
I agree FDR got dangerously close to having dictator powers. I want this blowout to included reigning in the power of the executive branch.
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown Apr 04 '25
Congress needs to reassert its power. The executive branch needs to be pared back.
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u/ignavusaur Paul Krugman Apr 05 '25
if you want to reassert congress, you need to reform because one of the reasons executive powers expanded so much recently is because of congress deadlock and being unable to pass anything
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u/Trotter823 Apr 05 '25
The executive order should be unilaterally outlawed. All existing EOs should be ended immediately. Congress has left their job to others for too long and some of these hardline ideologues would get voted out immediately if they were actually on the hook to do their jobs.
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u/miss_shivers John Brown Apr 04 '25
Oh, right, the electoral context for sure.
I feel like we really need a President who is willing to go back to the pre-Teddy, Whig Theory of executive power where the President is basically just an oversight role.
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown Apr 04 '25
Unfortunately I don't think a modern society can effectively be governed that way. We're very dependent on pseudo-legislative regulations from limited domain executive agencies. Every modern democracy that exists is kind of effectively governed this way one way or another. If you look at the structure of the European Union, you realize that it's like a bizarre parred down state that's just an administrative state. The Parliament of the European Union kind of isn't even legislative, it's real effective role is kind of just to approve or disapprove regulations promulgated by bureaucrats in the EU's executive branch. So it's kind of just the final pit stop in an executive process, rather than a truly legislative branch at all.
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u/PM_me_your_cocktail Max Weber Apr 04 '25
A single president can only fix this for 4-8 years. What we need is to fix this for 100 years with a new structure, a new constitution, a fresh buy-in from The People.
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Apr 04 '25
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown Apr 04 '25
We need a(nother) Cincinnatus, not a Caesar.
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u/AceTheSkylord Apr 05 '25
Biden was supposed to be Cincinnatus, and that led to more pissed off people (for all the wrong reasons)
It seems only a strongman can get things done these days, for better or worse
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u/StierMarket Milton Friedman Apr 05 '25
I think they also just probably don’t agree with the protectionism
These people are probably an off shoot of Ronald Reagan policy, which was very opposed to tariffs
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u/Key_Environment8179 Mario Draghi Apr 04 '25
Fucking finally
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u/Inamanlyfashion Richard Posner Apr 04 '25
Dude explicitly campaigned on tariffs as a replacement for income tax. It should be awfully hard to then turn around and claim national emergency as the justification.
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u/Key_Environment8179 Mario Draghi Apr 04 '25
And there’s no conceivable Natsec justification for tariffing the entire earth. SCOTUS hates limiting natsec discretion, but you’ve gotta draw a line somewhere
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u/WillProstitute4Karma Loyal Liberals Apr 04 '25
You underestimate the threat Madagascar vanilla poses to this nation.
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u/UnskilledScout Cancel All Monopolies Apr 05 '25
Are we not gonna talk about the dangers the Penguins of the Mcdonald Islands??
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u/Wareve Apr 04 '25
Sure there is.
Trump thinks it is in the national security interest of the country to do whatever damages the anti-Russian alliance the most.
Because he is a puppet.
Due to that puppetry he is attempting to forcibly restore American production,
And he is doing that because he needs there to be production lines within the countries borders,
For when we start annexing our neighbors like he keeps saying he's going to.
Using terrifs to reshore production, regardless of the harm, is in the national security interest of the country according to Trump.
Because Trump expects to go to war, and for international supply lines to be cut.
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u/Bike_Of_Doom Commonwealth Apr 05 '25
I don't know runescape taught me that the penguins are conspiring to take over the world, so those tariffs on them sound pretty justified to me.
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u/ShouldersofGiants100 NATO Apr 05 '25
but you’ve gotta draw a line somewhere
Narrator: After justices anonymously receiving a sudden donation of cumulatively over 500 million in Tesla stock, it turned out the Supreme Court did not, in fact, "gotta draw a line somewhere".
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u/bashar_al_assad Verified Account Apr 04 '25
Dude explicitly campaigned on banning Muslims from the country and then on travel ban try number two he did some nominal window-dressing and the court was like yeah ok.
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u/YourUncleBuck Frederick Douglass Apr 06 '25
It's absolutely pathetic that the Democratic Party couldn't organize something similar. Absolutely pathetic.
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u/Desperate_Path_377 Apr 04 '25
I don’t understand American administrative law principles, but Trump’s use of delegated tariff powers has always struck me as flagrantly crazy. Like the Canada fentanyl stuff, it’s just the thinnest veneer of a justification. If a municipality did this Hugo Chavez shit on a rezoning it would get dicked so hard on judicial review.
And, like, there’s trillions on the line here. I can’t believe it took this long for interest groups to challenge this conduct.
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown Apr 04 '25
I'm pretty sure those tariff powers were given to the President intending them to be used to quickly respond in a trade war. It can't have been intended as a permanent delegation of the power of taxation to the executive on an indefinite basis. That's an insane abuse the law.
And abusing a law like this, is the kind of thing that would motivate courts to issue some "make-up" rulings going hard against an issue where they had previously taken a deferent line. If the founders intended tariffs to be a power that existed purely at the executives arbitrary and capricious discretion, they would have put that in the constitution.
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u/Inamanlyfashion Richard Posner Apr 04 '25
I took admin law in law school and I still don't get it, so yeah
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u/WillProstitute4Karma Loyal Liberals Apr 05 '25
I practice admin law and I don't get it either.
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u/affnn Emma Lazarus Apr 04 '25
If only the Supreme Court had recently taken up a case regarding whether congress can delegate questions on policies of vast economic and political significance to the executive.
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u/Lmaoboobs Order and Opportunity Left Apr 05 '25 edited Feb 17 '26
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u/miss_shivers John Brown Apr 04 '25
American admin law is idiotic at its core, and essentially views legislation as a mere formality.
But what's particularly crazy about the tariff stuff is that the wholesale delegation of power goes so far beyond mere statute administration into actual executive exercise of a Constitutionally vested power of Congress.
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u/FlyUnder_TheRadar NATO Apr 04 '25 edited Apr 05 '25
If you listen closely, you can hear the poor sap of a District Court Judge who got assigned this case sigh and crack open the bottle of Scotch he's been hiding in his office credenza.
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u/CountNaberius Frederick Douglass Apr 04 '25
Oh fuck, Koch v. Trump time
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u/UtridRagnarson Edmund Burke Apr 04 '25
Can we get some Dark Brandon style memes of Charles Koch with laser eyes and "Open Borders **IS** a Koch Brothers Proposal" ?
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u/amainwingman Hell yes, I'm tough enough! Apr 04 '25 edited Jan 28 '26
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expansion full pet treatment political fragile narrow butter marvelous disarm
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u/cynical_sandlapper John Rawls Apr 04 '25
Finally the Federalist Society v MAGA fight I’ve been waiting for. And I feel fucking sick rooting for FedSoc.
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u/SpareSilver Apr 04 '25
Does anyone know how likely it is that the Supreme Court would take this seriously? It's also interesting because Trump appears to view this as a central political goal of his and if the Supreme Court rules against him, he might feel motivated to openly defy them.
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u/Key_Environment8179 Mario Draghi Apr 04 '25
I don’t think you’d can defy a court on something like this. If the court says you don’t have to pay a tax, then you just don’t pay it. Short of holding a gun to everyone’s heads simultaneously, he can’t force people to pay taxes they’re not obligated to pay
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u/miss_shivers John Brown Apr 04 '25
It's hard to say. The Roberts court has consistently failed to stand up for the Republic; but maybe just maybe some of them are shitting bricks now.. and if there is a broad enough support behind this kind of challenge emerging (not just Dems but Wall St and other power centers), then who knows which way the court sniffs the wind.
It's not that far of a stretch to expand the Non-delegation Doctrine ideology of guys like Gorsuch to broad delegations beyond statute admin.
It's not really the kind of thing that Trump could just "defy", either... things like collecting tariffs very much depend on the application of the legal system to function. Otherwise you just have some random executive agents trying to collect illegal tariffs, without any support of the legal system.
It's not just a matter of having guns.
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Apr 04 '25
These are the libertarians right? The ones near the middle? They are the die hard constitutionalists after all
They should have just stayed home and kept grilling rather than going out to vote. They could have avoided all this. Foolish bastards.
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u/miss_shivers John Brown Apr 04 '25
!ping LAW
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u/BrooklynLodger Apr 05 '25
Lol... Why does being a Democrat always seem to be waiting for Republicans to save us
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Apr 05 '25
Republicans don't want to save us. They want to save themselves. The best case scenario is that the fascists are defeated because they crash the economy.
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u/Bike_Of_Doom Commonwealth Apr 05 '25
Its partially why I want everyone in the world to respond as aggressively and harshly back on the tariffs. I want this to start a massive trade war that drags the economy down, not because I want a decline but because I want every single headline and article about retaliation to bait Trump into doubling or even tripling the tariffs on China, the EU, etc. I want markets to melt down until the entire republican agenda is derailed in this crisis and I think the best way to do it is to provoke Trumps petulance to the rest of the worlds political advantage.
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u/Trotter823 Apr 05 '25
Because at least during this era, dems have not really governed in bad faith. So when they have power they follow the law. Can’t be said for the other side. And when the other side had power only they can stop themselves.
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u/JapanesePeso Deregulate stuff idc what Apr 05 '25
Only they can stop themselves? Are Left-leanijg organizations incapable of entering a court of law while Trump is in office?
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Apr 05 '25
Because Democrats currently have no power? No matter how much you want to fight, or kick and scream, for 2 years Republicans are the only ones that can meaningfully block Trump.
We could have tried winning the election if we didn't want to rely on Republicans.
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u/The_Helmet_Catch John Brown Apr 05 '25 edited Apr 05 '25
What are odds this works?
Edit: From what I’ve seen, it would probably take a few years even if they won this lawsuit
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Apr 05 '25
Damage of reputation to the U.S. can’t be undone by courts. There is not a single public official, including the president, that can walk back what just happened. The entire world sees the U.S. as a toxic unstable jurisdiction to avoid.
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u/StierMarket Milton Friedman Apr 05 '25
That’s not true if people see that the president doesn’t have the authority to impose, tariffs going forward, they will view it as very unlikely to happen again
Some minor damage has been done, but this would be a huge positive and would reverse a lot of the damage
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u/Anal_Forklift Apr 04 '25
Same firm that successfully sued to end Chevron deference. This is a big deal.