[apexalpha]

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.

[mastax]

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.

[pdpi]

> 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.

[bradleyjg]

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.

[blackjack_]

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.

[Andrex]

The dissent seems to be "Ignoring whether or not the President acted lawfully, it would sure create an awful big mess if we undid it. And he's gonna try again anyways, and maybe even succeed in that future attempt, creating an even bigger mess. So for these reasons, it shouldn't be undone."

Curious if others have different readings.

[jasondigitized]

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.

[hinkley]

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.

[cael450]

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.

[tyre]

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.

[nutjob2]

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

[hshdhdhj4444]

It’s one of the few things in the U.S. constitution that is not ill defined. Tariffs are very explicitly the prerogative of Congress.

The fact that the administration of tariffs is so much better defined than really anything else shouldn’t be surprising because tariffs is the proximate cause of the Revolutionary war.

It’s embarrassing that the 3 justices put their partisanship ahead of the clear language of the constitution and explicitly stated intentions of the founders.

[Ajedi32]

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.

[philistine]

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.

[Paradigma11]

An additional problem seems to be that this law had some congressional check that has been ruled unconstitutional since.

[rtkwe]

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.)

[ssully]

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.

[shevy-java]

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.

[nitwit005]

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

[entuno]

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

[blibble]

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

15 days to be ruled on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_The_Prime_Ministe...

[loeg]

This is relatively fast for an issue to move through the courts.

[keernan]

>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?

[fuzzfactor]

>downvoting without explaining is ... just ...

Like I've said before, if you can't tell whether it's a bot or a real person voting, it doesn't matter anyway.

Might as well be a bot either way.

corrective upvote made

[tokai]

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.

[dmix]

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.

[allywilson]

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.

[duped]

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)

[zeroonetwothree]

Yes but in practice they delegate this power to the executive. Congress doesn’t run the IRS themselves after all

[karel-3d]

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

[loeg]

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.

[irishcoffee]

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.

[zeroonetwothree]

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

[onlyrealcuzzo]

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.

[fwip]

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.