SCOTUS

Are they learning anything?

Dave Vaillon

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Today, we got the news that SCOTUS has ruled that Trump’s tariffs are illegal — that he has no inherent power to impose tariffs unilaterally. The law he’s been depending on (according to his announcements) does not provide the President any such power at all. It’s all on Congress’ plate exclusively.

So, of course, Trump had something to say about that.

“The Supreme Court did not overrule tariffs, they merely overruled a particular use of IEEPA tariffs.” He continued, “Now I’m going to go in a different direction, probably the direction that I should have gone the first time.”

Now, if you’ve read the SCOTUS ruling, that definitively noted that the law he’s been relying on says NOTHING about giving the President tariff capabilities. What he’s talking about using now is the Trade Act of 1974, which gives him the right to impose 150 day limited tariffs, and is untested in court.

So, what should we take away from this?

That as usual, Trump refuses to acknowledge that the law applies to him or what he wants to do.

And, you may ask, what does this have to do with the title of this article?

Well, the question is, will this do anything to teach the conservatives on the Court that Trump has no respect for the law or the Constitution, and that he and the GOP have been using them for nefarious purposes? Granted, the three bribed idiots who dissented with this case wouldn’t let common sense disturb their monetarily altered brain stems, but given that several conservatives did vote against Trump indicates that if we’re lucky, at least a couple may be finally — or maybe — seeing the writing on the wall. Or maybe just an outline so far.

So perhaps there’s hope yet.

In that case, where do we go from here? File another case after he imposes the new tariffs?

I don’t know. He’s lost numerous court cases, and a lot of them have been ignored, and no court yet has seen fit to punish any DOJ lawyers for the failures of the government to obey their orders, although a couple have threatened to do that.

But the true issue is that there is no federal agency with law enforcement authority that isn’t under the ultimate command of the President. Excepting the Capitol police of course, but they’ve no authority to arrest the President for violating federal law.

Eventually, we do need to create some Constitutional amendments to fix a number of the issues we’ve seen in the last year, of which this is only one. But an amendment in the future isn’t going to fix the issues we have right now that are, combined, working alarmingly well to disintegrate our democracy. And given the testimony of that general a while back in front of Congress, who, when asked if he’d obey illegal orders to use his forces against American citizens inside this country, told Congress that he would, it seems we can no longer trust the military to obey their oaths of office.

To me, it seems that we’ve reached a turning point. Trump is, more and more, violating the law and the basic Constitution, and there’s no law enforcement agency with the federal authority to stop him. Without the security of the military obeying their oaths to that Constitution, how do we stop it?

Will protest work? The next No Kings Day is on March 28th. That’s way in the future, and I wonder if we can wait that long.

What do you think? Is there anything we can do? Anything that we can count on the military to not act against? Anything we can do to get Congress to get off their corrupt asses to stop this? Or to convince SCOTUS to stop supporting a corrupt GOP and President and go back to doing their damn jobs?

So, hey, you do know that as a Medium reader and/or writer, when you read an article and like it, you CAN clap up to fifty times, right? You can come up with a system, like fifty claps for a really great article (mine!) and perhaps thirty or thirty-five for a good one, and perhaps twenty for one that’s ok, and perhaps a single clap for one you read but weren’t at all impressed with but didn’t want to just walk away from. (Same with the comments, also.) Don’t feel too bad, it was almost two weeks before I got told about it. Additionally, if you’re a newbie, and a human and not a damn troll, unless you want to be mistaken for one, do two things. First, write a story. Anything, just something you care about, even if it’s just an introduction. Second, you know that profile blurb? You know, that short thing like I have that talks about “money is truthful”? Yeah, that. Create one for yourself, because the trolls DON’T. I block profiles that come here and clap once and haven’t written a story or created a profile description. Those with fewer than twenty or so followers and often less than a hundred they’re following. So, a word to the wise. Write, and give us that profile description.