Some days, there’s just so much news…
A few minutes after I clicked ‘publish’ on the previous post, news broke that the Court of International Trade ruled, in a case I previously mentioned captioned V.O.S. Selections vs. U.S., that none of Trump’s tariffs are a lawful exercise of Presidential powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.
The 3-0 ruling in V.O.S. Selections breaks the tariffs into two types: the “Trafficking Tariffs”, announced against Canada and China and Mexico in February and March; and the “Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariffs,” announced on ‘Liberation Day’ in early April and thereafter.
With respect to the Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariffs, the court ruled that they “do not comply with the limitations Congress imposed upon the President’s power to respond to balance-of-payments deficits. The President’s assertion of tariff-making authority in the instant case, unbounded as it is by any limitation in duration or scope, exceeds any tariff authority delegated to the President under IEEPA. The Worldwide and Retaliatory tariffs are thus ultra vires and contrary to law.”
With respect to the Trafficking Tariffs, IEEPA empowers the President to take actions to “deal with” an unusual and extraordinary threat, and the court ruled that these tariffs do not “deal with” the threat posed by fentanyl trafficking because there is no direct link between the tariffs and the emergency . Quoting from the opinion: “If “deal with” can mean “impose a burden until someone else deals with,” then everything is permitted. It means a President may use IEEPA to take whatever actions he chooses simply by declaring them “pressure” or “leverage” tactics that will elicit a third party’s response to an unconnected “threat.” Surely this is not what Congress meant when it clarified that IEEPA powers “may not be exercised for any other purpose” than to “deal with” a threat.”
The government will of course appeal, and appeals from this particular court go to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. We shall see how rapidly this court case progresses.
In other late-breaking news today, Secretary of State Rubio issued a two-sentence statement saying that the government will take action to “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those…studying in critical fields,” as well as “enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications” from China and Hong Kong. This comes in the wake of action the previous day to stop scheduling new student visa interviews while the government rethinks its approach to vetting applicants’ social media postings.
Also tonight, Trump announced a puzzling sentence commutation of 74-year-old Larry Hoover, a notorious Chicago gang leader and drug kingpin. Hoover was already serving a 150-year state sentence for a 1973 murder conviction when, in the 1990s, he was sentenced to life on federal racketeering charges for running the Gangster Disciples from prison. As such, while Hoover may soon be released from the federal supermax facility, Trump’s commutation doesn’t impact his state conviction and as such he may remain behind bars. Rapper Kanye West, a vocal supporter of Trump, had argued for Hoover’s clemency with Trump as far back as 2018.