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Big ups to you if you've heard of the US Court of International Trade before yesterday!
On April 22nd this court denied plaintiff's motion to issue a TRO against the Trump Liberation Day tariffs
That seems crushing but then yesterday they issued a summary judgment declaring the tariffs as unlawful.
https://www.cit.uscourts.gov/sites/cit/files/25-66.pdf
(1) What. Also, this was months ago but I remember a ~10 point market swing and business leaders expressing general panic about when/how to invest in the US. Port deliveries ending. Truckers saying they have nothing to truck. One wonders what qualifies as "immediate and irreparable harm" in the US Court of International Trade if not that.
(2) At first I thought this was some administrative agency in the executive branch defecting against Trump, but this is apparently a real court? In the judicial branch? With judges appointed by multiple Presidents
(though not Trump)? The SCOTUS might even uphold the ruling? Huh.(3) The court finds the President overstepped the authority delegated to him by Congress under IEEPA by declaring a fake emergency and using that to impose broad peacetime tariffs, something it was never meant to authorize.
I read >0 amount of political analysis about this and nothing seemed to cover the US CIT striking this down as a possibility. Does the media just suck?
The funny thing I read recently was about how shipping is a mess because of Trump - first, a ton of big ships made trips to the EU, and now that there’s a pause in the China tariffs and US companies are stocking up, the ships are in the wrong spot. Basically a lot of reactionary decisions all around and because Trump’s mind is hard to read the logistic decisions at also unstable and sometimes “wrong”
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I thought this was 70% likely to happen: which is why I bought the post-liberation day dip. I figured the courts would strike the tariffs down eventually.
It turned out I didn’t have to wait this long for my plan to pay off, since Trump backed down from the BigNum tariffs he announced that day and the market bounced back.
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The courts have very stupid standards for 'purely' economic harms, since they treat these as if they could always be remedied with money (even if the courts won't or can't issue that money). This was a big deal during a lot of the COVID cases. The arguments for the TRO thus rested pretty heavily on harm to goodwill or reputation that were... not very strong.
((That said, courts are also quite willing to munge on the sides of this norm; the NPR and especially trans military employment TROs are pretty significant in certain senses because they're bent over backwards to depart from this normal rule.))
It's unfortunately likely to be a for-the-case-only sort of thing rather than a serious revival of the non-delegation doctrine, but possibly. That said, I'd put an emphasis on 'possibly'; the focus here rests in an ugly crux on questions that border on political in a law that specifically lay out the approach Congress could and should block it, while Congress hasn't.
Rief is a Trump appointee, although the CIT appointment process tends to make it somewhat less politically loaded than, say, SCOTUS or federal appeals courts.
No, the court specifically finds that the declaration of emergency is not in question in this case:
Instead, the court focused on whether the tariffs were exercised in "exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose." This still comes across as an awkward fit, by my eyes, but it's a different question.
May depend on when you were reading about it. The VOS case was filed relatively late, compared to several other cases filed in other jurisdictions (eg two weeks after the NCLA one), which may impact what extent you heard about it.
Somin's been pushing it pretty heavily at Reason, unsurprisingly given that he's a major booster for the case -- I can't really promote the blog for its legal analysis anymore, but if you want to know what people want the law to be, it's still pretty informative.
I think there's two questions that are kind of conflated:
Does the statute really authorize to the President the authority to do what was done. Because of W. Virginia v EPA (and others down the line of cases), if the actions are a were of great significance, then the authorization has to be explicit.
If the answer is yes, can Congress really delegate that authority to the President?
In the current canons, the courts have to answer the first bullet before reaching the second. And it answer it in the negative and so there is no need to reach the questions on delegation because Congress (so the argument goes) didn't authorize it in the first place.
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Thank you for the clarifications (and outright corrections!). I suppose the awkward fitting is to avoid stepping on the President's toes wrt his authority to declare an emergency, which seems to be widely upheld?
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