Time to digest
It will take me a while to digest this:
Quoting from the NY Times article then commenting:
A panel of federal judges on Wednesday blocked President Trump from imposing some of his steepest tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, finding in two cases that he vastly overstepped his ability to issue those expansive duties under federal law.
The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, delivered an early yet significant setback to Mr. Trump in his campaign to strike a series of agreements that reorient the nation’s trading relationships, setting up a legal fight that could soon reach the Supreme Court.
The cases centered on the president’s use of a 1977 federal economic emergency law to issue many of his steep duties, including some of his tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, and his “reciprocal” rates on much of the rest of the world, which Mr. Trump announced and then suspended in April.
The thing is, it has been obvious all along that Trump’s use of the 1977 International Economic Emergency Powers Act to justify Smoot-Hawley level tariffs was a massive abuse of power. I mean, since when are 4 percent unemployment and 2.5 percent inflation an emergency justifying the reversal of 90 years of policy? But I guess I just assumed that things like that didn’t matter anymore.
Don’t we all.
