The Supreme Court, exhibiting skepticism about the legality of Trump’s tariffs, showed that even they understand that the tariffs 1) are a tax and that they 2) are a tax on Americans. Even the most conservative justices did not appear to buy the lie that foreign nations pay US tariffs, though they acknowledged that those nations may pay a small part with price adjustments.
The conservative judges also did not appear to buy the arguments by Trump’s lawyer that the tariffs have anything to do with any emergency, since the US has lived with the status quo in trade for decades. The US may not have had fair trade, but nothing about the situation was an emergency. Their comments even indicated that using the rubric of “emergency powers” for something like trade is nothing but a presidential grab of power away from Congress.
None of this was a final decision, but it was the general sway of their comments. So, we’ll have to wait and see if they still hold those opinions after they’ve digested the arguments made in response to those opinions/observations expressed during their questioning.
Here are a few quotes, showing their opinions:
Roberts questioned Sauer [Trump’s lawyer] and noted Congress’s “core power” of regulating taxes, clearly rejecting his argument that Trump’s tariffs aren’t taxes….
“Yes, of course, there are dealings with foreign powers, but the vehicle is imposition of taxes on Americans, and that has always been the core power of Congress.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the court’s three liberal members, told Sauer, “You say tariffs are not taxes, but that’s exactly what they are.”
“They’re generating money from American citizens, revenue,” Sotomayor said.
Sotomayor … [also] asked, “…Why not do what the statute permits: bar importation of products altogether. That would be the most effective way to do it. You follow the statute, the statute says the President can do that. What it doesn’t say is the president could raise revenue.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of six conservatives on the court, pressed Sauer on the fact that Trump unilaterally imposed the tariffs by citing purported international emergencies of trade imbalances and the flow of fentanyl into the United States, without Congress authorizing them.
“What happens when the president simply vetoes legislation to take these powers back?” Gorsuch asked.
“So Congress as a practical matter can’t get this power back once it’s handed it over to the president,” Gorsuch said. “It’s a one-way ratchet toward the gradual but continual accretion of power in the executive branch and away from the people’s elected representatives.”
Besides the apparent illegality of the tariffs in this overreach of presidential power, there is their great damage to some businesses, which has been made worse due to the capricious manner in which they have been carried out:
In a statement after the hearing, Victor Owen Schwartz, whose company V.O.S. Selections is one of the plaintiffs challenging the tariffs, said: “For nearly 40 years, my family has built this business from the ground up. Today, reckless tariffs threaten everything we’ve achieved.”
“Let’s be clear: these tariffs aren’t paid by foreign governments or companies,” said Schwartz, whose company imports wines and spirits. “It’s American businesses like mine, and American consumers, that are footing the bill for the billions of dollars collected monthly by our government.”
“Unlike past tariffs set by Congress that we could plan around, these new tariffs are arbitrary,” he said. “They’re unpredictable. And they’re bad business.”
Clearly, they have a significant impact on businesses, as even Trump stated the following:
In a social media post on Tuesday, Trump wrote, “Tomorrow’s United States Supreme Court case is, literally, LIFE OR DEATH for our Country.”
“With a Victory, we have tremendous, but fair, Financial and National Security,” Trump wrote in the Truth Social post….
“It will be, in my opinion, one of the most important and consequential Decisions ever made by the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote.
A tax on consumers
As for whether these tariffs are getting passed along to consumers, as Schwartz indicates is true with his business, they clearly are being passed along by the nation’s largest retailer in a very big way (13% inflation)!
While many are navigating the change with limited price increases, marketplace giant Amazon is hiking more than others….
Amazon prices have risen 12.8% this year on average as of the end of September, according to an analysis of online pricing data from third-party research firm DataWeave. Prices at Target were up 5.5% since the start of the year, and prices at Walmart were 5.3% higher, according to the analysis.
I’m sure you can trust these numbers a lot more than you can trust those that come from the constantly massaging (adjusting) federal government, as they are just raw data:
DataWeave reviewed roughly 16,000 items each on Amazon’s, Walmart’s and Target’s websites to conduct its analysis. The firm says it continuously collects publicly available data and captures live product and pricing information. Its data spans categories, locations and time periods, according to DataWeave’s methodology.
While part of the price increases happened before Trump’s tariffs, clearly a number as large as an average of 12.8% has been largely driven by the tariffs, since “normal” inflation had consistently been coming in below 3% annualized prior to the tariffs, and that was not an annualized number. That was the inflation from January through October, so it has two months to keep accumulating.
Political turnover
On the political front, Republicans celebrated the time bomb Democrats chose for themselves by electing Mamdani as the new mayor of the Socialist Republic of New York, but it was small consolation in the teeth of widespread Republican defeat—an election night turnover so bad that even Trump had to admit that it certainly wasn’t good for Republicans. It was so upsetting that it set Republicans against each other in a race to blame whoever was most responsible for America’s new antipathy toward the Republican Party.
Much of the dissatisfaction was over the evisceration of the economy and high inflation that the government hasn’t been admitting to—the very things that have been highly exacerbated by the Trump Tariffs. So, maybe the Repubs should stop blaming luminaries like Laura Loomer and other popular talking heads and turn to the man at the center, whose tariffs—as likely to be determined illegal as they are—have caused economic turmoil all over the world and have actually diminished the United States’ share of global trade while enhancing China’s share, as I revealed in my last Deeper Dive.
Read the full article here