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The headlines are full of stories about fights between federal judges exceeding their authority in response to some questionable uses of presidential authority. If only there were a third branch to sort these issues.
With millions of illegal aliens within our borders, a requirement of a lengthy hearing process to be held in the jurisdiction preferred and selected by the arrestee’s lawyers could effectively gut enforcement of immigration laws. The courts will require (see what SCOTUS said in Trump v. J.G.G. et al.) some kind of process. It is not clear what form that will ultimately take if left entirely to the courts. Golly, if only there were some branch of government that could authorize and fund some streamlined hearing process to both satisfy due process and permit efficient enforcement by eliminating gratuitous judicial interference and procedural delays.
Congress has the express authority to establish tariffs but is currently silent while statutory emergency powers are cited to address a trade imbalance that has been around for half a century (a rather lengthy emergency, it would seem). Maybe if there was some legislation that said something along the lines of, If the President is not satisfied that a country has not negotiated fair trade in good faith by such and such a time, pursuant to the criteria laid out, then a tariff from the attached table will apply. The missing branch could thus both aid the art of the deal in the 4-D chess that Trump is allegedly playing and reassure markets and allies that this is not an ad hoc policy of pseudo-autarky with permanent trade barriers.
The DOGE team has uncovered an astonishing range of waste, abuse and fraud. The legislative bad news is that the 1974 Impoundment Control Act makes it very hard for a president to refuse to spend money. The good news is that the same bill created a rescission process. The president can ask for cuts in an expedited process that cannot be filibustered. Why not a new routine of submitting batches of DOGE-uncovered fiscal atrocities presented by the president directly to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees to begin the process of having the cuts ratified? If Congress never acts on the DOGE-inspired cuts, it is a certainty that some federal judge will rule that all cuts exceed presidential authority, with some risk that SCOTUS will agree, however reluctantly, and stall the best efforts of DOGE indefinitely.
Forcing Democrats to vote on specific bills to address illegal immigration and egregious waste and fraud is also a possible boon to GOP House re-election chances. Democrats going on record to support making it hard to remove gang members and for funding rich grifters and LGBTQ coloring books for Peru is not a winning platform in most districts, even majority Democratic ones. This kind of legislative action also creates a justifiable perception of an active, productive, goal-oriented Congress worth re-electing. Granted, that would be a really novel, untried political approach, but why not give it a shot?
Discussion (30)
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So true. With only three teams in the league, there are only three possible cards. With four we'd be able to watch fights with seven different rivalries.
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Buying ANY good or service is an unbalanced trade. Buying groceries is an unbalanced trade.
I confess to making unbalanced trades almost every day.
You seem to think that when an American citizen voluntarily engages in an unbalanced trade, giving his own rightful and lawful property in exchange, that he has violated some natural law, and that under the Constitution, the Federal Government has the authority and responsibility to punish him for it with a discriminatory tax.
Or perhaps you think that the punishment is only due if the person with whom I trade is not a resident of the US? (In which case, the international accountants working for the Federal Government and the IMF and the World Bank will count it toward what you and they have [inappropriately] labeled the "trade deficit".
Or perhaps I have misunderstood you completely.
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I'm in agreement with your thinking but I don't like some other party tampering with my trade advantage.
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Stand down. I did not decry the trade imbalance. I simply questioned whether it is appropriate to invoke emergency powers to address something that has been the case for fifty years. IF it is appropriate and beneficial to impose tariffs, then it ought to be done by Congress. That can be done on a conditional basis to grant POTUS negotiating power.
Whether a trade imbalance is a bad thing or whether a truly level trade playing field is desirable/achievable or whether some more nuanced, particular set of policies would be optimal is not the issue in the OP. How any such goals and choices are approached and achieved does matter and Congress has to be involved.
Feel free to expound on the benefits of trade. Go wild with insights from Ricardo and Smith.
A more difficult question (and largely beyond my skill set and not implicit in the OP) would be how to systematically model circumstances, values and behaviors that would justify a departure from a state of unfettered (presumably efficient) trade.
The point here is that if and when it is US policy to to impose tariffs (for better or worse, perhaps for non-economic policy reasons), it should not be the result of spontaneous sudden executive gestures but debated and effected by Congress and with the approval (non-veto) by the President.
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