Trump’s tariffs: legal or illegal?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Bauxite” writes, concerning a court’s recent blocking of Trump’s tariffs:

A court “kneecapped” Trump’s power to impose tariffs because Trump never had that power to begin with.

It wasn’t that long ago, just a few years, that conservatives would still be rightly outraged when presidents acted beyond their powers and claimed to justify themselves with never-before-conceived interpretations of decades-old statutes. Good times.

Goodness knows there have been some screwy and abusive court decisions since January. This isn’t one of them.

Biden imposed tariffs by EO as well and extended some of Trump’s first-term ones: he kept Trump’s China tariffs, as well as later raising them. You can read more details here.

As far as the legality of tariffs by EO generally goes, see this:

A key question is whether a president has the authority to implement the types of across-the-board tariffs being discussed by Trump. The U.S. Constitution plainly grants the power to impose tariffs to Congress, not the president: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, . . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations” (Article 1, Section 8). However, Congress has delegated extensive authorities that allow the president to impose tariffs if certain statutory conditions are met.

While some analysts have tried to reassure investors and markets by asserting that Trump would lack the legal authority to implement his tariffs plans, this reflects an overly optimistic view of the limits of presidential tariff authority. As of today, there are multiple legal authorities that Trump could rely on to justify the imposition of increased tariffs, including many that Trump already availed himself of during his presidency. These include Sections 232 and 301, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), Section 122 Balance-of-Payments Authority, and Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. While Section 232 requires an investigation by the Department of Commerce and Section 301 requires an investigation and determination by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), these procedural niceties could be accomplished in relatively short order by cabinet officials, particularly since undue delay could put them at risk of getting fired. Regardless, any investigation or public comment period would allow anticipation to build, enhancing Trump’s negotiating leverage, which is likely one of the main points of the exercise.

That was published by CSIS, which bills itself as bipartisan but is currently headed by Thomas Pritzker. The article describes each law and how it could be used to justify Trump’s tariffs; it was written shortly prior to Trump’s 2024 election.

But some the tariffs in Trump’s second are somewhat different and were imposed under the National Emergencies Act. Wiki summarizes Trump’s second-term tariffs this way:

In his second term, Trump added tariffs to steel, aluminum, and auto imports under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act (TEA), which allows the President to modify imports if the Secretary of Commerce conducts an investigation, holds public hearings, and determines that the imports threaten national security. Trump directed the USTR to initiate similar investigations to impose tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.

Trump also invoked unprecedented powers under the National Emergencies Act (NEA) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) by declaring multiple “national emergencies” related to border security, energy, and trade deficits. Declaring these emergencies allowed Trump to enact tariffs quickly without following the complex procedures required by TEA or other trade statutes. While the IEEPA had been used for sanctions, it had never before been used for tariffs. …The New York Times reported that “many economists and legal experts believe that the idea of an emergency has been concocted to justify Mr. Trump’s desire to impose sweeping import duties without regard to congressional approval or international trade rules.”

Congress didn’t act against those tariffs:

To terminate a national emergency under the NEA, a member of Congress may file a privileged resolution requiring their chamber to vote on the topic within 15 days. Democratic representatives introduced resolutions to end several of Trump’s national emergencies justifying tariffs, but these efforts were blocked by the Republican congressional majority. JD Vance cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to uphold the emergency underpinning the “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Trump’s opposition was ready with many cases challenging his tariff imposition under this particular act – although of course they’d be on the other side if it was Biden trying to impose them:

In May 2025, the United States Court of International Trade (CIT) held hearings for V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump and Oregon v. Trump. Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump was heard before the Federal District Court in the District of Columbia. On May 28, a three-judge panel of the court unanimously ruled in favor of a permanent injunction preventing Trump’s 30% China tariffs, 25% Mexico and Canada tariffs, and the 10% universal tariff on most imported U.S. goods. They concurred with the plaintiffs in finding that IEEPA “does not authorize any of the worldwide, retaliatory, or trafficking tariff orders.”

The Trump administration will appeal, of course, and the case is likely to go to SCOTUS. I have no idea what will happen there, but here’s an article at Legal Insurrection laying out some of the legal complexities. It’s not a slam dunk either way, IMHO.

In other words, statutes are open to interpretation, and most court decisions these days seem to be mostly political.

NOTE: Here’s Jonathan Turley on the subject. As usual, well worth reading, and I basically agree with him that Congress needs to act.

The autopen: in Biden’s name only

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden’s aides signed a great many of his EOs with an autopen. Some – such as his pardons of the J6 committee members – Biden referred to himself when speaking, so we can assume that he was at least aware of those and approved of them to the extent he could understand them. But there were other EOs that Biden never spoke about publicly. Did he realize they were issued?

A group has done some research on that and raised the alarm:

The executive orders reviewed by Power the Future include an Arctic drilling ban in 2023, a 2021 executive order committing the federal government to net-zero emissions by 2050, an executive order mandating “clean energy” AI centers and an offshore drilling ban executive order shortly before leaving office in 2025.

Finding no evidence of Biden publicly speaking about the executive orders on climate, Power the Future sent letters this week to the DOJ, EPA, DOI, DOE, along with the House and Senate Oversight Committees, calling for an investigation to determine who made the decisions, drafted the executive orders and ultimately signed them.

Will we ever know? The Biden of yesteryear wasn’t known for sterling judgment. But he also wasn’t known for leftist ideology, so his leftward turn as president is suspicious. How much of that was outside his awareness?

Note, however, that prior to Biden’s presidency he was Obama’s VP, and at that point he was cognitively intact, healthwise. I don’t recall him objecting to anything Obama did, however leftist it was. He was Obama’s willing helper. Therefore he’d already compromised his previous pre-Obama positions to a large extent.

Democrats cling to imagology

The New Neo Posted on by

The left’s answer to everything seems to be better messaging:

“Democrats spending millions to learn how to speak to ‘American Men’ and win back the working class,” the Independent reported today, with party leaders holed up “in luxury hotel rooms on a strategy codenamed SAM, or ‘Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan.'”

Yeah, that’ll work.

It’s all about style and nothing about substance. See this:

This is all about perception, not reality … Study the “syntax” of the opposition so you can try to sound like them. Watch the “tone” you use to speak. Always be aware of your “messaging.” These people have learned precisely nothing from the rise of Donald Trump. The lesson in Trump’s rise, distilled to its essence, is “be authentic.” No “messaging” massaging can be remotely helpful if you’re obviously an inauthentic liar.

Although “be authentic” is indeed part of the lesson that should have been learned, the substance of the message is very important as well. If the left was authentic it would turn even more people off.

You may not recall the meaning of the “imagology” reference in the title of this post. It refers to an idea of Milan Kundera’s that I first wrote about twenty years ago in this post. The following passage is from Kundera’s 1990 work Immortality:

For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

Public opinion polls are the critical instrument of imagology’s power, because they enable imagology to live in absolute harmony with the people. The imagologue bombards people with questions: how is the French economy prospering? is there racism in France? is racism good or bad? who is the greatest writer of all time? is Hungary in Europe or in Polynesia? which world politician is the sexiest? And since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.

But reality sometimes asserts itself and becomes stronger than imagology. It’s a constant war between the two these days.

Germany: undermining democracy to “save” it

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a lot of this “we must become tyrants in order to save democracy” stuff going around. In Germany, for example, the latest salvo in the German war against the AfD:

By longstanding tradition, the AfD should have been allotted committee chairmanships and vice chairmanships based on its February vote share. Doing so would have meant that the powerful budget, interior, and finance committees, along with three other committees, would have been under AfD direction, giving it the possibility of shaping legislation. But in a reversal of what is normally an automatic affirmation, on Wednesday, May 21, the other parties in Parliament voted down the AfD chairmanships and put those six committees in the control of other, often less popular, parties. The far-left Die Linke (the Left) party, which had garnered just 9 percent of the parliamentary vote, was awarded two chairs.

The rationale given for this anti-democratic coup is a recent designation of the AfD as a right-wing extremist party. On May 2, 2025, four days before parliamentary power was to change hands, outgoing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser from the Social Democratic Party announced that Germany’s domestic spy agency (the BfV) had slapped that label on the AfD, based on a 1,000-page secret dossier. According to press leaks, the dossier appeared to consist of public statements by AfD leaders, many already chewed over endlessly by the party’s opponents, relating to Germany’s mass migration problem.

AfD representatives have asserted, for example, that Germans have a cultural history tied to their ethnic and national identity; that this history and identity deserve protection; and that unchecked illegal migration threatens national cohesion.

The dossier also contained statements “implying,” as a scandalized Reuters put it, that “immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals.” Actually, those AfD statements didn’t “imply” that immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals; they asserted that fact outright, because that is what government crime statistics overwhelmingly show. …

In any case, the “right extremist” designation was a mere pretext for shutting the AfD out of power. Half a year before Nancy Faeser revealed the existence of the secret dossier, the establishment parties had pulled the same trick in the state government of Thüringen.

I am reminded of the fact that even before Trump’s win in 2016, and certainly immediately afterwards, the Trump’s opposition equated the slogan or logo “MAGA” with racism. For many many Democrats that perception and labeling has stuck. Call something racist and bigoted, and you can not only disagree with it but discredit it and justify attempts to block it even when it wins elections – all in the name of protecting or “saving” democracy. The contradiction is obvious, but it seems to work as propaganda for many many people.

In Germany there is also the terrible legacy of Nazism. If a group such as AfD talks about German “cultural history tied to ethnic and national identity,” it’s easy to label them Nazi-esque in order to frighten people off, and in order to discredit any argument for preserving German culture against an Islamic onslaught. What’s more, because the Nazis came to power through democratic/legal means and then proceeded to establish a dictatorship that included (again through legal means) suspending the powers of the legislative body, the idea that the anti-fascist forces must subvert democracy in order to save it carries a certain amount of persuasiveness.

What good is a specialist if you can’t see one?

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I was late posting because I was helping a friend with a medical problem. I have several friends who are quite ill, as I mentioned in another post. Several of them have Parkinson’s disease.

Most people are aware of Parkinson’s disease. After all, it’s one of the most common progressive neurological illnesses in the world. But although many people think it’s just a movement disorder, it’s not. It’s a brain disease with many many manifestations, and for many people who suffer from it the movement problems are the least of it.

Parkinson’s takes so many forms that, although there are general “types,” it’s not an exaggeration to say that each person is unique. For some, the worst part involves hallucinations and delusions. That’s what going on now with my friend, whom I’ll call “X”.

I’ll skip the details, except to say it’s awful. This person ended up in the emergency room, where other causes were evaluated because it came on so suddenly. Dehydration might have been part of it, and a urinary tract infection. Antibiotics were prescribed, for example. And X was sent home and told to contact the neurologist who’d been taking of X’s Parkinson’s treatment for years.

Of course, it being Memorial Day weekend, there was no callback till today. And then when the call came, X was given an appointment – for February 2026. It’s like a bad joke, except it’s for real.

The neurologist is the Parkinson’s expert – supposedly. The sufferer can turn to a PCP, and that’s what will happen now. But the treatment of Parkinson’s psychosis is a specialized and delicate area of medicine. I suppose the PCP might facilitate an earlier appointment with the neurologist. But maybe not. Meanwhile – the mess goes on.

This is not okay. And it didn’t used to be this way. Nowadays a nine-month wait seems standard – even to see a neurologist who’s already supposedly been handling a person’s Parkinson’s treatment.

If you detect some anger in this post, your perception is correct.

Bidengate reflections

The New Neo Posted on by

For the past few days I’ve been reading articles and watching podcasts about the new spin that Democrats and the MSM (the latter in the form of Jake Tapper’s and Alex Thompson’s book) have been putting on what I’ll call Bidengate, the attempt at a coverup of Biden’s cognitive decline.

Their excuses and explanations are extraordinarily weak. And yet they offer them, and expect us – apparently – to believe them.

I’ll take a few points:

(1) Although it was an attempt at a coverup, it actually didn’t succeed. More than half of Americans easily perceived that Joe Biden, the president, was losing it.

(2) One of the excuses people like Tapper give is: “well, Bidens’ aides were lying to us and saying he was fine.” But aren’t people who write for the MSM supposed to be, you know, reporters? People who don’t just accept the self-serving responses of those with a motive to lie? People who will like, dig into and investigate a story? In other words, why rely on the report of aides? More than half of America could see the evidence with their own eyes and ears. Why couldn’t you, oh ye reporters/journalists? And if you couldn’t, isn’t it time to turn in your press passes and take up another profession?

(3) One excuse they make is that only doctors can diagnose mental decline. That’s as risible as Justice Jackson saying she doesn’t know what a woman is because she’s not a medical person. The approach of dementia or senility is not hard to notice, although it helps to have a doctor’s diagnosis for the specifics. Biden’s symptoms were obvious to all who didn’t have blinders on, and the exact diagnosis wasn’t necessary. Being president requires mental sharpness and he didn’t have it.

(4) Another excuse was that well, it doesn’t really require mental sharpness to be president. It just requires getting elected, and then the aides can take the wheel. One Democrat is as good as another, as in an ant colony.

I’m not kidding; see this:

(5) As Thompson says in that video, once you declare Trump that serious a threat, anything can be justified in order to fight him. If Biden’s the only candidate you have at the moment, then no matter what his cognitive state you’ll have to get him elected. Anything you do is justified – which is the argument tyrants often use to explain and excuse their own actions. And indeed, the aides and other Democrats did justify everything to themselves: the lies of Russiagate, the lies about Charlottesville, the laptop coverup, lawfare against Trump and his attorneys, so many things it would be tedious to list them.

(6) And if all those lies are done in the name of stopping Trump, who’s the biggest threat to democracy? Not Trump for sure, but either the perpetrators can’t see that or they’re lying to us even about how they evaluate Trump. They may know he’s no threat to democracy. What they do know is that he’s a threat to their power.

For Memorial Day: on nationalism and patriotism

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a repeat of a previous post, slightly edited and updated.]

The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book – as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers – that I was assigned in school.

It was exciting compared to Dick and Jane and the rest, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad – and unfair, too – that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students – au contraire.

Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades.

I think this feeling gathered more adherents (at least in this country) during the Vietnam era, and certainly the same is true lately. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were thought to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, coupled with a lot more than nationalism itself. But the experience seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.

Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…

A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which a particular type of amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response at the time, one that many decades later helped lead to the formation of the EU. The waning but still relatively strong nationalism of the US (as shown by the election of Donald Trump, for example) has been seen by those who agree with Mann as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.

But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. There’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores or tramples on human rights (like that of the Nazis), but one that embraces and strives for and tries to preserve them here and abroad, keeping in mind that—human nature being what it is—no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but has been a good country nevertheless, always working to be better, with a nationalism that traditionally recognizes that sometimes liberty must be fought for, and that the struggle involves some sacrifice.

So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Those lines from the anthem express a hope that has been fading. But even though things had been looking dim for both liberty and courage in recent years, it is not over.

When I looked back at my original, longer version of this post, I saw that it was written on Memorial Day in 2005, not that long after I began blogging. Seems longer ago than that. This is another portion of what I wrote then, and although I was describing my post-9/11 thoughts, I think it’s especially appropriate now [updates in brackets]:

I’d known the words to [our national anthem] for [over sixty years], and even had to learn about Francis Scott Key and the circumstances under which he wrote them. But I never really thought much about those words. It was just a song that was difficult to sing, and not as pretty as America the Beautiful or God Bless America (the latter, in those very un-PC days of my youth, we used to sing as we marched out of assembly).

The whole first stanza of the national anthem is a protracted version of a question: does the American flag still wave over the fort? Has the US been successful in the battle? As a child, the answer seemed to me to have been a foregone conclusion–of course it waved, of course the US prevailed in the battle; how could it be otherwise? America rah-rah. America always was the winner. Even our withdrawal from Vietnam, so many years later, seemed to me to be an act of choice. Our very existence as a nation had never for a moment felt threatened.

The only threat I’d ever faced to this country was the nightmarish threat of nuclear war. But that seemed more a threat to the entire planet, to humankind itself, rather than to this country specifically. And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country–its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.

And then other memorized writings came to me as well–the Gettysburg Address, whose words those crabby old teachers of mine had made us memorize in their entirety: and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here it was again, the sense of the nation as an experiment in democracy and freedom, and inherently special but vulnerable to destruction, an idea I had never until that moment grasped. But now I did, on a visceral level.

A song for Memorial Day

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve posted this song before, but I think it bears repeating, especially on Memorial Day.

It’s Tim McGraw’s extraordinarily moving song “If You’re Reading This“:

If you’re readin’ this
My momma’s sittin’ there
Looks like I only got a one way ticket over here.
I sure wish I could give you one more kiss
War was just a game we played when we were kids
Well I’m layin’ down my gun
I’m hanging up my boots
I’m up here with God and we’re both watchin’ over you

So lay me down
In that open field out on the edge of town
And know my soul
Is where my momma always prayed that it would go.
If you’re readin’ this I’m already home…

The first time I ever heard the song I got the chills as the lyrics unfolded and I realized what it was about, and then again and again as the heartstrings were jerked harder and harder as the song went on.

Most of us do, or should, feel a very strong gratitude to the men and women who sacrificed their lives to defend liberty here and abroad, and a very strong sorrow that it was necessary. On Memorial Day, we thank them.