Showing posts with label separation of powers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label separation of powers. Show all posts
May 12, 2025
Mar 6, 2025
Lost Another'n
It's starting to get really clear for me why Trump has been going so far out of his way to get his MAGAgoons to view judges with disdain.
Labor regulator Trump fired must be reinstated, judge rules
Gwynne Wilcox was appointed by Joe Biden to head the National Labor Relations Board. Trump tried to fire her in January.
A federal judge repudiated President Donald Trump’s effort to remove the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, calling it an “illegal act” and “power grab” that misunderstands the limits of his authority.
“An American President is not a king — not even an ‘elected’ one,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell wrote Thursday in a 36-page opinion, “and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants … is not absolute, but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances.”
Howell’s order reinstates Gwynne Wilcox to the NLRB, which plays a major role in policing labor disputes across the country. Though presidents nominate — and the Senate confirms — members of the board, federal law restricts the ability to remove board members absent “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
Despite that restriction, Trump fired Wilcox in a Jan. 27 email delivered by a subordinate, saying Wilcox was not working “in a manner consistent with the objectives of my administration.” The firing is part of a broader effort by the president to take control of all purportedly “independent” agencies within the executive branch and undermine decades of efforts in Washington to insulate some federal agencies from political pressure.
On Thursday, a federal workplace watchdog fired by Trump — Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger — dropped his legal bid to reclaim his post after a federal appeals court permitted his termination. Cathy Harris, a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which oversees the grievance process for many federal employees, is also resisting Trump’s effort to remove her and was reinstated last month by a federal judge.
The Supreme Court likely will soon weigh in on Congress’ ability to insulate executive branch officials from being fired by the president without cause. With Dellinger’s decision to drop his legal fight, Harris’ case appears likeliest to reach the high court in the near-term. It’s possible Wilcox’s case will get folded into that ongoing fight.
The NLRB consists of five members who serve five-year terms. But without Wilcox, three of the board’s seats are currently vacant.
Wilcox was appointed to the NLRB by former President Joe Biden in 2023 and became the board’s chair in December 2024. She was the first NLRB member ever to be fired in the board’s 90-year history.
Trump also fired the board’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, in a broad effort to take control of the regulatory agency.
Howell, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, wrote that reinstating Wilcox is in the public interest because without her, the NLRB will remain without a quorum and be unable to perform its required role of resolving labor disputes. And she said that Trump had other avenues to control the direction of the board without firing Wilcox: He could have appointed two new members to fill the already vacant seats, along with a new general counsel to steer the board’s policies.
The judge also delivered a warning about Trump’s multi-faceted bid to expand presidential power. She noted that, in defending the firing of Wilcox, Justice Department lawyers cited the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity that shielded Trump from some aspects of the criminal case he faced last year for seeking to subvert the 2020 election.
“The President seems intent on pushing the bounds of his office and exercising his power in a manner violative of clear statutory law to test how much the courts will accept the notion of a presidency that is supreme,” Howell wrote. “The courts are now again forced to determine how much encroachment on the legislature our Constitution can bear and face a slippery slope toward endorsing a presidency that is untouchable by the law.”
Like everybody who's paid any attention at all, I've had my suspicions, of course, but this brings it into sharper focus.
He's determined to warp The Judiciary so it's just another rubber stamp. He's got most of Congress licking the shit off his boots, but other than 4 SCOTUS bozos and the occasional Aileen Cannon, he's been running into quite a bit of resistance.
This one though - this decision is a pretty clear message that I hope gets out far and wide.
Thank the fake lord for Beryl Howell
Gwynne Wilcox was appointed by Joe Biden to head the National Labor Relations Board. Trump tried to fire her in January.
A federal judge repudiated President Donald Trump’s effort to remove the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, calling it an “illegal act” and “power grab” that misunderstands the limits of his authority.
“An American President is not a king — not even an ‘elected’ one,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell wrote Thursday in a 36-page opinion, “and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants … is not absolute, but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances.”
Howell’s order reinstates Gwynne Wilcox to the NLRB, which plays a major role in policing labor disputes across the country. Though presidents nominate — and the Senate confirms — members of the board, federal law restricts the ability to remove board members absent “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
Despite that restriction, Trump fired Wilcox in a Jan. 27 email delivered by a subordinate, saying Wilcox was not working “in a manner consistent with the objectives of my administration.” The firing is part of a broader effort by the president to take control of all purportedly “independent” agencies within the executive branch and undermine decades of efforts in Washington to insulate some federal agencies from political pressure.
On Thursday, a federal workplace watchdog fired by Trump — Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger — dropped his legal bid to reclaim his post after a federal appeals court permitted his termination. Cathy Harris, a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which oversees the grievance process for many federal employees, is also resisting Trump’s effort to remove her and was reinstated last month by a federal judge.
The Supreme Court likely will soon weigh in on Congress’ ability to insulate executive branch officials from being fired by the president without cause. With Dellinger’s decision to drop his legal fight, Harris’ case appears likeliest to reach the high court in the near-term. It’s possible Wilcox’s case will get folded into that ongoing fight.
The NLRB consists of five members who serve five-year terms. But without Wilcox, three of the board’s seats are currently vacant.
Wilcox was appointed to the NLRB by former President Joe Biden in 2023 and became the board’s chair in December 2024. She was the first NLRB member ever to be fired in the board’s 90-year history.
Trump also fired the board’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, in a broad effort to take control of the regulatory agency.
Howell, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, wrote that reinstating Wilcox is in the public interest because without her, the NLRB will remain without a quorum and be unable to perform its required role of resolving labor disputes. And she said that Trump had other avenues to control the direction of the board without firing Wilcox: He could have appointed two new members to fill the already vacant seats, along with a new general counsel to steer the board’s policies.
The judge also delivered a warning about Trump’s multi-faceted bid to expand presidential power. She noted that, in defending the firing of Wilcox, Justice Department lawyers cited the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity that shielded Trump from some aspects of the criminal case he faced last year for seeking to subvert the 2020 election.
“The President seems intent on pushing the bounds of his office and exercising his power in a manner violative of clear statutory law to test how much the courts will accept the notion of a presidency that is supreme,” Howell wrote. “The courts are now again forced to determine how much encroachment on the legislature our Constitution can bear and face a slippery slope toward endorsing a presidency that is untouchable by the law.”
Feb 2, 2025
The Tariffs
Tariffs can be helpful - if they're carefully considered, and selectively applied.
Trump imposes tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, raising prospect of higher costs for U.S. consumers
The Trump administration put the tariffs in place to force the three countries to stop the spread and manufacturing of fentanyl, in addition to pressuring Canada and Mexico to limit any illegal immigration into the United States.
PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump on Saturday signed an order to impose stiff tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada and China — fulfilling one of his post-campaign commitments to voters that also carries the risk of sparking higher inflation and disrupting businesses across North America.
Trump declared an economic emergency in order to place duties of 10% on all imports from China and 25% on imports from Mexico and Canada — America’s largest trading partners — except for a 10% rate on Canadian energy, including oil, natural gas and electricity. The tariffs would go into effect on Tuesday, setting a showdown in North America that could potentially sabotage economic growth.
A senior administration official, insisting on anonymity to brief reporters, said the lower rate on energy reflected a desire to minimize any disruptive increases on the price of gasoline or utilities. That’s a sign the White House understood as outside economists have warned that the import taxes if sustained could dramatically increase inflation, a possible problem for Trump as he promised to tame inflation after public unhappiness with price spikes under former President Joe Biden.
The order signed by Trump contained no mechanism for granting exceptions, the official said, a possible blow to homebuilders who rely on Canadian lumber as well as farmers, automakers and other industries.
The White House said Trump’s order also includes a mechanism to escalate the rates if the countries retaliate against the U.S., as they have threatened. Both Canada and Mexico have plans, if needed, to impose their own tariffs in response.
The Trump administration put the tariffs in place to force the three countries to stop the spread and manufacturing of fentanyl, in addition to pressuring Canada and Mexico to limit any illegal immigration into the United States.
The official did not provide specific benchmarks that could be met to lift the new tariffs, saying only that the best measure would be fewer Americans dying from fentanyl addition.
The order would also allow for tariffs on Canadian imports of less than $800. Imports below that sum are currently able to cross into the United States without customs and duties.
The Republican president is making a major political bet that his actions will not worsen inflation, cause financial aftershocks that could destabilize the worldwide economy or provoke a voter backlash. AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of the electorate in last year’s election, found that the U.S. was split on support for tariffs.
With the tariffs, Trump is honoring promises that are at the core of his economic and national security philosophy. But the announcement showed his seriousness around the issue as some Trump allies had played down the threat of higher import taxes as mere negotiating tactics.
The president is preparing more import taxes in a sign that tariffs will be an ongoing part of his second term. On Friday, he mentioned imported computer chips, steel, oil and natural gas, as well as against copper, pharmaceutical drugs and imports from the European Union — moves that could essentially pit the U.S. against much of the global economy.
It is unclear how the tariffs could affect the business investments that Trump said would happen because of his plans to cut corporate tax rates and remove regulations. Tariffs tend to raise prices for consumers and businesses by making it more expensive to bring in foreign goods.
Many voters turned to Trump in the November election on the belief that he could better handle the inflation that spiked under Democratic President Joe Biden. But inflation expectations are creeping upward in the University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment as respondents expect prices to rise by 3.3%. That would be higher than the actual 2.9% annual inflation rate in December’s consumer price index.
Trump has said that the government should raise more of its revenues from tariffs, as it did before the income tax became part of the Constitution in 1913. He claims, despite economic evidence to the contrary, that the U.S. was at its wealthiest in the 1890s under President William McKinley.
“We were the richest country in the world,” Trump said Friday. “We were a tariff country.”
Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted on the social media site X that the tariffs “if sustained, would be a massive shock — a much bigger move in one weekend than all the trade action that Trump took in his first term.”
Setser noted that the tariffs on China without exemptions could raise the price of iPhones, which would test just how much power corporate America has with Trump. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook attended Trump’s inauguration last month.
Recent research on Trump’s various tariff options by a team of economists suggested the trade penalties would be drags on growth in Canada, Mexico, China and the U.S. But Wending Zhang, a Cornell University economist who worked on the research, said the fallout would be felt more in Canada and Mexico because of their reliance on the U.S. market.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Canadians that they could be facing difficult times ahead, but that Ottawa was prepared to respond with retaliatory tariffs if needed and that the U.S. penalties would be self-sabotaging.
Trudeau said Canada is addressing Trump’s calls on border security by implementing a CDN$1.3 billion (US$900 million) border plan that includes helicopters, new canine teams and imaging tools.
Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum has stressed that her country has acted to reduce illegal border crossings and the illicit trade in fentanyl. While she has emphasized the ongoing dialogue since Trump first floated the tariffs in November, she has said that Mexico is ready to respond, too.
Mexico has a “Plan A, Plan B, Plan C for what the United States government decides,” she said.
Trump still has to get a budget, tax cuts and an increase to the government’s legal borrowing authority through Congress. The outcome of his tariff plans could strengthen his hand or weaken it.
Democrats are sponsoring legislation that would strip the president of his ability to impose tariffs without congressional approval. But that is unlikely to make headway in a Republican-controlled House and Senate.
“If this weekend’s tariffs go into effect, they’ll do catastrophic damage to our relationships with our allies and raise costs for working families by hundreds of dollars a year,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. “Congress needs to stop this from happening again.”
This doesn't look like it satisfies either of the essential criteria:
We won't know what he's actually doing - what he actually thinks he's doing - until some of the shit starts to hit the fan.
- Is he just flexing - reminding us that he's the big dog and we need to stay in line?
- Is this intended as leverage on someone or something?
- What does he stand to gain personally?
- Is it intended to put us in danger - or make us think we're in danger - so he can play hero and rescue us? (He declared an "economic emergency" to justify it, y'know)
- Is it some kind of variation on the Milton Friedman thing - Economic Shock Therapy? (A strategy that involves exploiting political and social chaos to implement unpopular policies. These policies favor corporations and disadvantage citizens)
Knowing what we know about the workings of Trump's "brain", there's no way this shit does anything but fuck things up. And given the Project 2025 subtext, that could be the whole point.
The tariffs don't take effect until Tuesday, so maybe it's just something he needed to do to claim that he kept a campaign promise, and he'll pull back, saying he's so amazingly awesome that all he had to do was say "Jump!" and the whole world said "How high, sir?".
The Trump administration put the tariffs in place to force the three countries to stop the spread and manufacturing of fentanyl, in addition to pressuring Canada and Mexico to limit any illegal immigration into the United States.
The word 'ostensibly' belongs in that sentence: "The Trump Administration put the tariffs in place ostensibly to force the three countries..."
The Denver Post is proving itself to be pretty docile and stenographer-ey.
PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump on Saturday signed an order to impose stiff tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada and China — fulfilling one of his post-campaign commitments to voters that also carries the risk of sparking higher inflation and disrupting businesses across North America.
Trump declared an economic emergency in order to place duties of 10% on all imports from China and 25% on imports from Mexico and Canada — America’s largest trading partners — except for a 10% rate on Canadian energy, including oil, natural gas and electricity. The tariffs would go into effect on Tuesday, setting a showdown in North America that could potentially sabotage economic growth.
A senior administration official, insisting on anonymity to brief reporters, said the lower rate on energy reflected a desire to minimize any disruptive increases on the price of gasoline or utilities. That’s a sign the White House understood as outside economists have warned that the import taxes if sustained could dramatically increase inflation, a possible problem for Trump as he promised to tame inflation after public unhappiness with price spikes under former President Joe Biden.
The order signed by Trump contained no mechanism for granting exceptions, the official said, a possible blow to homebuilders who rely on Canadian lumber as well as farmers, automakers and other industries.
The White House said Trump’s order also includes a mechanism to escalate the rates if the countries retaliate against the U.S., as they have threatened. Both Canada and Mexico have plans, if needed, to impose their own tariffs in response.
The Trump administration put the tariffs in place to force the three countries to stop the spread and manufacturing of fentanyl, in addition to pressuring Canada and Mexico to limit any illegal immigration into the United States.
The official did not provide specific benchmarks that could be met to lift the new tariffs, saying only that the best measure would be fewer Americans dying from fentanyl addition.
The order would also allow for tariffs on Canadian imports of less than $800. Imports below that sum are currently able to cross into the United States without customs and duties.
The Republican president is making a major political bet that his actions will not worsen inflation, cause financial aftershocks that could destabilize the worldwide economy or provoke a voter backlash. AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of the electorate in last year’s election, found that the U.S. was split on support for tariffs.
With the tariffs, Trump is honoring promises that are at the core of his economic and national security philosophy. But the announcement showed his seriousness around the issue as some Trump allies had played down the threat of higher import taxes as mere negotiating tactics.
The president is preparing more import taxes in a sign that tariffs will be an ongoing part of his second term. On Friday, he mentioned imported computer chips, steel, oil and natural gas, as well as against copper, pharmaceutical drugs and imports from the European Union — moves that could essentially pit the U.S. against much of the global economy.
It is unclear how the tariffs could affect the business investments that Trump said would happen because of his plans to cut corporate tax rates and remove regulations. Tariffs tend to raise prices for consumers and businesses by making it more expensive to bring in foreign goods.
Many voters turned to Trump in the November election on the belief that he could better handle the inflation that spiked under Democratic President Joe Biden. But inflation expectations are creeping upward in the University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment as respondents expect prices to rise by 3.3%. That would be higher than the actual 2.9% annual inflation rate in December’s consumer price index.
Trump has said that the government should raise more of its revenues from tariffs, as it did before the income tax became part of the Constitution in 1913. He claims, despite economic evidence to the contrary, that the U.S. was at its wealthiest in the 1890s under President William McKinley.
“We were the richest country in the world,” Trump said Friday. “We were a tariff country.”
Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted on the social media site X that the tariffs “if sustained, would be a massive shock — a much bigger move in one weekend than all the trade action that Trump took in his first term.”
Setser noted that the tariffs on China without exemptions could raise the price of iPhones, which would test just how much power corporate America has with Trump. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook attended Trump’s inauguration last month.
Recent research on Trump’s various tariff options by a team of economists suggested the trade penalties would be drags on growth in Canada, Mexico, China and the U.S. But Wending Zhang, a Cornell University economist who worked on the research, said the fallout would be felt more in Canada and Mexico because of their reliance on the U.S. market.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Canadians that they could be facing difficult times ahead, but that Ottawa was prepared to respond with retaliatory tariffs if needed and that the U.S. penalties would be self-sabotaging.
Trudeau said Canada is addressing Trump’s calls on border security by implementing a CDN$1.3 billion (US$900 million) border plan that includes helicopters, new canine teams and imaging tools.
Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum has stressed that her country has acted to reduce illegal border crossings and the illicit trade in fentanyl. While she has emphasized the ongoing dialogue since Trump first floated the tariffs in November, she has said that Mexico is ready to respond, too.
Mexico has a “Plan A, Plan B, Plan C for what the United States government decides,” she said.
Trump still has to get a budget, tax cuts and an increase to the government’s legal borrowing authority through Congress. The outcome of his tariff plans could strengthen his hand or weaken it.
Democrats are sponsoring legislation that would strip the president of his ability to impose tariffs without congressional approval. But that is unlikely to make headway in a Republican-controlled House and Senate.
Because of course - why would Republicans in Congress want to maintain the separation of powers as required by the US Constitution? Silly people.
“If this weekend’s tariffs go into effect, they’ll do catastrophic damage to our relationships with our allies and raise costs for working families by hundreds of dollars a year,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. “Congress needs to stop this from happening again.”
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