[CottonMcKnight]

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States..."

If the Line Item Veto was unconstitutional, then Congress surrendering its power to the President to not only impose tariffs unilaterally but then to _exempt_ favored parties from them, is not only blatantly corrupt, but clearly also unconstitutional.

But I'm not holding my breath for sanity from the Originalist Court.

[Terr_]

To put a slightly finer point on it, I have described it to my federal legislators[' answering machines] as an on-demand, retroactive, reversible, line-item veto.

More-importantly, what does it mean in a representative democracy, when a majority of legislators reach a "compromise" by passing a bill... and then one side simply violates the laws they just voted for because they don't like those parts? It's the same as making a trade with someone and then they take our a gun and mug you for your wallet.

In short, the federal legislative process died last month, and Republicans murdered it.

It is literally not possible to resurrect it until after Republicans throw away the murder-weapon. The main question now is how long Democrats will be in a state of denial like a battered spouse.

[jeffbee]

Even if you think that it is constitutional to delegate this power to the executive, it's clearly inconsistent with Biden v. Nebraska, where the supreme court ruled that the executive can't even exercise powers that congress explicitly delegated (when a Democrat is president only, for some reason).

[alabastervlog]

He’s also abusing the way the power’s delegated. He only declared the “fentanyl emergency” because unilateral tariffs are an emergency power. So then he tariffs China more (ok, sure, he doesn’t actually care about the fentanyl thing but fine I guess) and then also… Mexico? Ok they cooperate pretty well when we don’t levy tariffs so seems like that should have been like step fifty if things went poorly, but… I guess? Oh but also Canada, which no sane analysis would judge is relevant to his “fentanyl emergency”, so clearly he’s just full of shit and wanted to seize some power.

[jeffbee]

I have a feeling that the net flow of contraband across the Canadian border is northward, giving the Canadian Fentanyl Czar the opportunity to clown on Trump by imprisoning Americans.

[__egb__]

Oh, come on now, this one’s easy. They can just activate Textualist-mode and say that that if the founders wanted this clause to apply to tariffs then they should have explicitly used the word ‘tariffs’.