"Give him an inch and he'll take a mile."
The burden of the amicus curiae brief my attorney filed is that President Trump is out of control, a flagrant scofflaw.
And that he's getting worse.
Today's news makes my point for me.
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| Wall Street Journal: Trump and Bolsonaro |
Attorney Thad Guyer prepared the brief. It combines three examples of Trump's overreach:
-- Trump's claim that he has the power to set tariffs on a whim;
-- the claim that he can ignore laws passed by Congress to ensure a professional, merit-based Civil Service;
-- his lawsuit against every federal district court judge in Maryland, for having insisted on due process on deportations.
The point of the brief is that Americans need to hold the line, stopping Trump on tariffs, because if he gets away with ignoring clear Constitutional separation of powers here, there is no stopping him. The cancer is metastasizing.
The authors of the Constitution had good reason to want Congress, not the Executive, to set tariffs. They were attempting to keep unified a set of former colonies with very different interests, and Congress is set up to broker those conflicts. Cloth manufacturers in mill towns in New England would want tariffs on foreign cloth. Southern tobacco and cotton farmers would want the cheapest and best cloth, wherever made. Congress, with representatives giving voice and power to everyone, kept tariff policy from exploding the country -- a difficult task at a time when tariffs were a primary source of national income. A president -- John Adams from Massachusetts, for example -- if left alone to set tariffs might please textile manufacturers of his acquaintance in Massachusetts with tariffs, convinced he was serving the national interest, putting a burden on people in southern states -- who were not likely to vote for Adams, anyway -- who paid higher prices because of the tariffs. A president couldn't be trusted with that power.
In the case of southern Oregon wine, the premise behind my interest in the case, tariffs on China matter. In stores like Costco, where margins are tiny, a rise in wine bottle prices from 90 cents to $1.75 squeezes out all the margin in competition with Spanish wines. Senator Jeff Merkley has visited my farm, and Senator Ron Wyden and I have discussed the economics of grapes and melons multiple times. I may not get the tariff policy that pleases me -- indeed, I expect I would not under any circumstance -- but at least I have representation and a voice.
The worst fears of the authors of the Constitution are being played out today, with Trump exercising his personal agenda supporting a fellow election-denying incumbent president, who, like Trump, encouraged rioters to attempt to stop the vote count. In a formal White House letter to Brazil, Trump openly linked Brazil's tariff with Trump's support for their disgraced president. This letter, dated yesterday, embeds an open presumption that the American public would tolerate its president using U.S. tariff policy in flagrant service of Trump's personal political agenda:
Political columnist Paul Krugman said this letter alone should be the basis for impeachment. If impeachment would lead to conviction, I would agree. But it wouldn't. Trump has already moved the norms so far that there isn't a two-thirds majority to convict him, even for this flagrant misuse of his office.
The amicus brief with my name on it argues that a version of the "domino theory" is underway. One overreach leads to an even greater one. It is out there in the open for all to see: Trump dangling, taking away, then dangling again a tariff to extract a political benefit is one domino. Hold the line.
[Note, in future blog posts I will summarize the arguments made by other amicus filers. Each focuses on different reasons to oppose Trump's overreach. Coming soon, the brief by The Goldwater Institute, a conservative legal advocacy group.]
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3 comments:
That letter is a national embarrassment in every sense.
Oops, sorry--it's a National Embarrassment in every SENSE!
These letters are astonishingly unprofessional. Is there no one at the White House who proofreads official documents? How can any foreign government take such gibberish seriously?
Tying tariffs to political pressure is in direct violation of the "emergency" rationale for them. Will SCOTUS finally put their foot down?
I think that the only really effective opposition to Donald Trump will have to come at the ballot box. That would require the Democrats to implement an effective political strategy, something they have yet to demonstrate any movement towards.
Instead, they seem fascinated by bright, shiny objects like Zohran Mamdani, who will lead them straight off into the political wastelands of the far left.
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