Trump’s big plans on trade and more run up against laws of political gravity, separation of powers

WASHINGTON AP Once again President Donald Trump s biggest guidelines plans were stopped in their tracks On Wednesday an obscure but powerful court in New York rejected the legal foundation of Trump s majority sweeping tariffs finding that Trump could not use a law to declare a national crisis on exchange imbalances and fentanyl smuggling to justify a series of import taxes that have unsettled the world Reordering the global business activity by executive fiat was an unconstitutional end-run around Congress powers the three-judge panel of Trump Obama and Reagan appointees ruled in a scathing rebuke of Trump s action The setbacks fit a broader pattern for a president who has advanced an extraordinarily expansive view of executive power Federal courts have called out the lack of due process in several of Trump s deportation efforts His proposed income tax cuts now working their way through Congress are so costly that selected of them can t be made permanent as Trump had wished His efforts to humble Harvard University and cut the federal workforce have encountered legal obstacles And he s running up against reality as his pledges to hurriedly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have turned into slogs The laws of political gravity the separation of powers and geopolitical realities are proving to be tougher to conquer than Trump will publicly admit As various legal skirmishes play out he may have to choose between bowing to the limits of his power or trying to ignore the judicial system If the latter we may have a constitutional dilemma explained University of Texas history professor H W Brands After a second federal court on Thursday detected Trump s tariffs to be improper White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned the Trump administration expects to prevail in its judicial appeals but also indicated that personnel are exploring other laws to implement tariffs A federal appeals court disclosed Thursday the ruling body can continue to collect the tariffs under the emergency powers law for now as the Trump administration challenges the ruling though the executive could be obligated to refund the money if the ruling is upheld Kevin Hassett director of the White House National Economic Council declared there are two baseball caps in the room behind the Oval Office that say Trump Invariably Wins and Trump has been right about everything Trump does reliably win these negotiations because we re right Hassett disclosed on Fox Business Setup s Mornings with Maria These activist judges are trying to slow down something right in the middle of really crucial negotiations Part of Trump s challenge lies in the nature of the job in which only the thorniest of problems cross his desk But there s also the fact that Trump s keen instincts for what plays well on TV don t necessarily help with the nitty-gritty of guidelines details By unilaterally ordering tariffs deportations and other actions through the White House Trump is bypassing both Congress and the broader population which could have given more popular legitimacy to his program choices disclosed Princeton University history professor Julian Zelizer The president is trying to achieve his goals outside normal legal processes and without focusing on populace buy-in Zelizer declared The difficulty is that we do have a constitutional system and there are a large number of things a president can t do The courts are solely saying no The reality is that a multitude of of his boldest decisions stand on an incredibly fragile foundation As Trump sees it his tariffs would solve genuine problems His Liberation Day taxes on imports would close persistent deal imbalances with other countries with his baseline tariff providing a stream of revenue to help offset the trillions of dollars in federal borrowing that would be created by his planned income tax cuts But when the financial markets panicked and the interest charged on U S debt shot up Trump backtracked and ratcheted down plenty of of his tariffs to while negotiations began to take place Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested this had been the plan all along to force new agreement negotiations But Trump shortly undercut him by saying on the White House South Lawn that he backed down because the financial markets were getting yippy a reminder that Trump s own improvisatory and disruptive style can upend any working initiative process Trump still has tariffs in place on autos steel and aluminum Those are tied to the premise that imports would create national protection risks based on previous investigations under Section of the Business Expansion Act of He could use other laws to start new investigations or temporarily impose tariffs but the White House has ruled out those possibilities for the moment as it challenges the court ruling What is unprecedented is Trump asserting authority under a statute that had never been used for tariffs not just for targeted tariffs but the largest tariffs since the s revealed Peter Harrell a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served in the Biden White House That s what is unprecedented and rare Harrell mentioned Trump could re-create multiple of his tariffs using other laws but it would require more work and be a much more orderly process Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkley announced Trump s sense of the presidency relies on a deep misreading of the office He mistakenly assumes that the tariffs used in the th century to fund a much smaller federal regime would now be able to pay for a much larger federal governing body But he also assumes that power flows to and from him rather than from institutions and the rule of law He doesn t seem to realize that anytime he doesn t listen to the court orders that he s making an anti-American message Brinkley disclosed It s telling people that I m bigger than the American Constitution that judges are just errand boys for me The Trump White House blamed its latest setback on the U S Court of International Bargain White House deal adviser Peter Navarro stated in a Bloomberg News interview that the judicial branch was part of the obstacle keeping Trump from delivering on his promises We ve got courts in this country who are basically engaged in attacks on the American people Navarro explained The president ran on stopping the fentanyl poisoning stopping international bargain unfair practices from stealing our factories and jobs And courts keep getting in the way of that Source