Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts ‘losing patience with Trump’
As we try to make sense of what may or may not be happening to the checks and balances and separation of powers our country is based on, I appreciate the insights of former longtime Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse.
So I want to note her opinion article last week in The New York Times.
Chief Justice Roberts was usually in the majority on the unsigned and generally unexplained orders over the past year that “had the real-world effect of enabling the president to carry out his agenda, including slashing the federal work force and gutting lifesaving foreign assistance programs,” she says.
But Roberts “probably isn’t happy with the drip-drip-drip of public perception — reflected in polls and social media chatter — that the court was handing the president a blank check.”
The ruling on President Trump’s tariffs was the first of the court’s rulings, after full briefing and oral argument, on the merits of one of the second Trump administration’s cases.
In Roberts’ majority opinion explaining why Trump lacked the authority he’d claimed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs on countries all over the world, he was concise, Greenhouse says.
Except for this paragraph:
“Since imposing each set of tariffs, the president has issued several increases, reductions and other modifications. One month after imposing the 10 percent drug trafficking tariffs on Chinese goods, he increased the rate to 20 percent. One month later, he removed a statutory exemption for Chinese goods under $800. Less than a week after imposing the reciprocal tariffs, the president increased the rate on Chinese goods from 34 percent to 84 percent. The very next day, he increased the rate further still, to 125 percent. This brought the total effective tariff rate on most Chinese goods to 145 percent. The president has also shifted sets of goods into and out of the reciprocal tariff framework ([e.g.,] exempting from reciprocal tariffs beef, fruits, coffee, tea, spices and some fertilizers). And he has issued a variety of other adjustments ([e.g.,] extending “the suspension of heightened reciprocal tariffs” on Chinese imports).”
Greenhouse says she thinks the paragraph is a message, not only to Trump but to the world: “a reckless president is sowing chaos in America and around the globe.”
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