Trump Decides The State Should Run US Businesses, Orders Them To Stop Doing Business With China

Legal Issues

from the definition-of-'emergency'-is-now-'things-Trump-doesn't-like' dept

President Trump is back at it, misusing his emergency powers to declare difficult situations “national emergencies” so he can get what he wants. When Congress rejected his border wall funding, Trump simply declared an influx of immigrants a “national emergency.” How an uptick in families seeking citizenship and/or asylum suddenly became a threat to the nation as a whole went unexplained.

What did go explained were the President’s reasons for declaring a national emergency. During his press conference, he made it clear there was actually no emergency. This was done solely to secure the funding Congress said he couldn’t have. If our representatives possessed any collective backbone, this would have been rolled back by Congress with a veto-proof rejection of this non-emergency emergency declaration.

Trump has done it again. He’s now “ordering” US companies to stop doing business with China. This wasn’t delivered as an Executive Order or proposed legislation. Rather, it was delivered via tweets from a miffed president who has declared — and been repeatedly shown these assertions are false — that trade wars are:

A. Good
B. Easy to win

Here’s the relevant part of this tweet thread if you’re unable to read/see the embed:

The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP. Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing ….your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.

Going head-to-head with a powerful world economy — one that also holds 20% of the US government’s debts — is a terrible idea. Since the President assumes trade deals are zero sum, we’re stuck with tariffs flying back and forth between the United States and China like chips in the world’s stupidest (and most dangerous) game of poker.

Roughly 12 hours after his mini-tweetstorm, the President finally discovered a way to justify his unexpected conversion to Communism.

Here’s Trump’s devastating riposte to all the haters:

If you can’t read/see it, it says:

For all of the Fake News Reporters that don’t have a clue as to what the law is relative to Presidential powers, China, etc., try looking at the Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. Case closed!

Hi, Tim Cushing, Fake News: We’ve all spent quite a bit of time reading the IEEPA (the “I” stands for “International”) of 1977 for years now, since every president since George W. Bush has misused it — along with the National Emergency Act — to expand the government’s power. In fact, we were just re-reading its domestic counterpart a few months ago when Trump conjured an “emergency” out of thin air to grab money Congress refused to appropriate for his pet project.

The thing is the law doesn’t allow the president to use emergency powers in non-emergencies. In both cases — China and the Border Wall — there’s no national emergency involved. There are only things President Trump has decided to call emergencies so he can use his emergency powers. As Joshua Geltzer explains for Just Security, Trump is going beyond the bounds of the law with this current “order,” as well as his border-focused declaration from earlier this year:

Whatever one thinks of the laws currently on the books, Trump is breaking them… An increase in families entering the United States simply isn’t a “national emergency” of the type contemplated by the National Emergencies Act (NEA). It may present a hard policy challenge, but many things do. For President Trump to insist that it’s a “national emergency” represents not statutory ambiguity but presidential lawlessness. And, indeed, we all know why President Trump really invoked the NEA: because he failed to convince Congress to approve his wall funding.

The same form of lawlessness is evident in Trump’s recent reference to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). That law specifies that a national emergency can be declared “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” Trump’s escalation of a self-initiated trade war with China and inability to cut whatever deal might be necessary to end it are hardly the type of threat described by the IEEPA’s text. Indeed, to whatever extent we’re now facing an “unusual . . . threat . . . to the . . . economy of the United States,” its source appears to be not “outside the United States” but inside the Oval Office. If Trump in fact invokes the IEEPA to restrict American commercial activity in China, he’ll be replicating his treatment of the NEA not in using federal law but in violating federal law.

The problem is Trump can continue to break the law until one of the other branches stops him. Congress flunked the first test in February when it failed to bring a supermajority to the veto table following Trump’s border wall emergency declaration. Five months down the road, it seems doubtful there are enough Congressional reps from Trump’s party willing to stand up against the president’s abuse of his powers should Trump follow through with another emergency declaration.

That leaves it up to the courts. Fortunately, the courts don’t really care what the President thinks about them because they’re not — certain judges aside — partisan fanboys willing to overlook lawfulness for the sake of owning the libs/destroying the US economy to teach China a lesson.

The quickest route would be Congress. Maybe the House will surprise us this time around. The courts are the longer route, but more likely to actually get the job done. The law may be broad, but it cannot be used to declare tit-for-tat tariffs an “international emergency.”

Filed Under: china, donald trump, national emergencies