The odd part is that Congress, at any time, can revoke these tariffs but are choosing not to do so because they need them for the tax cuts the GOP will legislate later this year.
The only sad thing during this whole ordeal is how ineffectual democratic politicians are... especially when they personally dealt with minority parties stopping them quite easily for the last 15 years. You'd think they'd learn some lessons but their failure to seize the moment is the only consistency they have.
The democrats blew it by believing Americans were educated. Now they have ZERO POWER. They don't control the executive branch, they don't control the legislative branch, and they don't control the judicial branch. I'm not sure WTF you expect Democrats to do now. It's not like Americans don't have access to a plethora of history books informing them exactly how this will play out. Too bad they don't read.
The Democrats blew it by being unresponsive to their voters' material demands and instead doubling down on hollow NGO speak. They preferred to run issue-free "vibes" campaigns.
The same business-industrial class captures them as the Republicans. Neither party is genuinely going to organize around class or material needs.
The real threat to America or Americans isn't a single man. It's the superstructure that enabled him.
In other words: "Wer hat uns verraten? The Democratic Party."
But they weren't unresponsive to the actual needs of their voters. Biden was one of the most successful presidents in US history, but in this Republican-led post-factual world facts don't matter. The blame for that rests solely on US citizens. They've allowed themselves to be lulled into the fantasy that the party will continue on and on regardless of reality. Well, the party is over.
Gaza was not a need of the vast majority of their voters, whatever a handful of college kids who are utterly incapable of understanding basic international politics think of themselves.
Neither is Bernie’s idiotic version of Medicare for all, in spite of it being a fun bumper sticker.
Y’all have gotta give up the TikTok bullshit and read some books.
Voters don't respond to long-term policy wins or economic data.
They respond to the perception of their material conditions, and the rise in inflation of the last few years has resulted in regime change all over the world.
Liberals are only just now beginning to realize this, but it remains to be seen if they'll learn at a scale that matters.
I was a Biden voter, but he was a weak and deeply disappointing president who exercised awful judgment on multiple occasions: running for re-election at his advanced age, not sacking Lloyd Austin for either the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal or going on cancer leave without telling anyone, not taking the lead on ending the COVID emergency (Colorado's Jared Polis was ahead of the White House on that), having so little control over White House interns that they released open letters against official Biden Israel policy, failing to take inflation seriously, etc.
Republicans are awful, but Democrats don't seem to want to do any better than "at least we're not them." It shouldn't be any surprise that Trump has (had?) real appeal over feckless national Democrats.
> Biden was one of the most successful presidents in US history
Biden? If that man was actually the one leading the country over the last 2+ years, I’ll eat your hat. All that is coming out now from multiple sources in the administration seem to indicate he hasn’t been capable of making many decisions for quite a while now.
Can you give a few of the specific "multiple sources" you mention?
I see posters on HN trot this out, but I'm yet to see any evidence of this. Can you point to a couple of reliable news sources reporting on this so I can read more for myself?
There are two books that literally have dropped in the last 2 weeks and the authors have been doing a lot of media about them. One is called “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” another is called “Uncharted: How Trump beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History”. Both of these books quote anecdotes from Biden admin insiders and dem politicians about the challenges they saw and experienced.
DNC fundraiser Lindi Li has been all over the podcasts and news (back in November a lot) talking about the challenges she saw.
I’m not sure what you consider “reliable news sources” but I have seen this topic and these authors, and Lindi Li on network, cable, and new media news sources across the spectrum.
It's always interesting when you see a new meme emerging from the rightwing information wormhole into the open internet. This week's must be "NGO" used as some type of slur.
Anyway, the economy was rocking under Biden, we had the largest investments in manufacturing in decades (the advanced kind, not mud production), record low unemployment, stonks going up, etc.
Inflation is pretty much the only issue that mattered, which was a global phenomenon that America navigated better than anyone else, and there's almost nothing to say about it. Well, you can lie and say that you'll reduce prices on day one, despite having no mechanism to do so, which I suppose is the real takeaway: Dems should blatantly lie more.
They totally did. Sorry but no one but rightwing information wormhole seen NGO as something nefarious in principle. It is just laundering far right bullshit again.
So anyone critical of the Gates Foundation for distorting public health priorities through his NGO slush-funds is participating in "far right bullshit" again?
It has zero to do with material demands. Those lost the elections. What won them was conservatives stroking fears about trans, women and such. Talking about material demands is just repeating past mistakes.
Actual economical or other results have nothing to do with anything. It was not about that. Democrats thinking them being objectively better for economy might do something is what looses the elections.
The only reason those evergreen moral panics worked is the radio silence from the Biden and Harris campaigns on what concrete things they would do differently if given the chance at another term.
Instead, voters were told they were better off than ever, and there was some astroturfed panic about "Project 2025."
> they need them for the tax cuts the GOP will legislate later this year.
They're also playing games where new time-limited tax cuts are counted as "costs" for their planned lifetime, but now, later, they're claiming renewing the same cuts costs nothing because they're already there. [0]
This is like a man with a mid-life crisis renting a fancy sports car saying "just one month is quite affordable", except next month he extends the lease, saying "this is fine, it's already in the budget so it doesn't cost us extra."
That matters because they're using this fake math to try to trigger special rules which let them pass budgets with fewer votes.
> The odd part is that Congress, at any time, can revoke these tariffs
Side note: Originally the law (IEEAP, 1977) [1] allowed Congress to revoke them with 50% of each house. But few years later the Supreme Court ruled that mechanism unconstitutional. This means it now requires a veto-proof supermajority of >66.6% in each house.
So yeah, with enough votes this could be done in a very short time-frame... but "enough" is such a big number that it requires most of the GOP to decide it doesn't want to destroy America after all.
I recall that the GOP once introduced a bill requiring congressional approval for any changes to tariffs. I believe it was proposed sometime around 2015—or perhaps even earlier, around 2005. I’m not entirely sure of the exact date. What I do remember is that Democrats strongly opposed the bill at the time, as they were generally supportive of tariffs during that period.
Now, interestingly, the GOP has shifted to being largely pro-tariff—except for a few staunch free-market conservatives like Rand Paul.
Being pro-rational-tariffs and being pro massive tariffs that are calculated as ration of export deficit and originally used to damage former allies are two different thigns.
As in, I could buy tariffs as a strategic decision to help build own industry in some are ... but these are just not that. These were originally used in conjunction with annexation threats, then with lies and are deployed with no regards to own citizens.
They aren't pro-tariff, and the dissent will grow. But the GOP is absolutely captured by the Trump cult. Any deviation from conformance with whatever nonsensical thing Trump says today is seen as disloyalty by the cult. Normal checks and balances are gone.
Mmmm, I'm not so sure about that anymore ... at least not for a while yet.
Trump has a lot of leeway to declare emergency rulings and to have those enforced in the short term. Such powers come with a short leash that require appeals to be addressed in a short time frame.
That mechanism was upended twenty four days ago when US Republicians effectively "stopped time" ..
Each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622) with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the President on February 1, 2025.
"Each day [..] shall not constitute a calendar day"
This does not appear (on my admittedly brief search) to be something routine in US resolutions.
There's some further commentary here:
The Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to impose tariffs. But the International Emergency Economic Powers Act allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which Trump did on February 1. That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency, but if such a termination is introduced—as Democrats have recently done—it has to be taken up in a matter of days.
But this would force Republicans to go on record as either supporting or opposing the unpopular economic ideology Trump and Musk are imposing. So Republicans just passed a measure saying that for the rest of this congressional session, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day” for the purposes of terminating Trump’s emergency declaration.
* The appeal has to be heard and voted on within X number of "Calendar days"
* "Calendar days" usually means "every day of the week, including weekends and holidays, as a 24-hour period from one midnight to the next."
* However this term has been "redefined in a context" such that it no longer means that ... (just with respect to the appeal against Trump's tariff powers)
with the result that the filed appeal will never be heard or voted on within the current session.
Programmers likely are familier with changing the meaning or type of things within a context .. it's a procedural version of that.
They were stopped because they were following the rules to enact change: legislation. Trump is just blatantly subverting the constitution, there's no vote they can block or fill buster. It's done. Over. Kaput.
I'm so tired of hearing that even when it's the Republican's fault, it's the Democrats to blame for not... What? Committing an assassination? They have zero power in the federal government. No house, no senate, no judicial, no executive. Nothing.
McConnell has brought the Senate to an absolute standstill during key democratic legislation like several dozen times. Why is he a more effective minority leader than Schumer? Worse, why is Schumer not using the same tactics McConnell did? He knows they're effective.
You are right tho, it is the fault of Republicans in Congress to let it come to this point.
All the more reason to expand the house in the future.
Please, show me the bill they signed for these tariffs. Please, show me the bill for DOGE. The dissolving of the DoE. The mass firing of federal employees.
Democrats cannot do anything because Trump has dissolved the power of the legislative branch and Republicans are capitulating. He is acting unconstitutionally as a king who declared unilateral edicts. The only they can do is sue in the courts afterwards, but they would still need standing, which politicians lack.
It has nothing to do with legislation- the tariff power lies with the legislature inherently under the Constitution. They can revoke the delegation to the executive at any time.
What about the fact of Democrats having ZERO POWER in the legislature did you not understand? The Republicans have taken over America lock, stock, and barrel. Legally, there's nothing that can be done to stop them until 2026. By then it won't matter. It already doesn't matter. America is already finished. It's over.
Buddy I promise you I live in a much redder state than you and I didn’t give up in the last 10 years and neither should you. That being said, I do plan on moving to a swing state by 2026 and voting. If you think two or three votes in the house is like the seventh seal, I don’t know what to tell you. You sound like my roommate in 2016 who busted in the door the night of the election saying that trans people they knew on forums had decided to kill themselves and I snapped at him they should at least wait until all the votes are counted and the electoral college was finished. I would rather take my cues from the two black men walking down the street in front of my house the next day with one of them saying to the other they’d survived 400 years of this and they’d survive Trump too.
Voters too, but the fact that the business community gave no serious pushback given what was at stake and anyone with Econ 101 exposure could clearly foresee grave consequences... This is their wheelhouse for crying out loud. Voters aren't always sophisticated but Wall Street should know better.
Feel free to school me on all the valid reasons they had. Just bear in mind that I have no love for the opposing party either, I just consider them the lesser of two evils.
I don't feel arrogant about this, I feel depressed and angry.
The odd part is that Congress, at any time, can revoke these tariffs but are choosing not to do so because they need them for the tax cuts the GOP will legislate later this year.
The only sad thing during this whole ordeal is how ineffectual democratic politicians are... especially when they personally dealt with minority parties stopping them quite easily for the last 15 years. You'd think they'd learn some lessons but their failure to seize the moment is the only consistency they have.
The democrats blew it by believing Americans were educated. Now they have ZERO POWER. They don't control the executive branch, they don't control the legislative branch, and they don't control the judicial branch. I'm not sure WTF you expect Democrats to do now. It's not like Americans don't have access to a plethora of history books informing them exactly how this will play out. Too bad they don't read.
The Democrats blew it by being unresponsive to their voters' material demands and instead doubling down on hollow NGO speak. They preferred to run issue-free "vibes" campaigns.
The same business-industrial class captures them as the Republicans. Neither party is genuinely going to organize around class or material needs.
The real threat to America or Americans isn't a single man. It's the superstructure that enabled him.
In other words: "Wer hat uns verraten? The Democratic Party."
> The Democrats blew it by being unresponsive to their voters' material demands
The margin is so close that one can name any of a dozen reasons why they blew it and be totally correct.
The Democrats blew it by no cravenly violating norms like refusing to seat a supreme court justice because it was too close to an election.
But they weren't unresponsive to the actual needs of their voters. Biden was one of the most successful presidents in US history, but in this Republican-led post-factual world facts don't matter. The blame for that rests solely on US citizens. They've allowed themselves to be lulled into the fantasy that the party will continue on and on regardless of reality. Well, the party is over.
> But they weren't unresponsive to the actual needs of their voters.
Medicare for all? A cease-fire in Gaza and an end to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?
Gaza was not a need of the vast majority of their voters, whatever a handful of college kids who are utterly incapable of understanding basic international politics think of themselves.
Neither is Bernie’s idiotic version of Medicare for all, in spite of it being a fun bumper sticker.
Y’all have gotta give up the TikTok bullshit and read some books.
Voters don't respond to long-term policy wins or economic data.
They respond to the perception of their material conditions, and the rise in inflation of the last few years has resulted in regime change all over the world.
Liberals are only just now beginning to realize this, but it remains to be seen if they'll learn at a scale that matters.
I was a Biden voter, but he was a weak and deeply disappointing president who exercised awful judgment on multiple occasions: running for re-election at his advanced age, not sacking Lloyd Austin for either the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal or going on cancer leave without telling anyone, not taking the lead on ending the COVID emergency (Colorado's Jared Polis was ahead of the White House on that), having so little control over White House interns that they released open letters against official Biden Israel policy, failing to take inflation seriously, etc.
Republicans are awful, but Democrats don't seem to want to do any better than "at least we're not them." It shouldn't be any surprise that Trump has (had?) real appeal over feckless national Democrats.
> Biden was one of the most successful presidents in US history
Biden? If that man was actually the one leading the country over the last 2+ years, I’ll eat your hat. All that is coming out now from multiple sources in the administration seem to indicate he hasn’t been capable of making many decisions for quite a while now.
Can you give a few of the specific "multiple sources" you mention?
I see posters on HN trot this out, but I'm yet to see any evidence of this. Can you point to a couple of reliable news sources reporting on this so I can read more for myself?
There are two books that literally have dropped in the last 2 weeks and the authors have been doing a lot of media about them. One is called “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” another is called “Uncharted: How Trump beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History”. Both of these books quote anecdotes from Biden admin insiders and dem politicians about the challenges they saw and experienced.
DNC fundraiser Lindi Li has been all over the podcasts and news (back in November a lot) talking about the challenges she saw.
I’m not sure what you consider “reliable news sources” but I have seen this topic and these authors, and Lindi Li on network, cable, and new media news sources across the spectrum.
It's always interesting when you see a new meme emerging from the rightwing information wormhole into the open internet. This week's must be "NGO" used as some type of slur.
Anyway, the economy was rocking under Biden, we had the largest investments in manufacturing in decades (the advanced kind, not mud production), record low unemployment, stonks going up, etc.
Inflation is pretty much the only issue that mattered, which was a global phenomenon that America navigated better than anyone else, and there's almost nothing to say about it. Well, you can lie and say that you'll reduce prices on day one, despite having no mechanism to do so, which I suppose is the real takeaway: Dems should blatantly lie more.
The terms NGO-speak or PMC didn't come from some "rightwing information wormhole."
These are very real ideas and concepts that average people internally and instinctively revile: they are no longer people but "human resources."
Oooookay
?
Ok.
They totally did. Sorry but no one but rightwing information wormhole seen NGO as something nefarious in principle. It is just laundering far right bullshit again.
So anyone critical of the Gates Foundation for distorting public health priorities through his NGO slush-funds is participating in "far right bullshit" again?
This is demagoguery.
It has zero to do with material demands. Those lost the elections. What won them was conservatives stroking fears about trans, women and such. Talking about material demands is just repeating past mistakes.
Actual economical or other results have nothing to do with anything. It was not about that. Democrats thinking them being objectively better for economy might do something is what looses the elections.
The only reason those evergreen moral panics worked is the radio silence from the Biden and Harris campaigns on what concrete things they would do differently if given the chance at another term.
Instead, voters were told they were better off than ever, and there was some astroturfed panic about "Project 2025."
> Astroturfed Panic
Oh, please, if this isn't you just saying the quite part out loud.
They are enacting Project 2025. Significant portions are already done, for God's sake! Don't pretend like it's some Boogeyman made up thing!
"If Americans were educated and could read they would vote Democrat..."
EXACTLY the thinking that won Trump the election. Reduce legitimate concerns to the deplorable desires of the unwashed masses.
We need another "Why Trump won?" postmortem, as it seems people haven't learned yet.
We're still having to explain to adults that tariffs are, in fact, a consumer tax. We're not bringing crayons to the meeting for ourselves here.
> they need them for the tax cuts the GOP will legislate later this year.
They're also playing games where new time-limited tax cuts are counted as "costs" for their planned lifetime, but now, later, they're claiming renewing the same cuts costs nothing because they're already there. [0]
This is like a man with a mid-life crisis renting a fancy sports car saying "just one month is quite affordable", except next month he extends the lease, saying "this is fine, it's already in the budget so it doesn't cost us extra."
That matters because they're using this fake math to try to trigger special rules which let them pass budgets with fewer votes.
> The odd part is that Congress, at any time, can revoke these tariffs
Side note: Originally the law (IEEAP, 1977) [1] allowed Congress to revoke them with 50% of each house. But few years later the Supreme Court ruled that mechanism unconstitutional. This means it now requires a veto-proof supermajority of >66.6% in each house.
So yeah, with enough votes this could be done in a very short time-frame... but "enough" is such a big number that it requires most of the GOP to decide it doesn't want to destroy America after all.
[0] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/republicans-tax-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Econom...
I thought they are a negotiating tactic for countries that have their own anti-us tariffs.
I recall that the GOP once introduced a bill requiring congressional approval for any changes to tariffs. I believe it was proposed sometime around 2015—or perhaps even earlier, around 2005. I’m not entirely sure of the exact date. What I do remember is that Democrats strongly opposed the bill at the time, as they were generally supportive of tariffs during that period.
Now, interestingly, the GOP has shifted to being largely pro-tariff—except for a few staunch free-market conservatives like Rand Paul.
Strange world …
Being pro-rational-tariffs and being pro massive tariffs that are calculated as ration of export deficit and originally used to damage former allies are two different thigns.
As in, I could buy tariffs as a strategic decision to help build own industry in some are ... but these are just not that. These were originally used in conjunction with annexation threats, then with lies and are deployed with no regards to own citizens.
They aren't pro-tariff, and the dissent will grow. But the GOP is absolutely captured by the Trump cult. Any deviation from conformance with whatever nonsensical thing Trump says today is seen as disloyalty by the cult. Normal checks and balances are gone.
Mmmm, I'm not so sure about that anymore ... at least not for a while yet.
Trump has a lot of leeway to declare emergency rulings and to have those enforced in the short term. Such powers come with a short leash that require appeals to be addressed in a short time frame.
That mechanism was upended twenty four days ago when US Republicians effectively "stopped time" ..
~ https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolutio..."Each day [..] shall not constitute a calendar day"
This does not appear (on my admittedly brief search) to be something routine in US resolutions.
There's some further commentary here:
~ https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-12-2025I honestly don't understand this "stopped time" tactic? Reading the sources seems more confusing.
Can someone explain like I'm a college freshman?
It's an odd piece of procedural technicality.
* Trump declared emergency Tariff powers.
* An appeal was made to stop this.
* The appeal has to be heard and voted on within X number of "Calendar days"
* "Calendar days" usually means "every day of the week, including weekends and holidays, as a 24-hour period from one midnight to the next."
* However this term has been "redefined in a context" such that it no longer means that ... (just with respect to the appeal against Trump's tariff powers)
with the result that the filed appeal will never be heard or voted on within the current session.
Programmers likely are familier with changing the meaning or type of things within a context .. it's a procedural version of that.
They were stopped because they were following the rules to enact change: legislation. Trump is just blatantly subverting the constitution, there's no vote they can block or fill buster. It's done. Over. Kaput.
I'm so tired of hearing that even when it's the Republican's fault, it's the Democrats to blame for not... What? Committing an assassination? They have zero power in the federal government. No house, no senate, no judicial, no executive. Nothing.
McConnell has brought the Senate to an absolute standstill during key democratic legislation like several dozen times. Why is he a more effective minority leader than Schumer? Worse, why is Schumer not using the same tactics McConnell did? He knows they're effective.
You are right tho, it is the fault of Republicans in Congress to let it come to this point.
All the more reason to expand the house in the future.
Because.
There.
Was.
No.
Vote.
Please, show me the bill they signed for these tariffs. Please, show me the bill for DOGE. The dissolving of the DoE. The mass firing of federal employees.
Democrats cannot do anything because Trump has dissolved the power of the legislative branch and Republicans are capitulating. He is acting unconstitutionally as a king who declared unilateral edicts. The only they can do is sue in the courts afterwards, but they would still need standing, which politicians lack.
It has nothing to do with legislation- the tariff power lies with the legislature inherently under the Constitution. They can revoke the delegation to the executive at any time.
What about the fact of Democrats having ZERO POWER in the legislature did you not understand? The Republicans have taken over America lock, stock, and barrel. Legally, there's nothing that can be done to stop them until 2026. By then it won't matter. It already doesn't matter. America is already finished. It's over.
Buddy I promise you I live in a much redder state than you and I didn’t give up in the last 10 years and neither should you. That being said, I do plan on moving to a swing state by 2026 and voting. If you think two or three votes in the house is like the seventh seal, I don’t know what to tell you. You sound like my roommate in 2016 who busted in the door the night of the election saying that trans people they knew on forums had decided to kill themselves and I snapped at him they should at least wait until all the votes are counted and the electoral college was finished. I would rather take my cues from the two black men walking down the street in front of my house the next day with one of them saying to the other they’d survived 400 years of this and they’d survive Trump too.
Voters too, but the fact that the business community gave no serious pushback given what was at stake and anyone with Econ 101 exposure could clearly foresee grave consequences... This is their wheelhouse for crying out loud. Voters aren't always sophisticated but Wall Street should know better.
Actually, about 31% of the voters blew it. There were ~245M eligible voters and ~77M cast the deciding vote.
My faith in American "democracy" has faded significantly.
edit: fix the vote count.
That would make it well over half of eligible voters who blew it. Those who chose incorrectly as well as those who chose no vote at all.
I wonder if you can appreciate just how arrogant that sounds. Even if you disagree, people generally have reasons they act the way they do.
Feel free to school me on all the valid reasons they had. Just bear in mind that I have no love for the opposing party either, I just consider them the lesser of two evils.
I don't feel arrogant about this, I feel depressed and angry.
I’m sorry, are you saying that a decision is correct because it is popular?
If they didn't vote, they are, by definition, not "voters".
I prefaced it with eligible which sets the context for the outcome, i.e., what kind of "mandate" is implied by the outcome.