Latest news with #executivepower
Washington Post
9 hours ago
- General
- Washington Post
It's called the Library of Congress. But Trump claims it's his.
The Trump White House has a new target in its campaign to expand executive power: the Library of Congress. Never mind the name — administration lawyers are now arguing that the main research library of the legislative branch doesn't actually belong to Congress at all. A legal push to claim the Library as executive turf isn't a one-off. It's the latest move in a broader effort by President Donald Trump and his administration to erase the traditional lines that separate the branches of government.
Wall Street Journal
3 days ago
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Trade Court Strikes Down Trump's ‘Liberation Day' Tariffs
A federal trade court ruled President Trump didn't have the authority to impose sweeping tariffs on virtually every nation, voiding the levies that have sparked a global trade war and threatened to upend the world economy. The decision on Wednesday from the Court of International Trade blocked one of the Trump administration's most audacious assertions of executive power, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, and sets the stage for a possible appeal by the White House.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Trump is ‘remarkably like' 1930s far-right fascists, billionaire investor warns
Donald Trump wants to 'dictate' policies like those of far-right regimes in the 1930s, a leading billionaire investor has warned. Ray Dalio writes in a new book that the US president is acting like a chief executive without a board as he seeks to expand executive power even more aggressively than predecessors Andrew Jackson and Franklin D Roosevelt. Dalio, 75, is the founder of investment firm Bridgewater Associates, one of the world's biggest hedge funds, and a rare critic of the system that generated his wealth. His book How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle addresses the national debt and Trump's attacks on democratic norms. The Guardian obtained a copy. Invoking a decade when fascists such as Adolf Hitler of Germany and Benito Mussolini of Italy were in power, Dalio writes: 'When I say that the policies President Trump is using to 'make America great again' are remarkably like the policies that those of the hard-right countries in the 1930s used, that should not be controversial.' He continues: 'It would be fair to argue that his attempts to maximise the power of the presidency by bypassing the other branches of government are analogous to the ways that Andrew Jackson (of the right) and Franklin D Roosevelt (of the left) did, though he is even more aggressive than they were. We will see how far he will take it.' In times of conflict, Dalio notes, aggressive leaders work to eliminate the opposition, make changes to the law to assume special powers and seize control of the media to produce pro-government propaganda. If conflicts become severe, new laws and punishments target the opposition. Since returning to office in January, Trump has signed a record 152 executive orders, concentrating power and sidelining Congress. He has defied court orders and detained or deported immigrants without due process. He has sought to reward law firms, media companies and universities that bend to his will and punish those that defy him. 'Is Donald Trump a demagogue?' Dalio asks, describing a demagogue as a political leader who gains power by appealing to people's emotions, fears, prejudices and desires, typically stirring up populist sentiment and promising easy solutions to complex problems. 'The question is what will the controls be and how far will Trump push things? Unlike for a CEO, there is no board for the US president. Are there effective regulators in place? If so, it is not clear to me who they are.' Trump's strongman style is a symptom of America's polarised politics, the author argues. 'Donald Trump wants to dictate policies rather than have a classic 'let's work together across party lines' approach to governing. This confrontational approach is an extension of how great internal political conflict has become in recent decades.' Dalio grew up in a middle-class neighborhood on New York's Long Island. He began investing at the age of 12 when caddying at a local golf course. He went to Harvard Business School, had short stints at two Wall Street firms and started Bridgewater in 1975 from a two-bedroom apartment in New York. It went on to become the largest hedge fund in the world. In How Countries Go Broke, Dalio identifies the government's debt – currently more than $36tn – as the US's most serious problem, outlines what he calls the 'Big Debt Cycle' and offers advice on how people can protect themselves from the fallout. The businessman, who correctly predicted the 2008 financial crisis, condemns the Trump administration's cost-cutting measures as likely to have negative consequences because 'many people who will be hurt by them will fight back and valuable support systems will be weakened or eliminated'. He adds that his own wife works to help low-income students in deprived neighbourhoods who suffer from inadequate nutrition. The cancellation of school lunch programmes on which they depend 'will have terrible second-order consequences'. Trump's policies are aimed at moving more money, power and freedom into the hands of the most productive people, Dalio adds. 'It's not easy to manage and improve a country that has been mismanaged and in such a mess while also keeping people happy at a time when democracy is fracturing. I recommend regularly checking on how those in the bottom 60% are doing and feeling.'
Wall Street Journal
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
A Supreme Court Showdown on Trump Firings
The Supreme Court on Thursday let President Trump fire two members of so-called independent agencies without ruling on the merits of their legal challenges. But even the liberal dissent seems resigned that the Court's Humphrey's Executor (1935) precedent is a dead letter. Mr. Trump has been testing the limits of executive power with the goal of teeing up cases for the Supreme Court to reconsider long-standing precedents. He succeeded with his removal of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member Gwynne Wilcox and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) member Cathy Harris, who challenged their dismissal under Humphrey's Executor.
New York Times
23-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Supreme Court Ruled in Favor of Trump. And That Is OK.
It is a sign of the times that the Supreme Court may have just used its emergency docket to all but overrule an important precedent limiting executive power. That precedent is Humphrey's Executor, a New Deal-era case establishing the constitutionality of independent agencies. In a surprising twist, its decision to do so was both predictable and reasonable. The cases before the court were Trump v. Wilcox and Harris v. Bessent, which concern the president's power to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board without showing just cause to do so. Because these boards were created by Congress as independent agencies, the cases will ultimately test whether Congress can create such agencies, or whether the unitary executive theory instead requires them to be under complete presidential control. After lower courts held that the firings were unlawful and that the agency officials should retain (or regain) their offices, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of President Trump. We have plenty of things to worry about in constitutional law today. But those worried about how the court will confront the unprecedented and sometimes unlawful actions of the Trump administration should save their outrage for other cases. In the two cases here, the court held that the president was likely to prevail in his unitary executive claim, that the administration was unduly harmed by allowing the officials to keep their offices while the case was pending, and that this reasoning would not imperil the independence of the Federal Reserve. It did all of this in an emergency order, rather than waiting for the issues to arrive on the court's regular docket. All four of these things are noteworthy and provoked a powerful dissent by Justice Elena Kagan. But in this particular case, all four can be justified. First, the view of a majority of Supreme Court justices that independent agencies are likely unconstitutional is a straightforward application of its most recent precedents. In Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the court held that because the Constitution vests all of the executive power in a single person who is accountable to the whole nation — the president — and because it makes the president responsible for executing the laws, the president must have control over other officials who exercise executive power. In doing so, the court noted that past cases, such as the Humphrey's Executor precedent, had upheld the independence of multimember agencies that did not exercise significant executive power. But it strongly suggested that this exception was very small, and that it would be hard for modern agencies to qualify. Legal observers have long expected the court to follow this logic and overrule Humphrey's Executor sooner rather than later. Those who quarrel with this move (including Justice Kagan) disagree with the entire premise of Seila Law and the unitary executive theory. But there is not much new to see here. The court's view that agency officials should not keep their offices while the litigation is pending is also on strong precedential ground. Under the unitary executive premise, executive power is not theirs to exercise; it is on loan from the president. More important, even earlier cases that had departed from the unitary executive premise did not allow reinstatement as the remedy. One traditional remedy was back pay. A wrongly fired officer could sue for his salary — this is what happened in the Humphrey's Executor case. Other cases sought a remedy of blocking particular enforcement actions. But the precedent for judicially ordered reinstatement or retention is shaky at best. The court's declaration that the Federal Reserve is different also has a plausible basis. In the decades after the nation's founding, practice and precedent firmly established the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, which operated as a corporation with some independence from the president. This suggests that monetary policy is not necessarily executive power. While the Federal Reserve today does many things beyond its core mission of monetary policy, the court would have several options for preserving at least some independent functions for the Federal Reserve. Nor should we be too bothered that the court used the emergency docket in particular to issue such a major statement about independent agencies. Officially, the court was careful not to completely prejudge the legal issues, nor to state definitively that previous precedents about independent agencies would be narrowed or overruled. It made an honest judgment about the likelihood of success on the merits, as the law calls for. Even if it had gone further and made such definitive statements, this is not the kind of case where that should especially concern us. It is bad when the emergency docket forces the justices to quickly take positions on tough issues that they have not had time to consider carefully. But the unitary executive question has been before the court multiple times in recent cases, with extensive briefing and argument. All of the justices have thought carefully about the legal issues and made up their minds about most of them. The president's ruinous tariffs, purported cancellation of birthright citizenship, renditions to foreign prisons and retaliations against his political opponents all raise far graver constitutional problems than the court's ultimately unsurprising order in these cases. We should focus our concern there.
