ALWAYS BET ON THE DEEP STATE:
Most Trump tariffs are not legal, US appeals court rules (Dietrich Knauth and Nate Raymond, August 29, 2025, Reuters)
“The statute bestows significant authority on the President to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency, but none of these actions explicitly include the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax,” the court said. […]
“It seems unlikely that Congress intended, in enacting IEEPA, to depart from its past practice and grant the President unlimited authority to impose tariffs,” the ruling said. “The statute neither mentions tariffs (or any of its synonyms) nor has procedural safeguards that contain clear limits on the President’s power to impose tariffs.”
The 1977 law had historically been used for imposing sanctions on enemies or freezing their assets.
Grand Juries in D.C. Reject Prosecutors’ Efforts to Level Harsh Charges Against Residents (Alan Feuer, Aug. 29, 2025, NY Times)
For the third time in slightly more than a week, grand jurors in Washington have rejected efforts by federal prosecutors to obtain an indictment against a resident accused of a felony assault against a federal agent.The pattern of failure — in what was now three separate cases — suggested that something extraordinary was taking place in the city’s federal courts. It indicated that the ordinary people called upon to sit on grand juries were pushing back against efforts by prosecutors to harshly charge fellow citizens who had encountered law enforcement officers on the streets at a moment when President Trump had flooded them with National Guard troops and federal agents.