Copy of AFF Sentinel V22 #21-TROs and PIs and TPA
- Steve Dittmer
- Jul 22
- 3 min read
Judicial Activism and Trade Complexities
Steve Dittmer | AFF Sentinel
Colorado Springs, CO
Originally sent to subscribers 03/19/25
The crazies are torching Teslas as part of their overt “Resistance” campaign. The more hidden lefties are -- as usual -- using the legal court system as their form of resistance.
One thing we learned today is how judges are using every tool at their disposal to slow up President Trump’s moves to implement the government agenda he was elected by the American people to accomplish.
We’re referring to eliminating some government employees, government programs, agencies, DEI programs, criminal illegals, etc.
Turns out that there is a crucial difference between a temporary restraining order (TRO) and a preliminary injunction (PI) that judges are using to stymie the Administration’s moves. Temporary Restraining Orders last typically for 10-14 days. Preliminary Injunctions, by contrast, are long-term orders, requiring the case to work its way up through the courts, delaying the case for months or years. TROs cannot usually be immediately appealed.
You can guess what route the judges have been selecting.
The Administration may be forced to take a page out of the Democrat playbook: do what you want to do now and tie the actions up in the courts for years.
On another legal front, you may well remember the case of Kelo vs. New London (2005), wherein the city took property by eminent domain not for public infrastructure like a road or bridge but to sell to other private citizens. The Supreme Court ruled that public use included more jobs or increased tax revenue. The case was considered by many a horrible abuse of the Takings Clause.
Suzette Kelo’s pink house of 60 years residence and dozens of others were razed and the land cleared but the development of the land upon which SCOTUS relied upon never happened. The land is reportedly still vacant 20 years later.
SCOTUS is now in the process of reviewing a similar New York case. It’s unknown what could happen but they must have seen something or they would not have agreed to review the case.
A very interesting wrinkle has cropped up regarding reciprocal tariffs. You may recall us noting that Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) was up for renewal in 2021. That is the permission to negotiate trade deals granted to the presidents by Congress. But since President Biden had little interest in trade, he did not push for renewal of the TPA.
Apparently, without TPA, President Trump would not have the authority to lower our tariffs to reciprocate other nations’ lower tariffs (“Congress, Let Trump Cut Tariffs,” Wall Street Journal, 03/18/25). Under current policy, he has authority to raise tariffs under national emergency or unfair trade practice conditions. But to lower them, Congress would need to renew TPA. And that has not been easy in recent years.
That is against the backdrop of trying to meet Trump’s goal of devising a reciprocal plan by April 2. That leaves them about two weeks to devise a plan on how to handle reciprocity for the hundreds of countries the U.S. trades with. The top minds in the Administration have spent lots of time discussing how this could be done but no solid plan seems to have been settled on (“Official Fine-Tune Reciprocal Tariffs Plan,” Wall Street Journal, 03/19/25).
It appears “the plan” the above headline seems to refer to doesn’t exist. One major proposal has evidently been discarded.
Our guess it is the non-tariff trade barriers and subsidies that are proving difficult to handle. It wouldn’t be too tough to dump the present actual tariff numbers into a spreadsheet and add a couple columns. But figuring out how to discover and assign a value to barriers and subsidies might pose a problem.
They could just go with the tariff figures themselves in a first phase and later add in adjustments for barriers and subsidies. They might even allow countries to provide information and propose values themselves in order to speed up the process.
Any way one looks at it, it’s quite a task and risks more unhappiness without solid justification.
Maybe Elon’s whiz kids can figure something out.
Our address: Agribusiness Freedom Foundation, P.O. Box 88179, Colorado Springs, CO. 80908.
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