Too many forgotten laws
The courts have looked unfavorably on Trump's tariffs. Now, while an appeals court ponders one such ruling, someone has found a law that hadn't been considered before.
The America First Policy Institute wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief on Tuesday that a key law wasn't considered in a previous court decision that found Trump didn't have unilateral authority to impose tariffs.
I'm sure the various courts will have various things to say about it. What I find interesting is this poor little law that once was lost and now is found turns out to not have been lost at all. The "Tariff Act of 1930" is better known as the infamous "Smoots-Hawley Tariff Act", and has been discussed in many articles about Trump's tariffs, generally saying either later laws repealed it or amended it or replaced it, or it's still in force but doesn't authorize Trump's tariffs, and that Trump has never argued it authorizes his tariffs. It certainly wasn't hiding in plain sight. Or I could be out of touch, considering how many of these cases there are and how many courts have weighed in.
But that's not the point. The point is that some lawyers think brushing off a 95 year old law is a winning argument, and Trump's lawyers either didn't know about it or didn't think it was a winning argument.
Makes me wonder how many more laws are still on the books, forgotten until some law clerk gets bored and opens up a dusty 200-year-old volume. Every once in a while, someone makes a list of the top ten stupidest forgotten laws, like being illegal to carry sheep on a trolley car.
There are still Constitutional Amendments which could be ratified.
The Congressional Apportionment Amendment from 1789 (!) got its last state approval in 1791 and has stalled ever since.
The Titles of Nobility Amendment from 1810 would strip citizenship from anyone who accepted a title of nobility from an "emperor, king, prince or foreign power".
The Corwin Amendment from 1851 was intended to explicitly approve slavery and prevent the Civil War. Hmmm ... wouldn't approval have meant that slavery was illegal before, that all current slaves were not slaves, and leave all former slave owners liable to kidnapping charges?
The Child Labor Amendment from 1924 stalled, and then Congress passed a law in 1938 doing the same thing, which the Supreme Court said was OK in 1941. I guess the Constitution wasn't quite as clear as they thought.
And the Congressional Compensation Act of 1789 was ratified as the 27th Amendment in 1992, 203 years later, because some 19-year-old student found it in 1982 and apparently spent 10 years pushing its ratification. All it does is say that Congressional pay raises don't take effect until there's been an election. Heavens, I bet that scares a lot of Congress Critters!
It's ridiculous having laws and proposed amendments hanging around for so long. Common sense says if a law has been forgotten, it should be dead. The charter of course has a simple solution: all bylaws expire in 1.5 years unless explicitly renewed.
I bet if someone did propose any such automatic expiration Constitutional Amendment, and someone did generate a list of all such forgotten laws, Congress would freak out and renew all of them. "We mustn't be hasty." "We shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater." "There might be gold in there."