A Court Rules Trump's Terrible Tariffs Are Illegal (Again), Dems Need To Fight The Battle In Front Us This Fall - Not The Battle We Wish We Had

The terrible tariffs are providing Dems with an extraordinary opportunity to show that we are for the people and they are for the oligarchs. We need to seize it.

Morning all. Given Trump’s escalating, unhinged and dangerous actions of late - the attempted firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook, the ousters of heads of the Defense Intelligence Agency and Bureau of Labor Statistics, the ongoing illegal occupation of the Capital, the outrageous burying of the Epstein files, the deeply corrupt turning of the DOJ against his political opponents, the torching of the CDC and our public health programs, the rolling out of the red carpet and continued appeasement of Putin, the madman tariff increases - there simply is no reason for Democrats to be approaching the upcoming budget negotiations as something that looks or feels like anything they’ve ever been through before.

Yesterday, the Trump White House made it clear that this is going to be a bare-knuckled brawl and not a traditional negotiation by announcing that they were clawing back $5b in already appropriated foreign aid money through a “pocket rescission” - a process that few in Congress believe is legal. Here’s the Washington Post this morning:

President Donald Trump says he will cancel nearly $5 billion in congressionally approved funding for U.S. international assistance and diplomacy, setting up a fresh confrontation in the White House’s attempt to wrest constitutional spending power away from lawmakers.

The Republican chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Friday called the move an “attempt to undermine the law.”

The move risks complicating talks to avert a looming government shutdown deadline. Federal funding expires Sept. 30, and without new spending laws, broad swaths of the government would shutter. Republicans control both chambers of Congress but need support from Democrats in the Senate to pass spending laws.

Trump and White House budget director Russell Vought took office with plans to challenge Congress’s power of the purse through impoundments, or unilateral moves to cancel legally mandated spending. Impoundments are illegal under a 1974 law that Vought has pledged to challenge in court.

But the White House says it can block funds in a different manner using a loophole in the statute: When the president asks Congress to rescind certain funding, those resources are frozen for 45 days. By sending such a request to Congress within 45 days of the end of the fiscal year, Trump can essentially run out the clock on that funding and cancel it even if lawmakers don’t act, through what’s known as a “pocket rescission.”

A new Foreign Affairs article by Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt, Warnings From Weimar: Why Bargaining With Authoritarianism Fails, offers some powerful and necessary advice for Democrats as we head into the fall budget negotiations:

On March 23, 1933, inside a dimly lit chamber filled with the stale scent of cigar smoke, Ludwig Kaas tried to convince himself he was making the right decision. A Catholic priest and the leader of Germany’s establishment Center Party, he stood at a crossroads. For several years, his party had sought to block Adolf Hitler’s rise. But in 1932, Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis) became the largest force in parliament, and in January 1933, Hitler became chancellor. As he moved to consolidate power, the Center Party had become the last remaining obstacle to his bid for total control over Germany.

Hitler had introduced the Enabling Act, which would allow him and his cabinet sweeping powers to rule by decree, thereby dismantling democracy at its core. The act needed a two-thirds majority to pass. The Social Democrats—the only other significant group of parliamentarians that still fundamentally supported democracy—were too few to stop it alone. If the Center Party also resisted, it could block the act’s passage.

But Kaas hesitated. He feared what would happen if his party defied the Nazis. Would it survive? Could democracy endure if his party resisted? Hitler’s storm troopers had already begun arresting political opponents. Kaas convinced himself that his best option was to cooperate—to work within the new reality rather than be crushed by it. “We must preserve our soul,” he told his colleagues, “but a rejection of the Enabling Act will result in unpleasant consequences for our party.” The act passed, 444 to 94, opening the path to Hitler’s dictatorship.

This episode illustrates the dangerous logic of abdication: the belief that, faced with a rising threat to democracy, surrender is strategy, cooperating with an autocrat is survival, and sparing oneself or one’s party from immediate punishment is worth opening the door to long-term authoritarian rule. Kaas was not alone in this kind of thinking. In the years leading up to that moment, three catastrophic miscalculations—each rooted in short-term maneuvering and self-justification—paved the way for Hitler’s ascent.

Today, this chapter of the Weimar Republic’s history should be revisited. At a moment in which democracy is backsliding in places as varied as Hungary, India, Turkey, and the United States, it is a reminder that democracy often erodes slowly at first, via the gradual surrender of those entrusted to defend it. But with each concession, autocrats become bolder, defenses grow weaker, and reversal becomes harder. Responses that, early on, can feel pragmatic—waiting it out, remaining silent, cutting a deal—only embolden autocrats, leading ultimately to the demise of democracy itself.

In my Tuesday post, Fighting Trump Now, I offered some recommendations to Congressional Dems on how they might approach the fall. Leon Krauze gave our leaders some important advice in the clip I shared yesterday, as does Nathan Heller in our new interview and in his commentary. Here are the four things we here at Hopium are fighting for now:

• Roll back Trump’s terrible and unconstitutional tariffs that are re-igniting inflation and hurting Americans across the country

• Block the expansion of ICE and the use of the military on our streets including DC

• End Trump’s war on science, higher education and our public health; demand the removal of madman Robert Kennedy from HHS - yes we need to FIRE HIM

• Stand with Ukraine and block Trump’s selling out of the West to Putin. Bring back the Senate Russian sanctions bill that has over 80 co-sponsors.

There is no simple or easy path for us this fall. We should be heartened by our continued electoral success and Trump’s dramatic political decline and loosening grip over our public discourse. But this is going to be very hard, and I think our leaders have tough decisions to make. What I hope above all else is that they enter this period with an understanding that we are in a new and dangerous place, a new battlefield with new rules, and that traditional compromise can in this new era of Trump become dangerous appeasement. We need to, as we’ve been saying, keep finding a higher gear as a movement, keep using FDR and the greatness of the Four Freedoms as our inspiration, and fight the battle that is front of us not the one we wish we were fighting or the ones we fought before. It is a new day and new strategies and tactics will have to be used, new arguments will need to be made.

I’ve been encouraged by attempts we’ve seen of late to find that higher gear through greater collaboration of blue state leaders. Modeled on the 23 Dem AGs who meet and organize daily, and have had great success in challenging Trump including yesterday’s big tariff win, we’ve now seen Dem govs pen a joint letter warning Trump about sending National Guard to their states; New England health officials have met about charting a regional, independent course on vaccines and public health; big city mayors have begun meeting to create a united front; and yesterday we learned that Governor Pritzker is exploring ways of buying COVID vaccines for the people of Illinois. From The New Republic’s Greg Sargent:

This week, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker offered an extraordinary viral response to President Trump’s vow to dispatch troops into Chicago. Critically, Pritzker cast Trump as a malignant, active threat to his Illinois constituents—he called them “my people”—and vowed to use every ounce of his power to protect them from harm by the President of the United States. The move’s resonance showed that governors who creatively resist Trump’s malevolent despotism will be seen nationally as leadership figures by voters hungry for politicians to rise to the urgency of the moment.

Trump’s firing of the director of the Centers for Disease Control—which is unleashing an effective decapitation of our public health system, leading experts to fear the nation’s vaccine apparatus is slowly collapsing—provides Democrats with another opening to do exactly this. For ambitious state-level Democrats eager to break through as checks on Trump’s reign of destructiveness, this could represent the next frontier of resistance.

Pritzker’s health department in Illinois is currently exploring the possibility of purchasing Covid-19 vaccines in bulk straight from manufacturers in response to the mess in Washington, a senior Illinois health official confirms to me. Meanwhile, a coalition of mostly-blue states led by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey is planning to coordinate on the purchase and distribution of pediatric vaccines, should the federal government restrict access to them, according to a source familiar with ongoing discussions. This will likely include big states like New York and Pennsylvania.

One hopes and expects that there will be much more of this going forward. Democratic governors have numerous ways to fill the public health leadership void that Trump is creating, according to public health experts I interviewed.

All of this is a sign that yes our movement is finding a higher gear, and that our leaders understand, as we discussed on Tuesday, that we must organize ourselves differently if we are to be successful in challenging Trump.

My final bit of advice for our Congressional leaders this Labor Day weekend - we need to make it clear to every voter in America that we oppose Trump’s terrible tariffs. These tariffs are not just raising costs on everything for everyone, they are an extraordinary betrayal of Trump’s core promise in his campaign, and are without question the greatest abuse of Presidential power in all of American history. There is so much here to work with - hurting working people so the wealthy can have more, betraying promises, illegal and unconstitutional acts, modern day “taxation without representation.” Think about it - Trump is so intent to help the wealthy at the expense of working people that he is ferociously ignoring courts and breaking laws to do so.

Here’s a NYT account of the Appellate Court’s ruling invalidating the Trump tariffs:

A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that many of President Trump’s most punishing tariffs were illegal, delivering a major setback to Mr. Trump’s agenda that may severely undercut his primary source of leverage in an expanding global trade war.

The ruling, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, affirmed a lower court’s initial finding in May that Mr. Trump did not possess unlimited authority to impose taxes on nearly all imports to the United States. But the appellate judges delayed the enforcement of their order until mid-October, allowing the tariffs to remain in place so that the administration can appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

The adverse ruling still cast doubt on the centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s trade strategy, which relies on a 1970s law to impose sweeping duties on dozens of the country’s trading partners. Mr. Trump has harnessed that law — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA — to raise revenue and to pressure other countries into brokering favorable deals. The law has typically been reserved for sanctions and embargoes against other nations.

The loss proved especially stinging after the Trump administration told the court earlier on Friday that any weakening of its tariff powers could unleash economic chaos. Hours before the ruling, the president’s top economic advisers raised special concern about the fate of the trade agreements the United States had struck with other governments. Among the deals they cited was an agreement with the European Union, which made favorable concessions to escape even higher U.S. taxes on its goods.

So my advice to Dems this week - use every tool in your legislative, political and communications tool box to make clear that we are against these destructive and unpopular economic policies, and Republicans are for them. We are for the people and they are for the wealthy. It’s a golden opportunity and we need to seize it regardless of whatever the bigger budget negotiating strategy becomes.

Happy Saturday all. I am off for a long bike ride with my wife now on what is a beautiful late summer day here in the DMV, and hope you are getting to have a warm holiday weekend with friends and family. We need to rest up and get ready for what is going to be a very, very consequential fall.

Now, let’s get to work everybody!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Our “Must Win/Everyone In” Races

• Mikie Sherrill NJ Gov (2025) - $250,000 goal, $55k raised - Donate | Learn More | Volunteer | Watch my interview with Rep. Sherrill

• Abigail Spanberger VA Gov (2025) - $250,000 goal, $174k raised - Donate | Learn More | Volunteer | Watch my interview with Abigail Spanberger

• Roy Cooper for NC Senate (2026) - $250,000 goal, $28,000 raised- Donate | Learn More | Volunteer | Watch my interviews with Gov. Cooper and NC Dem Chair Anderson Clayton. We hit our $25,000 Labor Day goal Monday - great work everyone!

• Jon Ossoff GA Senate (2026) - $250,000 goal, $52k raised - Donate | Learn More | Volunteer

• Hopium House 7 (2026) - $250,000 goal, $186k raised - Donate | Learn More, Volunteer, Watch My Interviews With Our Intrepid Incumbents

Our updated fundraising goals are now for the end of the year, December 31st, except for the 2025 races, which are now for Election Day, 2025.

For more on Hopium’s approach to elections check out 1) our big recommendations to the family coming out of the 2024 elections 2) the many important wins we had together last cycle 3) my latest thinking on where we are and the path forward for the Hopium community.

Our Recommended Actions - We are prioritizing two actions today. You can get our full list of recommended actions here. Let’s get to it:

1 - Call Your Senators and Member Of The House And Demand They Act Upon Our Four-Part Agenda - We need to be loud people, very, very loud and make the case for our our emerging four part agenda. We must demand that Congress

1. Roll back Trump’s terrible tariffs

2. Block the expansion of ICE and the use of the military on our streets including DC

3. End Trump’s war on science, higher education and our public health and demand the removal of madman Robert Kennedy from HHS

4. Stand with Ukraine and block Trump’s selling out of the West to Putin

2 - Bring “Resolutions Of Condemnation” To Your Community - Inspired by the tactics of our Founders learn about how Hopium members are advancing “Resolutions of Condemnation” in their communities across the country and consider bringing this initiative to your state, country or city/town. Be sure to check out our new discussion with Deborah Potter and Rachel Poliner who have passed resolutions in New Mexico and Boston, and offer advice on how to get a resolution passed in your own community.

Remarkably, members of this community are now advancing 64 (!!!!) resolutions projects in 20 states. Can we get to all 50 states by the fall election?

Finally, please self-report your activities to our daily paid subscriber chat. These reports help inspire all of us to do more and fight harder! Been impressive to see how many of you remain involved in local, in person protests of all kinds in your communities. Keep it up!!!

As we get ready for what is going to be a very intense fall of politics let’s end with that famous Robert Frost quote - that “the best way out is always through” - Simon