Articles

The president doesn’t have the power to set tariffs—Congress does

April 08, 2025 | By OLIVER DUNFORD

Last week, President Donald Trump announced that his administration would be slapping tariffs on an enormous share of the things Americans buy. Tariffs have a long history in the United States. But the president does not possess the constitutional authority to create tariffs unilaterally. This power is vested solely in Congress and cannot be delega ...

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SCOTUS Scoop : One man’s regulatory flexibility is another man’s regulatory nightmare

April 04, 2025 | By ANASTASIA BODEN

There's so much interesting stuff happening at the Court that you get not one, but two scoops of SCOTUS this week. In Part I, I'll discuss all of the opinions that were released over the past two weeks. In Part II, we'll recap some of the wild oral arguments. Let's dig in! Even after the demise of Chevron deference, the government is gonna win som ...

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The EPA and Army Corps asked for Clean Water Act recommendations. Here are ours.

April 01, 2025 | By CHARLES YATES

Note: The photo above is of the Sacketts' Idaho property (marked by dotted line), which the EPA claimed was regulable as "navigable water." It's been nearly two years since the Supreme Court ruled for our clients, Chantell and Mike Sackett, in the landmark Clean Water Act case Sackett v. EPA. Yet the government still isn't complying with the jus ...

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Will the Supreme Court stop unconstitutional delegations of the taxing power?

March 28, 2025 | By CAMERON HALLING

The Supreme Court heard oral argument on Wednesday in the case of FCC v. Consumers' Research, which involves a nondelegation challenge to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. PLF filed an amicus brief in the case—because the nondelegation doctrine, which says Congress cannot delegate its lawmaking responsibilities, is key to PLF's fight for the co ...

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Ghost guns case shows justices seriously engaging with statutory text

March 27, 2025 | By ANASTASIA BODEN

The Supreme Court's ghost guns decision in Bondi v. Vanderstok centers on a fundamental question of American law: What happens when federal agencies reinterpret decades-old statutes to expand their own power? The justices considered whether, under the Gun Control Act of 1968, Congress authorized ATF to regulate gun parts kits—often called "ghost ...

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Did President Trump break the law by firing FTC commissioners?

March 27, 2025 | By JOSH ROBBINS

On Tuesday, March 18, 2025, President Donald Trump summarily fired two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission. This would be an unremarkable occurrence at the start of a new presidential administration, except Congress restricted the president's ability to fire commissioners to instances of "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance ...

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The Arizona Court of Appeals is not horsing around when it comes to agency adjudication

March 21, 2025 | By ASHLEY LEVINE

This week, the Arizona Court of Appeals closed the loop on the state's recent legislative mandate for de novo review of agency decisions, officially ending substantial-evidence deference to agency-found facts. In doing so, the court followed Pacific Legal Foundation's constitutional avoidance argument presented in our amicus brief and noted that bo ...

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The Dispatch : Amy Coney Barrett Is Doing Her Job

March 19, 2025 | By ALISON SOMIN

"She's a big problem" blared a tweet featuring a photograph of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Given the opposition she faced from Democratic senators and the broader left during her confirmation hearings in 2020, one might suspect that the post came from a progressive critic. But the post, which has been liked more than 117,000 times, w ...

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Here’s the status of COVID-19 policies, 5 years later

March 18, 2025 | By NICOLE W.C. YEATMAN

The COVID-19 pandemic happened "gradually and then suddenly," to steal from Hemingway. In early 2020, the U.S. Commerce Secretary optimistically predicted that the coronavirus outbreak in China would "help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America." New York City's health commissioner encouraged New Yorkers "to go about their everyday lives ...