<!–> [–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>Throughout the year, Mr. Trump has issued wave after wave of new duties, targeting almost every country in the world at levels not seen in roughly a century. The legality of the bulk of the new tariffs is now in jeopardy, as the Supreme Court on Wednesday begins hearing […] More
Companies that sell diamonds, plant sensors and wine all have one thing in common: They are weighing in against tariffs in a consequential case.EarthQuaker Devices, a manufacturer of musical instruments in Akron, Ohio, uses more than 900 components from over 15 countries to make products that alter the sound of guitars, with names like “Tentacle,” “Rainbow Machine” and “Gary.”The tariffs that President Trump imposed on nearly all trading partners have drastically increased the cost of those components. But EarthQuaker is hoping that the tariff case the Supreme Court plans to hear on Wednesday will render those taxes moot.The company has spent hours searching for U.S. suppliers that would allow it to avoid paying the tariffs. The president, citing an emergency law, has slapped tariffs on more than 100 countries this year in an attempt to reduce the trade deficit and force more manufacturing to the United States. But EarthQuaker found that parts available domestically were 20 to 30 times the price of foreign ones. There has been no sign that tariffs will encourage suppliers to set up U.S. factories to make their goods instead, the company said.“We have spent many hours of wasted time and energy searching for solutions which do not exist,” said Julie Robbins, EarthQuaker’s chief executive. The company paid the U.S. government more than $40,000 in tariffs this year, and sales revenue dropped by 10 percent, she said.EarthQuaker is one of hundreds of small businesses that say they are suffering as a result of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on imports. Many of them have waded into an unfolding legal clash to make that case. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will begin considering the president’s sweeping use of emergency powers to issue tariffs. Legal experts say the case is a tossup, but it has significant implications for U.S. businesses, whose fortunes are being shaped by policy set in Washington.Mr. Trump used the emergency authority, called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, to swiftly raise and lower tariffs on dozens of trading partners. In briefings submitted to the court last week, EarthQuaker and other small businesses argued that those decisions had hammered their bottom lines, forcing some to cut prices, lay off workers or otherwise upend their plans. The argument clashed with Mr. Trump’s repeated assertions that tariffs have not harmed U.S. businesses, workers or consumers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Two toy manufacturers asked the court to greatly expedite their case, in an unusual request.Two toy manufacturers challenging a major piece of President Trump’s tariffs program asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to expedite their case and rule that Congress had not authorized the levies.The request was unusual for several reasons. Petitions seeking review ordinarily come from the losing side, but the companies had won in front of a district court judge. They then sought to leapfrog the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which would ordinarily rule before the justices considered whether to grant review. And they asked the justices to move very quickly, asking that they schedule arguments in September or October.All of this suggests that the court is unlikely to agree to hear the case at this stage.The manufacturers — Learning Resources and hand2mind — argued that the law Mr. Trump relied on, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, does not authorize tariffs. Until Mr. Trump acted, their companies’ brief said, “no president had ever invoked I.E.E.P.A. to impose a single tariff or duty on goods in the statute’s nearly 50-year history.”In a separate and broader challenge, the Court of International Trade also ruled against the administration’s tariffs program. A different appeals court, the Federal Circuit, is set to hear arguments in that case next month. Both lower court rulings have been paused, allowing Mr. Trump to press forward with his tariffs.Once the appeals courts have ruled, appeals to the Supreme Court are all but certain, and the justices are quite likely to take up one or both of them.The toy companies seek to use an unusual procedure to bypass the D.C. Circuit, “certiorari before judgment.” The procedure used to be rare, mostly reserved for national crises like President Richard M. Nixon’s refusal to turn over tape recordings to a special prosecutor or President Harry S. Truman’s seizure of the steel industry.Before 2019, the court had not used it for 15 years, according to statistics compiled by Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University. Since then, he found, the court has used it at least 19 times. More
The appeals court’s decision delivered an important but interim victory for the Trump administration.A federal appeals court agreed on Tuesday to allow President Trump to maintain many of his tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, extending a pause granted shortly after another panel of judges ruled in late May that the import taxes were illegal.The decision, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, delivered an important but interim victory for the Trump administration, which had warned that any interruption to its steep duties could undercut the president in talks around the world.But the government still must convince the judges that the president appropriately used a set of emergency powers when he put in place the centerpiece of his economic agenda earlier this year. The Trump administration has already signaled it is willing to fight that battle as far as the Supreme Court.The ruling came shortly after negotiators from the United States and China agreed to a framework intended to extend a trade truce between the two superpowers. The Trump administration had warned that those talks and others would have been jeopardized if the appeals court had not granted a fuller stay while arguments proceeded.At the heart of the legal wrangling is Mr. Trump’s novel interpretation of a 1970s law that he used to wage a global trade war on an expansive scale. No president before him had ever used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to impose tariffs, and the word itself is not even mentioned in the statute.But the law has formed the foundation of Mr. Trump’s campaign to reorient the global economic order. He has invoked its powers to sidestep Congress and impose huge taxes on most global imports, with the goal of raising revenue, bolstering domestic manufacturing and brokering more favorable trade deals with other countries.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The Supreme Court refused to allow a key part of President Biden’s student debt plan to move forward. Here’s what’s left of it, and who could still benefit.President Biden’s latest effort to wipe out student loan debt for millions of Americans is in jeopardy.The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to allow a key component of the policy, known as the SAVE plan, to move forward after an emergency application by the Biden administration.Until Republican-led states sued to block the plan over the summer, SAVE had been the main way for borrowers to apply for loan forgiveness. The program allowed people to make payments based on income and family size; some borrowers ended up having their remaining debt canceled altogether.Other elements of Mr. Biden’s loan forgiveness plan remain in effect for now. And over the course of Mr. Biden’s presidency, his administration has canceled about $167 billion in loans for 4.75 million people, or roughly one in 10 federal loan holders.But Wednesday’s decision leaves millions of Americans in limbo.Here is a look at what the ruling means for borrowers and what happens next:Who was eligible for SAVE?Most people with federal undergraduate or graduate loans could apply for forgiveness under SAVE, which stands for Saving on a Valuable Education.But the amount of relief it provided varied depending on factors such as income and family size. More than eight million people enrolled in the program during the roughly 10 months that it was available, and about 400,000 of them got some amount of debt canceled.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
A narrow Supreme Court ruling left the door open for Congress to expand taxes on billionaires, but it’s not a guarantee.For years, liberal Democrats have agitated for the United States to tax wealth, not just income, as a way to ensure that rich Americans who derive wealth from real estate, stocks, bonds and other assets were paying more in taxes.On Thursday, that dream survived a Supreme Court scare, but just barely.Thanks to a narrow court ruling, a raft of plans to use the tax code to address the gaping divide between the very richest Americans and everyone else appear set to live for years to come in the campaign proposals and official budgets of top Democrats.The idea of a wealth tax was not directly before the court on Thursday. Justices were considering the constitutionality of a new tax imposed under former President Donald J. Trump that applies to certain income earned by businesses overseas. But in taking the case, the court could have pre-emptively ruled federal wealth taxation unconstitutional.It did not, and liberal groups celebrated the victory.“The Supreme Court also could have taken an activist turn of the worst kind by pre-emptively ruling federal wealth taxes unconstitutional today,” Amy Hanauer, the executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which supports higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, said in a statement. “To its credit, the court did not do so.”But the case also offered a window into the legal fight to come over various iterations of a wealth tax should Congress ever adopt one. It showed a solid four justices firmly opposed to such a tax — and two more who appeared skeptical.“This is a narrow decision,” Joe Bishop-Henchman, the vice president of the National Taxpayers Union, which opposes wealth tax proposals, said in a statement on Thursday. But, he added, “the court makes clear it is not opening the door to a wealth tax.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
In a blow to the National Labor Relations Board, the justices made it more difficult to order employers to reinstate fired workers.The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Starbucks on Thursday in a challenge against a labor ruling by a federal judge, making it more difficult for a key federal agency to intervene when a company is accused of illegally suppressing labor organizing.Eight justices backed the majority opinion, which was written by Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a separate opinion that concurred with the overall judgment but dissented on certain points.The ruling came in a case brought by Starbucks over the firing of seven workers in Memphis who were trying to unionize a store in 2022. The company said it had fired them for allowing a television crew into a closed store. The workers, who called themselves the Memphis Seven, said that they were fired for their unionization efforts and that the company didn’t typically enforce the rules they were accused of violating.After the firings, the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint saying that Starbucks had acted because the workers had “joined or assisted the union and engaged in concerted activities, and to discourage employees from engaging in these activities.” Separately, lawyers for the board asked a federal judge in Tennessee for an injunction reinstating the workers, and the judge issued the order in August 2022.The agency asks judges to reinstate workers in such cases because resolving the underlying legal issues can take years, during which time other workers may become discouraged from organizing even if the fired workers ultimately prevail.In its petition to the Supreme Court, the company argued that federal courts had differing standards when deciding whether to grant injunctions that reinstate workers, which the N.L.R.B. has the authority to seek under the National Labor Relations Act.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The coffee chain has challenged a federal judge’s order to reinstate a group of union activists who were fired at a store in Memphis.The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear a case brought by Starbucks challenging a federal judge’s order to reinstate seven employees who were fired at a store in Memphis amid a union campaign there.Starbucks argued that the criteria for such intervention by judges in labor cases, which can also include measures like reopening shuttered stores, vary across regions of the country because federal appeals courts may adhere to different standards.A regional director for the National Labor Relations Board, the company’s opponent in the case, argued that the apparent differences in criteria among appeals courts were semantic rather than substantive, and that a single effective standard was already in place nationwide.The labor board had urged the Supreme Court to stay out of the case, whose outcome could affect union organizing across the country.The agency asks federal judges for temporary relief, like reinstatement of fired workers, because litigating charges of unfair labor practices can take years. The agency argues that retaliation against workers can have a chilling effect on organizing in the meantime, even if the workers ultimately win their case.In a statement on Friday, Starbucks said, “We are pleased the Supreme Court has decided to consider our request to level the playing field for all U.S. employers by ensuring that a single standard is applied as federal district courts.”The labor board declined to comment.The union organizing campaign at Starbucks began in the Buffalo area in 2021 and quickly spread to other states. The union, Workers United, represents workers at more than 370 Starbucks stores, out of roughly 9,600 company-owned stores in the United States.The labor board has issued dozens of complaints against the company based on hundreds of accusations of labor law violations, including threats and retaliation against workers who are seeking to unionize and a failure to bargain in good faith. This week, the agency issued a complaint accusing the company of unilaterally changing work hours and schedules in unionized stores around the country.The company has denied violating labor law and said in a statement that it contested the latest complaint and planned “to defend our lawful business decisions” before a judge.The case that led to the dispute before the Supreme Court involves seven workers who were fired in February 2022 after they let local journalists into a closed store to conduct interviews. Starbucks said the incident violated company rules; the workers and the union said the company did not enforce such rules against workers who were not involved in union organizing.The labor board found merit in the workers’ accusations and issued a complaint two months later. A federal judge granted the labor board’s request for an order reinstating the workers that August, and a federal appeals court upheld the order.“Starbucks is seeking a bailout for its illegal union-busting from Trump’s Supreme Court,” Workers United said in a statement on Friday. “There’s no doubt that Starbucks broke federal law by firing workers in Memphis for joining together in a union.”Starbucks said it was critical for the Supreme Court to wade into the case because the labor board was becoming more ambitious in asking judges to order remedies like reinstatement of fired workers.The labor board noted in its filing with the Supreme Court that it was bringing fewer injunctions overall than in some recent years — only 21 were authorized in 2022, down from more than 35 in 2014 and 2015.A Supreme Court decision could in principle raise the bar for judges to issue orders reinstating workers, effectively limiting the labor board’s ability to win temporary relief for workers during a union campaign.The case is not the only recent challenge to the labor board’s authority. After the board issued a complaint accusing the rocket company SpaceX of illegally firing eight employees for criticizing its chief executive, Elon Musk, the company filed a lawsuit this month arguing that the agency’s setup for adjudicating complaints is unconstitutional.The company said in its lawsuit that the agency’s structure violated its right to a trial by jury. More
The Supreme Court decision on college admissions could lead companies to alter recruitment and promotion practices to pre-empt legal challenges.As a legal matter, the Supreme Court’s rejection of race-conscious admissions in higher education does not in itself impede employers from pursuing diversity in the workplace.That, at least, is the conclusion of lawyers, diversity experts and political activists across the spectrum — from conservatives who say robust affirmative action programs are already illegal to liberals who argue that they are on firm legal ground.But many experts argue that as a practical matter, the ruling will discourage corporations from putting in place ambitious diversity policies in hiring and promotion — or prompt them to rein in existing policies — by encouraging lawsuits under the existing legal standard.After the decision on Thursday affecting college admissions, law firms encouraged companies to review their diversity policies.“I do worry about corporate counsels who see their main job as keeping organizations from getting sued — I do worry about hyper-compliance,” said Alvin B. Tillery Jr., director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, who advises employers on diversity policies.Programs to foster the hiring and promotion of African Americans and other minority workers have been prominent in corporate America in recent years, especially in the reckoning over race after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.Even before the ruling in the college cases, corporations were feeling legal pressure over their diversity efforts. Over the past two years, a lawyer representing a free-market group has sent letters to American Airlines, McDonald’s and many other corporations demanding that they undo hiring policies that the group says are illegal.The free-market group, the National Center for Public Policy Research, acknowledged that the outcome on Thursday did not bear directly on its fight against affirmative-action in corporate America. “Today’s decision is not relevant; it dealt with a special carve-out for education,” said Scott Shepard, a fellow at the center.Mr. Shepard claimed victory nonetheless, arguing that the ruling would help deter employers who might be tempted overstep the law. “It couldn’t be clearer after the decision that fudging it at the edges” is not allowed, he said.(American Airlines and McDonald’s did not respond to requests for comment about their hiring and promotion policies.)Charlotte A. Burrows, who was designated chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by President Biden, was also quick to declare that nothing had changed. She said the decision “does not address employer efforts to foster diverse and inclusive work forces or to engage the talents of all qualified workers, regardless of their background.”Some companies in the cross hairs of conservative groups underscored the point. “Novartis’s D.E.I. programs are narrowly tailored, fair, equitable and comply with existing law,” the drugmaker said in a statement, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion. Novartis, too, has received a letter from a lawyer representing Mr. Shepard’s group, demanding that it change its policy on hiring law firms.The Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action was largely silent on employment-related questions.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesBeyond government contractors, affirmative action policies in the private sector are largely voluntary and governed by state and federal civil rights law. These laws prohibit employers from basing hiring or promotion decisions on a characteristic like race or gender, whether in favor of a candidate or against.The exception, said Jason Schwartz, a partner at the law firm Gibson Dunn, is that companies can take race into account if members of a racial minority were previously excluded from a job category — say, an investment bank recruiting Black bankers after it excluded Black people from such jobs for decades. In some cases, employers can also take into account the historical exclusion of a minority group from an industry — like Black and Latino people in the software industry.In principle, the logic of the Supreme Court’s ruling on college admissions could threaten some of these programs, like those intended to address industrywide discrimination. But even here, the legal case may be a stretch because the way employers typically make decisions about hiring and promotion differs from the way colleges make admissions decisions.“What seems to bother the court is that the admissions programs at issue treated race as a plus without regard to the individual student,” Pauline Kim, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in employment law, said in an email. But “employment decisions are more often individualized decisions,” focusing on the fit between a candidate and a job, she said.The more meaningful effect of the court’s decision is likely to be greater pressure on policies that were already on questionable legal ground. Those could include leadership acceleration programs or internship programs that are open only to members of underrepresented minority groups.Many companies may also find themselves vulnerable over policies that comply with civil rights law on paper but violate it in practice, said Mike Delikat, a partner at Orrick who specializes in employment law. For example, a company’s policy may encourage recruiters to seek a more diverse pool of candidates, from which hiring decisions are made without regard to race. But if recruiters carry out the policy in a way that effectively creates a racial quota, he said, that is illegal.“The devil is in the details,” Mr. Delikat said. “Were they interpreting that to mean, ‘Come back with 25 percent of the internship class that has to be from an underrepresented group, and if not you get dinged as a bad recruiter’?”The college admissions cases before the Supreme Court were largely silent on these employment-related questions. Nonetheless, Mr. Delikat said, his firm has been counseling clients ever since the court agreed to hear the cases that they should ensure that their policies are airtight because an increase in litigation is likely.That is partly because of the growing attack from the political right on corporate policies aimed at diversity in hiring and other social and environmental goals.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has signed legislation to limit diversity training in the workplace.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has deplored “the woke mind virus” and proclaimed Florida “the state where woke goes to die.” The state has enacted legislation to limit diversity training in the workplace and has restricted state pension funds from basing investments on “woke environmental, social and corporate governance” considerations.Conservative legal groups have also mobilized on this front. A group run by Stephen Miller, a White House adviser in the Trump administration, contended in letters to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that the diversity and inclusion policies of several large companies were illegal and asked the commission to investigate. (Mr. Miller’s group did not respond to a request for comment about those cases.)The National Center for Public Policy Research, which is challenging corporate diversity policies, has sued Starbucks directors and officers after they refused to undo the company’s diversity and inclusion policies in response to a letter demanding that they do so. (Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment for this article, but its directors told the group that it was “not in the best interest of Starbucks to accept the demand and retract the policies.”)Mr. Shepard, the fellow at the center, said more lawsuits were “reasonably likely” if other companies did not accede to demands to rein in their diversity and inclusion policies.One modest way to do so, said David Lopez, a former general counsel for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is to design policies that are race neutral but nonetheless likely to promote diversity — such as giving weight to whether a candidate has overcome significant obstacles.Mr. Lopez noted that, in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. argued that a university could take into account the effect on a candidate of having overcome racial discrimination, as long as the school didn’t consider the candidate’s race per se.But Dr. Tillery of Northwestern said making such changes to business diversity programs could be an overreaction to the ruling. While the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 generally precludes basing individual hiring and promotion decisions explicitly on race, it allows employers to remove obstacles that prevent companies from having a more diverse work force. Examples include training managers and recruiters to ensure that they aren’t unconsciously discriminating against racial minorities, or advertising jobs on certain campuses to increase the universe of potential applicants.In the end, companies appear to face a greater threat of litigation over discrimination against members of minority groups than from litigation over discrimination against white people. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, there were about 2,350 charges of that latter form of discrimination in employment in 2021, among about 21,000 race-based charges overall.“There’s an inherent interest in picking your poison,” Dr. Tillery said. “Is it a lawsuit from Stephen Miller’s right-wing group that doesn’t live in the real world? Or is it a lawsuit from someone who says you’re discriminating against your work force and can tweet about how sexist or racist you are?”He added, “I’ll take the Stephen Miller poison any day.”J. Edward Moreno More
