courts / SCOTUS let the government roll out a massive and obviously illegal tax on citizens for a long time.

The don't forget about congress. 216 GOP congressional reps voted to handicap congress's ability to halt tariffs. For much of the current session of congress, their calendar wasn't counting days.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/house-republicans-block-con...

> Absolutely absurd that we’re at this point.

It's not really, this is the result of having a flawed democratic system.

What do Turkey, Philippines, Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Nicaragua, etc and now US have all in common?

They are ALL presidential or semi-presidential republics where a single person "rules" without needing to face opposition in a parliament nor even requiring support from its own party.

Winner-takes-all democracies, aren't democracies if only part of the electors is represented in the executive.

Presidential republics are super dangerous, they combine the perils of dictatorships with a cherry on the cake of being able to claim popular mandate.

Seriously, it's not a coincidence that the last parliamentary republic to turn into an authocracy has been Sri Lanka 50+ years ago.

> probably

Hah, we are 100% not getting our money back. And the higher, tariff level, prices aren't going to go back down either.

There is no probably; we not getting our money back. In fact, any of the money that has been spent in the meantime (say to make up for wealthy tax cuts or to expand military or border funding) we get to pay again!

Still waiting on getting those freedoms back that we temporarily gave up after 9/11 via the patriot act so we could get the baddies.

Don't hold your breath for either to be given back.

Two things is that we won't get money back and price of stuff is still going up. add on to that the companies getting refunds are pocketing the money.

I suspect that money is involved. We’re becoming numb to it.

Congress needs to step up and take its power back from the executive. There was no good reason for the President to have this power in the first place. Why the hell do we have emergency powers to impose tariffs? Is there going to be a fleet of nuclear-armed bombers headed for the USA and the only way to stop them is to impose tariffs? It's ridiculous.

Congress has been gradually handing their power over to the executive for decades. For decades, people have been warning that this was setting up for major abuse if you got a particularly bad president. Well, guess what....

The latest temporary tariffs are also likely illegal.

There is no excuse for how long it took the Supreme court to decide this very obvious case.

I like Class Action lawsuits for $100 please

In terms of policy this is a truly massive gift to importing companies. They had to pay massive amounts of tax to import goods. Analysis shows most (but not all) of the tariffs were passed on down the line to consumers of the imported goods or their derivatives.

And now they get it all back! If they can figure out the paperwork. Which I expect most will, because if you import things and pay tariffs, you have to be good at govt paperwork.

Wow. I don’t know what this means. But it’s a huge windfall to a very specific horizontal slice of the economy - cutting across industries and supply chains. Just whoever happened to be doing the importing gets a giant present. So bizarre. Economists will write about this case study for decades.

I hate the tariffs, but giving the money back to the corporations would be absolutely _grotesque_.

Every company that collected a tariff fee needs to refund it as they collect their own refunds.