r/politics • u/sweatycat New York • 1d ago

California to Negotiate Trade With Other Countries to Bypass Trump Tariffs

https://www.newsweek.com/california-newsom-trade-trump-tariffs-2055414
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u/Mono_KS Foreign 1d ago

On one hand, this is unconstitutional and has no legal ground.

On the other, everything Trump does is unconstitutional and has no legal ground.

So fuck it.

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u/LackingUtility 1d ago

On one hand, this is unconstitutional and has no legal ground.

Depends. It's not my area of expertise, but at least one way to do it that would be completely constitutional would be to convince other countries to exempt specific products - that just happen to primarily be made in California - from their tariffs. For example, China imposes a 34% tariff on American agricultural products except almonds, which it exempts. Good for California, which produces 80% of the world's almonds. Totally constitutional, as it's not some sort of per-state treaty.

I'm not sure how California would do the reverse. Perhaps a state subsidy on particular products (that it primarily imports from China)? That would be legal.

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u/gplfalt 1d ago

but at least one way to do it that would be completely constitutional would be to convince other countries to exempt specific products

Politely asking why the hell we would do that? We'd still be getting tariffs and that would likely bring down more on us

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u/whofearsthenight 1d ago

Honestly the same reason that tariffs on coffee beans or bananas are insane – we simply cannot produce enough domestically. Not like "spin up the auto industry" which is already extremely stupid, but we simply do not have the climate to produce some of these things.

There are going to be US produced products like OP's example of almonds where if other countries don't want to pay exorbitant prices, the best option is to do a deal with California (and hopefully some other states get on board as well.)

The other reason they might want to do it: it's a clear fuck-you to Trump. While Putin is probably delighting in just how fucking incompetent and damaging this is, even Xi is going to feel pain from this. For most of the rest of the world, Trump just lobbed a grenade into the world economy that no joke has a large potential to start wars or could easily be the precursor to a world war. A significant deterrent for these kinds of conflicts is that we all have to buy shit from each other.

Last thing, in many cases this is not going to be heads of state negotiating, but heads of business. Think Tim Apple calling Dr Wei at TSMC.