Monday: Tariffs Incoming At SCOTUS; Thinking About Rare Earths

I’ll keep this brief. The tariff case will be argued at the SCOTUS on Wednesday. I make no secret of my view—tariffs are taxes and, as such, can only be imposed by Congress, which constitutionally controls the purse strings. SCOTUS must re-enunciate this very basic principle. Trump’s wild abuses of so-called national security needs in this regard only underline the importance of this case and the principle involved. Trump has weighed in, with the usual absurd gaslighting:

Disclose.tv @disclosetv

JUST IN - Trump says he will not be attending Wednesday’s court case about Tariffs, “If a President was not able to quickly and nimbly use the power of Tariffs, we would be defenseless, leading perhaps even to the ruination of our Nation.”

5:59 PM · Nov 2, 2025

There’s a lot more that could be said beyond this next brief post, but it hits at the personal abuses:

MenchOsint @MenchOsint

Trump has used Tariffs for personal benefits, market manipulation - at the expense of the taxpayer - that’s probably why he is afraid of the decision of the supreme court.

The market manipulation—leading to enormous profits by insiders of the ruling class—is real. So, too, has been the use of tariffs to reward/punish foreign nations with regard to their purely internal affairs. Trump has used tariffs as an instrument of empire to interfere in foreign countries that pose zero threat to the US. This attempt to extend the meaning of “national security” renders the term essentially meaningless in the sense that it could be applied to virtually any issue—it could mean anything, at home or abroad. To decide the case on this basis would open a Pandora’s box of national security state issues, enabling an authoritarian state for this president or any future president.

Back in the day, before I retired, I was involved in cases regarding the still developing Chinese capabilities in applying gallium arsenide to sensitive applications. This post by Arnaud Bertrand therefore caught my eye, but it’s a good general illustration of how much leverage China has, using the rare earths card.

First we have Bessent spouting his usual nonsense, which is quoted by Epoch Times as if this were real world stuff:

China ‘Made A Real Mistake’ With Rare Earth Threats: Bessent

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said China “made a real mistake” by threatening to restrict exports of rare earth minerals, adding that Beijing’s move has jolted the United States and its allies to fast-track efforts to secure new sources within the next two years.

Fast track? Next two years?

Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand

The more I listen to Bessent, the more delusional he sounds.

In the same breath he says it took China “25-30 years” to dominate rare earths (and remember, this is at China speed, incomparably faster than anywhere else) but that the U.S. can somehow break it in “1-2 years”.

As I keep saying, this is simply physically impossible, even if tens trillions of dollars were dedicated to the task, it’s just not doable.

Again, I’ll take the same example I keep citing (because I wrote an entire article studying it): gallium.

To produce gallium at scale, one first needs to build an entire aluminum industry since gallium is a derivative of alumina at ridiculously low ratios (you need to 120,000 kilograms of alumina to get a single kilogram of gallium).

Problem: China has a dominant global market share in aluminum production so your first step if you wanted to take over gallium from China would be to somehow build an aluminum industry that rivals China’s - which itself requires massive energy infrastructure (think multiple nuclear plants), tens of thousands of trained workers, and supporting ecosystems that take decades to develop. And that’s before you even get to the gallium part (and incidentally doesn’t answer the question of how you’ll ever be economically competitive with China).

How do you do this in 1-2 years? Even with all the budget in the world, it’s just not feasible. And again, by that stage you haven’t even started getting to the gallium part...

The same logic applies to several other elements: for instance another element on China’s export controls list is indium, a byproduct of copper. So again there your first step is to rebuild an entire copper refinement industry since, again, China leads that industry too. With again all the associated energy/infrastructure/people training challenges that come with it.

So yup, for the Nth time, the “rare earths card” is exceptionally strong and is likely to be effective for a very, very long time, no matter the delusions U.S. politicians are trying to feed you.

This was always the delusion of the “tariff card”—slap on tariffs and spend decades building up our lost industries again, as if the world will stand still for us? I’m all for redeveloping our industrial base, but there’s more at play here with the “tariff card” than reindustrialization. That’s just way too simplistic and, hopefully, the SCOTUS justices will be smart enough to see through Trump’s gaslighting.

By the way, I retired in 2006, just to give you an idea of how long this situation has been developing. Why didn’t the US address these issues back then and instead allowed our industrial base to be replaced by overseas suppliers? My assumption is that the ruling class got rich off that process while it was underway—there’s really no other way to make sense of it. Now it’s, ‘Hey, I got mine. Now I go to the Wall Street casino and Trump rigs it for me with the tariff card.’ Something of the sort. Somehow we were going to keep those other countries—mostly China—in servitude to be our suppliers forever. Now we threaten them with our nuclear arsenal to try to keep them in line—because without our nukes our threats would be totally empty. That won’t last.

Read up on Gallium and it’s uses here. The brief article doesn’t mention military applications, but that shouldn’t take much imagination.