At a hearing before the Supreme Court last week, a majority of the justices thankfully expressed real skepticism over Donald Trump’s bizarre and clearly illegal effort to utilize an emergency economic powers provision that doesn’t even mention tariffs to institute random tariff rates on pretty much every country in the world, shaking the foundations of the global economy while stripping Congress of its revenue-raising powers.
Is there any congressional authority that Trump and his acolytes won’t want to take for themselves? We know that the answer is no, so the next most important question is: how many of these powers will the legislative body itself and the courts permit Trump to snatch away? He’ll take whatever he can get, but the whole point of our system of three coequal branches is that any one branch cannot just choose to expand its authority, whatever the reason and circumstance.
What Trump is trying to do is to justify why this usurpation is good for the country. It’s not. His wild tariffs have sown economic chaos across the globe, undermined confidence in American markets, raised prices on consumers and threatened entire industries. But even if it were, that’s not really the point; presidents do not get to help themselves to the other branches’ powers as delineated under the Constitution just because they think they can justify it on practical terms.
Solicitor General John Sauer keeps calling the circumstances a “trade deficit emergency,“ but what is the emergency, exactly? Neither he nor anyone else in the executive branch has ever really tried to enunciate what exactly is so harmful to the American public about having nations from which we — and it’s important to remember, this is we cumulatively, including corporations, small businesses and individual American consumers making their own financial decisions — import more than export to.
The implication of this argument is that the ideal position for the United States is to either have a perfectly equal trade relationship or a trade surplus with every other country on the face of the Earth, which is insane and entirely economically unnecessary.
Let’s just lay it out plainly: we are having this discussion because Trump, for whatever reason, has become fixated on the idea that we cannot tolerate trade deficits for reasons that are frankly inscrutable and have no nexus to economic or geopolitical realities.
Everyone from his cabinet to Justice Department attorneys to his subservient GOP leadership in Congress has to pretend that this makes sense, but we certainly do not, and neither do the justices of the Supreme Court. Several lower court judges have already come to the conclusion that this is obviously unlawful, and you really don’t have to even be a lawyer to land in the same place.
Whatever ideological hang-ups have led the Supreme Court in recent years to do away with precedent and make disastrous decisions on the scope of executive power, the right to an abortion and gun regulation, among other things, we imagine that they can at least understand the implications of allowing a president to reorient entire aspects of the global economy on a whim while wrenching away the power of taxation from Congress.
Trump is already talking about how to do an end-run around their decision, which should illustrate just how little he cares about complying with the law.
