Washington Post columnist and Never Trump conservatives George Will warns the Supreme Court that if it wants to leap headlong into irrelevance and undermine the Constitution, it should give President Donald Trump unfettered power to unilaterally impose taxes through tariffs.
Trump’s tariffs will be facing Supreme Court scrutiny in oral arguments next week as Trump seeks to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs on U.S. consumers. But justices have already written that emergency powers can too easily be abused as presidents “tend to kindle emergencies” to more frequently use them.
Legal scholars and former government officials also argue that Congress never intended the IEEPA as a “backdoor” for turning the taxing power into “an executive instrument” that allows presidents to restructure the economy, said Will. A New York University School of Law brief argues that presidents must cite specific congressional language to use the IEEPA, and Cato Institute researchers refute Trump’s “extralegal doomsaying” of what will happen to the U.S. economy if his power is revoked — “perhaps to compensate for the weakness of its legal arguments,” according to Will.
Trump’s team is making some blustery arguments, to be sure, said Will. The administration says tariffs imposed under the IEEPA are indispensable for negotiating agreements with trading partners. But since the IEEPA’s 1977 enactment, 14 regional and bilateral agreements have been reached, without any IEEPA tariffs. And IEEPA tariffs were involved in none of the 538 treaties and thousands of other international agreements negotiated since 1977, said Will.
Also, total customs duties collected from May through September were just 6.4 percent of government revenue, despite Trump’s argument for their necessity.
“And if repeated in court, the president’s claim that America was a ‘dead country’ until his tariffs arrived eight months ago might cause the justices’ decorum to give way to more hilarity,” Will said.
But, additionally, how the court decides this case “will diminish either presidential power or the court’s stature,” Will warned.
“The court might flinch from impeding an elected executive’s core agenda. (It flinched regarding Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.) The court prudently husbands its perishable prestige, which undergirds its power,” Will said. “If, however, the court protects itself by protecting this president’s unexampled claim to uncircumscribed discretion, this question will linger: For what more momentous controversy might the court be hoarding the prestige that enables it to do its duty to police the excesses of the political branches?”
Read the Washington Post report at this link.