'Congress should be setting themselves on fire:' DC insider slams Republicans’ cave to Trump

Former Republican Congressman Charlie Dent cheered the U.S. Court of Appeals' decision upholding a lower court’s ruling that President Donald Trump does not have unlimited authority to impose tariffs. More thoroughly, however, Dent whaled on his fellow Republicans in Congress for meekly stepping aside and allowing Trump to steal their power to impose tariffs in the first place.

“Tariffs are taxes, which are the purview of Congress,” Dent told CNN host Audie Cornish. “It’s Article 1 authority [that] Congress should be voting on tax increases. … The whole point is Congress should be setting themselves on fire right now trying to reclaim their authority over tax policy. I never thought I'd see the day where a Republican president would be celebrating tax increases, and again, without a vote of the [Republican majority] Congress.”

Dent was responding to an Axios report showing Trump claiming the court’s decision was causing “an emergency” that forced the White House to demand an expedited appeal from the Supreme Court.

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“I think the president has overstepped here. There was never an economic emergency,” Dent told the CNN panel.

If not an emergency, Axios economics reporter Courtenay Brown reports Trump’s off-the-hip tariffs have created a new revenue stream, courtesy of a tax on consumers, that many Republicans are arguing to continue, if only in the name of staving off the nation’s exploding debt.

David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, said an ignored second problem facing the nation if the Supreme Court rules Trump’s tariffs illegal will be cleaning up Trump’s colossal “mess” as a legion of U.S. consumers file claims and counterclaims to recover $94 billion in tariff revenue the U.S. government illegally collected from them in the first half of 2025.

Frum added that some shippers like DHL might have the technology to cope with the small-dollar refund obligations of thousands of U.S. buyers, "but what about all of those companies that collected money that’s much harder to trace?” Frum asked.

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