Donald Trump’s favorite economic weapon may be on borrowed time now that Democrats are set to take over Congress in January.
In a Wednesday op-ed for The Washington Post, Zachary Karabell writes that the incoming Democratic majority should devote the next two years to “stripping the presidency of the imperial trappings it has acquired in fits and starts since World War II,” beginning with tariffs.
“There is no natural constituency for unbridled presidential power in perpetuity,” the columnist argues.
Virtually everything Trump has done unilaterally has been done through the power given the presidency by Congress, according to the columnist, ranging from the domestic tools granted by the post-9/11 Patriot Act to the ability to levy tariffs, which was added to arcane trade laws over the course of the 20th century.
While the Constitution’s Article I grants Congress the power to impose “Duties, Imposts and Excises,” in the years since, lawmakers have ceded to presidents the right to impose tariffs without congressional approval. In February, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to strike down Trump’s tariffs imposed under a declaration of emergency, and other courts ruled that the president had exceeded the authority Congress intended to give him. However, “the underlying problem is the laws that made the flexing possible in the first place,” the Karabell argues.
Tariffs are “both the most obviously flawed of Trump’s policies economically and the most objectionable to huge swaths of people,” according to the columnist. They have infuriated everybody from farmers in the Midwestern states to businesspeople across the country, and voter anger at tariffs is credited with helping Democrats win last week in Maine, Ohio and Texas, the column argues.
The columnist writes that barely a third of Americans support the administration’s tariffs, and blue-collar workers, many of whom once bought the idea that tariffs would bring factory jobs home, have turned on them, going from 49 percent in favor a year ago to 58 percent opposed.
That means that the Democrats have a two-for-one deal, the columnist writes: cutting back on the president’s tariff powers would both restore a balance under the Constitution and attack “one of the root causes of inflation and affordability.”
But standing in the way is Trump himself, the self-proclaimed “Tariff Man,” who would almost certainly veto such legislation. That would mean convincing at least 30 Republicans in the House and 11 GOP senators to vote with Democrats and override the veto, based on current projections.
But, the columnist argues, the tariffs are unpopular enough in many Republican districts that a bipartisan coalition might be amassed to chip away at them one by one — repealing, for example, the tariffs against Canada — or to dramatically curb the president’s tariff powers.
There is precedent for this: after Richard Nixon resigned over Watergate in 1974, Congress passed reforms to the civil service and installed inspectors general in major departments. Since then, the reforms have been weakened, and both Trump and a Supreme Court that adheres to the unitary executive theory have assaulted them.
“The risk is that the catnip of investigations and anger stands in the way of building a coalition that includes Republicans,” Karabell warns.
The new Congress is set to be sworn in on Jan. 3.
