Trump’s Big Tariff Stick Is a Little Smaller Now
He’s trying workarounds, but the Supreme Court ruling showed there are limits.
Only four justices attended the State of the Union address.
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What Trump imposeth, the Supreme Court taketh away. While in force, the tariffs imposed under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act produced a lot of money for Uncle Sam. But after 10 months, they’re over. It’s not clear whether the government can keep all that revenue, nor whether the new tariff regime — under a completely different justification — will be significantly different.
Still, there are already some conclusions to draw from this extreme episode in US economic policy — and many cut against what was widely expected on April 2 last year, Liberation Day, when the White House unveiled a long list of tariffs against countries to counter the “emergency” of a trade deficit that had been accumulating for decades. Most importantly, the court’s constitutional guardrail against executive overreach remains in place. It’s just that it takes a while to work, meaning that an unusually impatient president like Donald Trump can get away with a lot of mischief for quite a while.