The law to stop Trump’s trade war mayhem, much like the judicial body that finally used it, was hiding in plain sight. In 1977, Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act or IEEPA. The name makes it sound like it was intended to expand the president’s emergency powers, but in fact it was intended to limit them. The IEEPA was passed to end the executive branch’s over-reliance on the 1917 Trading With the Enemy Act, a law passed in wartime that, as amended in 1933, allowed President Franklin Roosevelt to claim expanded economic powers in peacetime simply by declaring a national emergency.
None of this should have required this court to step in and save the day. The ersatz national emergency that Trump cooked up as justification for his revenue-hungry tariffs ought to have been put to rest by means of a congressional joint resolution. Before Trump, no president had ever claimed IEEPA authority to impose a tariff. But today’s Republican-controlled Congress is James Madison’s worst nightmare, too frozen by terror of a vindictive chief executive to check his power.
While Congress dithered, 12 state attorneys general and the Liberty Justice Center, a Texas nonprofit that represented five import-dependent small businesses, filed suit with the United States Court of International Trade. In its summary judgment, the court noted that the IEEPA said its emergency powers could be invoked only “to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat”—which Trump failed to substantiate—and that “any interpretation of IEAA that delegates unlimited tariff authority to the president is unconstitutional.”
According to CNBC, Trump may ask the Supreme Court to grant emergency relief from the Court of International Trade’s decision “as soon as Friday.” One wonders whether even the Supreme Court’s most conservative members are getting a little tired of babysitting Trump. Trump filed 41 emergency appeals to the high court during his first term, according to Georgetown Law Professor Stephen Vladeck. That’s more than five times as many as George W. Bush and Barack Obama filed during their combined four terms. Trump will probably beat that record before the year is over. It’s not like the high court doesn’t have plenty of other things to do.
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