CROSSPOST: Alan Wolff: Bamboozled: What made anyone think the Trump tariffs were legal?

A phantom emergency power allowed Trump to blow up the constitution with respect to tariff and revenue: the first separation-of-powers victory ever won over England’s Plantagenet kings by the House of Commons thus falls without a whimper. Now the Supreme Court come very late—deliberately very late—to the party: but the six neofascist justices have rendered decisions with none of statutory, constitutional, logical, or philosophic underpinnings before, whenever they wanted to, or were scared not to. It was bad history and cowardly politics that broke this particular set of guardrails. The only way to pretend it was legal was to lean on a botched folk memory of Nixon’s 1971 surcharge and to assume that neither Congress nor the courts would seriously push back. They didn’t. What failed here was the non-Democrats in office sworn to uphold the Constitution, as something contrary to its plain text, original intention, original public meaning, or pattern as a living document nevertheless ruled…

The key takeaway here:

Alan Wolfe: Bamboozled: What made anyone think the Trump tariffs were legal? <https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2026/bamboozled-what-made-anyone-think-trump-tariffs-were-legal>: ‘Three courts found correctly that IEEPA included no extensive tariff authority, if it had any at all. But the strange history of Nixon’s surcharge with the incorrect supposition that he had invoked TWEA persists…. It was convincing to four Federal Circuit appellate justices (none appointed by President Trump) for them to find this last year that broad tariff authority did exist in the more recent statute IEEPA…. [But] the claimed emergency tariff authority, not even mentioned in the statute, and not anywhere recorded in Congress’s consideration of the legislative authority cited by the president’s lawyers, never existed at all…

The legal authority to impose Trump’s tariffs never existed. But what did exist was a Republican congressional leadership that wanted to avoid picking any fights with Trump they could avoid, no matter how stupid and destructive the policies; Republican congressional sheeple scared of Trump’s hold over their core electoral base and tribally unwilling to join with Democrats to vindicate the separation of powers or even, you know, stop destructive policies; and a Supreme Court anxious to blow up procedure whenever it delays something of Trump’s that its six-member neofascist majority likes, and eager to slow-walk anything that might wind up with them picking a fight with Trump they think they have a chance of losing.

Hence constitutional government went completely out the window ...