Trump’s Tariffs Usurp the Legislature’s Tax Power
Watching the stock market fluctuate wildly in response to President Donald Trump’s constantly changing tariff plans, you might wonder why the Framers would have given a single man so much authority over the U.S. economy. The short answer: They never did, and neither did Congress.
The Constitution vests Congress, not the president, with the power to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises.” Yet Trump has announced a dizzying array of “duties,” including punitive tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods, a 25 percent tax on imported cars and car parts, tariffs on Chinese goods as high as 145 percent, and a 10 percent general tax on imports that may rise further based on supposedly “reciprocal” rates that make no sense.
These levies amount to the largest tax hike since 1993 and raise tariffs more than the notorious Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, which deepened the Great Depression by setting off a trade war. The main authority that Trump cites for these far-reaching, commerce-disrupting, price-boosting tariffs is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that says nothing about tariffs.
The IEEPA—which was designed to constrain, not expand, the president’s powers—authorizes economic sanctions in response to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” to “the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States” after the president “declares a national emergency.” Although the law has been on the books for nearly half a century, no president until Trump has ever invoked it to impose a general tariff.
There are good reasons for that. The IEEPA mentions restrictions on transactions involving foreign-owned assets, but it never refers to taxes, tariffs, or any of their synonyms.
The statute “enables the executive branch, in a foreign policy crisis, to block transactions, freeze assets, and seize or sequester foreign property,” notes a brief supporting a lawsuit that the Liberty Justice Ce
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