Trump’s Haste Begets Lawlessness
Last week, a federal court ruled that President Donald Trump had exceeded his statutory authority by imposing a raft of tariffs based on the “national emergency” supposedly caused by the longstanding U.S. trade deficit. Those tariffs are part of an alarming pattern: In his rush to enact his agenda, Trump frequently treats legal constraints as inconveniences that can be overridden by executive fiat.
The U.S. Court of International Trade rejected Trump’s reliance on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to justify sweeping import taxes he announced in February and April. The three-judge panel said that 48-year-old law, which does not even mention tariffs and had never been used this way before, does not authorize the president to “impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world.”
That decision did not affect tariffs that Trump has imposed or proposed under different statutes, such as his taxes on cars, steel, and aluminum. But by invoking the IEEPA, Trump hoped to avoid the specific rationales and sometimes lengthy procedures those laws mandate.
Trump’s immigration crackdown features similar legal shortcuts. After he asserted the power to summarily deport alleged members of a Venezuelan gang as “alien enemies,” for example, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that they had a due process right to contest that designation.
That decision did not address Trump’s dubious interpretation of the 227-year-old Alien Enemies Act. But several federal judges, including a Trump appointee, subsequently concluded that it made no sense to portray gang members as “natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects” of a “hostile nation or government” that had launched an “invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.”
As with tariffs, Trump had a more legally defensible option:
Article from Reason.com
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