A Trade Court Stopped Trump’s Tariffs. Why Didn’t Congress?

The economic situation in 1933 was unquestionably an emergency. But in the early 1970s, Congress discovered that no president had ever called that four-decades-old emergency off. As a consequence, presidents continued to exercise the 1917 law’s various emergency powers by, among other things, imposing tariffs wherever and whenever they wished. A Senate Special Committee on the Termination of the National Emergency was established, chaired by liberal Senators Frank Church and Charles Mathias. A 1976 law limiting use of the 1917 law to wartime was one result. The IEEPA was another. It limited the president’s emergency powers in peacetime and empowered Congress to block, by joint resolution, any tariff or other emergency action claimed under the 1977 law.

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.

In April the Senate did pass one resolution, 51–48, blocking Trump’s nonsensical 25 percent “fentanyl tariff” on Canada, and later that month the Senate narrowly failed to pass a second resolution, 49–49, blocking Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Under IEEPA, such resolutions are “privileged,” meaning the majority party can’t keep them from coming to the floor. But the House Rules Committee, chaired by the reactionary battle-ax Virginia Foxx, snuck language into a March spending bill blocking House consideration of the Canada resolution.