Liberation Day for Real? Not Really
Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
“[The International Emergency Economic Powers Act] does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.”
That’s the single really important sentence from the US Supreme Court’s February 20 ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump.
Trump’s ongoing tariff tantrums, starting with his “Liberation Day” schedule of “reciprocal” tariffs, were illegal under the law in question, and under the US Constitution, which gives Congress, and only Congress, the power to levy taxes.
Every dime taken by the US government via those tariffs is stolen money. Which is true of all taxes, but in this case, the money was stolen even according to the very political and legal systems which usually pretend otherwise.
There are four aspects of the court’s ruling which should be, but aren’t surprising.
One is that the court took months to finally just come out and say what everyone, including Trump, knew from the very beginning. The court granted certiorari for the case in September of last year. How long should it take nine justices to conclude that words mean things, and that the words in the Constitution and the IEEPA mean what they mean rather than meaning something else? This was an epic exercise in foot-dragging.
Unfortunately, foot-dragging is business as usual where SCOTUS is concerned.
A second is that the opinion wasn’t unanimous. Three justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanagh — flushed their shared supposed “originalism” down the toilet and then jumped in after it, holding in dissent that words don’t mean things, that history doesn’t matter, and that the powers of the presidency actually derive from the film Where The Buffalo Roam, in which Peter Boyle wanders around wearing a Nixon mask and bellowing “I’m the President of the United States and I can do anything I want.”
Unfortunately, Supreme Court justices round-filing their supposed principles in service to their political masters’ agendas is nothing new either.
The third should-be-but-ain’t surprising aspect of the ruling is that SCOTUS kicked the can down (that is, BACK down) the road when it came to ordering a remedy.
In cases — civil or criminal — concerning theft, the most obvious remedy is restitution. It’s time for the US Treasury to start cutting refund checks to all the businesses it stole those tariff revenues from. But rather than simply so ordering, the court remanded the case back to lower courts, which will no doubt engage in protracted “struggle” over how to — and even whether — to deliver justice to the victims.
The fourth, and least surprising, outcome? After venting his spleen at the Supreme Court for daring to defy him by nixing his illegal tariff scheme, Trump immediately went to work on a new version. His next caper will no doubt be as illegal as the previous one, and the courts will no doubt take their time addressing that one too.
The court’s ruling is correct as far as it goes, but don’t hold your breath waiting for relief, let alone recompense. To misquote the old Miller Lite commercial: Tastes great, less fulfilling.
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