COME UP WITH A BETTER TALKING POINT.

[Editorial note, 4 pm: Our President's tariff ukases involving Mexico and Canada, noted in the continuation below the jump, are on pause.]

Ralph Nader predictably objects to a president he disagrees with doing what presidents are prone to do.  "He is using illegal executive orders as poisoned spears against just about every program the federal government administers to advance the health, safety, and economic well-being of all Americans."

Complete with what we've come to expect.

Seriously.  "Yes, without food, healthcare, and safety initiatives, Americans will die or get sick, whether they voted for Trump or not."

Yes, we've all learned helplessness from a hundred years or so of the administrative state, haven't we?  Unsurprisingly, Mr Nader concludes by illustrating how little he understands of limited government.  "He is now ruling by dictates that are getting more sweeping and penetrating by the day. He should read a history book."

No, he should obey the Federal Constitution.  Oh, wait.

It’s as though Trump were telling King George III: Hold my beer. More astonishing, though, is that Trump’s tariff decree is probably legal. Congress and the courts have only slightly more chance of undoing it than his pardons for the violent rioters of January 6.

What happened to Article I of the Constitution? It pretty clearly says “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States,” including the power to levy “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises.”

The short answer is that, for much of the country’s history, Congress did legislate tariffs—in great detail, wrangling over duties on everything from iron to wool. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, lawmakers ceded to the executive branch more and more power over tariffs and international economic affairs generally. Now, Trump has seized that power and bent it to his purposes.

This is especially ironic because, ever since the New Deal, Congress’s broad goal was to promote trade.

Members of Congress, however, forgot that you never give a friendly president powers you wouldn't want an unfriendly president to have.  Oops.

Correctly believing that the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 helped bring on the Great Depression, Congress delegated to presidents—less beholden to regional interests that dominated the tariff sausage-making—the authority to negotiate mutual tariff reductions with other countries.

This was subject to exceptions for “national security” or unfair trade complaints from U.S. industries, to be sure. But they applied only when executive branch agencies formally found reasons for imposing quotas, tariffs, or other penalties.

Trump used those authorities to impose or threaten tariffs in his first term, many of which President Biden retained.

But on Saturday, Trump reached for the biggest loaded gun Congress had left lying around: the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The IEEPA, enacted in 1977, authorizes the president, pretty much on his own, to declare that the country faces an “unusual and extraordinary” peacetime threat from abroad, and to levy economic sanctions in response.

Until now, presidents had invoked IEEPA against hostile states such as Russia, Cuba, or Iran. None had even thought to use it to punish friendly nations with tariffs—let alone countries with which the United States has a mutual defense pact, as it does with NATO member Canada.

Congress passed IEEPA thinking it was more narrowly defining executive power in the wake of President Richard Nixon’s sudden imposition of a 10 percent “import surcharge” to strong-arm European trading partners in 1971. Nixon’s action was the closest any president has ever come to doing what Trump did Saturday.

Where is there a political scientist to trace the evolution from presidential veto messages telling Congress "I cannot find that line in the Federal Constitution that authorizes this expenditure" to Congress empowering the president to stop them from engaging in log-rolling?

And so we have one-man rule on a policy whose pros and cons can be debated but whose far-reaching impact, at home and globally, cannot.

The closest recent analogy might be Biden’s attempt to order hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of student loan relief based on a strained reading of a Covid-era economic relief law.

The Supreme Court largely—but not totally—blocked Biden’s attempted massive distribution from the majority of the population to a college-educated minority. It would be unlikely to intervene on Trump’s tariffs because the IEEPA is a clearer statutory basis.

The Constitution said what it did for a reason: It’s usually best to allow for deliberation, debate, and a vote by the people’s representatives before the government jacks up the cost of everything from guacamole to a Chevy Silverado. You know, checks and balances.

For now, let us hope that John Hinderaker has correctly pegged the tariff decrees as the opening position in bargaining that is now under way.  "My guess is that an actual trade war will be averted."

If the flurry of ukases from the White House and Mar-a-Lago make congressional Democrats more interested in enumerated, limited, and separated powers, so much the better.