Isaac Saul (19:07)
All right, that is it for the left and the right are saying. Which brings us to my take. So an odd thing happened here. The court ruled exactly how I expected it to. Yet my opinion on the legality of Trump's tariffs became more complicated. For months, I've been arguing that Trump's tariffs were illegal. The basis for this belief has been as straightforward as the majority's ruling on Friday. The Constitution gives Congress the power to tax tariffs or taxes, and no national trade emergency could allow Trump to wrest that power from Congress through the International Emergency Economic Powers act, or the ieepa, also known as ipa. However, after reading through all the opinions in the ruling, I don't feel up for a victory lap. Instead, I feel like my previously held black and white views here were just not nearly as straightforward as I thought. For starters, seven different justices filed opinions signaling meaningful disagreements across the bench. It's probably better to think of this decision as 333 than 6. Three Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson all struck down the tariffs based simply on the ordinary tools of statutory interpretation. Justices Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett found the tariffs failed the Major questions doctrine, and Justices Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh dissented, arguing that AIPA's phrase regulate importation included the power to impose tariffs. Justice Kavanaugh led the dissenting voices, and I found his argument much more compelling than I expected. Kavanaugh made two thorough arguments. First, that the language of IIPA gives Trump the express power to tax during peacetime national emergencies, which he had already declared. Second, the major questions doctrine does not apply to IIPA because the law gives the President express authority and it deals with foreign affairs. As Kavanaugh argued, tariffs are an import regulation tool, like quotas or embargoes that have been used since the country's founding. He cataloged the history of IPA's creation, including evidence that members of Congress were aware that AIPA granted the President some tariff authority. The legislation was born out of the Trading with the enemy act, the TWEA, which Nixon used to impose 10% tariffs on most foreign imports in 1971. As Kavanaugh asked if Congress wanted to exclude tariffs from IIPA's scope, why would it enact the exact statutory language from TWEA that had just been invoked by the President and interpreted by the courts to cover tariffs? Further, Kavanaugh raised an interesting question, taking the majority's argument. AIPA gives the President the authority to completely block some imports, but not to tariff them. This means, for example, the President could invoke IIPA to block all imports from China, but cannot order even a $1 tariff on goods imported from China. This is very obviously an odd contradiction. In the Yale Journal on Regulation, law professor Chad Squittieri put it like assume a legislative body was vested with the powers to 1 raise revenue at baseball stadiums, and 2 regulate how many people enter baseball stadiums. Charging money for baseball tickets might be a means of exercising either power. So to say that a statute explicitly delegating the second power does not delegate the authority to charge money for tickets simply because the statute does not also grant the first power is again to miss the point. This view makes a lot of sense to me. Of course, reading a single Justice's opinion in a Supreme Court case is a good way to skew your view. These are, after all, nine of the most compelling and intelligent people on earth. Justice Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, wrote an equally thorough opinion responding to Kavanaugh and defending the invocation of the major questions doctrine, which the Court used repeatedly to limit Biden's executive excesses. Gorsuch addressed Kavanaugh's argument by pointing out that in the 85 years this statutory language has existed, only one President Nixon, on one occasion in 1971, has used that language to impose tariffs. Ultimately, I found Gorsuch's opinion the most appealing to my head and my heart. He strongly reaffirmed that the executive can't simply bypass Congress when pressing problems arise, however tempting that may be, and that our system is designed to run ideas through the messy legislative process, to allow the wisdom of the people's elected representatives to ensure we the people have a stake in the laws that govern us. His argument felt aspirational, even a little obvious. The entire thing had a my house, my rules undertone of a parent explaining basic responsibility to their teenage child. Chief Justice Roberts, writing the opinion of the Court, was also appealing in his straightforwardness. AIPA authorizes a president to investigate, block, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit all all manner of economic transactions. But it does not mention tariffs or duties. Congress knows how to delegate authority. Yet the Trump administration could not identify any statute in which the power to regulate includes the power to tax. And despite Kavanaugh's inference, this power was not expressly given by iipa, meaning the major questions doctrine reasonably applies, and Trump cannot invoke an emergency to levy tariffs. This makes total sense, too. In the words of law professor Ilya Shapiro, we don't assume that when Congress creates a federal program, it's secretly giving the agencies in charge of the implementing regulations, carte blanche taxation authority Like Kavanaugh, Roberts also highlighted an interesting logical contradiction. If we were to interpret the word regulate in IIPA to include the power to tax, that would render IEEPA partly unconstitutional. The law cannot grant the President the power to regulate, that is Tax importation and exportation, because the Constitution specifically bars taxes on exports. So if that is the understood meaning, as Kavanaugh argues, then the law is unconstitutional. This left me in an odd position. The Supreme Court's final decision affirmed my priors, and I believe they came down on the right side of the tariff question. The simplicity of Robert's argument and the obvious inconsistency of not invoking the major questions to auction here are boulders too big to push aside for me. Yet at the same time, I was much less firm in my convictions. After reading Kavanaugh's dissenting opinion, the justice didn't wholly convince me of his view, but he did convince me that reasonable people can disagree on the statutory meaning, historical context, and application of the major questions doctrine. So now what? The Court has not ordered Trump to repay the tariff revenue to those he taxed, but the lawsuits are almost certainly coming. Trump will blame the Court for the absolute mess that creates, but the truth is he can only blame himself. This is the risk of stretching the boundaries of executive power, since the judicial branch can always find your argument unconvincing. This is what happens when you usurp the power of Congress. Already the president has begun trying to replace the tariffs that were struck down with tariffs under new authority, but he's off to an inauspicious start. Section 122 tariffs also look illegal, as the law authorizes payments to reconcile balance of payments deficits, not trade deficits. I wouldn't be surprised to see the courts shut these down as well. When that challenge will come, or what law Trump will try to leverage next, I don't know, and I don't know how much longer this ricocheting economic policy can go on. After taking all this in, I'm left with two core feelings. One, IIPA seems to be a sloppily written law, given how differently it can be interpreted and used, and two, the executive branch's emergency powers are genuinely out of hand. We rightly spend a lot of time talking about Congress's dereliction of duty, but maybe they'd do more if a president weren't able to say the words national emergency and then upend trillions of dollars of economic activity, knowing the courts would take nearly a year to catch up. And maybe they should do more to stop a president before he tries such maneuvers. Until we fix that problem, both the judicial and legislative branches will be chasing the executive around, yelling and screaming, but always a step too slow or too inept to stop the chaos. That's a problem that this ruling fails to address, and that far too few people are thinking critically about how to resolve. We'll be right back after this quick break.