Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Trump Tariffs are Unconstitutional
The Supreme Court on Friday announced that the tariffs upon which Donald Trump has rested much of his second term were unconstitutionally levied. The 6-3 decision means that as of Tuesday, the federal government must stop collecting those tariffs. While the court said nothing abour refunds, it is inevitable that those companies that paid the Treasury will sue and likely win. The problem is that they passed on most of the costs to others, like retail consumers, who will never see a penny returned. The court itself is partially at fault for this situation. Had they stayed the implementation of the tariffs pending their decision, there would be nothing to return because there would have been nothing collected. They made a bad situation worse.
The Trump administration could very easily have gone to Congress in the first weeks of this second term and asked Congress for the authority to act as the president saw fit. The Democrats would have whined and moaned, but the political landscape a year ago would have forced them to yield just as Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) did over the first government shut down last year. That was the constitutional way to do this.
The White House and the Federalist Society prefer the "unitary executive," which says the president is the top dog in the executive branch, and anything the executive branch does is done without question. He has total authority. Unfortunately, the founders believed that the purse strings of the entire federal operation belong to Congress. Article 1, section 8 reads in part, "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises . . . ." Tariffs are a subset of duties. That is both modern day economic usage and the definition one will find in the 1755 dictionary of Samuel Johnson (which the founders owned and referred to).
So when the White House decided to use the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act as its basis for acting without Congress, it set the stage for the Supreme Court to intervene. The court said that the IEEPA simply did not apply. There is no emergency.
The White House has said that it will rely on a 1974 Trade Act that allows the president to impose a tariff up to 15% for up to 150 days to address "large and serious" balance of payments deficits. After that five month period, Congress must act to continue them. This is probably constitutional so long as the targets run a trade surplus with the US. Nevertheless, after 150 days, these will lapse. There is not a chance that Congress will extend them. There just are not enough votes to do it.
This leaves Mr. Trump without the power he likes so much to screw with the trade system and global economics. Before his idiocy over tariffs (a tax paid by the American consumer not foreign companies), the goal of global trade negotiations was to try to get tariffs and non-tariff barriers to as close to zero as politically possible. Now, nations are forming more trading blocs, excluding certain nations, in a return to the bad old days before the post-WWII arrangements came into being.
All the same, the Supreme Court is responsible for screwing over the American consumer with tariffs. The tariffs went into effect April 2, 2025, and the court heard oral arguments November 5, 2025. They did not issue a stay preventing the tariffs from going into effect. In other words, they allowed these unconstitutional tariffs to be collected for 7 months before they even heard the case. It took more than four more for them to issue a ruling. The harm they inflicted comes out to $1,700 per American family. Unfortunately, they will not suffer for their incompetence.
The decline under the Trump administration continues to accelerate.
© Copyright 2026 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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