Trump’s Tariff War — Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

Given that to “lay and collect” taxes, duties, imposts, and excises is the first power the Constitution grants to Congress, one would think that the courts would have long since clarified the role of the president in respect of tariffs. Our Court of International Trade, though, along with a federal judge at Washington, find that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act fails to confer on President Trump the “unbounded authority” he’s been using.A circuit court has just lifted the trade tribunal’s halt of the tariffs. This is a live dispute — one in which we’re on the side of Congress, even if it’s not a party. These columns have been covering Professor Hamburger’s campaign to retrieve for Congress the powers it gave up to executive agencies. We’ve also tracked the rising sense that, as the value of the dollar the Fed issues collapses to under a 3,000th of a gold ounce, the central bank has jumped its constitutional traces. The battle of tariffs is right up in that league. In a way it reminds us of the debate that erupted in the months before America sent a thousand Abrams tanks into Kuwait to eject the forces of Saddam Hussein. Was it constitutionally necessary to go to Congress to get a proper war declaration? No, was our view, it was not necessary. It was, though, wise. President George H.W. Bush chose to go to Congress, got his authority, and victory followed.That’s how we feel about President Trump and tariffs. During the first Gulf War, we were wary of our GIs getting stuck out there in the middle of a distant war only to be abandoned by Congress, as happened in the early 1970s in Vietnam. In today’s conflict, the question is whether Mr. Trump is “waist deep in the big muddy” of a trade war over tariffs and is only now discovering that maybe it would have been wise to go to the Congress at the outset.The Trump White House, after all, has a point when it depicts America’s yawning trade gap with foreign nations as a crisis, even if the persistent imbalances don’t necessarily constitute a “national emergency” in the strictly legal sense. Yet Mr. Trump has it right when he laments how America’s manufacturing heartland has been hollowed out, in part as a result of ill-advised trade agreements that have led jobs to move overseas where labor is cheaper.“Foreign countries’ nonreciprocal treatment of the Unites States has fueled America’s historic and persistent trade deficits,” a White House spokesman, Kush Desai, said after the trade court’s ruling. “These deficits have created a national emergency that has decimated American communities,” left working Americans behind, “and weakened our defense industrial base,” he adds, calling those “facts that the court did not dispute.”That appraisal is one that many Americans share, and helped animate the voters to hoist Mr. Trump back into the White House in the November election. The two federal lower court rulings, though, underscore the limits of the president’s power to fix this problem unilaterally. The challenge facing Mr. Trump and team now is to move ahead, following the path set out in the Constitution, to correct these imbalances and restore America’s manufacturing base.In doing so, Mr. Trump would also be wise to recall that protective tariffs — which amount to a tax on consumers — are not the only, or necessarily best, way to revive America’s industrial prowess. The ill-starred Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 is a reminder that our rivals can just as easily impose their own levies and start a trade war that benefits no one. Making America’s domestic industry more productive, and our exports more competitive, offers a better path.All of these points can be addressed by working with members of Congress in both parties to advance needed revisions to trade and tariff rules — while curbing regulation and promoting low-tax, high-growth policies — via legislation. Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, decries the adverse ruling as “judicial overreach” and vows the dispute will go to higher courts. Wouldn’t Mr. Trump get further by turning not to the Supreme Court but to Congress?

Trump’s Tariff War — Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

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