Colby Cosh: It turns out Trump's tariffs were illegal after all

National Post

a day ago

The U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) issued a decision yesterday that annuls various salvos of surprise economic tariffs, including ones on Canada, that have been enacted by President Donald Trump since his inauguration in January. I won't lie to you: I had the same initial reaction to this consequential news that you probably did, which was 'Hooray!' and then 'Huh, there's a U.S. Court of International Trade?'
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This court is surely unfamiliar even to most Americans, no doubt because much of its work involves settling issues like 'Do hockey pants count as 'garments' or 'sports equipment' under customs law?' Nevertheless, the CIT does have exclusive jurisdiction over civil actions involving U.S. trade law. It's just that no president has ever before rewritten the tariff schedule of the republic in the half-mad fashion of a child taking crayons to a fresh-painted wall.
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The American Constitution, from day one, has unambiguously assigned the right to set international tariffs to Congress. Congress is allowed to delegate its powers to the president and his agents for limited or temporary purposes, but it can't abandon those powers to him altogether. Defining this legal frontier is what the CIT was asked to do, and their demarcation of it will now swim upward through higher appellate courts (its decision has been put on hold in the meantime).
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The lawsuit was actually two parallel suits raising overlapping objections to the tariffs. One was brought forward by 12 U.S. states, and the other was filed by a group of tariff-exposed American businesses, including manufacturers of bikes, electronics kits and fishing equipment. The latter set of plaintiffs was roped together by the usual posse of heroic libertarians and legal originalists, including George Mason University law prof Ilya Somin.
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About 24 hours after Trump originally announced the 'Liberation Day' worldwide tariffs, Somin quickly blogged about how insanely unconstitutional the whole idea was, and concluded his article essentially by saying 'I'm darn well gonna do something about this nonsense.' I don't mean to suggest he deserves primary credit; I only intend to call attention, once again, to U.S. libertarians being the best friends Canada doesn't know it has.
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