Terrible Totalitarian Tariff Tyrant Teetering?

 

Terrible Totalitarian Tariff Tyrant Teetering?

“Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” is one of the more famous questions in American history. Elizabeth Powel asked this of Benjamin Franklin on September 17, 1787, the last day of the Constitutional Convention. He replied, “A republic . . . if you can keep it.”

Until John Roberts’ reconfigured Supreme Court, the process of amending the US Constitution, outlined in Article V, has been very difficult and has only been used to add 27 amendments to the Constitution. It took 203 years to pass that last amendment, in 1992. The Article V process makes our Constitution the most difficult foundational document to amend among the world’s democracies. At least until the Roberts’ court set about repealing, embellishing or limiting the basic constitutional system of checks and balances by redefining the relationship among the three branches of government: legislative (Article I), Executive (Article II) and Judicial (Article III). The result: increasing Presidential powers and severely limiting congressional and judicial powers, even to the extent of exempting the President from prosecutable responsibility for criminal acts somehow associated with his official acts.

Slowly, the Supreme Court has given the President unilateral power to override past congressionally approved statutes, creating and funding federal agencies, and to usurp constitutionally allocated roles and responsibilities. That court has severely limited any federal judicial review of his edicts as well. We’ve been in a constitutional crisis almost from the beginning of Trump 2.0 with the President’s attempt to legislate by executive order. That crisis has just exploded exponentially.

One of Trump’s most important cornerstone executive orders began his unilateral imposition of an entire litany of tariffs for virtually the entire rest of the world. He declared the aggregate trade imbalance with all those nations to be a national emergency as if that were a sudden phenomenon. In fact, in 1971, the United States experienced its first balance-of-trade deficit since 1888, importing $2.26 billion more in goods and services than it exported, a reality that has since been with us for over half a century. Hardly an “emergency” by any definition.

On August 29th, a full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a lower court’s finding in May that the vast majority of Trump-imposed tariffs “exceed any authority granted” by a decades-old law that gives the president sweeping economic powers during a national emergency. That 1977 law, known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, had been invoked by the White House to justify most of those import taxes (aka “tariffs”). That statute, which does not mention the word “tariffs” at all, in fact allows the President the right to issue sanctions against a foreign threat against the United States in a time of “emergency.” The appellate court put a stay on its ruling (until October) to allow the Trump administration time to appeal to our highest court.

“The ruling applies to a series of April executive orders that imposed 10% baseline tariffs on virtually every country and higher ‘reciprocal’ tariffs on dozens of trading partners. It also applies to a separate set of tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China to pressure those three countries to crack down on fentanyl trafficking and unauthorized immigration… Mr. Trump lashed out against the 7-4 ruling in a Truth Social post on Friday [8/29], calling the appeals court ‘Highly Partisan’ and noting that the tariffs are still in effect… ‘If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America,’ he wrote.” CBS News, August 30th.

As of this writing, the United States Treasury has generated a massive $159 billion in tariff receipts since those Trump-imposed tariffs were imposed, one of his revenue solutions to compensate for his massive budget deficit created mostly by the huge tax cuts for the rich under his very badly named “Big Beautiful Bill.” The United States might be required to refund wrongfully collected tariffs, bolstering the argument Trump’s tattering of one more provision of the Constitution is so huge that it must remain, along with the right to keep those wrongful tariffs in place. Basically, “if I screw up big enough, you cannot stop me!”

Indeed, under normal times, the almost unanimous conclusion of non-partisan constitutional scholars that Trump tariffs truly represent a serious overreach against those constitutional checks and balances would dictate Supreme Court affirmation of that U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s ruling. The Constitution is unambiguous, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act is obvious in its intent and scope, and the reversal of Trump’s tariff orders is beyond clear. But Chief Justice John Roberts has repeatedly led his conservative court to look the other way as Trump’s executive orders have so frequently defied the plain reading of the Constitution. Effectively, John Roberts has found a way to amend the Constitution by completely ignoring the only mechanisms for such amendments as set forth, with no ambiguity, in Article V of the Constitution.

This ability to play fast and loose with the Constitution, even with the most basic tenets that define representational democracy, has horrific consequences for the entire nation. A leader who has a national polling consistency of uniform disapproval, over each and every basic platform of his governance to date, now knows his lackeys in Congress are extremely unlikely to continue to control both houses of Congress if the upcoming elections are free, full and fair. His response: gerrymander the result so Democrats are quite literally pushed entirely out of the national political decision-making process. Forget “free, full and fair”!

I’m Peter Dekom, and the United States’ being a nation “of laws” has become a nation governed “by laws”… that just happen to be generated solely by an ego-starved autocrat increasingly identified as America’s dictator.