The New Yorker:

There are seven separate opinions—and even the Justices who agree with one another are in some ways at odds.

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

On Friday, President Donald Trump asked reporters at the White House to consider how “ridiculous” it was that the Supreme Court had just struck down tariffs that he’d been imposing, unilaterally and gleefully, around the world since last year. As President, he had the right “to destroy foreign countries,” Trump said. “But not the right to charge a fee—how crazy is that?” He seemed to find it crazier still that two of the Justices he’d appointed—Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett—had joined John Roberts, the Chief Justice, and the Court’s three liberals in ruling against him. “I’m ashamed of certain members of the Court. Absolutely ashamed,” he said, and he thought their families should be embarrassed, too. The Justices who’d opposed him were “fools and lapdogs,” “very unpatriotic,” and probably under the sway of “foreign interests” and other “slimeballs.” He added that, by the time he was through, tariffs might be even higher than they are now.

That threat was not empty. Before Friday was out, Trump had announced a new ten-per-cent worldwide tariff, with exceptions for certain countries and goods, this time under a different legal authority; by Saturday, he’d raised the rate to fifteen per cent. An odd aspect of this chapter in American economic history is that there are, in fact, statutes on the books that give Presidents the power to impose meaningful tariffs. But when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs last April, he instead invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or ieepa, a vaguely worded law that is dependent on a declaration of a national emergency. (He’d declared two emergencies, for good measure: drugs and migrants entering the United States from Canada, China, and Mexico; and a “large and persistent” trade deficit.) Some of those other, sounder tariff laws do have more time limits and require more of a process—an investigation, for example—which make them more difficult to deploy via Truth Social posts. There is additional uncertainty about the trade deals that Trump negotiated in recent months using the threat of roughly a gazillion dollars in tariffs as a stick. Trump’s tariff adventure is not over. But, going forward, he may have to pay more attention to the law.

Go to link