Don’t Be Fooled By the Corrupt Court’s Tariff Decision
The scale of the Supreme Court’s corruption has forced us to find new language to describe its actions. Today’s decision, which rolls back Trump’s massive series of tariffs that upended the global financial system, is a case in point.
We say that the Court “overturned” these tariffs. But this formulation is inadequate and misleading. These tariffs have always been blatantly illegal. To say that the actions were “overturned” suggests at least a theoretical logic with which the Court did not agree, or perhaps a form of continuing practice and constitutional understanding from which the Court decided to chart another course. This is not the case either, far from it. There is no ambiguity in the law in question. Trump assumed unilateral power to “find” a national emergency, then used that (apparently fraudulent) national emergency to exercise powers that the law in question does not even delegate. This is, among other things, an example of the central principle of current conservative jurisprudence: determining what the law or constitution would require if the words had no meaning. We might digress further on whether Congress could “delegate” such powers, given the Constitution’s clarity on Congress’s authority over tariffs, or whether any purported ambiguity in the law invokes yet another of the corrupt Court’s invented doctrines. But that would be nothing more than ceding to the Court the authority to force us to spend time exploring the gauzy logical intricacies of its bullshit doctrines.
