The depth of the Supreme Court’s corruption has forced us to find new language to describe its actions. Today’s decision, undoing Trump’s massive array of tariffs that upended the global financial system, is a case in point.
We say the Court “struck down” these tariffs. But that wording is inadequate and misleading. These tariffs were always transparently illegal. Saying the actions were “struck down” suggests at least a notional logic which the Court disagreed with, or perhaps one form of standing practice and constitutional understanding away from which the Court decided to chart another course. Neither is remotely the case. There’s no ambiguity in the law in question. Trump assumed a unilateral power to “find” a national emergency and then used this (transparently fraudulent) national emergency to exercise powers the law in question doesn’t even delegate. It is, among other things, an example of the central tenet of current conservative jurisprudence: to determine what law or constitution would require if words had no meaning. We could go into the further digression over whether Congress could “delegate” such powers, given the Constitution’s clarity on congressional authority over tariffs or whether any purported ambiguity in the law invokes yet another of the corrupt Court’s made-up doctrines. But doing so would be nothing more than ceding to the Court an authority to compel us to expend time exploring the vaporous logical intricacies of its bullshit doctrines.