This isn’t ripe yet. But it’s important to watch. Senators Cantwell and Grassley have a bill that would significantly reduce the president’s unilateral ability to impose tariffs. So far they have seven Republican co-sponsors. Axios has a piece up reporting that the White House has now issued a veto threat over the bill. That’s hardly surprising. The bill would radically, though not completely, scale back Trump’s power on what he is making the centerpiece of his presidency.
It’s important to remember that the President has no inherent power over tariffs whatsoever. It’s purely a delegation from Congress. Even on the basis of that law he is at least abusing his authority and very arguably exceeding it. The law requires the existence of a national emergency, which requires rapid action on tariffs. There is no national emergency by any reasonable estimation. But that’s on Congress because it gave the president the ability to decide and declare what’s an emergency.
Over the last half century the law has mainly been used to provide targeted and generally short term protection for specific industries, in many cases because of “dumping” by this or that country. There’s a strong logic to giving the President this authority if it’s used in that way. And the bill doesn’t actually meaningfully restrict that ability. It says it can only last two months without Congress approving the decision. That still allows a decent amount of abuse but it puts some limit on it and reduces the value of abusing it. The point is that it was never conceived as giving the president unilateral authority to create a new global trading regime by fiat.
Another way to put it is that these and other similar delegations rested on the assumption of a more or less sane president. Obviously that’s no longer an operative assumption.
With a veto threat, obviously the bar gets much higher, two-thirds margins in both houses. The House is highly likely to be the bigger bar here. But it’s telling that there are already seven Republican senators signing on before the tariffs even fully go into effect. This bill now becomes the focus of everything on this issue. Republicans could bring this catastrophic stupidity to a halt at any moment. The public needs to know that.
They’re the target here, not Trump. They face reelection. He doesn’t. The pressure will only increase. Simply passing the law and getting it vetoed would be a big and critical step forward because it would let people know that this is all in Congress’s hands. It’s a big deal even if it has a way to go. If and when this actually happens, it will not only be good policy (President’s can’t be given this carte blanche authority) but a crushing defeat for Trump’s presidency. And the immiseration could get there sooner than people think.
