Trump Abuses 'Emergency' Power to Set Tariffs by Autocratic Whim

Apr 11, 2025

How is that the Constitution gives the president the power to raise and lower tariffs and then make special exceptions and change the trade rules daily according to his whim? The answer is that it doesn’t, and a conservative group is actually challenging this in the courts.

The New York Times reports:

In what appeared to be the first tariff-related lawsuit against the Trump administration, the founder of Simplified, Emily Ley, argued that President Trump overstepped his authority in February when he first imposed new import taxes on Chinese goods. …
The complaint filed on behalf of Ms. Ley, in Federal District Court for the Northern District of Florida, … argued that Mr. Trump was circumventing Congress by unlawfully using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to impose the tariffs. The law gives the president the broad authority to regulate a variety of economic transactions following a declaration of national emergency.
In its complaint, the organization argued the law does not give Mr. Trump the power to impose tariffs by simply declaring that trade deficits constitute a national emergency, and if he is allowed to do so, he “will have nearly unlimited authority to commandeer Congress’s power over tariffs.”

The Constitution gives Congress the power to set tariffs. Since the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in 1930, Congress has delegated this power to the president, often in foolishly vague ways. Donald Trump is abusing these powers to create the trade autocracy we’ve all been living with recently.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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