Dem
47
GOP
53
An article in Politico Magazine by former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori makes the case that Donald Trump is trying to blackmail the Supreme Court on tariffs. We would describe it, a bit more gently, as "lobbying." Basically, it is all about making absurd, nonsensical claims about what will happen to the country if the Court doesn't side with him on issue after issue. On Friday, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit struck down his authority to levy tariffs on the grounds that he has no authority to levy tariffs, he claimed the government is taking in $17 trillion in tariffs. This is 4x more than the total value of all imports. In fact, it is about 15% of the GDP of the entire planet.
Trump's underlings have clearly been instructed to help out. In the appeals court filing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that striking down the president's ability to levy tariffs would damage national security. What he didn't explain is: If tariffs are so crucial to national security, why can't the president just ask Congress to levy them? Rubio later claimed that a loss for Trump on this would make it harder to end the war in Ukraine.
Solicitor General John Sauer told the Court that before Trump the United States was a dead country. If the Court doesn't give Trump his way, that would be ruinous for the country.
The implication here is that Trump's case is very weak and he is afraid the Court knows it. So he is lobbying for the Court to give him what he wants and to find a rationale later. This is precisely the kind of judicial activism conservatives have long despised. Well, that they've long claimed they despised, at least.
Trump has two problems. First, he is basing his case on the IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act), which grants the president the power to regulate imports when an emergency has been declared (also by the president). But the power to regulate is not the power to tax and nowhere does the IEEPA mention tariffs or taxes. Second, the public is strongly against tariffs because most people know they will raise prices. The Supreme Court is already very unpopular and the justices are surely aware if they side with Trump, Democrats will blame them for the subsequent price increases. They don't want their approval rating to go down more, because in the end, all they have is moral authority. If people simply believe they are in the tank for Trump, that gives the next Democratic trifecta the backing it needs to do something about the Court, whether it is expanding it, stripping some jurisdiction from it, forcing sitting justices to take senior status at 70 (and filling seats while continuing to pay the senior justices their salaries, thus de facto expanding the Court), or other things. Trump (or people close to him) understand this, hence the all-hands-on-deck approach to pressuring the Court. (V)