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On Black Friday, customers piled into Costco stores hunting for deals. The company’s executives celebrated in their own quiet way by suing the Trump administration.
They weren’t in federal court to take advantage of holiday discounts on filing fees, and it wasn’t a demonstration of woke DEI. Instead they want a refund of the tens of billions money the company has paid in illegal import duties under the president’s ever-shifting tariff scheme.
Guess we really are saying “Merry Christmas!” again.
A fake emergency
The president’s claims about tariffs are a rancid brew of populism, xenophobia, and bad math.
He touts them as a means of extracting cash from other countries, whom he insists pay the import levies directly. Or maybe tariffs are a tool to encourage domestic production by making imports so expensive that Americans are forced to buy local. Or possibly tariffs are a cudgel to force other countries to lower their own trade barriers and negotiate more favorable trade deals.
“Taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years,” Trump blustered in April. “But it is not going to happen anymore.”
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Eight months after he brandished that poster with "reciprocal” tariffs on every country from Lesotho to the Heard and McDonald islands, American consumers are no better off.
Inflation is up and retail prices have risen almost five percent, costing the average American household roughly $1,100. US manufacturing jobs declined, as the promised wave of onshoring never arrived. Trump’s minions have been reduced to promising that Dear Leader’s boom economy is just around the corner, as the president invents “trillions” of dollars in tariff income filling US coffers.
Under the Constitution, Congress has the power to levy tariffs. Trump’s putative legal justification for seizing the authority is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), a law which has mostly been used to halt trade with terrorists or confiscate their money. Trump claims to be imposing tariffs to fight the “emergencies” of fentanyl importation and trade deficits, although he routinely lets the mask slip. At one point he threatened crippling tariffs on Brazil because it dared to prosecute former president Jair Bolsonaro for fomenting a coup.
Trump warns of “economic disaster” if courts block his haphazard tariff regime. But no president in history has ever used IEEPA or its predecessor statutes this way, and every court to examine the issue has ruled that the so-called “emergency” tariffs are illegal.