Donald Trump is losing all of his bluster on tariffs. Trump can no longer bully foreign countries after the Supreme Court threw out his emergency reciprocal tariffs. Republicans and the White House complained that Trump “lost leverage{ when the court ruled that no president can make up and impose tariffs unilaterally.
PoliticusUSA is 100% independent. Support us by becoming a subscriber.
Aaron Blake of CNN explained that Trump may bring his whole tariff house of cards crumbling down if he keeps trying to use Section 122:
And his stated alternative, that he would institute a global 15% tariff under a different authority, could easily fizzle — and bring his entire tariffs gambit down with it.
That’s because the law he’s now relying upon, Section 122(a) of the Trade Act of 1974, was intended to address different situations. It’s meant not for trade deficits, which the Trump administration has cited as the justification for the president’s now-nixed emergency tariffs, but rather a severe “balance of payments” deficit.
The problem is that the Trump administration has already argued that Section 122 does not apply to trade deficits, which is why the president had to use an emergency to impose his own tariffs. The 122 tariffs are not unilateral and must be renewed by Congress, but Senate Democrats immediately slammed the door on that possibility.
Read more below.
