Having been ruled illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court, the damage of Donald Trump’s foolish tariffs is being unwound. His destructive idea was that the tariffs were needed because the largest economy in the world should have no trade deficits with any other country on the planet.
That was always ridiculous, yet he was able to get away with nearly a year of wreaking havoc on global commerce before the high court put a stop to it.
So much of our system of government and the checks and balances baked in depend on the presumption that, at the very least, each branch will act in good faith within the bounds of the law, and that each will seek to safeguard its own authority. These assumptions have not held in the Trump era, when the president and most of his upper echelon of government are happy to violate the Constitution, separation of powers, and every other legal and procedural hurdle, and Congress itself is all too happy to go along, sitting back as Trump takes their powers for himself.
That’s left the courts to work overtime to try to rein Trump in. It’s good that the courts remain largely independent and are willing to concretely constrain and push back, but they’re not really set up to act fast on these questions. Courts are deliberative places, where there are briefing schedules and hundreds of pages of evidentiary documents and lengthy rulings citing hundreds of years of case law. That’s left us in this situation where Trump can issue an illegal policy, it can go into effect and cause massive damage and confusion, and then it is blocked after it’s become part of our political life.
So here we are, with Customs and Border Protection last week telling a federal judge of the Manhattan-based U.S. Court of International Trade that the agency won’t currently be able to comply with his order to refund $166 billion in tariffs that it unlawfully collected. CBP officials claim they can take steps to begin issuing refunds by April, but as with everything else in Trumpworld, we’ll just have to see.