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On Wednesday, speaking from the White House, US President Donald Trump suggested that families scale back on gifts this year. Asked about his tariff program, the president remarked, “Somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are gonna be open. Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.’” But the toy stores where those dolls are sold might have something to say about it.  Earlier in the week, Mischief Toy Store in St. Paul, Minnesota joined a growing number of American small businesses suing the president over his emergency tariff plan. Throughout April, a groundswell of lawsuits led by 13 states further challenged Trump’s ambitious tariff program. Their success or failure rests on hundreds of years of judicial policy and American constitutional law.  The legal basis for the Trump tariffs When Trump first announced his ambitious tariff program to the world, you might have wondered, Why is he allowed to do this? Well, he may not be. The president’s power to unilaterally impose tariffs is not rooted in the office’s constitutional Article II power. Instead, it is a delegation of authority by Congress.  Article I of the US Constitution creates Congress, and Section 8 delegates the authority to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises.” For much of the United States’ history, this is precisely what it did — through a series of colorfully named tariff programs like the Tariff of Abominations of 1828, the Dingley Tariff of 1897 and culminating in the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930.  At the time, Smoot-Hawley was widely perceived as contributing to the devastation of the Great Depression. As a consequence, Congress’s use of tariffs became viewed as corrosively political and dysregulated, spurring change. In the early 1930s, then-President Franklin…

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Filed under: News - @ May 3, 2025 4:19 am