President Donald Trump went out of his way, following the Supreme Court decision striking down his move to impose tariffs under emergency powers law, to say he will keep the tariffs in place, using a different set of federal statutes that he claims still put the policy on lawful footing — something Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued he could try to do in his dissent.
However, economic historian Phil Magness warned that Trump’s new order to impose a 10 percent global tariff under the so-called Section 122 power already faces massive legal problems.
“Trump’s new Section 122 10 percent tariff order is already on shaky legal ground,” wrote Magness, posting a screenshot of the relevant statute. “This law only applies when there are ‘large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits’ under a fixed exchange rate system.”
The problem with that, said Magness, is that “The world abandoned the fixed exchange rate system in the 1970s.”
This comes as Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, similarly echoes promises that the administration will continue its tariff system, and that he expects to continue collecting roughly the same amount of revenue as before the Supreme Court decision.
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