The Trump administration’s tariff regime is under consideration at the Supreme Court.
President Trump’s approach — largely focused on the careful and potent use of tariffs as a negotiating tool for so much more than simple trade — is unique and unprecedented, so it’s not surprising that it would be challenged, and that it would reach the High Court.
These cases are not the simple “slam dunk” that many of the president’s opponents think they are.
On the one hand, Article I, Section 8 assigns the responsibility to set duty rates to Congress, but in so many instances, Congress has assigned that power over to the president. On the other hand, Article II, Section 2 assigns the power to negotiate with other countries to the president alone, though treaties require Senate confirmation.
There have been disagreements for decades on which agreements are treaties (requiring Senate consent) and which are not. This disagreement has led numerous Democrat administrations into committing to outrageous international agreements that Republicans blocked from passage, but the incumbent administrations supported and forced America to comply with them anyway, and we were freed of their onerous obligations only when Republicans returned to the White House and canceled them through executive orders.
The most interesting aspect of the current debate is the question of an emergency. Many of these broad grants of tariff-setting power that Congress has handed over to the president, again and again, are based on the need to act in an emergency. Congress takes forever to do anything; where foreign policy, national security, and the global economy are concerned, only a president can react decisively, so Congress has provided for the president to have these powers in an emergency.
I am not a lawyer, but I have been a customs broker — a facilitator and compliance manager in international trade — for almost forty years, so I can speak to the way that both tariff barriers and non-tariff barriers act on a society.
The Trade Deficit
We have trade deficits with most countries. This means we import more goods, by value, than we export. Supply-siders have always argued that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this; it could mean that our country is getting more for our money than the other country is getting. We send them dollars for their goods, and if they don’t buy goods with them, then they’ve just got useless paper until they spend it on our goods.
The problem there is that they don’t sit on our dollars; they spend them on things other than physical goods, causing new and worse problems. What have the Chinese done with its surplus dollars, for example? They buy up our housing, our farmland, our businesses. They plant students and professors in our colleges to spy for the CCP; they invest in our stock market so they can control our public companies. Our trade deficit — with many countries, not just China — has enabled dangerous relationships of all kinds in all sectors to balloon.
Supply Chain Dependence
When China and other “low cost countries” offered a cheaper version of goods available everywhere else, it looked like a great deal; we can get these cheap three-cent gaskets from China when quality doesn’t matter, and we can buy the higher-quality local six-cent gaskets for the more delicate equipment where it does matter. But over the years, over the decades, all those other suppliers gradually went out of business, so now the only source on earth for a vast array of components and finished goods, both unimportant ones and important ones, too, is China.
Does this matter? Well, this long, slow erosion of American manufacturing has meant that American jobs of all kinds have been destroyed, as we have become a consumer nation rather than a producer nation in so many ways. It’s not just about the assembly line jobs; it’s everything that they lead to, from climbing the ladder up to quality supervisor and plant manager to engineering departments and purchasing teams. Think of how many more career paths, how many more ladders from poverty into the middle class and up into wealth, we would have today if we had not outsourced half our manufacturing needs — or more — over the past half-century.
But beyond that, think of how we now suffer when those foreign nations decide to flex their muscle.
During the COVID-19 disruptions and the “supply chain crisis” that followed it, China shut down whole cities and entire seaport complexes for a month at a time, for two solid years. There were necessary parts we couldn’t get for six months.
Detroit couldn’t make American cars because the dashboards came from China. Appliance-makers couldn’t make American furnaces and ovens because the heat exchangers came from China. Grocery stores couldn’t stock meat because even American-grown beef had been shipped to China to be processed.
And think for a moment: What if those were defense components, needed for military supplies? They often are. And what if the country we end up at war with is China? One day, it will be.
Tariffs and Non-Tariff Barriers
We spend all our time talking about tariffs, but the non-tariff barriers erected by our so-called trading partners have infinitely more stopping power than a simple tariff.
Try to make an appliance in America and sell it into the European market. You must apply for CE mark approval, confirm that 100% of your components comply with RoHS and REACH, hire an authorized representative in Europe to be named on your packaging, test and report the amount of plastic and cardboard in your packaging, and reprint that packaging to show all the little logos and approvals you’ve paid for. And then once you’ve spent the millions to comply with all these regs, the E.U. will add yet another, so you’re always spending so much in compliance costs that you eventually give up trying to export to Europe at all.
If you’re dependent on European countries for sales, they can make it costlier for you to sell there. And if you’re dependent on them for purchases, they always have the power to forbid your purchase.
In 2024, for example, China quietly announced massive export controls on rare earths — primarily such critical electronics materials as neodymium magnets. They set these to be effective in 2025, so the press reported it as if it was a reaction to President Trump’s tariffs, but China introduced this assault on our economy during the Biden-Harris regime’s final year.
Our economy would prefer an increased tariff over crippling non-tariff barriers like these, any day.
A True Emergency
So is this status quo — a period in which our source countries can shut off supply to our manufacturing sector, and our export destination countries can erect barriers to keep our products out of their economies on a whim — an emergency, or not?
We are no longer talking about some theoretical, potential future challenge.
We all lived through the 2020-2022 period, when we couldn’t make cars or washing machines because of this disastrous array of foreign obstacles.
What constitutes an emergency?
Imagine a dam that protects a city from being flooded and destroyed by a nearby lake. When we start to see reparable cracks in the dam, is that an emergency? Must we wait until a section of the dam gives way, and a quarter of the city is destroyed, to call it an emergency? Must we wait until half the town is wiped out? When is it late enough to authorize emergency powers so the Executive can take action? After the whole city is gone?
In truth, only people who have been protected from the realities of the world — like the pampered elites of the Washington Beltway and the Manhattan press corps — could fail to see that we have been in an international trade emergency for decades now. Flyover country understands it, even if the coastal establishment doesn’t.
In Federalist #70, Alexander Hamilton envisioned a time when Congress would be too confused, too slow-acting, too distant, or too factionally divided to act, and he called for “energy in the executive” when such urgent needs arose.
Through Sections 301 and 232, through the IEPPA and all the other legislation that the Trump administration has utilized, Congress laid the groundwork for President Trump to do what is necessary now that his action is needed.
With these tools, he and his team have made immense progress for our country in just this first year. To remove these arrows from their quiver, when they have already performed so well, would be economic suicide, cultural suicide, and national security suicide as well.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
This column was originally published in the American Thinker, here.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. He’s recently begun an eponymous podcast, and his business consulting / trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
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