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Colby Cosh: The U.S. president breaks his own laws in waging the trade war

Can he actually do that? I guess we’ll see!

Last year, as faithful readers will recall, the president of the United States went haywire and imposed new tariffs on Canada by unilateral fiat. And while other commentators were endlessly analyzing Canadian trade strategy and U.S. electoral politics, I was reading treatises by crazy American libertarian lawyers and asking the question “Can he actually do that?” The answer, once it got to the Supreme Court, turned out to be “no, mostly,” with a 6-3 finding against the president.

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The right thing to do, all along, had been to look at, to, and into American law. Most reporters and columnists like to seize upon the personal aspects of a political issue, rather than plunge into anything slightly technical, and the ones in Canada are widely guilty of making the dozy, repeatedly falsified assumption that U.S. courts will automatically do whatever Trump wants. (Of course, lots of writers south of the border make this mistake too.)

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