Again, Trump Completely Misreads the Law

By Lev Menand and Joel Michaels

Mr. Menand is the author of “The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis.” Mr. Michaels served as a senior adviser in the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s use of an international emergency powers statute to impose broad tariffs on imports from across the world.

He immediately announced that he was relying on a different statute — the Trade Act of 1974 — to impose new, near-universal 10 percent tariffs, which he then raised to 15 percent.

These new tariffs are illegal, too. They are just another attempt by the president to ignore the law and dare the courts to stop him.

Courts should put a halt to the new tariffs — before they disrupt global trade and the domestic economy.

The never-used provision the White House is relying on, Section 122, says that the president shall impose tariffs or import restrictions, for up to 150 days, whenever “fundamental international payments problems require” restricting imports to deal with, among other things, “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.” Mr. Trump has seized on this language, pointing primary to America’s substantial and persistent trade deficit (around $900 billion last year).

But the president misreads the statute. The provision is not about trade imbalances. Other parts of the statute address those. It is about financial imbalances — in particular ones that threaten financial stability.

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