Week In Review #059: 15FEB - 21FEB26
On tariffs...
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The Supreme Court’s decision this week to nullify vast swathes of Trump’s tariffs has finally forced into the open what many of us have argued since the inception of the tariff regime: the power to lay and collect duties is not an executive power. It is, in the plain text of Article I, a congressional prerogative. Whatever one thinks of the prudence, efficacy, or strategic necessity of tariffs as such is an entirely separate matter. Trump’s reaction to the Supreme Courts censure has been predictable: double down and project confidence. Whatever the aftermath of this case portends, the citizenry continues to pay — quite literally. Tariff revenues swell the coffers, yet the tax burden does not correspondingly diminish.
The Founders, for all their goods and ills, were acutely aware of the dangers of concentrating fiscal powers in a single, transient executive. Trade policy is not merely abstract economics: it is taxation by any other name. A tariff is a tax paid by importers and, ultimately, by consumers. When such burdens are imposed or adjusted unilaterally, without legislative assent, the republican principle this country was supposedly founded upon erodes.
Since last year, the regime’s defenders have hidden behind elastic readings of “emergency” authority. Yet we witnessed tariffs raised not in response to invasion, embargo, or financial collapse, but because the President disliked the treatment of his foreign counterpart. Even the most generous reading of delegated emergency powers strains to encompass punitive rate hikes such as this.
And here again the broader lesson surfaces: emergency powers, once normalized, become the default instrument of governance.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the stories shaping the week that was…