Emergency Exit Strategy

His brand is crisis, so it can be hard to keep abreast of the various calamities President Trump stumbles into or deliberately courts. Now that tensions with Iran seem to have momentarily cooled, another recent episode of Trumpian brinksmanship, closer to home, deserves some attention before we lurch forward into new dangers.  As you ’ve surely heard, but may have already forgotten amid the fog of near-war, three weeks ago, President Trump threatened to declare yet another national emergency at the southern border. If Mexico didn’t sufficiently crack down on cross-border migration,Trump warned, he ’d use “the authorities granted to me by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act” to hammer our third largest trading partner—and U.S. consumers—with a series of escalating tariffs on Mexican goods, rising to 25 percent across the board. Fortunately, on June 7, three days before the deadline he ’d set, President Trump called off the trade war. But, Trump warned, he“can always go back” to raising tariffs if he ’s not happy.The notion that the president can, with the stroke of a pen, upend peaceful trade relations and implementa massive tax hike ought to sound the alarm about Trump ’s expansive view of presidential emergency powers. Are they as vast as the president claims, and, if so, what can Congress do to rein them in? As I arguedin Reason magazine recently, our latest Imperial President has aggressively exploited the powers he inherited, but has...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs