CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATIONS

During the last six months of 1971, President Richard Nixon imposed roughly a ten percent surcharge, subject to an absolute maximum tax, all payable to the federal government, upon most goods imported into the United States from foreign countries. In 1975, the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals upheld the legality of that surcharge under a federal statute with wording identical to the present-day International Emergency Economic Powers Act (the IEEPA). The Court also upheld the legality of President Nixon’s five-month long surcharge under the federal Constitution. See United States v. Yoshida, 526 F.2d 560 (USCPA 1975). In his briefs to the United States Supreme Court in the case of V.O.S. Selections v. Trump, President Trump relies extensively upon that Court of Appeals case to support the legality of the tariffs he imposed upon imported goods under the IEEPA as soon as he was inaugurated in January of 2025.

As a matter of Constitutional Law, President Trump is wrong. The federal Constitution grants the power to impose tariffs, i.e., taxes, to the United States Congress, not the President. U.S. Const., Art. I, §§1,8 (the powers of Congress); see also U.S. Const., Art.II, (the powers of the President). The “Necessary and Proper Clause” of Article I, Section 8, does authorize Congress itself to delegate a limited power to tax during an emergency that justifies an immediate exercise of the power to tax. However, as the Yoshida Case itself ruled, that delegation of power must be subject to limitations drawn by Congress and enforceable by courts-of-law. As interpreted and applied by President Trump, the IEEPA’s delegations of power to the President are not subject to any such limitations; President Trump actually claims as much in his Supreme Court briefs.

President Trump’s tariffs under the IEEPA have no limits as to their ultimate amounts, or as to their ultimate duration. In effect, they displace Congressional authority over taxes on imports and transfer that authority to the President. They literally impose “taxation without representation,” in gross violation of the founding principle of the United States of America, and of the United States Constitution itself. They must be declared unconstitutional.

Dan D. Rhea