One of the signature initiatives of President Trump’s second term has been what I have called the “tariff gambit” — the rapid blizzard of tariff actions, including declarations of emergencies, tariff impositions, increases and decreases in rates, postponements, and negotiations of new trade deals with various countries.

In several prior posts, including here and here, I have raised a series of concerns with this area of the President’s policies.

Putting aside for a moment the question of whether these various tariff initiatives constitute good public policy, a separate question is whether the President has a legal basis to impose, raise and lower tariffs on his own authority, even if he declares a “national emergency.”

In Federalist Number 70, one of the most often-cited of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton famously made his pitch for a strong unitary executive as provided for in the then-proposed Constitution:

Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy. . . .

Our current President Trump carries the concept of “energy in the executive” to an extreme level, undertaking a dizzying array of initiatives, with new ones emerging so rapidly that it is difficult to keep up.

Many of Trump’s initiatives have corrected disastrous and destructive policies of the Biden and Obama years. But with so many initiatives, perhaps it is inevitable that some will be misfires; or perhaps Trump lacks a capacity for self-criticism to distinguish his good ideas from the bad ones.