The U.S. Court of International Trade ruled Trump's Section 122 tariffs unlawful, and that ruling is a win for small businesses crushed by illegal trade policy. The Constitution gives Congress — not the president — the power to tax, and no amount of executive creativity changes that. Rebranding a trade deficit as a balance-of-payments crisis to justify sweeping import taxes is exactly the kind of overreach the courts exist to stop.
The CIT ruling is a judicial stretch — the chief judge sided with the administration, and the two-judge majority essentially declared a valid law unusable, which isn't how legal interpretation works. Section 122 was enacted precisely to give the president tariff authority, and courts shouldn't rewrite statutes based on whether they think the economic conditions that inspired them still exist. An appeal will correct this flawed reasoning.
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