The Supreme Court Spurns a Presidential Power Grab

Source: The Dispatch
by Ilya Somin

“The framers of the Constitution wanted to ensure the president would not be able to repeat the abuses of English kings, who imposed taxes without legislative authorization. Under Trump’s interpretation of the law, the president would have virtually unlimited tariff authority, similar to that of an absolute monarch of the kind King Charles I aspired to be. The court decisively rejected this aspiration to unconstrained presidential power. … But the judiciary’s future ability to constrain dangerous presidential power grabs depends in large part on an issue the court managed to avoid in the IEEPA case: whether and to what extent to defer to presidential assertions that an extraordinary situation exists justifying the invocation of sweeping emergency powers.” (02/23/26)

https://archive.is/Vkroh