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In other news a traffic court judge ruled that corporations are not people. -- So that's that.

Now this is getting ridiculous. The judges just unplugged Trump’s tariff dashboard, right in the middle of a game. Yesterday afternoon, Politico ran the latest judicial disappointment, headlined “Federal court strikes down Trump's tariffs on countries around the world.” Before we go any further, let me just say: Congress needs to do something. Anything! Stage a rally outside the Supreme Court, at least. Even better, do your jobs and pass some laws. But I digress. ...

I can only imagine how Trump’s legal team must be feeling. Now what? Not only did the court’s decision completely destroy all the deals currently in the system, and caused Trump to lose all his game progress, but adding gross insult to mortal injury, the order even requires the U.S. to pay back all the tariffs already collected. It’s like the courts are spending their credibility faster than drunken sailors on shore leave in a Thai brothel.

“An injunction would be extremely disruptive while the president is in the middle of foreign negotiations with other countries about trade deficits and about the fentanyl crisis,” Trump’s lawyer argued to the 3-judge panel. They ignored him. ...

The Constitution explicitly gave Congress the power to set tariffs. The trouble is, modern Congress is slow, ineffectual, and often can’t agree on which party gets the big office at the front of the building, never mind what to do about Chinese fentanyl. So, when countries declare economic war on the U.S., Congress can’t keep up. So over the years, they’ve created various laws and statutes designed to give the president a certain degree of flexibility and power, especially under declared emergencies.

Thus, President Trump has a variety of tariff tools available to him. One of them is a wordily named 1997 statute called IEEPA, which is the one Trump used to build his trade dashboard, and which the three judges in this case found don’t let him set tariffs at all. They wrote a lot, page after mind-numbing page, about predecessor statutes and what happened during Smoot-Hawley...

The judges must have known their reasoning was as thin as gas-station toilet paper. So they bolted on a second “but even if” reason. Even if they were wrong, they wrote, they would still strike the tariffs down under the Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine, which is a generalized and rarely-used “non-delegation” prohibition against letting Congress assign its Constitutional powers to other branches.

The “major questions” theory was even more suspect and subject to appellate revision than their obsessive-compulsive definition of “regulate.” Politico drily observed, “Ultimately, the case could end up at the Supreme Court.” ...

I remain optimistic about Trump’s chances on appeal, but it sure would also be helpful if Congress could weigh in. I realize the GOP lacks the Senatorial firepower to overcome what remains of the filibuster, but maybe it’s time for more nuking.

Don't clutch your pearls. The appellate Court ruled that the tariffs are still intact while under appeal. This gives the heads up that Trump's gonna win.

It’s not nothing: At May’s pace, these customs and excise taxes would amount to $288 billion per year, up by $190 billion from 2024.

Tariffs are taxes paid by businesses – some of the biggest of which pay little nor no income taxes in the US. Total corporate income tax receipts amounted to only $507 billion in 2024, or about 12.5% of the $4.1 trillion in pre-tax corporate profits, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

And an additional $190 billion in tariffs per year would be an increase of 37% of the taxes paid by corporations.
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/06/02/revenues-from-tariffs-spiked-to-23-billion-in-may-up-by-168-in-3-months/

I told you so, part II. ABC, yesterday: “US trade deficit narrowed significantly amid Trump's tariff escalation.” Experts were baffled.

The U.S. global trade gap fell by more than half in April, as the U.S. chalked up a trade deficit of only about $61 billion in April, “marking a sharp decline from a $140 billion trade gap a month earlier.” In other words, in just one month, Trump’s tariffs have cut the trade deficit by more than half.