Donald Trump, Steel Tariffs, and Executive Power Run Amok
Congress Keeps Giving Presidents Too Much Power. Time to Take Some of It Back.
A few days ago, a newsletter called The Daily Shot, which specializes in graphical representations of macroeconomic trends, published a fascinating graph showing that the price of steel in the US was almost $1000 more a tonne than steel prices in Europe, and more than double the price of steel in Asia.
Some of this difference can probably be attributed to supply-chain issues. But a big chunk of it is the result of one of the worst policy moves of the Trump era, one that the Biden administration has, dubiously, chosen to keep in place: putting tariffs on imported steel in place that raised its price by a full 25%. These tariffs are not only bad from an economic perspective. They also illustrate a bigger, and more important, problem with the American system: the way presidents are able to exploit poorly-written, overly broad laws to unilaterally put in place policies they support, but Congress may not.
In the case of the steel tariffs, the overly broad legal provision in question is Section 232 of something called the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. That law was enacted at the height of the Cold War, and, reflecting Cold War anxieties, it gives the president the power to…
