President Donald Trump has used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to levy duties on $2.2 trillion worth of imports. Next month, the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether those tariffs are constitutional.
The Constitution unambiguously and explicitly grants the power to raise revenue to Congress; for the president to possess these taxing powers, Congress must explicitly delegate them in statute. Yet Chad Squitieri, a law professor at Catholic University, recently argued in The Washington Post that "not all tariffs are taxes—at least not in a constitutional sense." Instead, he wrote, they were recognized as a trade regulation.
