Countless Democrats are vehemently critical of the steep tariffs that President Donald Trump is imposing on the United States’ trading partners, warning that a variety of imported goods are going to get a lot more expensive in the months ahead. But criticism is coming from parts of the right as well, including some conservative and libertarian legal scholars.
According to New York Times legal reporter Adam Liptak, a friend-of-the-court brief submitted back in April laid out right-wing concerns about Trump’s trade policy.
Those who signed the brief, which was filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade, included, among others, Steven G. Calabresi, who was a founder of the Federalist Society in the early 1980s; former U.S. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey; and Richard Epstein, a libertarian legal scholar at New York University. The brief, Liptak reports, was prepared by Michael W. McConnell, who now teaches at Stanford Law School in California and is an ex-federal appeals court judge appointed by former President George W. Bush.
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Epstein told the Times, “You have to understand that the conservative movement is now, as an intellectual movement, consistently anti-Trump on most issues.”
Some liberals and progressives, according to Liptak, signed the brief as well, including Yale University law professor Harold Koh. But much of the participation came from the right.
Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University in Virginia, told the Times, “The brief unites big-name constitutional law scholars across the political spectrum in a way I have rarely seen. I never would have expected to see Richard Epstein, Steve Calabresi and Harold Koh all on the same brief on a major issue. But here they are, together, opposing ‘taxation by proclamation.’ Donald Trump brought them together.”
One of the brief’s main criticisms of Trump’s trade policy is that he carrying it out by executive order and failing to get Congress’ input.
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The brief read, “The powers to tax, to regulate commerce and to shape the nation’s economic course must remain with Congress. They cannot drift silently into the hands of the president through inertia, inattention or creative readings of statutes never meant to grant such authority. That conviction is not partisan. It is constitutional. And it strikes at the heart of this case.”
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Read Adam Liptak’s full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).
