Opinion | Congress Needs to Stop Trump’s Tariff Madness

President Trump’s repeated attempts to impose tariffs have become an encapsulation of his second term. They have hurt the American economy and his own popularity. They also range from legally dubious to blatantly illegal.

With Mr. Trump now engaging in a trade war with Canada — which has decided to stand up to his bullying — we want to step back and explain both the economic and the legal damage from his tariffs. We also urge Congress and the courts to take action and stop this madness. The tariffs offer a signature opportunity for the other two branches of the federal government to insist that Mr. Trump abide by the Constitution and stop punishing American workers and consumers.

The Supreme Court has already rejected most of Mr. Trump’s tariffs once. In February, it ruled them to be illegal, and he immediately made clear that he would not be deterred. “Their decision is incorrect,” he said within hours of the ruling’s release. “But it doesn’t matter.”

It is true that other presidents have at times taken a similarly combative approach to a Supreme Court decision. They have abandoned policies that the court rejected and enacted alternatives that tried to accomplish the same goals in different ways. Only a few years ago, President Joe Biden did so with student debt. “The Supreme Court blocked me from relieving student debt,” Mr. Biden said. “But they didn’t stop me.”

Still, Mr. Trump’s defiance stands out. He has twice tried to cirblockvent the court’s tariff ruling, imposing new rounds of import fees by invoking legal justifications that are patently ridiculous.

This is part of a broader pattern, in two ways. First, he has tried to get around court rulings far more often than his predecessors. With lower courts, he has openly flouted judges’ decisions, including in January, when he violated nearly 100 court orders related to immigration. With the Supreme Court, he has been more respectful but has still engaged in “legalistic noncompliance,” as the scholars Daniel T. Deacon and Leah M. Litman have written. It involves “an array of specious legal arguments and legalisms in an attempt to conceal what is actually widespread resistance to judicial oversight.” Mr. Trump has taken this approach with tariffs, immigration and funding freezes.

Second, several of Mr. Trump’s individual justifications are far flimsier than those that past presidents have attempted. His latest round of global tariffs offers an example. The administration’s rationale for them is a section of a 1974 law that empowers a president to enact tariffs against countries that import goods made with forced labor. Last month, the administration cited the law to impose tariffs on nearly all goods entering the United States. That round of tariffs is a successor to the similarly sized tariff level that the Supreme Court rejected in February, as well as a temporary tariff Mr. Trump imposed after the decision. A panel of federal judges ruled that temporary tariff to be illegal as well.

Some countries do deserve scrutiny for importing goods made with forced labor. One major source of forced labor is China, which has compelled residents of Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region, to produce cotton, car parts and other items. Yet federal law already empowers the government to address forced labor in other ways, including by simply blocking the entry of goods made with such labor. Mr. Trump has used a genuine problem as an excuse to apply tariffs to more than 80 countries that are collectively responsible for more than 99 percent of American imports.

He is effectively claiming that products made with forced labor are a major issue in Canada, Japan, South Korea, Britain, France and dozens of other countries. The tariffs apply even to Norway, which has been a pioneer in fighting forced labor around the world.

Then there is the sketchy rationale for his latest tariff on Canadian goods. The president invoked part of a 1930 law that has never been used before to impose tariffs, while ignoring more recent laws — as well as the trade agreement that his first administration negotiated with Canada. He has imposed a 50 percent tariff on many Canadian goods by claiming that Canada has discriminated against American goods, even though his administration started the trade dispute. And Canada is not exactly responsible for the legitimate problems with American trade policy in recent decades. It is the largest buyer of American exports.

Congress can play a vital role here.

Even many Republicans in Congress are unhappy about the tariffs, and they have the power to halt them. They can start with public criticism, which will raise the political cost for Mr. Trump of keeping the tariffs in place. If he does not yield, they should p*** new laws closing the loopholes he has used. In the case of the Canada tariffs, Congress should p*** legislation to make clear that he cannot use the 1930 law to enact sweeping tariffs.

Judges can act, too, especially on the forced-labor tariffs. They are now before the Court of International Trade, a federal body, and it should swiftly rule on them. As the leaders of 25 U.S. states argued in a legal filing, “The tariff action is arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law.” The administration’s claims about forced labor “make a mockery of the statute used to justify them.”

While federal judges have often done an admirable job of trying to respond to Mr. Trump’s illegal policies, the tariff cases highlight a core problem: Mr. Trump’s legalistic noncompliance moves more quickly than the courts do. When a judge rules one Trump policy to be illegal, he replaces it with a new one accomplishing similar aims.

Eventually, the forced-labor tariffs will probably go back to the Supreme Court, which needs to become nimbler about protecting the Constitution from Mr. Trump’s disrespect for the balance of power among the three branches of government. The justices have shown themselves willing to stand up to some of Mr. Trump’s worst abuses of power, on tariffs, birthright citizenship and false claims of election fraud. Yet they have sometimes shown an unfortunate deference to him and even undercut lower-court judges trying to uphold the law.

When Mr. Biden was president, the court quickly acted to halt several policies it considered illegal, including his second attempt at student-loan forgiveness. When faced with blatant defiance of the law from Mr. Trump, however, the court’s Republican-appointed majority sometimes takes its time or demurs. In the meantime, Mr. Trump’s policies do damage.

After the Supreme Court threw out Mr. Trump’s original tariff policy, the average effective tariff rate on U.S. imports fell to 7 percent, from 14 percent, according to the Yale Budget Lab. The rate has since risen to 11 percent.

In economic terms, the policy has so far been a disappointment. The tariffs have raised prices on many goods, without producing a revival in manufacturing employment. Overall job growth and economic growth have slowed in recent months. Instead of pulling back in response, Mr. Trump has doubled down on his trade war. Incredibly, the 1930 law that he has used to justify the Canadian tariffs is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, a law notorious for contributing to the Great Depression.

The even more important principle, though, is the constitutional one. Mr. Trump is breaking the law. Congress and the judiciary need to respond.