There’s no reason to explain why Trump’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources v. Trump was, as Ed Whelan called it, “stupid and vile.” The left lunatic Wall Street Journal characterized his rant as “arguably the worst moment of his Presidency,” which is hard to say given how many moments vie for the title.

But as Trump’s now favorite justice explained in his dissent, there are other statutes that permit a president to impose tariffs, and Trump immediately seized upon Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 (19 U.S.C. § 2132) to impose a universal tariff of 10%, upped the next day to the maximum 15%, which can last 150 days, after which he will require congressional approval. While it’s true that § 122 is a mechanism for the imposition of ad valorem taxes, that does not mean that the statute authorized Trump to impose them at will.

As Andy McCarthy argues at National Review, Trump’s latest attempt at playing the Fearless Leader against the foreign influences of the shameful, anti-American fools and lapdogs in robes is no more legitimate than his last effort.

In Section 122, Congress endowed the president with narrow, temporary authority to impose tariffs “to deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits” (emphasis added). What Trump is complaining about — something he insists is a crisis but is not — is the balance of trade, not of payments. The United States does not have an overall balance of payments deficit, much less a large and serious one.

A trade deficit between the U.S. and a foreign nation occurs, mainly in connection with goods (which is just one aspect of international commerce), when imports are greater than exports. This is not really a problem for a variety of reasons — e.g., a trade deficit results in an investment surplus, the U.S. is a major services economy and often runs exported services surpluses that mitigate the imports deficit in goods, etc.

The balance of payments is a broader concept than the balance of trade. It accounts for all the economic transactions that take place between the United States and the rest of the world. Even without getting into every kind of transaction that entails, suffice it to say that foreign investment in the United States, coupled with the advantages our nation accrues because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, more than make up for the longstanding trade deficit in goods.

Our overall payments are in balance. There is no crisis.

Of course, Trump has no more grasped the meaning of crisis than he has law, seeing both as a mere mantra to be uttered or derided at his convenience to empower him to do as he pleases. While the Supreme Court has shown enormous deference to the president’s proclamation of national emergencies for things that were hardly emergent, an issue that was left unaddressed in Learning Resources, the fact remains that the reality triggering the availability of § 122 simply doesn’t exist.

It’s vital to understand why Section 122 was enacted. There was a financial crisis in the late 60s and early 70s under the Bretton Woods system, when the dollar was tied to gold. Foreign countries that held dollar reserves could exchange them for gold at a fixed rate. Meanwhile, our government was spending at a high clip due to the Vietnam War and Great Society programs. This and the obligation to pay out gold put enormous pressure on the dollar…

Now, over a half century later, these conditions no longer obtain. The dollar floats and the government does not concern itself with gold parity. The dollar is the global reserve currency, so demand for dollars by foreign nations is robust. We have strong capital inflows and our highly liquid financial markets are the envy of the world. Notwithstanding trade deficits, there is no balance of payments problem.

It doesn’t matter that Trump was elected and the Supreme Court shouldn’t stand in the way of his doing as he pleases. It doesn’t matter that Trump propagates a string of nonsensical claims about how tariffs are making America great again, despite every fact to the contrary. What matters is that the authority of the president is limited by the Constitution to exercise only those powers constitutionally relegated to Congress when, and under the conditions, that Congress has explicitly authorized. If the conditions are not met, then the president has no authority to impose tariffs.

What cannot be gainsaid is, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Learning Resources, that tariffs are taxes, and only Congress can impose taxes.

The power to impose tariffs is “very clear[ly] . . . a branch of the taxing power.” Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1, 201 (1824). “A tariff,” after all, “is a tax levied on imported goods and services.”

Regardless of whether you choose to believe that tariffs, Trump’s favorite word in the dictionary, which he has yet to read, will bring “back” the Golden Age or is a regressive tax that needlessly burdens Americans, they cannot be imposed without lawful authority. And while some of us never doubted that Trump’s employment of tariffs under the IEEPA was unlawful and ultra vires, he is no more empowered to unilaterally impose unbounded tariffs according to his whims under Section 122.