Are We Tired Yet of Tariffs by Decree?

The headline asks if we're tired yet, and the honest answer is: tired of the wrong thing. What's exhausting isn't tariffs. It's the method. One person picks a number, picks a country, picks a Tuesday, and the entire economy has to reorganize around a decision nobody outside the West Wing had any say in. That's not a policy critique. That's a structural one.

Congress has a tariff power for a reason. It's slow, it's annoying, it requires building an actual coalition, and that friction is the point. Emergency authority was supposed to be the exception for genuine crises, not the default lane for running trade policy indefinitely. When every tariff becomes a declared emergency, the word stops meaning anything, and so does the constitutional design that was supposed to keep this kind of power out of one office.

None of this requires you to be a free-trade purist. You can think China has been gaming the system for decades and still think the fix shouldn't arrive by decree, reversible on a whim, unpredictable enough that businesses can't plan a quarter ahead. Predictability is not a liberal talking point. It's what lets a factory owner sign a lease or a farmer decide what to plant.

We've spent years complaining about executive overreach when it came from the other side. It doesn't become fine now because the tariffs sound tough. Good policy that can't survive an actual debate in Congress isn't good policy. It's just a guess with better PR.