Cleo Rios: I need to ask you something before we even start — did you know that there's a law whose entire job was to stop presidents from going rogue on trade, and that law is the exact law they used to go rogue on trade?
June Hadley: I did know, and it's genuinely one of those things where — mm — the structure produces the opposite of what it intended.
Cleo Rios: Congress passed IEEPA in 1977 to clip the wings of the Trading With the Enemy Act — this old 1917 wartime statute that kept getting used in peacetime. The fix. The corrective. And look, it worked for forty-eight years in the sense that nobody used IEEPA for tariffs at all. And then Donald Trump invokes it, no congressional vote, and suddenly we have a trillion-dollar tariff regime running off a single executive signature.
June Hadley: Wait, can I check — because I think this is the thing that confuses people most. Article I, Section 8 is unambiguous: the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, excises — that's Congress. Full stop. So how is any of this legal in the first place?
Cleo Rios: That's exactly the trap and it's exactly what we're here to pull apart. Because the Supreme Court — February 20, 2026, six to three — finally ruled in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that no, actually, IEEPA does not hand the president that kind of authority. But the fact that it took until 2026 to get that answer is the whole story.
June Hadley: So the driving question, I think, is this: how did the statute designed to constrain executive trade power become the primary vehicle for the biggest unilateral tariff action in a century? That gap is what we're walking through today.
Cleo Rios: Congress built the cage, signed the paperwork, and then watched the next guy redecorate it as a launchpad. Mock-formally: buckle up.
June Hadley: But before we get to how the cage got repurposed — think about why it was built that way to begin with. The Framers put tariff power in Article I, Section 8, deliberately. Not because they forgot about the president. Because they treated import duties as taxation. Same category. Same constraints. Congress holds the credit card for tariffs the same way it holds the credit card for income taxes — and no one person gets to run that up alone.
Cleo Rios: Wait — tariffs and income taxes are the same thing constitutionally?
June Hadley: Structurally, yes. Import duties are revenue bills. And the Origination Clause says revenue bills have to start in the House — not the Senate, not the White House. The House. That's how seriously the Framers took the idea that taxing power shouldn't sit with one person.
Cleo Rios: I'm sorry — so a president repricing every imported good in the country overnight is, structurally, the same kind of move as the president unilaterally raising your income tax rate. That's the comparison.
June Hadley: That is exactly the comparison. Which is why the separation of powers question here isn't exotic — it's actually the same question we already answered for every other tax. The executive can't originate it. Congress holds that authority and can lend pieces of it, carefully, under what's called statutory delegation. But the underlying power never moves.
Cleo Rios: So when Nixon in August 1971 just — slaps a ten percent surcharge on every single import because the dollar's bleeding out — that should have been, by this logic, constitutionally a House bill first.
June Hadley: I mean — yes, by the baseline logic, yes. What Nixon had was a statute, TWEA, that Congress had already used to lend him that authority. The delegation existed. But the constitutional floor — the Article I floor — never moved. That's the thing that gets lost. The floor says: this is legislative taxing power. Any president exercising it is exercising borrowed authority, not native authority. And borrowed authority can be taken back.
Cleo Rios: Which is what the Court said in February 2026 — six to three — Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. Congress hadn't clearly lent IEEPA for trillion-dollar tariff regimes. The credit card was maxed out on something the cardholder never authorized.
June Hadley: And that credit card metaphor actually gets at the ladder — because Congress didn't hand one card. They handed several, one rung at a time. TWEA in 1917, amended in 1933 to extend into peacetime. That's rung one.
Cleo Rios: Nixon hits that rung in August 1971 — not for a war, not for Pearl Harbor — for a balance-of-payments deficit. A number on a ledger. That's the thing that repriced every import in the country.
June Hadley: That's the crack. Because TWEA was literally called the Trading With the *Enemy* Act — and the enemy in 1971 was... an economic metric.
Cleo Rios: So Congress passes IEEPA in 1977 as the corrective — you now need to declare a national emergency, an *unusual and extraordinary threat*, before you touch international commerce. Sounds tighter. Except — and this is where I keep losing my mind — Congress then builds two more rungs anyway. Section 232 in 1962, Section 301 in 1974.
June Hadley: Which is the part I'd push back on a little — Congress wasn't sleepwalking. They voted for each of those. Section 232, Section 301. The delegation was deliberate each time.
Cleo Rios: That's what makes it stranger, not less strange! Picture a fabric importer in Ohio — she gets her supplier invoice on a Wednesday, her input costs have jumped fifteen percent, and she never got a vote on it. Not a committee vote, not a floor vote. A national emergency was declared and her margin evaporated.
June Hadley: And each rung — TWEA, IEEPA, 232, 301 — was framed as narrow. Temporary. Crisis-specific. The ladder looks sensible one step at a time.
Cleo Rios: Until someone climbs all of it at once.
June Hadley: Mm. And the *unusual and extraordinary threat* standard was supposed to be the guardrail — but it turns out no court was rushing to define where extraordinary ends.
Cleo Rios: Which — and I want to come back to this — is actually the part that makes the Learning Resources ruling so strange. The Court said IEEPA didn't authorize Trump's specific orders. But the ladder? Still standing. And that's the worse part.
June Hadley: And that's the part I want to actually sit on — because the ladder standing is not a side note. IEEPA sat completely untouched for tariff purposes for 48 years. Forty-eight. Which means any future president just inherited a loaded statute the moment they took office.
Cleo Rios: Wait — untouched for 48 years and then just... activated. Like a sleeper agent.
June Hadley: That's actually — yeah, that's a good way to put it. And the mechanism isn't dramatic. It's a reading shift. Presidents stopped asking 'is this crisis real enough?' and started asking 'does the statute technically permit me to declare one?' That's not a constitutional crisis, it's a linguistic one.
Cleo Rios: I'm sorry — the entire trillion-dollar tariff regime turns on a reading of a word?
June Hadley: The word 'unusual and extraordinary.' IEEPA requires that threshold. But no court defined its ceiling before 2026. So the major questions doctrine — which says courts demand clear congressional authorization for economically massive executive claims — that got invoked in the Learning Resources litigation, February 20, 2026, six to three. The Court finally drew the line.
Cleo Rios: And struck down Trump's specific IEEPA-based tariff orders. But Section 232, Section 301, remaining TWEA provisions. All still there.
June Hadley: Every one of them. Closing one statutory door leaves — I mean, three others are still open. The nondelegation doctrine, the intelligible principle standard from J.W. Hampton back in 1928 — courts have almost never enforced those against trade statutes specifically.
Cleo Rios: So the ruling accomplished what, exactly?
June Hadley: It named a limit on IEEPA. That's real. But the structural architecture — Congress holding Article I power, repeatedly lending it through multiple statutes — that survived entirely intact.
Cleo Rios: So a future president just reaches for a different rung. Section 232 — national security — and suddenly it's a new emergency, new tariffs, same outcome.
June Hadley: That's the structural problem the ruling didn't touch. The borrowed authority is still sitting there. And the next dormant statute is 48 years of silence away from being activated again.
Cleo Rios: The thing that landed for me — Congress had the legal option to take it back. Any of it. At any point in those forty-eight years. Both parties. Nobody reached for it.
June Hadley: Yeah. And I think — I mean, each generation looked at the flexibility and decided flexibility was worth more than the fight. That's not negligence, exactly. It's a repeated choice. The default just happened to be someone else's hands.
Cleo Rios: Which means the February 2026 ruling is real, but it's also just... one door. Article I is still where it was. Unresolved.
June Hadley: Constitutional architecture doesn't fix itself. That part I feel pretty settled on. Thanks for thinking through it with me.
