A defiant statement read aloud by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is drawing mockery for its apparent lack of basic constitutional understanding as she lashed out against a unanimous court ruling that struck down President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs as illegal.
Despite the U.S. Constitution specifically granting Congress purview over tariffs and trade, Leavitt told reporters on Thursday that the “courts should have no role here.”
Leavitt also decried what she called the “troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges, inserting themselves into the presidential decision making process,” while claiming that “America cannot function if President Trump or any other president, for that matter, has their sensitive, diplomatic, or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges” who are “threatening to undermine the credibility of the United States on the world stage.”
She also insisted that “for the sake of our Constitution and our country” the U.S. Supreme Court must step in.
The Press Secretary also claimed that President Donald Trump’s “rationale was legally sound,” while the court engaged in “judicial overreach.”
“Using his full proper legal authority, President Trump imposed universal tariffs and reciprocal tariffs on Liberation Day to address the extraordinary threats to our national security and economy posed by large and persistent annual U.S. Goods trade deficits,” she said—a claim with which the court disagreed.
Critics blasted Leavitt’s remarks.
“This is flat-out nonsense,” wrote The Atlantic’s James Surowiecki, who previously wrote The Financial Page for The New Yorker. “No one is stopping Trump from engaging in trade negotiations. What he’s been stopped from doing is imposing tariffs that he has no legal or constitutional authority to impose. Stopping illegal and unconstitutional action is precisely the courts’ role.”
“If Trump imposed a national sales tax by presidential fiat, the courts would of course be required to step in to stop him,” continued Surowiecki, who is also the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds.”
“The same is true of him imposing a 10% universal tariff on every country in the world, along with arbitrary tariffs on top of that,” he wrote.
“Leavitt says the US trade deficit is an ‘extraordinary’ problem, then in the next breath says we’ve run an annual trade deficit every year since 1975 – meaning it’s not, in fact, extraordinary,” he added.
Attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick appeared to take aim at Leavitt’s grasp of the U.S. Constitution.
“The courts should have no role in interpreting a law? Really?” he asked. “I don’t know what country Leavitt thinks she lives in, but it’s not this one.”