Ankush Khardori writes:

Donald Trump is making a last-ditch effort to salvage his beloved, beleaguered tariff policy, heading to the Supreme Court in hopes that the Republican appointees will come to his rescue. The desperation is both palpable and warranted given the conspicuous weakness of the administration’s legal arguments, as underscored by a series of lower court rulings against him. That has in turn led the president and his aides to make increasingly histrionic public claims about what will happen if the Supreme Court does not cave and side with Trump.

Call it The Chicken Little Defense: If the courts do not sign off on the administration’s tariffs, it “would be a total disaster for the Country” and “would literally destroy the United States of America,” Trump said on Friday after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the bulk of the president’s tariffs are illegal. He doubled down on those claims on Tuesday while tacking on the transparently ridiculous assertion that the U.S. is “taking in $17 trillion … because of tariffs.”

In the petition to the Supreme Court filed on Wednesday night, the administration continued in this vein, saying that “the tariffs are promoting peace and unprecedented economic prosperity” and “pulling America back from the precipice of disaster, restoring its respect and standing in the world.”

This should all be seen for what it is — a tacit admission that the administration is on very weak footing as a legal matter. The most charitable interpretation of the effort is that the administration is lobbying the Supreme Court to engage in the sort of outcome-driven judicial activism that conservatives have long claimed to hate. A less generous read of the situation is that this is an effort to politically blackmail the court into giving Trump what he wants even if it is clearly unlawful or unconstitutional. [Continue reading…]