Mining old laws to justify breaking trade deals

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/03/2025 (365 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Somewhere, in the dusty bowels of a congressional library, some poor hapless presidential assistant is strip-mining ancient American laws to justify the fickle behaviour of that country’s president.

It’s bad enough when a president manufactures a fentanyl threat from Canada to impose tariffs — a threat that even his own intelligence agencies don’t believe exists.

Worse when he claims a state of war exists between the U.S. and Venezuela to be able to impose mass deportations, using a law dating from 1768 to expel people from the U.S. without due process. Or that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has used the Immigration and Nationality Act from 1921 that allows him to personally revoke the legal permanent status of any immigrant.

But reading the latest justification — for 25 per cent tariffs on automobiles made outside the United States — is like visiting a parallel, upside-down universe.

This time the challenge includes claiming that importing Canadian-built Ford F-150 trucks constitutes a threat to U.S. national security.

First, a little background. This time, the Donald Trump administration is arguing that the tariffs are necessary and justified by Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, a 63-year-old law that, believe it or not, has as one of its stated purposes, “to strengthen economic relations with foreign countries through the development of open and non-discriminatory trading in the free world.” (The law was viewed as a signature piece of legislation during the President John F. Kennedy’s administration, put in place to dramatically cut American tariffs, not impose new ones.)

But there were protective caveats in the legislation. The law gives presidents the ability to “take such action, and for such time, as he deems necessary to adjust the imports of such article and its derivatives so that such imports will not so threaten to impair the national security.” (An interesting aside — the law is old enough to only consider men to be able to be president.)

So, why are imported motor vehicles and motor vehicle parts a threat to national security?

Well, because the law says “the president shall further recognize the close relationship of the economic welfare of the nation to our national security, and shall take into consideration the impact of foreign competition on the economic welfare of individual domestic industries, and any substantial unemployment, decrease in revenues of government, loss of skills or investment, or other serious effects resulting from the displacement of any domestic products by excessive imports shall be considered … in determining whether such weakening of our internal economy may impair the national security.”

That’s the long way of saying that, in the manner that Trump has chosen to use it, the law gives carte blanche for the president to essentially abrogate any trade treaty at any time he wants to. It’s a clear reason why the current administration of the United States cannot be trusted to be a good faith adherent to any future trade deal it signs. It’s, quite simply, a dusty, old but useful “get-out-of-trade-deals-free” card — if a president decides to use it.

One can only wonder what hoary, mildewed scrap of justifying legislation the Trump administration will harvest next to do, let’s face it, anything that Trump suddenly decides he wants to do.

It probably doesn’t matter a hill of beans at this point to point out that many of Trump’s legislation-mining executive orders are at odd with the American constitution, because it’s abundantly clear that no one in the United States is going to even try to stop his single-minded destruction of the three pillars of the American republic: the tripartite powers of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of U.S. governance.

We’re only a couple of months in: the next four years looks like a long, long time.