A reader asks: What's going on with the trade courts?

A reader asks: What’s going on with the trade courts?

Archer replies: In his 1853 novel, Bleak House, Charles Dickens masterfully satirized the workings of the English court system circa 1820. The matter before the court: Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. The trial has been going on so long that no one can remember what it’s about. Meanwhile, what was once a grand estate is slowly wasting away, as is anyone associated with the court’s proceedings.

Early on, Dickens writes:

“The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.”

While there are no children involved in the present dispute, known officially as V.O.S. Selections (a New York wine importer) v. United States, there is one participant whose behavior tends towards the infantile. Like the matter Jarndyce, the case seems to have vanished into the bottomless chasm of the legal system.

Unlike Jarndyce, the events here are current enough. Simply put, the administration has coopted the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which was intended to allow a response to an “unusual or extraordinary threat” to declare just about everything a national emergency. The latest, apparently: coffee from Brazil.

Notably, the Act does not explicitly mention trade (though it does include various economic transactions). The first suit protesting Trump’s use of the IEEPA (“Liberation Day”) was filed in April. That was eventually heard in the U.S Court of International Trade. Trump lost. He appealed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard arguments on July 31. A decision there is awaited. Meanwhile, the administration continues to set various tariff levels seemingly by picking numbers out of a (MAGA) hat.

It's been clear for some time that Trump is not a second order effect kind of guy. His worldview does not admit of much complexity. Disraeli he is not. But one thing does in fact lead to another, and not always in the best of ways. One example: the ongoing effort to debase the dollar. Like tariffs, this is a kind of tax on imports and may help push inflation higher, the opposite of the administration’s stated policy goals.

There have been many complaints against the plodding nature of the democratic process over the years but there has been at least one salutary effect: it made tyranny cumbersome, rules bound. In that way, maybe the Founders were on to something.

But now someone has seemingly found a way to end-run things, using “executive authority” to move at the speed of reality TV while the legal system slogs along behind, a horse drawn carriage stuck in mud layered upon mud, as Dicken’s describes the scene on the streets outside London’s Chancery Court.

Jarndyce v. Jarndyce ends not when the case reaches resolution, but when the estate runs out of money. The U.S. is not yet out of money, or at least has not exhausted its ability to borrow. But piling up debt and browbeating the Fed chairman isn’t much of an economic policy. More to the point, it’s likely to prove counterprodcutive.

As Buffy the Vampire Slayer said in 1992 film of the same name, “Doesn’t the word ‘duh’ mean anything to you?”

Woof!