A few days ago, the US Supreme Court ruled that Trump could not use emergency rules to establish tariffs. In response, Trump blasted the Supreme Court and increased global tariffs from 10% to 15%.

In the interest of being fully transparent, I'm not an economic policy wonk. My goal here isn't to tell you about how this decision will help or harm the American economy, because frankly I don't know enough about economics to say one way or another.

Rather, what I want to take a look at is the Supreme Court's decision, and how it impacts the balance of checks and powers in this American democratic experiment.

First of all, let's look at the law that Trump used to impose his global tariffs -- the IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act). My understanding is that this law is supposed to be used in response to international emergencies or incidents, and when an emergency is declared the United States can use IEEPA to impose trade restrictions or economic sanctions.

For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the IEEPA was used to impose oil sanctions on the Russian government. President Biden didn't have to go through Congress to do so; he used IEEPA first. Then Congress voted to support the sanctions.

When Trump became President, he decided to declare trade deficits as "emergencies" and attempted to use the IEEPA to impose his tariffs without going through Congress first. The Trump administration got sued, and the case went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court basically listened to Trump's "trade deficit emergency" rationale, said "Yeah, no, that's not an actual emergency," and ruled it unconstitutional. SCOTUS also heavily implied that if Trump wanted his tariffs, he needed to work with Congress to make it happen, as that power belonged to the legislative branch.

The U.S. Constitution is very clear about this. There are three branches of governments: The Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial. Those three branches have checks and balances over each other, to ensure one doesn't trample over the others. And one of the powers assigned to the legislative branch is the ability to create and establish budgets and determine economic policies. That includes establishing and imposing tariffs.

We'll ignore the fact that the current Republican-controlled Congress is completely feckless and rolls over for Trump, the fact remains that they're supposed to be the ones to make that decision. That's why the US Supreme Court found Trump's actions to be unconstitutional. This has made Trump big mad, as he absolutely does not want to work with Congress at all. He wants to be able to decide everything on his own, and in his eyes Congress's only purpose is to rubber stamp his declaratives. If they refuse to, he'll just ignore them and do whatever he wants to, including raising tariffs.

He wants to centralize all of the government's power onto himself. When power centralizes, when institutions weaken, when identity fuses with authority ... that's a pattern. And as history has repeatedly shown us, this pattern is concerning.