Who holds the power to lay duties — and by what authority?

CNBC reports that Canada has doubled its retaliatory tariffs on American steel and aluminum to 50%, in direct answer to duties imposed by Washington. The trade rift, as the headline names it, is deepening. I will leave the economics to those who have studied them in this century. The constitutional structure, however, is a matter I cannot pass by.

The text is plain. Article I, Section 8 vests in Congress — not the executive — the power "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations" and "to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises." The framers placed this power in the legislature deliberately. A single magistrate commanding the revenues of trade is precisely the posture of a monarch, and it was against that posture that the compact was designed. Whether modern statutes have delegated that power back to the president, and on what conditions, is the structural question the courts and Congress must answer — not one I can resolve from my vantage point.

Delegation is not abdication. The extended-republic theory I argued in Federalist No. 10 rests on the premise that no single faction — including the executive faction — should be able to impose its will without restraint. When broad tariff authority flows from a single office, exercised at discretion, the check that the legislature was designed to supply is effectively suspended. Whether Congress has consented to this arrangement, or merely acquiesced in it, is a distinction of the first constitutional importance.

The compact with a neighbor. A trade war with Canada is, as I understand from the CNBC account, a rupture with a longstanding partner. The framers knew that commerce between nations is also a form of diplomacy, and that its disruption carries consequences beyond the ledger. When duties escalate in rounds — Washington acts, Ottawa retaliates, Washington escalates again — the executive of each nation is effectively legislating for the other's people without any representative body of either nation consenting to the outcome. That is a condition the law of nations was meant to discipline.

The structural question. I do not pretend to know whether these particular tariffs are wise policy. What I do insist upon is the mechanism. If the executive may lay duties of any magnitude on any nation's goods, without a specific legislative mandate renewed and reviewed by the people's representatives, then the Commerce Clause of Article I has been quietly transferred from the branch that holds it to the branch that was never meant to hold it alone. The proper remedy, if Congress regards this as an overstep, is to reclaim the power — not by complaint, but by statute. The means are in their hands; the question is whether they have the motive and the will to use them. That is, as I wrote in Federalist No. 51, the very problem ambition was meant to solve.