President Trump's Justice Department wants the Supreme Court to believe in a unicorn — something it calls a “regulatory tariff.”

In its brief defending President Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sweeping tariffs, the DOJ claims the president wasn’t raising revenue, but regulating imports.

For starters, that’s hard to square with the administration’s own statements.

Trump and his cabinet have boasted about the revenue generated by the tariffs. In fact, they’ve proposed scrapping federal taxes and replacing them with the “trillion dollars of revenue” the tariffs have raised. They’ve even warned the Supreme Court not to overturn the tariffs because, in their view, the U.S. will be “destroyed” without this revenue.

Legally, however, it’s easy to unde

See Full Page