The Law with an Expiration Date

Donald Trump lost at the Supreme Court on February 20, 2026. By February 21, he had already invented another way.

That, in short, is the state of American democracy in the second term.

The Court struck down the tariffs imposed via IEEPA — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the emergency law Trump had been using as a Swiss Army knife to tax the rest of the planet. Six votes to three. Two of those votes against him came from Gorsuch and Barrett, his own appointees, his legacy, the justices he spent years saying were proof his presidency had been worth it. When the result came in, Trump said the decision made him sick. He said "sicken me." The children who never obey are always a disappointment.

In less than twenty-four hours, he signed another proclamation. This time, the legal basis was Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — a law written specifically for commercial emergencies, with a peculiar characteristic that the 1974 drafters considered perfectly reasonable and that Trump apparently read with selective care: the powers it grants expire in 150 days, unless Congress votes to renew them.

One hundred and fifty days.

Trump wants permanent tariffs. He wants a United States that depends on nothing and no one. He wants American commercial sovereignty written in stone. The only law he found available has an expiration date stamped on the package, like milk.

There's a metaphor here that writes itself, and that serious commentators pretend not to see because they consider it too obvious. I don't mind the too obvious. The obvious has the virtue of being true.

The expiration date falls in July 2026. Fifty-five days have passed since the clock started. Congress will need to vote. And the American Congress of 2026 is a place where nothing happens by consensus and everything happens through negotiation, leverage, or strategic neglect. Twenty-four states have already filed suit. Manufacturers and agricultural lobbies are in the corridors of Washington doing what they always do: spending money to explain, politely, that the tariffs cost more than they yield.

Trump didn't lose. He improvised. But there's a difference between winning a battle and securing the outcome of the war, and that difference is why nations write constitutions.

The American Supreme Court was designed by men who feared concentrated power — they feared it because they had just escaped a colony with an arbitrary king and knew exactly what that felt like. Montesquieu had just published. Locke was in everyone's head. The result was a machine of checks and balances that makes any president, from any party, look more powerful than he actually is.

Trump has spent two terms fighting that machine. The machine keeps running. Not out of love for democracy — machines don't love anything — but out of structural inertia. Because the lawyers trained on it. The judges swore to it. The twenty-four states hired firms that know exactly which paragraph undoes which executive order.

The central paradox of Trump's tariff policy is this: he wants permanent independence, but every legal mechanism he finds comes with an expiration clause, a required vote, a pending judicial review. "America First" isn't a policy. It's a race against a constitutional clock.

And that clock doesn't stop.

The private sector learned this the hard way. It's not the level of the tariffs that destroys business planning — it's the uncertainty. Today it's IEEPA. Tomorrow it's Section 122. The day after tomorrow it could be something else, depending on who the president is feuding with that weekend. Supply chains built over decades with millimeter precision were not designed to operate under executive orders swapped out every quarter.

A logistics executive managing Asia-US routes said in March that the volatility of the rules was worse than the rules themselves. That at least with a stable tariff you can calculate. With a tariff that changes legal basis with every court ruling, you stop calculating and start praying.

Praying is a strategy. It's not a good strategy.

What the Supreme Court did in February was remind the President of the United States that he runs a republic, not a fiefdom. That the law he invokes to act has limits he did not write and cannot erase. That his appointees — two of them — are judges, not employees.

Trump called that revolting.

The U.S. Constitution, if it could respond, would probably say: "Likewise."

One hundred and fifty days. The clock is running. And the next election is still a long way off.