Donald Trump has never lacked for litigation opponents. Democratic state attorneys general routinely gather by the dozen to sign on to lawsuits contesting his policies. Nonprofit advocacy groups base their present existence entirely on suing the president and his administration. Private civil claimants have accused Trump of everything from fraud to discrimination to sexual assault. Prosecutors indicted him four times. The only party more litigious than Trump’s opponents is Trump himself: The president has a long history of using (and often abusing) the legal process to go after everyone who glances sideways at him, from media outlets to his former employees to his own executive branch. Trump wins some legal battles, loses more of them, and seems to revel in the combat itself.

Yet when it comes to the president’s new tariffs on Canada, nobody has yet emerged to file a lawsuit that would have a genuine shot at success, potentially saving American companies and consumers tens of billions of dollars in the process.

Trump spent much of his late summer picking a bizarre trade (and cultural) war with one of our closest global allies. His gripe, in sum, is that Canada “has been ripping off the United States for decades” and that new U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods are necessary to even the scales. Canadian leaders have retaliated in action (imposing new tariffs of their own on U.S. goods) and in words (“He has a lot of room to kiss my ass,” declared Ontario premier Doug Ford).

You may sensibly be thinking, Didn’t the Supreme Court already reject Trump’s tariffs a few months........

© Daily Intelligencer