It’s never a good idea to treat U.S. Supreme Court justices as if they’re fools. And yet U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, in his Nov. 5 defense of President Trump’s tariff authority, came very close.

Lawyers are sometimes called on to defend the indefensible. And those who refuse to do so may step down or are sometimes fired, as were federal attorneys who did not believe they had enough evidence to bring a case against certain Trump enemies.

Sauer may have done the best he could putting lipstick on the pig that is Trump’s tariffs — but it’s still a pig.

The most ludicrous aspect of Sauer’s Supreme Court argument was his claim that federal revenue from Trump’s tariffs was “incidental.” Sauer claimed Trump was just exercising his constitutional power to manage foreign policy, not raising federal revenue. According to Sauer, “These are regulatory tariffs, they are not revenue-raising tariffs. The fact that they raise revenue is only incidental.”

The problem with Sauer’s claim is that the president and his advisors have repeatedly cited increased federal revenue as one of the........

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