Comment by kimbernator

Congress delegated tariff power to the president after Smoot-Hawley caused such a disaster.

> The reason the President doesn't have this power is because the economy should not rest on the whims or understanding of any one person.

It's interesting to see that it just takes time for lessons to be un-learned. The reason Smoot-Hawley was such a disaster is that it took hundreds of people to agree that it was good policy in the house, which meant adding tariffs to the bill in favor of the districts they individually represented. The result was an egregiously long list of things being tariffed. They delegated it to the one person specifically because they weren't similarly beholden to so many conflicting pressures.

I don't mean any of this to defend Trump's actions, in fact the opposite: he's essentially managing to do the same thing even without politic pressures to do so. I just mean to say that it is reasonably sane for congress to have delegated tariffs in a limited capacity when this flaw was revealed.