150 Days

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, February 23, 2026

 

I’ve gotten used to cowardice from congressional Republicans, but I’ll never get used to horses—t like this.

 

After the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday, GOP sources assured Axios that the legislature would have acted to limit the president’s tariff authority soon if the court had not. “A ‘messy’ full-scale revolt on the issue was just around the corner,” those sources claimed. According to one senior House Republican, “Patience was running thin, and in some respects the Supreme Court decision makes a messy breakup unnecessary."

 

We’ve been waiting 11 years, through a coup attempt and four criminal indictments, for a “full-scale revolt” against Donald Trump by right-wing invertebrates in Washington that has never come. If Axios’ source really did believe that revolt was “just around the corner,” one would think, he wouldn’t have insisted on being quoted anonymously. The only thing more pathetic than licking the president’s boots is licking them while swearing that you’ve almost—almost, but not quite—gotten sick of the taste.

 

So long as craven House and Senate Republicans have a say in the matter, there will be no revolt. The tongue-shining will continue.

 

What’s interesting about the president’s latest move on tariffs is that, under the law, they might no longer have a say.

 

Hours after the court nuked his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), Trump issued an executive order imposing a 10 percent global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. (He raised it to 15 percent a day later, just because.) He preferred to use IEEPA as his cudgel on trade because it came with no strings attached—no restrictions on how high the tariffs could go, no requirements that he explain himself to Congress and, importantly, no time limits on how long the tariffs might remain in effect.

 

Section 122 does come with strings. In particular, any tariffs imposed by the president under its authority expire automatically after 150 days … unless Congress votes to extend them.

 

That means the deadline for Trump’s new tariff authority will detonate like a grenade in the House and Senate in late July, with the midterm campaign in full swing. Interestingly, most state primaries will be over by then, theoretically freeing nearly all congressional Republicans to oppose the tariffs without fear of losing their party’s endorsement this cycle.

 

Nothing will stop them from doing so—except, I suppose, the prospect of the president throwing a gigantic tantrum and urging right-wing voters not to turn out in the general election for “disloyal” Republicans. Which he’s perfectly capable of doing.

 

Side with the tariff-hating American majority or with the tariff-loving vindictive Peronist autocrat: That’s the intriguing dilemma that House and Senate Republicans will face this summer, 100 or so days out from a national election. How likely is it that the “full-scale revolt” we’re forever being promised might arrive at last in July?

 

Not very, I think. But a full-scale revolt won’t be needed to kill these tariffs dead.

 

Let someone else handle it.

 

The average Republican coward’s approach to restraining Trump has been clear and consistent for a decade. Five simple words: Let. Someone. Else. Handle. It.

 

That meant forcing House Democrats to impeach the president after January 6 with almost no Republican support. It meant leaving it to the criminal justice system to stop him from returning to office instead of Senate Republicans disqualifying him at his second impeachment trial. And it meant crossing one’s fingers and making a wish that the Supreme Court would blow up his IEEPA tariffs in lieu of Congress doing it.

 

“Let someone else handle it” will also be the way congressional Republicans approach Trump’s new tariffs. And someone else—namely, the courts—almost certainly will do so.

 

That’s because the Section 122 tariffs are illegal. By its own terms, as National Review’s Andrew McCarthy explains, the statute empowers the president to act when there are “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.” The White House seems to believe “balance-of-payments deficit” is a fancy term for “trade deficit,” but it isn’t: They’re two different things. There’s a yuuuuuge trade deficit right now thanks partly to Trump’s trade war but no balance-of-payments deficit whatsoever.

 

Absurdly, his own Justice Department is on record as agreeing. In defending the president’s IEEPA authority, the DOJ argued that he couldn’t use Section 122 instead because there’s no national emergency involving a balance-of-payments deficit, only one (supposedly) caused by a trade deficit. Now, I suppose, they’re going to have to argue the opposite.

 

It won’t work. The courts are going to block these tariffs—and for many congressional Republicans, that will provide a convenient excuse to support extending them as the 150-day deadline approaches. Why risk your neck with Trump and MAGA by voting to kill the Section 122 levies if the judiciary is likely to do it for you, sparing you from swing voters’ wrath in November? Let someone else handle it.

 

In fact, House and Senate Republicans might use the ongoing litigation as a justification to try to extend them. If Congress hasn’t acted by late July, an appeals court weighing Trump’s Section 122 authority might declare the matter moot and dismiss the case, reasoning that the tariffs have now lapsed. “We need to extend these tariffs simply to keep the case alive and give the judiciary a chance to decide the ‘balance-of-payments’ issue,” the GOP might claim, not very convincingly.

 

Caesar and the Senate.

 

The president will inevitably try to spare them from having to make that argument, though.

 

As we approach the 150-day deadline, my guess is that he’ll try to extend the deadline unilaterally via executive order instead of following the statute by asking Congress to do it. There’ll be no “full-scale revolt” among Republicans because they’ll be too busy pretending that Trump can reset the deadline on his own authority. In this iteration of “let someone else handle it,” the president himself is “someone.”

 

He did something similar, remember, when he repeatedly extended the deadline for TikTok’s sale despite the fact that nothing in the statute allowed it. Extending the Section 122 deadline unilaterally would be even more absurd, as the whole point of the 150-day time limit is to bar the president from setting trade policy indefinitely without congressional approval.

 

But he’s going to try it—not primarily because he’s worried that Congress won’t pass an extension, I suspect, but because he resents in principle the idea that he should have to ask the legislature for permission to do anything. We live in a world in which Trump’s party controls the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court and yet he still grasps for excuses not to seek authorization from other branches. It’s not because he can’t win a vote in Congress, it’s because the thought of having to do so offends his Caesarist prerogatives on trade.

 

Although, for the record, he almost certainly can’t win a vote in Congress on Section 122.

 

That’s the third reason there’ll be no “full-scale revolt” against the new tariffs among Republican lawmakers. There’s no need. The margins in the House and Senate are now so narrow that even a tiny revolt within the GOP will suffice to block legislation that would extend the 150-day deadline—and that tiny revolt is already underway, as we’ve seen in other recent tariff votes.

 

In the Senate, four Republicans have already voted more than once to block other Trump tariffs. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell owe the president nothing, and Rand Paul is a libertarian ideologue who’s unlikely to buckle on trade. Those four votes together with all 47 Democrats in the chamber would be enough to prevent a Section 122 extension.

 

Meanwhile in the House, six Republicans joined Democrats earlier this month in voting to end the fake “national emergency” that Trump cited to justify slapping tariffs on Canada. With one exception, those members are either retiring (Don Bacon, Dan Newhouse), answer to major Democratic constituencies back home (Brian Fitzpatrick, Kevin Kiley), or have gone full maverick (Thomas Massie).

 

There’s no reason to think any of those five would flip on a gut-check Section 122 vote. (The sixth, Jeff Hurd of Colorado, has already been savaged by the president as a RINO who should be primaried, so flipping on the new tariffs wouldn’t do him much good either.) With all House Democrats joining them, that should guarantee that legislation to extend the new tariffs will fail.

 

What incentive is there, then, for a “full-scale revolt” among the rest of the GOP caucus? If Massie et al. are willing to do the dirty work of killing the bill, then there’s no downside to the average House Republican in casting a futile vote to pass it. Doing so will earn them the gratitude of Trump and MAGA, and the bill’s failure should spare them the wrath of swing voters satisfied by the outcome. Win-win. Let someone else handle it!

 

Lame duck.

 

Is there any scenario in which we really might see a broad revolt among congressional Republicans against extending the 150-day deadline?

 

The only one I can think of is if the bottom fell out of the president’s job approval before July, making him an especially lame duck, which is unlikely but not unthinkable. In particular, if the cause of his slide were economic—a new surge in inflation, for instance—tariffs would become a harder sell to the American public than they already are. And they’re a pretty hard sell already.

 

For once, the House and Senate GOP would have an electoral reason not to let someone else handle it.

 

On Friday, YouGov published a snap poll about the Supreme Court’s tariff decision. Americans supported it to the tune of 60-23 while independents split 63-16. Even more notable were the results when respondents were asked what effect they thought Trump’s tariffs have had on costs. Forty-one percent of those surveyed believe prices have increased “a lot” and another 25 percent think they’ve increased “slightly” because of his policies. Among independents, those numbers were 44 and 24 percent, respectively. Among Republicans, 13 and 31 percent.

 

In the midst of a major cost-of-living crisis, in other words, a heavy majority of the public and a near-majority of his own party believes the president’s trade policy is partly responsible for their pain. When I said last year that tariffs were the biggest political mistake he’s made in his second term, that’s why. By deliberately making life less affordable, he’s taken ownership of an economy with which most Americans are dissatisfied; if that economy takes a dive this summer, congressional Republicans will be desperate for ways to offload blame for it.

 

That’s when a vote on the Section 122 tariffs would get interesting.

 

The mere fact that the 150-day deadline guarantees five more months (at least) of tariffs as a scalding hot political potato also threatens the GOP, as it might cause midterm-minded voters to start asking uncomfortable questions about the policy. For instance, why did Trump impose 10 percent global tariffs after Friday’s court ruling and then immediately jack them up to 15 percent the next day? What was the careful deliberative logic behind that decision?

 

It must be the first time in U.S. history that Americans were hit with a major tax hike because the president is mad at the Supreme Court.

 

Another question: Didn’t he just negotiate a bunch of trade deals with foreign powers, some of whom promised to invest heavily in the United States? Are those deals affected by the new 15 percent rate? What happens to a country that signed a deal with a tariff rate higher than 15 percent?

 

Did the White House give a moment’s thought to any of that in its rush to spite the court by replacing the IEEPA tariffs as quickly as possible?

 

A show about nothing.

 

Here’s a particularly good one, per Vox’s Benjy Sarlin: Won’t these new Section 122 tariffs obviously fail to achieve the president’s goals on trade?

 

His goals on trade, I thought, were to reshore jobs and investment in the United States by forcing trade partners who’d been “taking advantage of us” to come to the table. The IEEPA tariffs made sense in that context. Because they were unlimited in scope and duration, they were well-suited for a long-term protectionist project to rebuild American industry. Trump could, in theory, have gone on using them to try to bring manufacturing back to the United States for the duration of his presidency.

 

But Section 122 is limited. As I’ve explained, the new tariffs will be kaput in court eventually and kaput in 150 days regardless since there’s virtually no chance they’ll be extended by Congress. They’ll expire before the president can use them to achieve any long-term protectionist goals. And given the immense legal and legislative uncertainty around them (a Trump specialty!), foreign nations now have no incentive to negotiate new trade deals with him. They’re better off sitting tight until July and waiting for the tariffs to expire.

 

Protectionism by executive fiat is dead thanks to the Supreme Court, and rightly so. So why, voters might wonder, are we still doing tariffs? If Trump is unwilling or unable to get Congress to agree to take the baton on repatriating jobs by taxing imports lawfully, why continue to subject Americans to the ludicrous volatility of imposing disruptive here-today-gone-tomorrow levies?

 

Many will struggle to understand it—but not us. You and I know why: The president yearns to govern as a king, and arrogating all power over trade was one of his most kingly pretenses. Economist Noah Smith correctly identified why the IEEPA tariffs mattered so much to him:

 

It allowed him to conduct foreign policy entirely on his own. It allowed him to enrich himself and his family. It allowed him to gain influence domestically, by holding out the promise of tariff exemptions for businesses that toe his political line. And it allowed him to act as a sort of haphazard economic central planner, using tariffs like a scalpel to discourage the kinds of trade and production that he didn’t personally like.

 

In other words, I think that although the tariffs had their origin in 1990s-era worries about trade deficits, they ended up as a way to make the Presidency more like a dictatorship.

 

Trump relishes the pardon power for similar instrumentalist reasons, because it grants him leverage over would-be courtiers. It’s a royal shield for those willing to do His Majesty a favor. His tariff authority was far greater, though, a royal sword he could and did hold to the throats of everyone from heads of state to captains of industry to ensure their cooperation with whatever new demand he had made of them.

 

To a megalomaniac, it must have felt like a bona fide superpower.

 

Now it’s gone, and there’s no such thing as a superpower that lasts for only 150 days. The clearer it becomes to voters that Trump’s ongoing interest in tariffs has more to do with protecting his personal influence than with protecting the American economy, the heavier that liability will become for him and his party. If you’re still holding out hope for that long-awaited “full-scale revolt” among House Republicans, that’s your best shot.