Well, that didn’t take very long. I wrote on Friday about the en banc Federal Circuit’s decision striking down the Trump administration’s global 10 percent tariff, “liberation day” retaliatory tariffs on 90 countries, and fentanyl-emergency tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico. The court did so on the grounds that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) doesn’t authorize presidents to impose tariffs. We editorialized on Tuesday on the ruling. Thursday afternoon, six weeks before the ruling is set to go into effect, the Justice Department filed a petition for certiorari asking the Supreme Court to take the case. The petition asks for a fast-track schedule that would get the case argued by the first week of November, and indicates that the challengers agree to such an accelerated schedule if the Court takes the case.

The petition leans hard on the policy urgency of the case, which calls into question “the validity of the Administration’s most significant economic and foreign–policy initiative.” Of course, that’s why Trump should not have planted his flag on a power he doesn’t legally have. Hyperbole abounds, in ways that seek to browbeat the justices instead of persuading them: “The stakes in this case could not be higher. The President and his Cabinet officials have determined that the tariffs are promoting peace and unprecedented economic prosperity, and that the denial of tariff authority would expose our nation to trade retaliation without effective defenses and thrust America back to the brink of economic catastrophe . . . To the President and his most senior advisors, these tariffs thus present a stark choice: With tariffs, we are a rich nation; without tariffs, we are a poor nation. According to the President, ‘[o]ne year ago, the United States was a dead country, and now, because of the trillions of dollars being paid by countries that have so badly abused us, America is a strong, financially viable, and respected country again.’”

We were not a poor nation a year ago.

Notably, the petition also raises the constitutional question raised by the concurrence: “If IEEPA authorizes the tariffs, whether the statute unconstitutionally delegates legislative authority to the President.” That suggests that the solicitor general is not taking the posture presented by the Trump legal team in past cases of trying to narrow the issues to the rifle shot most favorable to its position.