That’s the conclusion of a new Cato Institute report by Clark Packard and Scott Lincicome. Being libertarians, they are not happy about this fact, but the relevant laws and regulations as currently written give the president very broad authority to impose tariffs.

Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution very clearly gives the power to impose tariffs to Congress. It used that power extensively in U.S. history. Tariff bills were often among the top legislative fights in any given Congress. Tariff policy shifted over time from low rates on many goods to raise revenue to high rates on specific goods to protect industry.

Then Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff law (key parts of which are still on the books) in 1930, which aside from being an economic disaster was also a political disaster for the Republicans who passed it. Congress saw the consequences of getting blamed for tariffs and sought to offload that responsibility to the president.

It also believed that the president would be more reliable to act in the national interest, since he does not have a legislative district with companies to please. That was a bit naive, as there are still plenty of ways for interest groups to lobby through the bureaucracy and get special favors, and presidents have acquiesced to their wishes in many specific instances. But overall, since the 1940s, presidents have generally used their trade powers to reduce trade barriers and expand market access for U.S. companies.

The laws that presidents can use for trade were not written with Donald Trump in mind. “Several US laws authorize the president to impose tariffs on a wide range of imported goods without substantial procedural or institutional safeguards on their use,” Packard and Lincicome write. “One can reasonably argue that Congress did not intend for a president to use these laws as Donald Trump is now promising, but their broad and ambiguous language could let a future president plausibly claim otherwise.”

For example, they write that:

In recent years, two bipartisan bills to amend the laws to require congressional approval of presidential tariff decisions never made it to the floor. Even if they had, Congress is stuck in the catch-22 of delegating its powers to the president: The president can veto bills that would take the power back.

The Trump and Biden administrations have both defended executive tariff powers in court. “Despite the appearance of significant procedural and substantive flaws surrounding the tariffs’ implementation, the courts have ultimately sided with the executive branch in every case thus far,” Packard and Lincicome write. And that’s especially true for anything justified on national-security grounds, even if those grounds are specious, as national security is an Article II power of the president that courts stay away from.

Dismissing Trump’s tariff proposals as crazy campaign rhetoric that he couldn’t act upon is not correct. There’s a whole mess of broad laws with few checks on the president that a team of lawyers could probably finagle into an airtight case for unilateral tariffs before a federal judge. Impossible to finagle are the laws of economics, which will govern the consequences of tariffs regardless of their legal justification.