The executive branch of the United States, like a well-tailored overcoat, is supposed to fit within constitutional seams. When it begins sprouting extra sleeves, buttons and hidden pockets for emergency powers, the wearer may feel invincible — but the stitching of the republic starts to strain.

That strain is now visible in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court ruling that the US administration's sweeping tariffs under emergency powers exceeded its authority. Instead of adjusting to the judicial hemline, the White House has responded with a flurry of new trade probes, licensing schemes and a blanket tariff under Section 122.

That means if one legal pathway closes, another will be improvised. The Court may have invalidated tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, but the executive branch swiftly reached for Section 122, Section 301 and Section 232 — a numerical shell game that turns trade law into a choose-your-own-authority adventure. The rapid pivot to new provisions and plans for additional measures is ushering in a more uncertain phase of trade disputes, one that global markets and trading partners will have to watch with heightened vigilance.

This is not merely bureaucratic creativity. It is a stress test of the US system of checks and balances, exposing how easily executive improvisation can outrun congressional inertia.

Congress, constitutionally vested with the power to regulate commerce, has been conspicuously absent — a ghost at its own constitutional banquet. Decades of partisan trench warfare have hollowed out its institutional confidence, with the president's lashing out at Democrats in his State of the Union address the latest manifestation of the divide. Political scientists have documented how collegial lawmaking collapsed from over 80 percent of legislative processes in the early 1990s to less than 20 percent two decades later, while party-line voting now approaches near-total loyalty. Legislative time is devoured by procedural theatrics; public trust hovers near historical lows. The branch designed to write the rules has become a spectator sport.

Into that vacuum steps executive improvisation. Trade statutes written for narrow contingencies — "national security" threats, balance-of-payments crises — have become all-purpose levers. The loophole is statutory. Vague definitions of "national security" and emergency powers allow tariffs on goods with only tenuous security relevance. Oversight hearings lack expert testimony. Refund mechanisms remain undefined. The result is a policy environment where sweeping economic measures can be launched by proclamation and litigated later, like beta software released to an unwilling public.

Economists warned from the outset that such tariffs function as domestic taxes in disguise. Research from the Federal Reserve and independent economists has found that as US tariffs have climbed into double digits, up to 90 percent of the burden fell on US consumers and businesses.

Much of the nation is worried about the direction of the economy, yet the US administration insists rising costs are no longer a problem. Such baseless optimism shows some policymakers are divorced from reality.

The US' trade deficits have barely budged. Supply chains have been rerouted rather than repatriated. The "deals" touted as "victories" have resembled overdrafts on US credibility — short-term concessions extracted at the cost of long-term trust.

The global reaction to the latest tariff improvisations has been swift. Trade partners have recalibrated their position. China's Commerce Ministry struck a tone of wary restraint, noting that it is evaluating these impacts of new surcharges and reserving the right to respond. Beijing has signaled openness to candid consultations even as it prepared countermeasures — a diplomatic pas de deux in which each side bows while checking the other's footing. It urged the US not to "create trouble" in response to Washington's announcement that it will continue the Section 301 probe against China.

The deeper issue is not one administration's tactics but a structural temptation embedded in the system: when Congress is paralyzed and statutes are elastic, the chief executive can transform personal impulses into public policy with global consequences. Tariffs become not instruments of strategy but expressions of will — taxes levied by proclamation, markets jolted by executive improvisation.

When the Court draws a boundary and the executive branch treats it as a detour sign, constitutional lines begin to blur. The question is no longer whether tariffs are legal under one statute or another. It is whether the US still possesses a functioning equilibrium among its branches — or whether, in an age of partisan spectacle and statutory loopholes, economic policy will continue to emerge from the improvisations of some politicians and the silence of a cowered Congress.

In that silence lies the real surcharge.

- Li Yang, China Daily