Trump, Canada, and the Constitutional Problem Beneath the Bridge

President Trump has declared that he’ll block the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge – a major infrastructure project connecting Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario – unless “the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given [Canada].”

President Trump is right: In the long run, the bridge is a raw deal for the United States (and I say that as a Canadian). As part of a deal struck between the Michigan Department of Transportation and the Canadian Government, Canada has an exclusive and perpetual right to charge tolls on the bridge. That’s a serious compromise given that the bridge’s main competitor, the century-old Ambassador Bridge, accounted for 27%, or $720 billion of trade between Canada and the United States in 2019. 

America shouldn’t even be in this position. The Gordie Howe International Bridge has been a long and arduous folly in spending abuses of the very type the Constitution is designed to protect us from. 

The GHIB was initially planned in 2001, intended as a public competitor to the privately owned Ambassador Bridge. But in order to begin construction, Michigan needed land. Much of the land along the Detroit river, it turned out, rested in the hands of Manuel “Matty” Moroun – the billionaire owner of the Ambassador Bridge. Obviously not keen to sell his land to his competitor, Moroun played hardball – and the State had no option but to exercise its power of eminent domain. 

But after a successful lobbying campaign, Moroun persuaded the Michigan State Legislature to ban the Michigan Department of Transportation from making any expenditures on the bridge – theoretically saving his land. That is, until the Michigan DOT struck a reimbursement deal with the Canadian government. Canada would foot the bill for the seizure of Moroun’s land, and in exchange, it would get ownership of the bridge and exclusive and perpetual tolling authority. 

Not so fast, said Moroun. Each state, after all, is required by the federal Constitution’s Guarantee Clause (Article IV, Section 4) to provide a republican form of government. And, as with the federal system, republican governments are designed to place the control of the purse strings in the hands of the legislature. From James Madison’s writings in “Federalist 58,” to George Mason’s 1787 declaration, the founding fathers understood that placing the proverbial “purse” in the same hands as the “sword” was a recipe for a tyrannical executive. 

So Moroun sued. Just as is the case with any federal agency, he argued, Michigan’s Department of Transportation can’t spend money when the legislature has expressly told it not to. Both the Michigan constitution (Art. IX, § 17) and Michigan legislation (§ 18.1366) make that clear. 

Still, the Michigan Court of Appeals disagreed. In DOT v. Riverview-Trenton R.R. Co. (Mich. 2020), the court held that money was not really “expended” unless it was missing at the end of a fiscal year’s accounting. Accordingly, the DOT could spend however much money it wanted, so long as someone else provided reimbursement in the proper timespan. 

This is a disgrace, and the consequences are clear: Unbound from democratic accountability through the legislature, the executive can wield state power on behalf of the highest bidder. Under this system, the executive devolves from a faithful servant of the public will into a gun-for-hire with a monopoly on violence. 

In this instance, the consequences are only the perpetual GHIB toll. But under these lax principles, there’s no real limit as to what benefits rogue executives may deliver into the hands of foreign and private actors. 

Indeed, SCOTUS has left similar vulnerabilities in the federal legal system. In the 2024 case Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America, Ltd. (2024), the court held that so long as the executive is able to identify a legal source of funds, the Appropriations Clause (which safeguards the power of the purse) is satisfied. Justices Alito and Gorsuch provided a grave warning in their dissent: Such loose conditions “would give the Executive a most dangerous discretion,” that, as the solicitor general admitted at oral argument, would “permit an agency to be funded entirely by private sources.”

It’s under this system that Trump accepted an anonymous $130 million dollar donation to fund the military during 2025’s government shutdown and accepted the new Air Force One from the Qataris.  It’s anyone’s guess what benefits might inure to that donor. 

The president is right: Canada’s exclusive right to toll on the GHIB is rotten. But if we don’t want the executive handing out special privileges to foreign actors and private parties unchecked, we need to draw a hard line at allowing the executive to take their paychecks.