Constitutional Liquitity Power

Abstract: This paper argues that the stability of the international monetary system depends on a dimension of American constitutional order that political science has yet to theorize: constitutional liquidity power. Dollar hegemony is not sustained merely by economic predominance, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, or the technocratic capacities of the administrative state. It rests on the constitutional permissibility of delegated authority and discretionary crisis powers—capacities forged during the New Deal and now increasingly questioned by the Supreme Court. Recent doctrinal shifts—revived nondelegation, the Major Questions Doctrine, and new constraints on agency independence—reach far beyond domestic regulatory politics. They directly touch the institutional machinery through which the United States stabilizes global markets, supplies dollar liquidity, mobilizes emergency instruments, and orchestrates Treasury–Federal Reserve coordination. Pending cases on tariff authority, financial rulemaking, and emergency lending make 2026 the most consequential moment for the constitutional foundations of the dollar order since the rise of the administrative state in the 1930s. Our central claim is that judicially induced fragility has emerged as a structural risk in the world’s monetary core. The Supreme Court, historically peripheral to international finance, now stands in a position to redefine the boundaries of U.S. monetary power without possessing the epistemic tools to understand the global consequences. By theorizing constitutional liquidity power and tracing its interaction with contemporary judicial doctrine, the paper reframes global financial governance as a problem of constitutional political economy. The question Marshall posed in 1803—who decides?—now extends to the governance of the world’s monetary architecture.