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The Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s sweeping “emergency” tariffs on Friday, ruling 6–3 that they far exceed what federal law allows. With its decision in Learning Resources v. Trump, the court wiped out Trump’s signature economic agenda, a withering rebuke to a president who has insisted that these tariffs are foundational to the success of his second term. Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for the court sends the blunt message that Trump should not expect SCOTUS to rubber-stamp all of his expansions of executive power, no matter how much political pressure he puts on the justices. This rejoinder may be surprising given the Republican-appointed supermajority’s previous tolerance for the president’s assertions of king-like authority. But as Roberts’ crisp, confident opinion explains, allowing the president to impose taxes unilaterally—at least without clear congressional authority—is an existential threat to the very “existence and prosperity” of the nation.
In truth, Trump’s tariffs were always on shaky legal ground, no matter how confidently the White House insisted they were permissible. The president claimed the freedom to impose tariffs on any nation, of any amount, for as long as he wished, based on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. But IEEPA does not mention tariffs, duties, taxes, or anything else that would hint at Congress’ desire to delegate tariff authority to the executive branch. Instead, it allows the president to “regulate” foreign “importation” to “deal with” an “unusual and extraordinary threat” abroad. Trump’s Justice Department insisted that he could “regulate” “importation” by slapping any tariff on any country he wanted. And it claimed two different “emergencies” that justified these duties: a long-standing trade imbalance with many other nations, and the smuggling of fentanyl into the United States.
Roberts—joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—rejected this interpretation. All six justices agreed on the bottom-line conclusion that “those words cannot bear such weight.” As the chief explained, the Constitution assigns primary authority over tariffs to Congress, not the president. “Recognizing the taxing power’s unique importance,” the Framers gave Congress alone “access to the pockets of the people.” And tariffs, of course, are “a tax levied on imported goods and services.”
Congress has delegated some tariff authority to the executive branch, but those laws impose “strict limits” on the scope and duration of tariffs that the president may dictate. IEEPA’s grant of authority to “regulate” foreign imports, by contrast, contains none of these “procedural limitations.” So if it did permit tariffs, Roberts noted, it would leave the president “free to issue a dizzying array of modifications at will.” And “all it takes to unlock that extraordinary power is a presidential declaration of emergency, which the government asserts is unreviewable.” That is one clue that Congress did not intend IEEPA to encompass such freewheeling tariff authority.
Another clue: The government could not identify “any statute in which the power to regulate includes the power to tax.” In the entire U.S. Code, not a single law uses “regulation” to mean “taxation.” The court, Roberts wrote, was “therefore skeptical that in IEEPA—and IEEPA alone—Congress hid a delegation of its birth-right power to tax within the quotidian power to ‘regulate.’ ” Rather, “Congress’s pattern of usage” reveals that when it “grants the power to impose tariffs, it does so clearly and with careful constraints. It did neither here.” Combining these hints with “breadth, history, and constitutional context,” the chief found that IEEPA cannot plausibly be read to hand Trump the boundless freedom over tariffs that he claimed.
There was, however, a rift within the six-justice majority. Roberts, joined by Gorsuch and Barrett, invoked the “major questions doctrine” to bolster their conclusion that IEEPA does not cover tariffs. This controversial rule holds that the president must point to an explicit delegation of authority when addressing a matter of immense “economic and political significance.” The conservative supermajority has previously invoked the doctrine to strike down President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan, climate regulations, and other progressive goals.
Trump’s Justice Department argued that the doctrine does not apply to “foreign affairs,” attempting to gerrymander a massive exception to accommodate its trade policy. But Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett rejected this contention, particularly when those “affairs” implicate “the core congressional power of the purse.” The trio therefore applied the doctrine to confirm the court’s reading of IEEPA. Kagan, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson, wrote that there was no need to invoke “major questions” in this case. Rather, she wrote, “the ordinary tools of statutory interpretation amply support today’s result,” without any resort to rules that put “a thumb on the interpretive scales.” (In dueling concurrences, Gorsuch and Barrett also battled about the true meaning of the “major questions doctrine,” which confirms that the liberals were right to resist legitimizing this slippery, ill-defined rule here.)
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s principal dissent—joined by Justices Thomas and Alito—is an embarrassment that cannot be squared with much of his jurisprudence under Biden. After consistently reading statutes narrowly to hem in Biden’s authority, the justice interpreted IEEPA as expansively as possible, declaring that “tariffs are a traditional and common tool to regulate importation.” And after touting the major questions doctrine for his entire judicial career, he announced that it does not apply “in the foreign affairs context” (at least when Trump is in office). Thomas’ separate, lone dissent is even worse: The justice has long endorsed the “non-delegation doctrine,” which holds that Congress cannot delegate its core powers to the executive branch. Yet on Friday, he revised his view, writing that this doctrine does not apply to former “powers of the Crown.” Those powers, Thomas wrote, include tariffs, which are ostensibly not “within the core legislative power.” It is difficult to read this dissent as anything other than Thomas amending his views to accommodate Trump’s power-grabs.
Should we be shocked that this court—which has, for 13 months, enabled Trump’s abuses of office over the shadow docket—smacked down Trump’s marquee economic policy so emphatically? Not really. For one thing, this case is pretty easy: As Roberts explained, no sensible reading of IEEPA would hand over unlimited tariff authority to the president. Moreover, the business community does not like these tariffs; even the Chamber of Commerce urged the justices to strike them down. The conservative justices are sympathetic toward corporate interests, and did them a favor by ending Trump’s whim-based tariff regime. These justices are also economically literate and must understand that tariffs are bad for the economy. As with Trump’s efforts to fire members of the Federal Reserve, this case gave the conservatives an opportunity to flaunt their independence while delivering a victory to corporate America. From that angle, it’s a pure win-win.
But we should not be entirely cynical about Friday’s ruling. It does take courage for the justices to stand up to the president this way, especially when he has tried to bully them into ruling in his favor. Since Trump returned to the White House, we have wondered whether the Supreme Court could muster enough independence to save our constitutional system from his efforts to consolidate all power in the Oval Office. Too often, SCOTUS has shirked this duty. But there are still some lines it won’t let Trump cross. As Roberts wrote, the Framers viewed taxation as “the one great power upon which the whole national fabric is based.” And in the end, he and his colleagues felt obliged to protect this thread of our national fabric from the man who would unravel it.