SCOTUS rules Trump cannot impose tariffs using emergency powers law

The US Supreme Court split, 6-3, Friday in ruling that President Donald Trump cannot use a federal emergency powers law to impose tariffs.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority decision in Learning Resources v. Trump and Trump v. VOS Selections. Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor joined him on its key holding. Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas dissented.

“Today’s decision is a victory for the Constitution, for consumers, and for the rule of law,” said Donald Bryson, CEO of the John Locke Foundation. “The Supreme Court has reaffirmed a foundational principle: the power to tax and regulate trade belongs to Congress. Tariffs are taxes, and no president may impose sweeping new taxes on the American people through creative interpretations of emergency statutes.”

“These tariffs increased costs for families, disrupted supply chains, hurt North Carolina businesses, and triggered retaliation against our farmers and manufacturers,” Bryson said. “By rejecting this misuse of emergency authority, the Court has restored clear constitutional limits and reinforced that major economic policy must come from the legislative branch.”

“The John Locke Foundation has opposed these tariffs from the beginning because free trade, limited government, and predictable rules are essential to long-term prosperity,” Bryson added. “Today’s ruling is an important step toward restoring those principles — and toward ensuring that economic decisions affecting every American are made transparently and constitutionally.”

The case produced 170 pages of opinions from seven of the nine justices. They offered multiple takes on the president’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to justify tariffs on imported goods.

“Based on two words separated by 16 others in Section 1702(a)(1)(B) of IEEPA— ‘regulate’ and ‘importation’ — the President asserts the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time. Those words cannot bear such weight,” Roberts wrote for the majority.

“We do not attempt to set forth the metes and bounds of the President’s authority to ‘regulate … importation’ under IEEPA,” Roberts added. “That ‘interpretive question’ is ‘not at issue’ in this case, and any answer would be ‘plain dicta.’ Our task today is to decide only whether the power to ‘regulate … importation,’ as granted to the President in IEEPA, embraces the power to impose tariffs. It does not.”

“The question is not, as the Government would have it, whether tariffs can ever be a means of regulating commerce,” the chief justice wrote. “It is instead whether Congress, when conferring the power to ‘regulate … importation,’ gave the President the power to impose tariffs at his sole discretion. And Congress’s pattern of usage is most relevant to answering that question. That pattern is plain: When Congress grants the power to impose tariffs, it does so clearly and with careful constraints. It did neither here.”

“The President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope,” Roberts wrote, in a portion of his decision joined only by Barrett and Gorsuch. “In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it.”

“IEEPA’s grant of authority to ‘regulate … importation’ falls short,” Roberts added. “IEEPA contains no reference to tariffs or duties. The Government points to no statute in which Congress used the word ‘regulate’ to authorize taxation. And until now no President has read IEEPA to confer such power.”

“We claim no special competence in matters of economics or foreign affairs. We claim only, as we must, the limited role assigned to us by Article III of the Constitution,” Roberts wrote, with support from Barrett and Gorsuch. “Fulfilling that role, we hold that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.”

Gorsuch wrote separately to emphasize the Supreme Court’s “major questions doctrine.”

“The Constitution lodges the Nation’s lawmaking powers in Congress alone, and the major questions doctrine safeguards that assignment against executive encroachment,” according to Gorsuch’s concurrence. “Under the doctrine’s terms, the President must identify clear statutory authority for the extraordinary delegated power he claims. And, as the principal opinion explains, that is a standard he cannot meet.”

“[T]he most natural reading of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not encompass the power to impose tariffs,” Barrett wrote in her own concurrence, which focused mostly on responding to Gorsuch’s commentary on the major questions doctrine.

Kagan, joined by Jackson and Sotomayor, supported the ruling against the president without supporting the reliance on the major questions doctrine. The doctrine calls for the president to identify “clear congressional authorization” for his actions.

“The use of a clear-statement rule here is unnecessary because ordinary principles of statutory interpretation lead to the same result,” Kagan wrote. “It is not just that the Government’s arguments fail to satisfy an especially strict test; it is that they fail to satisfy the normal one. Even without a clear-statement rule in the picture, the conclusion follows: IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.”

Jackson wrote separately to emphasize that IEEPA’s legislative history showed Congress’ intent.

“In the cases now before us, that evidence shows that Congress did not intend for IEEPA to authorize the Executive to impose tariffs,” Jackson wrote. “Instead, Congress intended to delegate to the President the power to freeze and control foreign property transactions.”

Kavanaugh wrote a dissent supported by Alito and Thomas.

“The tariffs have generated vigorous policy debates,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Those policy debates are not for the Federal Judiciary to resolve. Rather, the Judiciary’s more limited role is to neutrally interpret and apply the law. The sole legal question here is whether, under IEEPA, tariffs are a means to ‘regulate … importation.’ Statutory text, history, and precedent demonstrate that the answer is clearly yes: Like quotas and embargoes, tariffs are a traditional and common tool to regulate importation.”

Thomas wrote a separate dissent emphasizing the consistency of a ruling favoring Trump with the constitutional separation of powers. Congress may not delegate “core legislative power, which is the power to make substantive rules setting the conditions for deprivations of life, liberty, or property,” Thomas wrote. Neither constitutional clause tied to this nondelegation doctrine “prohibits Congress from delegating other kinds of power. Because the Constitution assigns Congress many powers that do not implicate the nondelegation doctrine, Congress may delegate the exercise of many powers to the President. Congress has done so repeatedly since the founding, with this Court’s blessing.”

“The power to impose duties on imports can be delegated,” Thomas wrote.

“SCOTUS rules Trump cannot impose tariffs using emergency powers law” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.