Trump’s Tariff Fantasy Just Exploded |
President Donald Trump’s sweeping, global “Liberation Day” tariffs are dead. The outcome wasn’t tough to foresee — Trump had already lost twice in the lower federal courts, and the Supreme Court clearly leaned against him at oral argument – but the ruling hits the administration like a bomb.
The cross-ideological composition of the majority here stands as a sharp rebuke both to Trump and to those who glibly bemoan that this conservative Court always gives Trump everything he wants. In the six-Justice majority, three conservatives — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett – joined forces with liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown-Jackson. Gorsuch and Barrett — two of the three Justices appointed by Trump himself – stood against him here. (The third, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined fellow conservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in spirited dissent.) The president lost two-to-one among his own appointees.
The Court’s opinions run over 170 pages in total. Here’s the gist: the Constitution gives the tariff power solely to Congress. But Congress can choose (and has chosen at various points in history) to delegate some of that tariff authority, through legislation, over to the president.
Here, Trump invoked the 1977 International........