The Supreme Court Fractures While Striking Down Trump’s Tariff Policy

It may look like the justices made a clean break with the president, but the mess the conservative bloc made for itself raises some major questions.

The Supreme Court delivered a crushing blow to President Donald Trump’s policy agenda on Friday, ruling that a Cold War-era law for economic emergencies does not give the executive branch a blank check to impose trillions of dollars in tariffs without congressional approval.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for himself and five other justices, held that Trump had exceeded his powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, also known as IEEPA. “The President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope,” Roberts concluded. “In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it.”

The six-justice majority brought together the court’s three liberal members and three of their conservative colleagues: Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. But while they agreed on the outcome, they differed widely on the reasoning that led them there.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the liberals, argued that Trump’s invocation of IEEPA failed under the “ordinary rules of statutory interpretation.”

“Usual text-in-context interpretation dooms the tariffs the President has imposed,” she explained. “The crucial provision of IEEPA, when viewed in light of the broader statutory scheme and with a practical awareness of how Congress delegates tariff authority, does not give the President the power he wants.”

Roberts, on the other hand, argued alongside the other two conservatives that the tariffs were invalid under the major-questions doctrine. Under that doctrine, the executive branch cannot invoke congressionally delegated powers in novel ways on matters of “vast economic and political significance” unless the courts decide that Congress has “spoken clearly” enough to authorize it.

In practice, the major questions doctrine has served one real purpose: It’s given the court’s conservative justices a freewheeling veto over Obama and Biden administration policies over the past decade. It has also received criticism in legal circles for its lack of a firm jurisprudential basis, for the uneven ways in which the court applies it, and for its vague and insubstantial nature. (What is a matter of “vast economic and political significance” and what isn’t?)

While the differences between the justices may seem arcane, the implications for the court’s jurisprudence could be significant. The court’s conservatives missed a chance to bolster the doctrine’s legitimacy by applying it to a Republican president for the first time. Their failure also exposed fissures among the conservatives over the nature of the major-questions doctrine itself.

Those implications pale in significance, at least in the short term, with the political and economic consequences. By its own terms, the ruling is a defeat for the president. Trump has used IEEPA tariffs—and the mere threat of imposing them—as his principal means of carrying out foreign policy. They became emblematic of his personalist rule, allowing him to punish and reward foreign nations at a whim.

Earlier this month, for example, Trump said he had initially imposed a 30 percent tariff on Swiss goods but raised it higher after a perceived slight from the “prime minister of Switzerland.” (Switzerland does not have a prime minister; he was likely referring to a member of the country’s seven-member executive council.)

“She was very aggressive, but nice, but very aggressive,” Trump said in a Fox Business interview. “‘Sir, we are a small country, we can’t do this, we can’t do this,’ I couldn’t get her off the phone. […] And I didn’t really like the way she talked to us, so instead of giving her a reduction, I raised it to 39 percent.”

Tariff-related abuses have been a constant in Trump’s second term. When a Canadian provincial government aired advertisments........

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