Supreme Court strikes down Trump tariffs in rebuke of signature policy

The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a huge chunk of President Donald Trump‘s far-reaching tariff agenda, delivering a major rebuke of the president’s key economic policy.

The law that undergirds those import duties “does not authorize the President to impose tariffs,” the majority ruled six to three in the long-awaited decision.

The ruling is a massive loss for Trump, who has made tariffs — and his asserted power to impose them on any country at any time, without congressional input — a central feature of his administration’s economic and foreign policies.

Trump’s legal stance “would represent a transformative expansion of the President’s authority over tariff policy,” the majority concluded. And they highlighted that Trump imposed the tariffs without Congress, which has the power to tax under the Constitution.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the opinion of the court. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh dissented.

The decision noted that before Trump, no president had ever used the statute in question “to impose any tariffs, let alone tariffs of this magnitude and scope.”

To justify the “extraordinary” tariff powers, Trump must “point to clear congressional authorization,” the court wrote. “He cannot.”

The ruling was silent on whether tariffs that have been paid under the higher rates will need to be refunded. That sum could total $175 billion, according to a new estimate from the Penn-Wharton Budget Model.

Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent that the refund process “is likely to be a ‘mess,'” after predicting that the short-term impact of the court’s tariff ruling “could be substantial.”

Since retaking the White House, Trump has rapidly reshaped America’s longstanding trade relationships by imposing a staggering array of import duties that have touched nearly every country on earth.

Many of those tariffs were invoked using a novel reading of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. They include Trump’s near-global “reciprocal” tariffs, and separate duties related to the alleged trafficking of deadly drugs into the U.S.

IEEPA does not explicitly mention tariffs, as the Supreme Court noted Friday. Instead, it allows the president to “regulate … importation” of foreign property transactions after declaring a national emergency in order to deal with certain “unusual and extraordinary” threats.

The Trump administration has argued that language empowers the president to impose tariffs on foreign goods.

Critics charged that the law does not permit the president to unilaterally impose levies of any size on any country at any time. A federal trade court and a federal appeals court both found Trump’s IEEPA tariffs illegal before the Supreme Court took up the case.

The majority of U.S. tariff revenue generated last year came from the IEEPA duties.

Reaction to the ruling quickly poured in, with the loudest voices cheering the demise of the chaotic…