The ruling: Supreme Court rejects Trump tariffs, stressing Congress’ powers

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Friday that President Trump’s sweeping worldwide tariffs are illegal and cannot stand without the approval of Congress.

The 6-3 decision deals Trump his most significant defeat at the Supreme Court.

Last year, the justices issued temporary orders to block several of his initiatives, but Friday’s ruling is the first to hold that the president overstepped his legal authority.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., speaking for the court, said Congress, not the president, has the power to impose taxes and tariffs.

Trump slammed the decision as “deeply disappointing” and said he was “ashamed of certain members” of the court. “They are frankly a disgrace to our nation,” he told reporters.

He said he would press ahead to impose tariffs under other laws.

“We have very powerful alternatives,” he said, adding that he would act on his own and would not consult Congress. “I have the right to decide.”

However, the Supreme Court majority focused on the Constitution’s separation of powers.

Roberts said Trump wrongly claimed support for his go-it-alone approach under a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which refers to an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to America’s national security but does not mention tariffs or taxes.

“The President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it,” he wrote in Learning Resources vs. Trump.

“Until now no President has read the International Emergency Economic Powers Act 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. Fulfilling that role, we hold that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs,” Roberts wrote.

The court’s three liberals — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — joined the majority, along with two of Trump’s appointees — Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.

In a 46-page concurrence, Gorsuch stressed the primary role of Congress.

“The Constitution lodges the Nation’s lawmaking powers in Congress alone,” he said. “Whatever else might be said about Congress’s work in IEEPA, it did not clearly surrender to the President the sweeping tariff power he seeks to wield.”

Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented.

Kavanaugh said he read the 1977 law as allowing tariffs as one means to “regulate … importation,” quoting the law.

“Like quotas and embargoes, tariffs are a traditional and common tool to regulate importation,” he wrote in a 63-page dissent.

Seven of the nine justices — all but Alito and Sotomayor — wrote opinions for the majority or dissent that covered 164 pages in total.

The justices did not decide on how people and companies may seek refunds for the illegal tariffs they paid.

Ilya Somin, a constitutional scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, called the decision “a major victory for the constitutional separation of powers, for free trade, and for the millions of American consumers and businesses enduring the higher taxes and higher prices as a result of these tariffs.”

Others said it was significant that the court had limited the president’s use of open-ended emergency powers laws.

“This ruling is a victory for the rule of law. Emergency powers like IEEPA give presidents vast powers that are highly vulnerable to abuse,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center.

Trump claimed his new and ever-shifting tariffs would bring in trillions of dollars in revenue for the government and encourage more manufacturing in the United States.

But manufacturing employment has gone down over the last year, in part because American companies have been hurt by higher costs for parts that they import.

Critics said the new taxes harm small businesses in particular and have raised prices for American consumers.

The justices focused on the president’s claimed legal authority to impose tariffs as responses to an international economic emergency.

Several owners of small businesses sued last year to challenge Trump’s import taxes as illegal and disruptive.

Learning Resources, an Illinois company that sells educational toys for children, said it would have to raise its prices by 70% because most of its toys were manufactured in Asia.

A separate suit was filed by a New York wine importer and Terry Precision Cycling, which sells cycling apparel for women.

Both suits won in lower courts. Judges said the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 cited by Trump did not mention tariffs and had not been used before to impose such import taxes.

The law says the president in response to a national emergency may deal with an “unusual and extraordinary threat” by freezing assets or sanctioning a foreign country or otherwise regulating trade.

Trump said the nation’s long-standing trade deficit was an emergency and tariffs were an appropriate regulation.

While rejecting Trump’s claims, the lower courts left his tariffs in place while the administration appealed its case to the Supreme Court.

Trump claimed Friday that the country is “booming” because of his tariffs, and said he will press ahead despite his loss in the high court.

The president is scheduled to give his State of the Union address Tuesday, and Roberts and several of the other justices usually attend.

They were invited, but Trump said he had second thoughts.

“They are barely invited,” he said. “Honestly I couldn’t care less if they come.”