{"id":19542,"date":"2026-02-22T15:38:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-22T15:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=19542"},"modified":"2026-02-22T15:38:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T15:38:12","slug":"supreme-court-strikes-down-bulk-of-trumps-tariffs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=19542","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court strikes down bulk of Trump\u2019s tariffs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Reading Time:<\/span> 3<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

(THE HILL) \u2013 The Supreme Court cast aside the bulk of President Trump\u2019s sweeping tariffs Friday, obliterating a canon of his economic strategy in ruling that his use of an emergency statute to remake global trade was unlawful.\n<\/p>\n

The\u00a0decision invalidates what the Trump administration called the president\u2019s most significant economic and foreign policy initiative of his second term, a result Trump has warned could foist financial ruin upon the United States.<\/p>\n

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The justices rejected Trump\u2019s expanded use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in imposing tariffs on\u00a0nearly every\u00a0country. The 1970s-era law allows the president to \u201cregulate\u201d imports when necessary to respond to national emergencies that pose an \u201cunusual and extraordinary\u201d threat.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWe claim no special competence in matters of economics or foreign affairs,\u201d Chief Justice\u00a0John Roberts\u00a0<\/span>wrote.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Trump is the first president to\u00a0attempt\u00a0to invoke the IEEPA to impose tariffs in its\u00a0nearly 50-year\u00a0history.\n<\/p>\n

The\u00a0decision\u00a0does\u00a0not\u00a0provide\u00a0guidance\u00a0for how refunds\u00a0will\u00a0work,\u00a0a battle that lies ahead in the lower courts.\n<\/p>\n

Despite Trump\u2019s string of victories before the high court over the past year, the justices expressed deep skepticism about his ability to justify his economic agenda with the string of emergencies he cited.\n<\/p>\n

Starting in February, Trump declared an emergency over fentanyl to impose tariffs on Canada,\u00a0China\u00a0and Mexico. And more recently, he cited a trade deficit emergency in imposing his so-called reciprocal tariffs on dozens of trading partners across the globe.\n<\/p>\n

Lower judges allowed the levies to continue until the Supreme Court resolved the case. Trump\u2019s sector-specific tariffs that rely on separate legal authorities, like those on steel, aluminum and copper, were not at issue and remain in effect.\n<\/p>\n

Trump has called the case one of the most important in American history, and as the court worked on its decision behind closed doors, the president repeatedly warned publicly that ruling against him would spell economic disaster.\n<\/p>\n

The decision left three of the court\u2019s conservatives in dissent.\n<\/p>\n

Justice\u00a0Brett Kavanaugh\u00a0<\/span>wrote in a dissenting opinion joined by Justices\u00a0Clarence Thomas\u00a0<\/span>and\u00a0Samuel Alito\u00a0<\/span>that, despite the \u201cvigorous policy debates\u201d spurred by Trump\u2019s tariffs, those debates are not for the courts to\u00a0resolve.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sole legal question here is whether, under IEEPA, tariffs are a means to \u2018regulate \u2026 importation,\u2019\u201d Kavanaugh wrote. \u201cStatutory text, history, and precedent\u00a0demonstrate\u00a0that the answer is clearly yes: Like quotas and embargoes, tariffs are a traditional and common tool to regulate importation.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

He\u00a0said that\u00a0\u201ccontext and common sense\u201d\u00a0underpin\u00a0that interpretation of the emergency powers law. However, Trump\u2019s bid to impose tariffs may not be entirely foiled.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIn essence, the\u00a0Court today concludes that the President checked the wrong statutory box by relying on IEEPA rather than another statute to impose these tariffs,\u201d Kavanaugh\u00a0added.\n<\/p>\n

The decision is expected to spark a\u00a0refund\u00a0push from companies across the country to recover the billions in now-invalidated tariffs\u00a0they\u2019ve\u00a0paid.\u00a0The Supreme Court does not lay out a process for how they will be refunded.\n<\/p>\n

In the lead-up to the decision, Costco, parts of the Toyota Group, Revlon and hundreds of other companies had already filed lawsuits\u00a0seeking\u00a0to protect their claims.\n<\/p>\n

None of those major corporations was part of the Supreme Court case, however.\n<\/p>\n

The justices considered underlying lawsuits brought by Democratic-led states and two groups of small businesses. Those businesses were represented by a heavyweight legal team with lawyers across the political spectrum.\n<\/p>\n

It\u2019s\u00a0a rare loss for the administration, which has regularly\u00a0emerged\u00a0victorious before the conservative-majority Supreme Court in a flood of emergency appeals the Justice Department has brought to fight lower judges\u2019 injunctions.\n<\/p>\n

But the\u00a0tariffs\u00a0decision marks the first time the Supreme Court has provided a final opinion on the underlying legality of one of Trump\u2019s policies.\n<\/p>\n

Though it marks a significant defeat for the president, he\u00a0retains\u00a0avenues to still push through his tariff agenda. Congress has constitutional authority to impose new tariffs, and Trump may try to justify tariffs under another existing law.\n<\/p>\n

Ilya Somin, a lawyer for several businesses that challenged Trump\u2019s tariffs, celebrated the decision as a \u201cmajor victory.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\u201cToday, the Supreme Court rightly ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not give the President the power to \u2018impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,\u2019\u201d he said in a statement. \u201cIt\u2019s\u00a0a 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\u00a0as a result of\u00a0these tariffs.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

How are you praying for our nation\u2019s economy? Share your prayers and scriptures below.<\/h4>\n

This article was originally published in The Hill.<\/em>
\n \n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: 3 minutes (THE HILL) \u2013 The Supreme Court cast aside the bulk of President Trump\u2019s sweeping tariffs Friday, obliterating a canon of his economic strategy in ruling that his use of an emergency statute to remake global trade was unlawful. The\u00a0decision invalidates what the Trump administration called the president\u2019s most significant economic and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[6360,316,171,421,1512,803],"class_list":["post-19542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-prayer","tag-bulk","tag-court","tag-strikes","tag-supreme","tag-tariffs","tag-trumps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19542\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}