WASHINGTON (TNND) — The overriding question for the court: Does the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, authorize President Donald Trump to impose tariffs?
The answer in the 6-3 ruling was a resounding no. (TNND)
The answer in the 6-3 ruling was a resounding no.
Trump: “The Supreme Court’s ruling on tariffs is deeply disappointing.”
The three liberal justices, joined by Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote the opinion, connected the issue to the founding of the country itself.
Roberts wrote, “Americans fought the revolution in no small part because they believed that only their elected representatives (not the king, not even parliament) possessed authority to tax them.”
They added, “The framers gave that power to ‘Congress alone.'”
In an interview on Fox News, Jonathan Turley, a Constitutional Law Professor at George Washington University, said the ruling was what he predicted.
Right out of the bat when that oral argument began, the Chief Justice John Roberts said this is a tax. You could hear the administration gulping. That’s not what they wanted the justices to take from their argument. But Roberts and others clearly viewed this as a tax that rests with Congress.
Trump excoriated the decision and vowed to use other laws to try to keep his tariffs in place.
To date, as they’ve already brought in about $200 billion in revenue, also insisting the country still faced a national emergency due to the influx of illegal drugs from countries like Canada, Mexico and China and because of unfair trade deficits.
“We are being ripped up by almost every single country in the world, massive surpluses. China had hundreds of billions of dollars in surpluses with the United States. They rebuilt China. They rebuilt the army,” he said.
Legal experts said the decision is not the end of the road for the Trump administration, but it will make things far more difficult.
“Essentially, the court is saying you have to go back to the drawing board and you have to do it country by country. Individual countries have to be shown to be engaged in unfair trade practices or have to be shown to be a national security threat,” said Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, also to Fox News.
There is a major question the Supreme Court did not answer. What happens to all the revenue already collected from tariffs..in his dissenting opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote those billions of dollars in refunds would have significant consequences for the U.S. Treasury. The process of returning that money, he said, is “likely to be a mess.”
National Headline
