Supreme Court Agrees to Decide Limits of President’s Authority to Impose Tariffs

“The President claims the power to impose, reduce, hike, suspend, double, treble, or eliminate tariffs all on his own. That’s just not the law, and the Supreme Court should say so.”
—Zac Morgan, WLF Senior Litigation Counsel

(Washington, DC)—The U.S. Supreme Court today agreed to consolidated and expedited review of two decisions that enjoined tariffs imposed by President Trump. The order was welcome news for Washington Legal Foundation (WLF), which filed an amicus brief with the Court urging immediate consideration.

Both granted cases, Learning Resources v. Trump and V.O.S. v. Trump, arose from a series of executive orders that claim the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as a legal basis to impose tariffs. Those orders have been challenged by a host of plaintiffs across the United States. Recently two courts, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, held that IEEPA does not grant the President any authority to issue tariffs. The prevailing party before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Learning Resources, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case now—short-circuiting the usual appellate-review process—and WLF filed a brief supporting that ask.

As WLF’s amicus brief explained, the President has no inherent constitutional authority to impose tariffs, so he must rely on Congressional authorization to do so. But IEEPA, a nearly 50-year-old statute that no other President has used to justify tariffs, does not mention tariffs in its text at all. The President’s strained reading to the contrary is of a piece with earlier Executive Branch overreaches halted by the Supreme Court, such as President Biden’s effort to cancel student loan debt and President Obama’s effort to create a carbon cap-and-trade program through the EPA.

WLF argued that immediate review is vital for America’s business community. The President claims a roving right to unilaterally set taxes on America’s multi-trillion-dollar portion of the international marketplace and to alter those rates whenever he sees fit. The Court’s grant today means that the private sector will soon get an answer as to whether Congress truly intended to give the President such whipsaw authority on a major question.