A much needed win on tariffs

CONGRATULATIONS to my Cato colleague Ilya Somin for playing a key role in organizing today’s successful challenge to Donald Trump’s tariffs and the claim of arbitrary power that underlay them. As Ilya writes of today’s Supreme Court decision, “It’s 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.”

Cato itself also filed two briefs in the tariff cases, one legal and one economic in content. Thomas Berry and Brent Skorup explained that “IEEPA provides no textual authority for imposing tariffs and that the Constitution vests tariff-setting power solely in Congress. The brief traces two centuries of U.S. practice showing that Congress has always retained this power, even during wars and financial crises, and has never delegated open-ended tariff authority to the executive branch.” On the economics side, Scott Lincicome, Colin Grabow and Clark Packard rebutted “the administration’s ‘fantastical claims’ regarding the supposed calamities that would befall the nation’s economy and foreign policy if the Court were to strike down the president’s ability to impose tariffs under IEEPA.”

At the most basic level, today is a victory for correct reading of statutory language. Three deciding votes (Roberts, Barrett, Gorsuch) also grounded the decision in the so-called Major Questions Doctrine, which makes yet another example of how legal doctrines perceived as helping one side in the Red/Blue conflict can in fact assist the other side when the wheel turns. The Court earlier invoked the Major Questions Doctrine to strike down overreach by the Biden administration, and now it has done the same thing against Trump. (The three liberal justices peeled away on this, finding that statutory interpretation was sufficient to disallow the tariffs and that it wasn’t necessary to reach Major Questions.)

Three conservative Justices dissented (Kavanaugh, Alito, Thomas) and there were some other differences between Justices. As my colleagues write, Trump unfortunately has some other statutes at his disposal by which to keep the chaos going in pursuit of his manifestly failed policy. But all in all it was a good day for freedom and the balance of powers, and a sharp rebuke to a spirit of Caesarism that should have no place in American governance.