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This court ruling blocks one of the main tools Trump has used to implement his economic agenda.
The conservative-majority Supreme Court ruled by six votes to three, saying the International Emergency Economic Powers Act “does not give the president the power to impose tariffs.”
Trump uses tariffs as leverage for pressure and negotiations, and last year, when he returned to the presidency, he imposed new tariffs on almost all of the United States’ trading partners in an unprecedented invocation of extraordinary economic powers.
The Supreme Court said Friday that “if Congress had intended to confer special and extraordinary power to impose tariffs” with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, “it would have done so expressly, as it has consistently done in other tariff laws.”
The ruling does not affect sectoral tariffs that Trump has separately imposed on imports of steel, aluminum and various other goods.
The Supreme Court’s ruling upholds earlier findings by lower courts that Trump’s tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act are illegal.
A lower trade court ruled in May that Trump exceeded his authority by imposing sweeping tariffs and blocked most of them from taking effect, but the government appealed the ruling.
