A Legal Analysis of the Supreme Court’s Tariff Ruling
Stefan Padfield /
The Supreme Court has struck down President Donald Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs by a vote of 6-3, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority.
Notably, the majority opinion made clear: “We claim no special competence in matters of economics or foreign affairs. We 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.”
Background
Before diving into the substance of the case, some background facts should be helpful.
In his first term, Trump immediately made it clear to allies and foes alike that, when it comes to tariffs, he means business. Just ask China, the European Union, Canada, or Mexico.
When he returned to the campaign trail in 2024, Trump pledged to impose tariffs again, citing national security and imbalances in trade relationships.
On Feb. 1, 2025, he followed through and imposed tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China.
But the president didn’t stop there. On April 2, the president imposed further “Liberation Day” tariffs.
But where does the president derive this authority? Isn’t Congress supposed to impose taxes?
The president’s answer rests on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a statute enacted by Congress in 1977. IEEPA allows the president, after declaring the existence of a foreign threat deemed “unusual and extraordinary,” to “investigate, block, during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, [and] direct” transactions involving property in which a foreign country or national has an interest, where that property is “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.”
However, some disagreed with the president’s use of this statute, and legal challenges soon followed. Among them was Rick Woldenberg, the chief executive of Learning Resources, a toy manufacturer.
Plaintiffs filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. On May 29, Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, rejecting the administration’s interpretation of the statute.
The court reasoned that, although IEEPA allows the president to “regulate importation,” that authority does not extend to imposing tariffs.
As Contreras explained, “This case is not about tariffs qua tariffs. It is about whether IEEPA enables the President to unilaterally impose, revoke, pause, reinstate, and adjust tariffs to reorder the global economy. The Court agrees with Plaintiffs that it does not.”
Despite this conclusion, Contreras stayed his order to allow for appellate review.
Unsurprisingly, Trump appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. But Woldenberg and his attorneys had their sights set higher and filed for a motion to expedite directly to the Supreme Court.
At the same time, a parallel challenge was unfolding.
In V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump, five small businesses facing potential bankruptcy also challenged the Trump administration’s use of IEEPA. After denying a temporary restraining order, a bipartisan three-judge panel granted summary judgment for the plaintiffs, permanently enjoining the tariffs on the ground that IEEPA does not delegate “unlimited tariff authority” to the president.
The Trump administration appealed, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed in part, vacated in part, and remanded in part.
In their per curiam decision, the en banc court held that Trump exceeded his authority by imposing tariffs of unlimited duration on imports from numerous trading parties, raising serious concerns under the major questions doctrine.
However, 4 of the 11 circuit court judges joined Judge Richard Taranto’s dissent.
Taranto argued that the IEEPA represents an “eyes-open congressional grant of broad emergency authority,” which Congress exercised its constitutionally delegated role through “demanding procedural requirements.”
By late summer 2025, the separate tariff challenges were pulled together. The Supreme Court consolidated the cases—Learning Resources and V.O.S. Selections—to decide once and for all whether a president may invoke emergency powers to impose tariffs.
On Nov. 5, the court heard oral arguments. The businesses argued that using the IEEPA to rewrite the nation’s tariff policy defied the separation of powers, raised a major-questions problem, and marked a jarring break from historical practice.
The government countered that the case was fundamentally about presidential power in foreign affairs and national emergencies, pointing to President Richard Nixon’s temporary tariffs in the early 1970s as precedent for decisive executive action to address economic crises.
The SCOTUS Opinion
The Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump draws a bright and decidedly textual line: the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs—full stop.
However, as The Heritage Foundation alluded to elsewhere: While the court has ruled that a president cannot use IEEPA to implement tariffs, Congress has still delegated such authority to the executive via the Trade Act of 1974 (Sections 122, 201, and 301), the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 (Section 232), the Tariff Act of 1930 (Section 338), and the Trading with the Enemy Act.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh rightly stated in his dissent that “numerous other federal statutes authorize the President to impose tariffs and might justify most (if not all) of the tariffs at issue in this case—albeit perhaps with a few additional procedural steps that IEEPA, as an emergency statute, does not require.” And sure enough, the administration invoked several of these authorities within hours of the ruling to reimpose tariffs previously covered by IEEPA.
What follows is a reader-friendly unpacking of the decision framed around (1) the actual holding and who joined it; (2) how the votes break down across the opinion’s parts; (3) the majority’s reasoning; (4) the concurrences and dissents; (5) what remains unresolved; (6) how national security arguments fared; (7) some takeaways for what to expect next.
The Holding
The binding holding appears in Parts I, II–A–1, and II–B of the chief justice’s opinion, which are joined by Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elana Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. These parts together conclude that IEEPA’s text does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. The court’s language is unequivocal: “IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.”
That conclusion rests on two building blocks.
First, tariffs are taxes and Article I vests the taxing power—including duties—exclusively in Congress.
As the opinion puts it: “The power to impose tariffs is ‘very clear[ly] … a branch of the taxing power’” and “the President enjoys no inherent authority to impose tariffs during peacetime.”
Second, IEEPA’s grant to “regulate … importation” cannot be stretched to include taxation: Had Congress wanted to delegate tariff authority, it would have “done so expressly,” as it has repeatedly done elsewhere using terms like “duty” and “surcharge.”
Although the opinion includes a part applying a major-questions analysis, that part is joined only by Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett. That section reasons that because the claimed authority is “extraordinary” and implicates the “power of the purse,” the executive must point to clear congressional authorization, and that there is no emergency statute or foreign affairs exception to that clear statement requirement.
Gorsuch and Barrett each wrote separately to further address that doctrine, while Kagan (joined by Sotomayor and Jackson) wrote separately to assert that no major questions doctrine analysis is needed given that straightforward statutory interpretation suffices.
Kavanaugh, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, dissented, arguing that “regulate … importation” has historically encompassed the power to impose duties, and that past precedent (including United States v. Yoshida Int’l, Inc., which was decided under the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA), which preceded the IEEPA, as well as Federal Energy Administration v. Algonquin SNG, Inc., which applied Section 232(b) of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962) supports a broader executive role. That dissent further argues that the majority’s reading produces “nonsensical textual and practical anomalies”—notably, allowing the president to embargo imports under IEEPA (a severe measure) while denying him authority to impose tariffs (an arguably lesser measure).
The majority’s reply to the “anomaly” charge appears squarely in Part II–B: tariffs are constitutionally distinct because they raise revenue (a “branch of the taxing power”), whereas embargoes and prohibitions are conduct-regulating tools within the core of “regulate … importation.” Congress drew that line in IEEPA’s verbs; the Constitution draws it in Article I. That the statute permits one category of tools but not the other is, in the majority’s view, not “nonsensical” but required by text and structure.
Thomas meanwhile argued in a separate dissent that the nondelegation doctrine forbids only delegations of core legislative power over “life, liberty, or property,” and that the tariff power—rooted in foreign commerce—is historically delegable to the Executive. He thus sees IEEPA as consistent with the separation of powers and reads “regulate … importation” to include duties.
What Happens to the 2 Consolidated Cases?
Two cases were consolidated for this appeal: (1) Learning Resources filed in the District of D.C., and (2) Trump v. V.O.S. Selections filed in the Court of International Trade. The Supreme Court vacated and remanded Learning Resources with instructions to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction, holding that tariff disputes fall within the Court of International Trade’s exclusive jurisdiction. It affirmed the Federal Circuit in V.O.S. Selections, cementing the merits result that IEEPA does not authorize the challenged tariffs.
On additional next steps, Kavanaugh noted that:
One issue will be refunds. Refunds of billions of dollars would have significant consequences for the U. S. Treasury. The Court says nothing today about whether, and if so how, the Government should go about returning the billions of dollars that it has collected from importers. But that process is likely to be a ‘mess,’ as was acknowledged at oral argument.
Conclusion
Looking ahead, EJ Antoni, Ph.D., acting director of The Heritage Foundation’s Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies and chief economist, noted:
In light of this decision, we strongly encourage Congress to get off the sidelines and work with the White House to make America more competitive by rebalancing international commerce, achieving freer, fairer, and more secure trade. Likewise, Congress should build on the [One Big Beautiful Bill] Act to make more reforms to regulation, taxation, and spending since government overreach in these areas has been the primary drag on our economy.