There’s no denying that the US supreme court’s long-awaited ruling that overturned Donald Trump’s global tariffs is important, and if the ruling turns out to be a harbinger that the court is ready to abandon its startling sycophancy toward the US president, it could prove hugely important. The ruling this Friday is the first time during Trump’s second term that the justices have struck down one of his policies. Not only that, the policy they struck down is Trump’s signature economic policy – he has used tariffs to bash, lord over and terrorize dozens of other countries and make himself the King of the Economic Jungle.
In the court’s main opinion, joined by three conservative justices and three liberals, chief justice John Roberts used some sharp language to slap down Trump’s tariffs, writing that the constitution specifically gives Congress, not the president, the power to impose taxes and tariffs. (Roberts noted that tariffs are indeed taxes.)
Roberts added that Trump had misinterpreted the law he invoked to impose tariffs against more than 80 countries, noting that the law – the International Emergency Emergency Powers Act – doesn’t mention the word tariffs even once as it lays out numerous ways presidents can regulate imports. Roberts added that if Congress had wanted to give presidents the power to impose tariffs under that law, it would have specifically said so.
In the tariffs case, Learning Resources Inc v Trump, Roberts seemed appalled at the extraordinary powers Trump had seized to impose whatever tariffs he wanted at any amount he wanted against any country he wanted. Roberts wrote that “the President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope” and that under the administration’s reading of the law, “the President is unconstrained by the significant procedural limitations in other tariff statutes and free to issue a dizzying array of modifications at will.”
Over the past year, the court’s six-person conservative supermajority has ruled in Trump’s favor in a remarkably high percentage of shadow docket cases– letting Trump gut the Department of Education, letting Ice stop people based on their ethnicity, letting Trump refuse to spend appropriated USAID funds, letting the Pentagon discharge transgender service members.
After all that water-carrying for Trump, it’s encouraging to see the court stand up to him and trumpet in the tariff case that Trump was interpreting laws in implausible, illogical ways in order to use his executive powers to the max. It would be good, for instance, if the court similarly rules that Trump is interpreting the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in implausible, illogical ways when he seeks to deport Venezuelan immigrants without due process, even though that act applies only when the US is facing an armed, organized attack.
Soon after the tariff ruling was issued, Trump quickly slandered and savaged the justices who had ruled against him. “They’re just being fools and lapdogs” for political opponents, including “the radical left Democrats”, he said. “They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our constitution. It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests.”
Trump also said the justices who ruled against him were a “disgrace to our nation” and that he was “ashamed of” them “not having the courage to do what’s right for our country”. Trump beat up mercilessly on the six justices who ruled against him, including conservatives Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, even those three had ruled for Trump about 80% of the time in shadow docket cases, many of them highly controversial and contentious.
After Trump insulted the justices and whipped up Maga loyalists against them, let’s hope the justices will be more motivated to put their Trump sycophancy behind him and be more emboldened to rule against him. When will the justices admit to themselves that they shouldn’t be so quick to defer to Trump and shouldn’t rush to give him more power under the “unitary executive theory”, considering that he is so autocratic and thuggish and often pays scant heed to the law and the truth.
It’s high time that the high court realize that Trump’s elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top. Remember last December when he wrote that if the supreme court ruled against him in the tariffs case, that would be “the biggest threat in history” to US national security. In October, he said something even more ludicrous: that if the tariff ruling went against him, it “would literally destroy the United States of America.” (When I woke up this morning. the US was still standing,)
The importance of the tariffs case will turn in part on which of two roads the US supreme court will take: a limited, pro-corporate route or a broader, more robust course defending the constitution against the most authoritarian president in history.
Many US supreme court watchers predict that the high court will rule against Trump in only two important cases this year – cases in which much of Corporate America has parted ways with the president. Roberts and the other conservative justices don’t like to part ways with Corporate America. Those two cases are the tariffs case and the case in which Trump sought to fire Federal Reserve member Lisa Cook, without giving her any due process, after a Trump ally alleged that Cook made false statements on a mortgage application. She denied any wrongdoing.
Corporate America detests Trump’s tariffs, convinced that they muck up trade relations and undermine economic growth. Corporate America also opposes Trump’s heavy-handed effort to eliminate the Federal Reserve’s independence and transform it into a group of Trumpian puppets who will, per Trump’s wishes, slash interest rates, which could cause inflation to spike in a few years, very possibly after Trump leaves office. At a minimum, let’s hope the court rules for Cook over Trump, but doesn’t stop there.
Let’s hope the court removes its pro-Trump glasses and starts to see how he so often holds the truth and the law (and the justices) in contempt. We all need to stand up and defend the US constitution. And the US supreme court needs to do that more than anyone else.
Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues
