Photograph by Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty
The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision today striking down President Trump’s tariffs isn’t just significant because it constrains him from imposing his transformative economic policy under the guise of a national emergency. The ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump is more important as a welcome signal that even this Court is willing, at times, to stand up against an overreaching President. Warning: Don’t go overboard with the champagne. This remains an undoubtedly conservative Court, which has ruled repeatedly in favor of the Trump Administration during the past year. It will do so again; the conservative Justices’ devotion to nearly unbridled executive authority aligns conveniently with Trump’s desire to exercise such power. So watch for the Court, later this year, to overrule a ninety-year-old precedent and grant the President new power to fire agency officials.
But as wrong-headed as the Court’s obeisance to the executive branch has been (see, for example, its 2024 ruling on Presidential immunity), that deference has its limits. This phenomenon was on display Friday, as the Court’s three remaining liberals joined with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. They weren’t in complete agreement about the basis for the ruling, but they were together in their understanding that a law lacking any mention of tariffs does not give the President, as Roberts put it in his opinion for the Court, “the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time.” This text-based conservative resistance could very well reappear later this year when the Court deals with Trump’s executive order purporting to eliminate birthright citizenship. We will get a glimpse of the Court’s inclinations when the case is argued on April 1st, but the conservatives who were unwilling to go along with Trump’s assertion of unconstrained emergency power over tariffs aren’t likely to let him rewrite the Constitution.
Later, during a petulant news conference, Trump lambasted the Court’s Democratic appointees as a “disgrace to our nation,” and assailed other “politically correct” Justices, presumably including two of the three he had appointed, for being “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats.” Of the Justices who disagreed with him, Trump said, “They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” and are swayed by “foreign interests.” This is, perhaps, not the best strategy for dealing with a branch that is not only coequal but whose members possess lifetime tenure.
A year into the Trump Administration, the Justices are moving from skirmishing over how much leeway to give the President while his policies make their way through the lower courts to issuing final rulings on the legality of his actions. The Administration’s remarkably good track record on the Court’s emergency docket is not likely to be matched when the Justices get to the merits, or lack thereof, of Trump’s many illegal actions.
What Just Happened?
On Thursday, Alysa Liu became the first American woman to win Olympic gold in singles figure skating since 2002.
