At the heart of the court decision that struck down Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs is a critical legal distinction between the power to “regulate” and the power to impose “tariffs.” The court’s finding that the former does not automatically include the latter was the argument that ultimately undid the policy.
The Trump administration’s case rested on a clause in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) that allows the president to “regulate” imports during a national emergency. They argued that imposing a tariff is a form of regulation.
However, the appeals court rejected this broad interpretation. The 7-4 majority opinion stated that the power to tax imports via tariffs is a significant and distinct authority that Congress has historically guarded. The court reasoned that if Congress had intended to grant this specific power within the IEEPA, it would have used the word “tariff” or one of its synonyms, which it did not.
This narrow, textualist reading of the law proved decisive. It concluded that the general power to regulate was not enough to justify the specific act of setting widespread tariffs, an action that “exceeds the authority” delegated by the statute. This seemingly semantic debate has now led to the potential unraveling of a multi-billion dollar trade policy.