With a vote of 6-3 the highest American judicial body rejects the American President’s tariffs: “The use of emergency powers to impose tariffs is illegal”
Just when the storm related to the duties seemed to have finally calmed down, here’s the vote that changes everything: the Supreme Court of the United States has in fact established that the legal means used by Donald Trump to unilaterally impose tariffs on various countries around the world is illegal.
The vote
On Friday morning (afternoon in Italy), after having postponed the decision twice, the judges of the Supreme Court ruled with a ruling of 6 votes against 3, that the lower court’s decision that the use of the Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) by the President exceeded his authority.
Translated: the means used by Trump to impose tariffs is illegal, therefore, so are the tariffs imposed by him tycoon to more or less every country in the world.
The three judges who ruled in favor of Trump’s tariffs were Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomasbut they were not enough to reach the vote of 5 that the American President would have needed, despite the majority of conservative judges on the Supreme Court.
The Court’s reasons
John RobertsPresident of the Supreme Court, wrote in the reasons that “the president must point to clear congressional authorization to justify his extraordinary assertion of the power to impose tariffs”, adding, however, that in the case of his tariffs the President “he can’t do it”, meaning that Trump is unable to provide such a justification.
The Chief Justice further added that if Congress had intended to give the President, through the IEEPA, “the distinct and extraordinary power to impose tariffs, it would have done so expressly, as it has always done in other tariff statutes.”
How the Supreme Court vote came about
The Supreme Court reached this conclusion following an appeal filed by American businesses affected (indirectly) by the tariffs and by 12 US states, most of them governed by Democrats, against Trump’s use of the IEEPA to unilaterally impose taxes on imports.
The consequences
The difficult part comes now, because according to the estimates produced by the economists of the Penn-Wharton Budget Model the amount collected by Trump’s duties on the basis of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act amounted to over 175 billion dollars. Billions which, logically speaking, they will therefore have to be returned.
the administration’s possible moves
The administration had already made it known in recent weeks that it would consider alternatives if the ruling went against its tariffs, as actually happened.
The Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessentin particular, had stated that the United States would invoke other legal justifications to maintain as many tariffs as possible.
These include a provision of the law that allows the imposition of tariffs on imported goods that threaten U.S. national security and another that allows retaliatory actions, including tariffs, against trading partners who have used unfair trade practices against American exporters.
