The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to quickly hear a pair of broad legal challenges to President Donald Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs on countries around the world.
By putting the cases on a highly accelerated track, with oral arguments in the first week of November, the justices indicated that they likely would resolve the issue quickly — perhaps as soon as the end of the year. The Trump administration is urging a rapid decision.
At issue in the cases are the tens of billions of dollars of tariffs that Trump has collected since February under a nearly 50-year-old law known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
The Congressional Budget Office has forecast Trump’s tariffs could reduce the budget deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade if left in place, while economists warn the tariffs could hurt U.S. economic growth and drive up inflation —– making it one of the biggest economic issues the Supreme Court has ever faced.
“The stakes in this case could not be higher,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer said last month in the Justice Department’s petition. “The President and his Cabinet officials have determined that the tariffs are promoting peace and unprecedented economic prosperity, and that the denial of tariff authority would expose our nation to trade retaliation without effective defenses and thrust America back to the brink of economic catastrophe.”
Presidents have drawn on the 1977 law to impose economic sanctions on a long list of countries during the past five decades, but no president before Trump has used it to impose tariffs and to pressure other countries into trade negotiations.
Critics say Trump abused the law to impose to impose massive new tariffs, a power that the Constitution assigns to Congress, although it has yielded some of its authority in that area to the White House over the past century.
Last month a federal appeals court ruled, 7-4, that Trump had overstepped his authority to enact two sets of emergency tariffs: one imposed on most countries aimed at reducing the large U.S. trade deficit and another set aimed at China, Mexico and Canada to pressure those countries to stop fentanyl and precursor chemicals from entering the United States.
That appeals court ruling was the third loss for the administration, following a May ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade in the same case — brought by a group of small businesses and 12 Democratic-run states — and a ruling in a separate case by Judge Rudolph Contreras in U.S. District Court in Washington.
The Supreme Court agreed to consolidate the district court case brought by the two Illinois toy companies with the case brought by the other small businesses and the Democratic-run states.
Both the international trade court and Contreras granted injunctions barring the administration from collecting the tariffs, but they put those injunctions on hold to allow time for an appeal. The Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case allows the Trump administration to continue collecting the tariffs until the justices rule.
Sauer asked the high court to resolve the case as quickly as possible, and by setting an accelerated briefing schedule and quick oral argument, the justices indicated that they are taking that request seriously. But there is no guarantee that a ruling will come right away.
After hearing the case, the justices could take until June to issue a decision. That’s when the final and most momentous decisions of the term are typically released.
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said in an interview last week he is optimistic that the Supreme Court will side with him and other Democratic attorneys general and strike down Trump’s tariffs.
“There’s a lot of incredibly compelling facts and law supporting our case. So it wasn’t really a surprise that you’d win at these lower courts,” Rayfield said. “I think that same dynamic is going to persist at the Supreme Court.”
Although the current Supreme Court has been deferential to Trump’s expansion of executive power, Rayfield noted that many of the key constitutional principles and doctrines being used to challenge the tariffs have been developed by “conservative jurists.”
Attorneys on behalf of V.O.S. Selections, a New York-based wine importer, and other small business, also welcomed the Supreme Court’s action.
“We are confident that the Supreme Court, like the CIT and the Federal Circuit, will recognize that the President does not have unilateral tariff power under IEEPA,” said Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel and director of litigation at the Liberty Justice Center. “Congress, not the President alone, has the constitutional power to impose tariffs.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday that he was “confident” the Supreme Court will uphold the tariffs.
“This is the President’s signature policy. First, he solved the border, now he’s solving trade, and I think courts are very reluctant to overrule a president’s signature policy,” Bessent said in an interview with Larry Kudlow on Fox Business Network.
He also argued that both the fentanyl crisis and the large trade deficit were clearly national emergencies that warranted the use of tariffs.
Trump has used the emergency tariffs to pressure major trading partners such as the European Union, Japan and South Korea to negotiate trade agreements with the United States. The future of deals would be in doubt if the Supreme Court strikes down the duties, although it may not cause them to collapse since the Trump administration could draw on other authorities to authorize similar tariffs.
Bessent acknowledged on Tuesday that the administration does have a “fallback position. [But] It’s more cumbersome, and I think it limits the president’s hands to do these great deals.”
The case does not affect some other Trump tariffs, such as the 50 percent duties he has imposed on steel, aluminum and copper to protect national security and 25 percent duties on autos and auto parts using the same rationale.
Daniel Desrochers contributed to this report.
