Kavanaugh Dissent Gives Trump a Tariff Workaround to All-But Undo SCOTUS Ruling
Justice Brett Kavanaugh offered President Donald Trump a workaround to the Supreme Court’s ruling Friday that struck down Trump’s broad use of emergency powers to impose tariffs as a tool of foreign policy.
In April, Trump imposed tariffs under a 1977 emergency powers law known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, citing a record $1.4 trillion trade deficit in 2024.
In Friday’s 6-3 ruling, the high court held IEEPA “does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.”
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, joined by conservative Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, as well as the liberals on the bench: Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Kavanaugh, along with conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, dissented.
In his dissenting opinion, Kavanaugh wrote, “Although I firmly disagree with the Court’s holding today, the decision might not substantially constrain a President’s ability to order tariffs going forward. That is because numerous other federal statutes authorize the President to impose tariffs and might justify most (if not all) of the tariffs at issue in this case—albeit perhaps with a few additional procedural steps that IEEPA, as an emergency statute, does not require.”
“Those statutes include, for example, the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 (Section 232); the Trade Act of 1974 (Sections 122, 201, and 301); and the Tariff Act of 1930 (Section 338). In essence, the Court today concludes that the President checked the wrong statutory box by relying on IEEPA rather than another statute to impose these tariffs,” he argued.