Supreme Court blocks Trump's emergency tariffs, billions in refunds may be owed

But the court did not agree that Congress intended to give the president “the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,” Roberts wrote. “Those words cannot bear such weight,” particularly in peacetime. “The United States, after all, is not at war with every nation in the world.”

Specifically, Trump failed to “identify any statute in which the power to regulate includes the power to tax,” Roberts wrote. And the majority of justices remained “skeptical” that in “IEEPA alone,” Congress intended to hide “a delegation of its birth-right power to tax within the quotidian power to ‘regulate.’”

“A contrary reading would render IEEPA partly unconstitutional,” Roberts wrote.

According to the majority, siding with Trump would free the president to “issue a dizzying array of modifications” to tariffs at will, “unconstrained by the significant procedural limitations in other tariff statutes.” The only check to that unprecedented power grab, the court suggested, would be a “veto-proof majority in Congress.”

Trump has yet to comment on the ruling. Ahead of it, he claimed the tariffs were “common sense,” NBC News reported. Speaking at a steel manufacturing factory in northwest Georgia, Trump claimed that IEEPA tariffs were projected to bring in $900 billion “next year.” Not only could he now be forced to refund tariffs, but the Supreme Court ruling could also undo trade deals in which Trump used so-called reciprocal tariffs as leverage. Undoing tariffs will likely be a “mess,” Barrett said last year.

“Until now, no President has read IEEPA to confer such power,” Roberts wrote, while noting that the court claims “no special competence in matters of economics or foreign affairs.”

Gorsuch seems to troll Trump

In a concurring opinion, Gorsuch slammed Trump as trying to expand the president’s authority in a way that would make it hard for Congress to ever retrieve lost powers. He claimed that Trump was seeking to secure a path forward where any president could declare a national emergency—a decision that would be “unreviewable”—to justify imposing “tariffs on nearly any goods he wishes, in any amount he wishes, based on emergencies he himself has declared.”