The supreme court’s tariffs ruling puts Trump on notice with a bloody nose | Trump tariffs

After an agonizing year in which the US supreme court stood on the sidelines and watched Donald Trump take a blunt stance on the constitutional separation of powers, the highest judicial panel has finally moved to impose limits on the president’s increasingly regal posturing.

Friday supreme court decision By declaring Trump’s sweeping tariffs illegal, he wrenched away the bloody stick with which the president had used to beat foreign friend and foe alike.

With just nine months until the midterm elections, Trump is missing an important weapon in his second presidential arsenal.

“Finally” he shouted Thorn McQuadeLaw professor at the University of Michigan. The court recalled that “Congress is a separate and equal branch of the government…one of Trump’s favorite tools has been removed from his arsenal of usurpation.”

The decision came as a shock, and Trump wasted no time in voicing his anger at the judges who challenged him. He smeared them on social media with a personalized all-caps attack that was extraordinary even by his norm-breaking standards.

The three liberal-leaning justices who were part of the majority decision were “FOOLS” and “LAPDOGS”; the six who voted against their tariffs were universally indebted to foreign countries; The three opposing right-wingers were filled with “strength, wisdom and love for our Country.”

What Trump has said belies the fact that the current Supreme Court has largely given him everything he desires until his second term as president. Over the past year, conservative justices with supermajorities have shared their opinions piecemeal, causing growing alarm among constitutional lawyers and democracy advocates.

Even before Trump returned to the White House, they had given him the gift of authoritarianism. Trump v USA. The decision granted him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official presidential actions, or as some observers framed it, “power of a king”.

In its first year back in office, the court issued 24 interim rulings on the opaque “shadow file.” Collectively, these emergency orders gave Trump the benefit of the doubt and thwarted many bold efforts by lower court judges to rein him in.

Many of these decisions have allowed Trump, at least in the short term, to trample on powers reserved to Congress, such as restrictions on the president’s ability to fire heads of government agencies.

Friday’s tariff decision turns back from that cliff. Learning Resources v Trump He rejects Trump’s invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as justification for his global tariffs.

The decision clearly states that the law does not give Trump the authority to impose tariffs. Tariffs are taxes, and the power to tax is vested solely in Congress, as guardian of the nation’s purse.

Students of the high court will spend the coming weeks and months poring over the finer details of the decision for clues about the currents of power swirling among the nine justices.

Some signs are already clear.

First of all, John Roberts is back. The court’s shift to the right with critical decisions Like anti-abortion Dobbs Roberts finds himself in the minority, leading some to wonder whether the chief justice is losing his grip on his own court.

Friday’s decision puts the chief justice back in the driver’s seat, as both the author of the tariff decision and the architect of the unexpected 6-3 voting composition. Not the 6-3 that America has become so painfully accustomed to: six conservatives and three disarming liberals.

It was a 6-3 vote in which Roberts was joined by two of his right-wing friends, allied with three liberal-leaning justices, and played to give Trump a collective bloody nose.

These other two right-wingers are extremely important. Both conservatives who followed Roberts to the majority were brought to the field by none other than Trump.

Neil Gorsuch took over the late Antonin Scalia’s seat in 2017 after nearly a year in which Senate Republicans held the seat open by depriving Barack Obama of the chance to elect him. Amy Coney Barrett was named by Trump in 2020 following the death of liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Two Supreme Court nominees angrily turn on him Trump’s reaction to the decision. in the white house At the press conference shortly after the decision was announced, he chose candidates who betrayed him with his narcissistic perspective.

Trump is certainly not the only US president angry at Supreme Court justices who dare to uphold the rule of law. But the way he expresses such thoughts openly and publicly, in personal and caustic terms, places him in the first class.

“I think their decisions are terrible,” he said, referring to Barrett and Gorsuch. “I think it’s embarrassing for their families.”

Of the two, Barrett’s vote is the least surprising. He opened an exhibition in the last five years independent series This saw him reach agreement with liberal-leaning judges on multiple occasions.

Gorsuch’s position is more shocking and will take time to understand. He was reliably conservative on the top court for nearly a decade, forming a new wing of far-right jurisprudence along with other hardliners like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

His majority vote perhaps says more about Trump’s excesses than Gorsuch’s conservatism. The president’s disdain for constitutional inconveniences, his tendency to blow raspberries at other supposedly equal branches of government, could anger someone like Gorsuch, who is clearly committed to the original meaning of the constitution.

“Whatever else is said about Congress’s work in IEEPA, it clearly did not cede to the President the broad tariff authority he intended to exercise,” the judge writes in the concurring opinion.

How this new 6-3 configuration will work out in the long run is another matter for review. Its existence suggests that it is also vulnerable to some of Trump’s clearly unconstitutional actions; specifically, the attempt to destroy birthright citizenship enshrined in the 14th amendment.

Friday’s decision caught Trump’s attention. Although the president reacted to the decision as if he were impervious and immediately announced a new set of tariffs under different legislative authority, the court made itself clear: there is a limit.

However, those who are surprised at this juncture should also be taken into consideration. There is a limit to the Supreme Court’s goodness.

As right-wing legal expert Lisa Graves puts it: “This decision is not judicial courage. It is the Roberts court doing the bare minimum to rein in Trump’s abuse of power.”