No Tariffs for You!
By 
As expected, the Supreme Court has struck down the Trump administration’s tariff authority:
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that President Trump exceeded his authority when he imposed sweeping tariffs on imports from nearly every U.S. trading partner, a major setback for his administration’s second-term agenda.
The court’s 6-3 decision has significant implications for the U.S. economy, consumers and the president’s trade policy. The Trump administration had said that a loss at the Supreme Court could force the government to unwind trade deals with other countries and potentially pay hefty refunds to importers.
Mr. Trump is the first president to claim that a 1970s emergency statute, which does not mention the word “tariffs,” allowed him to unilaterally impose the duties without congressional approval.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the statute does not authorize the president to impose tariffs.
“The president asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it,” the chief justice wrote.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh dissented.
Now, the big, unclear question is on the extent to which those who paid tariffs may be able to obtain refunds. A coalition of small businesses called We Pay the Tariffs, which has fought the president’s duties and demanded compensation for them, said the administration needed to make firms harmed by high costs whole.
Dan Anthony, the executive director of the group, said in a statement that a “legal victory is meaningless without actual relief for the businesses that paid these tariffs.”
“The administration’s only responsible course of action now is to establish a fast, efficient, and automatic refund process that returns tariff money to the businesses that paid it,” he continued. “Small businesses cannot afford to wait months or years while bureaucratic delays play out, nor can they afford expensive litigation just to recover money that was unlawfully collected from them in the first place…”
Even before the Supreme Court issued its ruling, hundreds of American businesses had prepared to pursue tariff refunds by hiring lawyers, filing lawsuits or submitting official claims to get tariff refunds. We Pay the Tariffs, a coalition of over 800 small businesses, called for fast refunds.
“A legal victory is meaningless without actual relief for the businesses that paid these tariffs,” the group said in a statement. “The administration’s only responsible course of action now is to establish a fast, efficient, and automatic refund process that returns tariff money to the businesses that paid it.”
The U.S. Court of International Trade will ultimately manage that process. But refunds are not automatic. Any importer that wants its money back must sue individually.
Trump has bureaucratic and legal alternatives but none of them offered the flexibility and immediacy of the IEEPA. Moving forward the process of imposing and changing tariffs will become more difficult, with necessarily haphazard effects on the economy. And Trump has placed enormous weight on his tariff policy:
It’s important to remember that this case wasn’t just about trade. For President Trump, the tariffs — specifically, the ability to institute them on an immediate, boundless and emergency basis — were central to the entirety of his second term. They were the tool he used to force companies to manufacture goods domestically, open access to foreign markets, force an end to foreign conflicts and project political power globally. So too were the emergency tariffs central to his fiscal agenda, offering a lucrative offset to the expensive, debt-heavy tax cuts that Republicans adopted last year.
There is effectively zero appetite in the Congressional GOP to grant Trump any kind of significant tariff latitude, especially because tariffs are quite unpopular and the GOP is already looking into the barrel of a midterm massacre. So Trump will attempt to impose tariffs under alternative legal authorities, and those tariffs will last until they get struck down again by the Supreme Court. Rinse, Repeat.