A US Court of Appeals has upheld a ruling by the US International Court of Trade that most of Trump’s tariffs are unlawful and have been imposed by him without any legal authority. The judgement is 127 pages long and gives the administration until mid-October to challenge the ruling in the Supreme Court, which I assume they will do. A post on Trump’s social media platform described the Appeals court as “highly Partisan.” I’m not convinced Trump actually wrote the post since it doesn’t contain any spelling mistakes, all-caps rants or mangled grammar. It looks like someone is trying to emulate his style but isn’t quite stupid enough. More on this below.
Trump is convinced the SCOTUS will help him out, and he may be right:
The judgement looks watertight but it was far from unanimous. Four out of the eleven judges disagreed and thought Trump was within his rights to impose tariffs on whichever country he likes, at whatever rate he chooses, and for as long as he wants. This wasn't necessarily a split on party lines either. One of the seven was a George W. Bush appointee, while two of the dissenters were appointed by Barack Obama.
The ruling only affects tariffs that were imposed using powers granted under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977, which is roughly about 70% of them. The IEEPA essentially allows a president to “regulate” trade when he believes there to be an economic crisis. The court takes quite a chunk of its 127 pages to examine the meaning of the word ‘regulate’ and finds against the government’s opinion that regulating includes imposing huge tariffs.
No previous government has ever claimed that it does.
The court argues, quite logically, that in other statutes previous governments have used 'regulating' and 'imposing duties' separately, which they wouldn’t have done if they amounted to the same thing. The justices also pointed out that the IEEPA would have been a lot shorter if, as the Department of Justice claims, it simply gave presidents carte blanche to ‘regulate’ trade in whatever way they wanted.
This isn't to say a president has never imposed a tariff in an emergency. Nixon did it in 1971 under a predecessor act “to address a balance of payments deficit,” by imposing a 10% additional tariff, but this modest surcharge “lasted less than five months” and never exceeded the maximum tariff set by Congress. Every time Congress has delegated tariff policy to the president, the court writes, it imposed “well-defined procedural and substantive limitations”.
This time, Trump is applying massive, virtually unlimited tariffs on almost every country, friend or foe, and whether there is a trade deficit or not, for reasons that change weekly and at levels that he is constantly changing on a whim.
Another significant point in the ruling is that the tariffs are said to “run afoul” of something known in US law as the “major questions doctrine.” This is a principle of US administrative law, adopted by the Supreme Court in 2000, that requires agencies to demonstrate clear, explicit congressional authorisation for actions of major economic or political significance. If there is no such clear expression of the will of Congress, courts tend not to uphold the powers that a government claims.
The SCOTUS has previously held that a case in Alabama which had an economic impact of $50 billion, breached the principle. Another, in Nebraska, involved up to $519 billion, which the Supreme Court described as having a “staggering” scope of impact. The Trump government itself has claimed that the Reciprocal Tariffs alone will “generate between $2.3 trillion and $3.3 trillion over the budget window.”
These are astronomical sums and all done with extremely tenuous congressional authority. Trump and his gang of lunatics are simply resting on their idea of the meaning of the word 'regulate.' It's farcical.
The ruling is explicit about which arm of government has tax-raising powers and what tariffs are:
"The Constitution grants Congress the power to 'lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises' and to 'regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.' Tariffs are a tax, and the Framers of the Constitution expressly contemplated the exclusive grant of taxing power to the legislative branch; when Patrick Henry expressed concern that the President 'may easily become king,' James Madison replied that this would not occur because 'the purse is in the hands of the representatives of the people'.”
The SCOTUS could rule that Trump does have tax-raising powers, or they could uphold the lower courts' ruling. They could even decide not to intervene at all. It will be quite a tricky decision and could potentially create a rift between Trump and the chief justice at SCOTUS, John Roberts, a conservative who up to now has been very helpful to the president.
If SCOTUS rules against Trump, the president and his entire administration will look even more stupid and incompetent that they are.
Where has Trump been?
The president wasn’t seen in public after last Tuesday until yesterday (Saturday) morning when he was pictured at a golf club, leading some people to speculate that he was ill or even that he had died!
Trump at his golf club today. He hid from the public for days and won’t let the press pool near him.— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes.bsky.social) 30 August 2025 at 22:17
He had no public engagements after Tuesday and has none over the weekend or at the start of next week. I am also pretty sure his Truth Social account is being operated by aides.
For a man who loves to be at the epi-centre of attention and for whom words like narcissistic and solipsistic might have been invented, and who likes nothing better than to pontificate in public on subjects about which he is totally ignorant, his absence for a week or more has certainly raised a lot of questions.
As yet, there are no answers. But I'm sure we'll soon find out.
