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The Supreme Court ruled that President Donald Trump exceeded his authority when he imposed sweeping tariffs by using a law reserved for a national emergency on Friday (February 20), NBC News reports.
The majority conservative high court voted 6-3 to rule that Trump's aggressive tariffs approach on international imports didn't adhere to the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) with conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and Trump-appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett joining liberal colleagues Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson in their voting.
"The president asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration and scope," Roberts wrote in the ruling via NBC News, claiming the Trump administration "points to no statute" in which Congress had previously said the language included in IEEPA could apply to the imposed tariffs. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito dissented from the majority in what was a rare setback for the second Trump administration at the Supreme Court.
The ruling won't affect all of Trump's tariffs as ones imposed on steel and aluminum using various laws will be kept in place, but it will upend country-by-country "reciprocal" tariffs and ones imposed on Canada, China and Mexico based on what his administration called a failure to limit the flow of fentanyl into the United States.