Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs get their day in court

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OTTAWA — Massive tariffs proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump were debated in court Wednesday as government lawyers faced questions from the nation's top judges.

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The US Supreme Court spent two and a half hours hearing arguments Wednesday to determine whether Trump's plan would use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). impose massive tariffs on US trading partners — with judges who must decide whether Trump's move was legal and constitutionally sound.

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White arguments in two cases brought by 12 states and several private businesses ended around 1 p.m., and it could be months before a decision is announced.

Questions about the purpose of legislation

The case was previously heard by the U.S. District Court and the Court of International Trade, which ruled that citing IEEPA did not give the president the authority to impose his tariffs.

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Both conservative and liberal members of the US Supreme Court questioned US Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who argued that the president's actions were legal.

In her questions to Sauer, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson argued that IEEPA, signed into law in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter, was designed to limit presidential powers, not give him new ones.

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“Congress was concerned about how presidents used the powers under the prior TWEA (Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917) statute, and it is clear that Congress was trying to limit the president's emergency powers in IEEPA,” she said.

“It therefore seems a little inconsistent to say that we should interpret a law that was designed to limit presidential power in accordance with the understanding that Congress intended the president to have essentially unlimited power.”

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Sauer disagreed, arguing that the purpose of Congress was not to limit the power of the president, saying that legislators did not intend to change the scope of the law and the tools given to it.

General tariffs are not unprecedented

He also pointed out that former President Richard Nixon used similar authority under the TWEA to impose blanket 10% tariffs on all U.S. imports in 1971, a point that Justice Brett Kavanaugh has repeatedly mentioned.

Nixon's decision was the only time in U.S. history that a president invoked a national emergency to impose tariffs—in this case, a balance of payments crisis in which the inflation-plagued U.S. government found itself in trouble by spending more abroad than it received through exports.

In your Truth Social app Trump called this decision “one of the most important and significant” ever handed down by the highest court in the country.

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