US Supreme Court strikes down Trump's global tariffs

Washington - The US Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs that he pursued under a law meant for use in national emergencies, handing a stinging defeat to the Republican president in a landmark opinion on Friday with major implications for the global economy.

The justices, in a 6-3 ruling authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld a lower court's decision that Trump's use of this 1977 law exceeded his authority. The justices ruled that the law at issue - the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA - did not grant Trump the power he claimed to impose tariffs.

"Our task today is to decide only whether the power to "regulate … importation," as granted to the president in IEEPA, embraces the power to impose tariffs. It does not," Roberts wrote in the ruling, quoting the statute's text that Trump claimed had justified his sweeping tariffs.

The White House had no immediate comment on the ruling. Democrats and various industry groups hailed the ruling.

Part of the Supreme Court's majority also declared that such an interpretation would intrude on the powers of Congress and violate a legal principle called the "major questions" doctrine.

The doctrine, embraced by the conservative justices, requires actions by the government's executive branch of "vast economic and political significance" to be clearly authorized by Congress.

The court used the doctrine to stymie some of Democratic former President Joe Biden's key executive actions.

Roberts, citing a prior Supreme Court ruling, wrote that "the president must 'point to clear congressional authorization' to justify his extraordinary assertion of the power to impose tariffs," adding: "He cannot."

Roberts wrote that if Congress had intended IEEPA to bestow on the president "the distinct and extraordinary power to impose tariffs, it would have it would have done so expressly - as it consistently has in other tariff statutes."

Trump has leveraged tariffs - taxes on imported goods - as a key economic and foreign policy tool.

They have been central to a global trade war that Trump initiated after he began his second term as president, one that has alienated trading partners, affected financial markets and caused global economic uncertainty.

The Supreme Court reached its conclusion in a legal challenge by businesses affected by the tariffs and 12 U.S. states, most of them Democratic-governed, against Trump's unprecedented use of this law to unilaterally impose the import taxes.

The three dissenting justices were conservatives Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh.

Joining Roberts in the majority were conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both of whom Trump appointed during his first term in office, along with the three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The liberal justices did not join the part of the opinion invoking the major questions doctrine.

The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, previously had backed Trump in a series of other decisions issued on an emergency basis since he returned to the presidency in January 2025 after his policies were impeded by lower courts.

Trump's tariffs were forecast to generate over the next decade trillions of dollars in revenue for the United States, which possesses the world's largest economy.