In a sweeping defeat for President Trump’s grasp for broad emergency powers, the Supreme Court on Friday took away all of his authority to act on his own to put new charges – that is, tariffs — on goods being imported from around the world.

In a 6-to-3 ruling, producing 170 pages of opinions, the Court said Congress has the power to impose tariffs and it could share that authority with the White House in some situations, but simply has chosen not to do so.

This was an even sharper rebuke of President Trump than the Court’s recent ruling barring him from sending National Guard troops into major cities to help enforce immigration control laws.  He may face another defeat later this year when the Court issues a forthcoming ruling on presidential power to deny U.S. citizenship to children born in this country whose parents entered the U.S. illegally on only temporarily to work, study or go touring.

The new tariff decision’s major implications included these:

·       The government has now collected $133 billion in tariff revenue from U.S. importers, leaving Congress, the Treasury and the federal courts to sort out whether all or any of that must now be refunded to the companies that paid the import duties.  The Court had no suggestions of its own, stopping with the simple declaration that Trump had acted illegally.

·       The issue of what to do with the collected funds will hang over the stock markets and the economy in general, shaking up wide sectors of business across the nation, as well as unsettling the government’s management of the federal budget, pushing deficits deeper.

·       The decision may well undercut the legal basis for new nation-to-nation trade deals that the Trump Administration has made with other countries, such as China and Great Britain.

·       The ruling marked the first time that any decision by the Court had applied a broad new constitutional doctrine, limiting Congress’s authority to share its policymaking powers with the President and the Executive Branch, to a dispute involving America’s relations with other nations.  Only three of the six Justices in the majority took that position as justification for the ruling, but that marked a potential shift in doctrine with widening impact.  Foreign policymaking is traditionally an area of government where the Court generally allows the President and his branch of government wide-ranging discretion.

·       Trump failed to get the support of two of the three Justices he had named to the Court: Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil M. Gorsuch, who joined with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in the opinion’s reliance upon the limitation of sharing of Congress’s powers with the Executive Branch.  Trump’s other nominee, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, was one of the three Justices who dissented; Kavanaugh wrote what is considered to be the most significant dissenting arguments in answer to the ruling; he was joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and Clarence Thomas.  Justice Thomas also wrote a separate dissenting opinion, for himself only, that argued that there are almost no powers given to Congress that could not be shared with the President if Congress chose to do so.

The Court’s three more liberal Justices – Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor – supported the ruling that Trump lacked the power to impose the tariffs, but they did so on the narrow basis that the action was simply not authorized by a 1977 federal emergency powers law dealing with trading between the U.S. and other nations.

Beyond the significant and historic dimensions of the ruling, the outcome was a particular personal defeat for Donald Trump who, for years, has been arguing that the most important power that the U.S. government can use to deal with foreign policy is the power to impose tariffs on goods sold to Americans by foreign suppliers.

Besides flatly dismissing that argument, today’s ruling also rejected Trump’s claim that foreign suppliers of goods paid the tariffs as part of deals with the U.S.  The Court ruled that the tariffs operated precisely as a form of U.S. tax, imposed by the government on American businesses when they buy foreign goods.

Trump’s arguments in favor of collecting the $133 billion in tariffs were that they were necessary to deal with two emergencies: the rising flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. from overseas, and the rising deficits in U.S. trade with other nations.  The Court made clear that neither argument could salvage the tariffs, in the wake of Trump’s total lack of legal authority to impose the tariffs, which were applied to every nation with whom the U.S. carries on any trade deals.