“First, the Constitution gives Congress the authority to tax and impose tariffs. Congress has delegated that authority to the executive branch in a handful of trade laws passed over the course of the last century, but the president’s power in this area is a function of the particular language contained in those statutes. (The likely reason that Trump invoked IEEPA is that, unlike the more commonly invoked trade laws, IEEPA does not require administrative investigations or consultations with Congress.)
Second, the relevant provision of the IEEPA contains a bunch of words, but none of those words is “tariffs” or “taxes.”
Indeed, no president before Trump has ever used the IEEPA to impose tariffs. The law has typically been deployed to impose economic sanctions, such as prohibitions on transactions with designated foreign governments or businesses.
In theory, these facts should resonate with the Republican appointees on the court, who typically hold themselves out as committed textualists, eager to adhere only to the words on the page.
Third, even if the IEEPA granted the president the authority to impose tariffs, there are no actual “emergencies” here that would support them (though we will return to this notion).
The law authorizes the president to act when there is “an unusual and extraordinary threat … to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States,” and the Trump administration has claimed that there are several different emergencies. They include the opioid crisis and illegal immigration, which Trump has invoked to support tariffs against Canada, Mexico and China. To support other global tariffs, Trump has claimed that the country’s “trade deficits” constitute the emergency.
At least as a factual matter, credible independent analysts have generally rejected these claims. Take the country’s trade deficits. “They’re not actually harmful any more than it’s somehow harmful if I have a trade deficit with my local supermarket,” Somin said. “I buy a lot of things from them, but they virtually never buy anything from me.”
Fourth, as the California complaint correctly notes, IEEPA was passed as part of an effort in the 1970s to limit the president’s emergency economic powers. Congress did not intend to expand the president’s powers or to give him carte blanche to overhaul the global trading system.
That fact may not move the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court if the issue gets to them — they generally oppose the use of legislative history in statutory interpretation — but it is likely to prove relevant to the three Democratic appointees.”
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” The Supreme Court might also side with the Trump administration given that the court is generally deferential to the president’s handling of foreign policy and his assessment of what constitutes a national emergency. We may not have had any national emergencies before Trump returned to office, but ironically, his tariffs may themselves have caused a global emergency — one that could give the justices reason to pause before coming in against the president in a way that could now severely constrain his powers on the global stage and diminish his international diplomatic standing.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/04/21/trump-tariffs-supreme-court-legal-arguments-00299467
Trump defying a Supreme Court order is a constitutional crisis. The crisis comes to a head with Congress derelict in its duty. The only one with the power to enforce limits on the president’s power is Congress through its power of impeachment and a little bit through passing legislation that restrains the president.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiBggW15jLk
“Deeply ingrained in the Constitution genius are checks and balances. The president can veto legislation; Congress can override a veto. The Courts can invalidate an act of Congress or the president. And the executive and legislative branches enjoy checks against the judiciary.
The Constitution called for the establishment of a Supreme Court and lower federal courts. It left it to Congress and the president to decide just what shape the judiciary would take. They did so in the Judiciary Act of 1789, which created district courts, circuit (or appellate) courts, and a six-member Supreme Court. Over the years, Congress, with the president’s approval, has increased and decreased the number of justices on the Supreme Court, created and changed the jurisdiction of district and circuit courts, and adjusted the number of federal judges.
By now, it’s well-known that Congress can change the size, and thus the composition, of the Supreme Court by simple legislation. Court-packing, as it’s been called since 1937, when President Franklin Roosevelt unsuccessfully attempted to circumvent a hostile court by expanding its membership, is a deeply controversial practice.
Critically, but less widely understood, the Constitution also grants Congress the power to strip the Supreme Court of its jurisdiction over specific matters. Article III, Section 2 reads: “In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
At least one founder was clear about the intent of Section 2. Hamilton wrote, “From this review of the particular powers of the federal judiciary, as marked out in the Constitution, it appears that they are all conformable to the principles which ought to have governed the structure of that department, and which were necessary to the perfection of the system. If some partial inconveniences should appear to be connected with the incorporation of any of them into the plan, it ought to be recollected that the national legislature will have ample authority to make such exceptions, and to prescribe such regulations as will be calculated to obviate or remove these inconveniences.”
Defenders of judicial review appropriately point to Federalist 78 as evidence that Hamilton believed the Constitution contained an implicit power of judicial review. But he also believed that Congress could adjust the court’s jurisdiction.
In practice, so few instances exist of jurisdictional stripping that its meaning and scope are open to debate. But it has happened. In the late 1860s, federal authorities jailed William McCardle, a newspaper editor, under provisions of the 1867 Military Reconstruction Act. McCardle sued for his freedom, citing the Habeas Corpus Act of 1867. Congress denied the justices jurisdiction in the matter, and the court conceded that it was powerless to act.
Writing several decades later, Justice Felix Frankfurter, an FDR appointee, noted that “Congress need not give this Court any appellate power; it may withdraw appellate jurisdiction once conferred and it may do so even while a case is sub judice.” Chief Justice Warren Burger, whom President Richard Nixon placed on the bench, agreed, writing that Congress could pass simple legislation “limiting or prohibiting judicial review of its directives.”
No less than the executive and legislative branches, the judiciary — particularly, the Supreme Court — is limited in just how much power it can exert. But only if Congress and the president exercise their right to check its power.”
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“A world in which a highly partisan and increasingly unpopular Supreme Court found its jurisdiction routinely boxed out by Congress is hardly a recipe for political stability. With every change of control, a new Congress and president could overturn precedent and lock the court out of its intended role as a constitutional arbiter. Moreover, there would likely be widespread confusion over just what might happen, were Congress to strip the court of its jurisdiction over, say, the state legislative doctrine. Would it then be left to lower courts to adjudicate cases? And what if they disagreed?
Conversely, today’s court majority claims largely unchecked power.
John Marshall, the chief justice who first asserted the power of judicial review, was “notably cautious in dealing with cases that might excite Republican or popular sensibilities,” noted historian Charles Sellers. He sought consensus among the associate justices, Federalists and Republicans alike, operated with “restraint” (Sellers) and led with “lax, lounging manners” (Thomas Jefferson) rather than cutting partisanship. He did so because he understood that the court was a new institution, and were it to lose popular support, the powers it claimed for itself would become either unenforceable, or subject to congressional restraint.
Ultimately, it is the responsibility and prerogative of the executive and legislative branches to encourage greater restraint and humility on the part of the judiciary.
Judicial review is well-rooted in American political tradition. But so are checks and balances. To save the Supreme Court from itself, Congress might first have to shrink it.”
“Trump v. Vance, largely maintains the status quo. As Chief Justice John Roberts states in the first line of that opinion, “in our judicial system, ‘the public has a right to every man’s evidence,’” and “since the earliest days of the Republic, ‘every man’ has included the President of the United States.” Trump does not enjoy absolute immunity from a state prosecutor’s criminal investigation.”
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“The upshot of Trump v. Mazars is that House investigators almost certainly will not see potentially damning records concerning Trump’s finances until after the November election. Mazars was also written by Roberts.
Though Mazars does not preclude the House from seeing those records eventually, by the time those records become available Trump will almost certainly either be an ex-president, or he will be firmly entrenched in his second term.
On the surface, it is easy to see Mazars as a defeat for Trump. The decision was 7-2, with all four of the Court’s liberals joining the majority. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito both wrote dissents, where they complain that the majority didn’t do enough to protect Trump from investigation.
But make no mistake, Mazars is a victory for Trump because it holds that the president enjoys special immunity from congressional investigation enjoyed by no other citizen — and because it likely shields Trump’s records from the public eye until after the election.”
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“Eastland held that Congress is entitled to gather information — and to use compulsory subpoenas to gather such information — whenever that subpoena is “intended to gather information about a subject on which legislation may be had.” So long as the congressional subpoenas sought information on a topic that could plausibly be subject to an act of Congress, those subpoenas were lawful.
The new rule announced in Mazars, however, can be boiled down into four words: “the president is special.”
According to Roberts, “congressional subpoenas for the President’s information unavoidably pit the political branches against one another.” He adds that “without limits on its subpoena powers, Congress could ‘exert an imperious controul’ [sic] over the Executive Branch and aggrandize itself at the President’s expense, just as the Framers feared.”
So Mazars invents new limits on congressional subpoenas targeting the president, and sends the case back down to a lower court to apply this new rule.”