President Donald Trump complained on Sunday night about some of his legal losses, including last month’s Supreme Court tariffs ruling, which said he didn’t have the power he claimed to have under a law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. One of the untrue things he wrote in lengthy Truth Social posts was that the court “pointed out” that he has “the absolute right to charge TARIFFS in another form.”
It’s true that Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s dissent said that “the Court’s decision might not prevent Presidents from imposing most if not all of these same sorts of tariffs under other statutory authorities.” But that musing only represented the view of the three dissenters on the nine-member court: Kavanaugh and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts stressed that the court wasn’t weighing in on those other authorities.
Roberts wrote in a footnote that Kavanaugh’s dissent “surmises that the President could impose ‘most if not all’ of the tariffs at issue under statutes other than IEEPA.” The chief justice wrote that those other authorities “contain various combinations of procedural prerequisites, required agency determinations, and limits on the duration, amount, and scope of the tariffs they authorize.” Roberts concluded that the court doesn’t “speculate on hypothetical cases not before us.”
So, contrary to the president’s social media complaint, the court didn’t preapprove his tariffing backup plan, which is the subject of new litigation.
The high court could eventually be called on to settle that new litigation, as it did the IEEPA case. But the majority didn’t predetermine the outcome of future litigation in that case.
