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Six of the nine justices who currently serve on the U.S. Supreme Court were appointed by Republican presidents. Today, in its landmark decision invalidating the unilateral tariff regime imposed by President Donald Trump, those six jurists split right down the middle, with three holding Trump’s tariffs to be unlawful while the other three dissented in favor of the president’s power grab. What explains this notable fracture in the Court’s so-called conservative bloc?

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who joined today’s majority opinion in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, tackled that query in the solo concurrence that he filed. “My dissenting colleagues have defended the major questions doctrine in the past,” Gorsuch observed, referring to the legal doctrine which says that when the executive branch seeks to wield significant regulatory power, it must first point to an unambiguous delegation of such power by Congress to the executive.

In Biden v. Nebraska (2023), for example, the Court relied on the major questions doctrine when it struck down President Joe Biden’s unilateral student debt cancellation plan. The Court in that case found the executive branch guilty of wielding power that the legislative branch had not properly delegated to it. Unsurprisingly, Biden v. Nebraska was repeatedly cited as a precedent for striking down Trump’s overreach in today’s tariffs decision.

Among those who voted against Biden in the 2023 student loan case were Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh. Today, however, those same three justices voted in support of Trump’s tariffs.

In his concurrence, Gorsuch detailed the many ways in which the current views of his “dissenting colleagues” fell short. For example, the dissenters claimed that “Presidents have long been granted substantial discretion over tariffs.” But that claim is contradicted by American history. “Americans fought the Revolution in no small part because they believed that only their elected representatives (not the King, not even Parliament) possessed authority to tax them,” Gorsuch pointed out. And “Americans later codified these beliefs in the Constitution.”

Then, in an even more damning move, Gorsuch detailed how Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh’s past votes in similar major questions doctrine cases cannot be reconciled with their present votes in support of Trump’s tariffs.

For example, the dissenters argued that the restrictions imposed by the major questions doctrine should not apply to presidential action when “foreign affairs” are involved. But what about the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in West Virginia v. EPA, in which, as Gorsuch explained, “the Court applied the major questions doctrine over a dissent expressing concern that doing so would deny the EPA (and therefore the President) the power to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time’—'[c]limate chang[e].'” “Was West Virginia a ‘foreign affairs’ case?” Gorsuch asked. Climate change is a global issue that plainly implicates foreign affairs.

Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh all voted against the EPA in West Virginia. But if they had followed the logic of their dissents today in Learning Resources, they would have voted for the EPA. “It’s hard not to wonder,” Gorsuch wrote, how the Thomas-Alito-Kavanaugh view “fits with some of our existing major questions precedents.”

Gorsuch did not accuse Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh of hypocrisy. It is clear, however, that Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh were willing to let Trump get away with the same kind of executive overreach that they previously refused to let Biden get away with. Whether or not that glaring inconsistency will mar their future credibility remains to be seen.

The post Gorsuch Blasts Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh for Favoring Trump's Illegal Tariffs appeared first on Reason.com.

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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice.

Registration is ongoing for IJ’s upcoming conference “The Other Declarations of 1776.” As part of the nationwide celebration of 250 Years of America, we’re partnering with the Liberty & Law Center at Scalia Law School for an examination of the various declarations of rights that the new states adopted in 1776. It’s Friday, April 10 in Arlington, Va. Register here! And, if you want to learn more about The Other Declarations in the meantime, check out the latest blog post in our series, this week focusing on Pennsylvania.

New on the Short Circuit podcast: Two-Steps in Kansas, switchblades in California, and spreading the news about the Second Circuit as a part of our #12Months12Circuits series.

1. During the 2014 invasion of Crimea, Russia effectively took over certain Ukrainian energy companies. The companies responded by pursuing millions in arbitrations against Russia in Europe. Can the awards they received be enforced in the United States, which, according to our most geographically astute editor, is part of neither Russia, nor Ukraine, nor Europe? Maybe! There’s at least subject-matter and personal jurisdiction, holds the D.C. Circuit. Thanks, 1958 Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards.
2. The nerds who write this newsletter were thrilled to read these sentences: “In ordinary English grammar, we ‘routinely’ use the past participle . . . as an adjective ‘to describe the present state of a thing.’ Thus, for example, an ‘escaped’ prisoner is currently at large, a ‘broken’ window is not yet fixed, and a ‘delayed’ train has not yet arrived.” Unfortunately, the D.C. Circuit opinion containing those sentences is not about a prison break, just a dispute about whether certain immigration programs created in the past are currently obligated to pay for antifraud monitoring. Read pages 9 to 12, ye Garner fans, and skip the rest.
3. “But if you go carryin’ pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” True. But if you’re a Nepalese Maoist you might so threaten a countryman with persecution and torture that years later the First Circuit will order the BIA to reconsider his attempts to not be reacquainted with believers in the Prachanda Path.
4. Colombian patrol cop says his colleague recruited him to pose as a police major in meetings with a drug trafficker—not to traffic drugs, but to lure the trafficker’s cocaine to a warehouse where the Colombian National Police (CNP) would seize it and split the reward money. It turns out the “trafficker” was a DEA agent, and the cop was extradited and convicted of conspiracy to import cocaine. District court: Let’s exclude evidence that the colleague had provided tips leading to successful CNP seizures. Second Circuit: Which would have bolstered the cop’s defense that he was facilitating a seizure. Excluding the evidence wasn’t harmless error. Conviction vacated and remanded.
5. It’s Defense Distributed once again. That’s the Texas company that shares code for 3D-print plastic guns. Is that speech? Is it conduct? And can New Jersey stop them from sharing their information? You might think the interesting part would be the First Amendment holding: New Jersey wins because nonexpressive code isn’t speech. But the fun part is actually the fed-courts boondoggle about whether the case should even be in the Third Circuit, given that Defense Distributed sued in the Western District of Texas.
6. Old-fashioned (and since amended) statute from 1952 makes immigrant children citizens if they are born out of wedlock, their mother naturalizes, and the “paternity of the child has not been established by legitimation.” Did that apply if the unwed father had signed the birth certificate? Fourth Circuit: Yes, signing a birth certificate is not a process of “legitimation,” so this immigrant is indeed a citizen and hence not deportable. We do not care if El Salvador modernized its law of legitimacy before Congress; this is America, and here we follow American law and play football with our hands.
7. North Carolina prisoner is severely injured when he’s attacked by a “safekeeper”—a category of dangerous prisoners prone to violence—who should have been separated from general-population prisoners. Gen-pop victim sues guards under Eighth Amendment. Fourth Circuit: Guards knew this was a big security risk, had been repeatedly warned about it, and were still lazy about keeping safekeepers separated. That’s enough to go to trial on a deliberate-indifference claim. Dissent: We’ve granted qualified immunity for way worse prison-guard neglect, so we have to do so here too.
8. U.S. Military bars HIV-positive individuals from enlisting, alongside hundreds of other disqualifying conditions. Plaintiffs, whose infections are asymptomatic and well-managed with daily medication, sue under the Fifth Amendment and the APA. Fourth Circuit: Rational basis review is already relaxed, even more so in the military context. Medication resupply at forward positions, the need for blood donations abroad, and the costs of treatment are all rational justifications. (IJ filed an amicus brief in support of the Plaintiffs in this case.)
9. Another day, another set of sanctions for a lawyer using artificial intelligence to hallucinate case citations. This time in the Fifth Circuit, where an attorney representing a different attorney in an appeal from a district-court sanctions award (yikes) outsourced the writing of her reply brief to AI (double yikes) and then, according to the court, “likely” used AI again to respond to the show-cause order that ensued (yikes trifecta).
10. Fans of Trader Joe’s will be sorely disappointed by this Fifth Circuit matter if they are in want of affordable goat cheese or sodas sporting unpronounceable names. But fans of the downstream effects of the demise of Chevron deference as it relates to labor law may enjoy the dissent, which objects to upholding an unfair labor practice finding in the case of a store employee who objected to “unsafe” practices during the COVID pandemic (and who the dissent calls “the sort of employee who haunts the nightmares of HR managers everywhere”).
11. In which the Fifth Circuit holds that the empty whiskey bottle in the plaintiffs’ parked car in Ridgeland, Miss. created reasonable suspicion to extend the stop while an officer summoned a drug dog but does not explain how a possible open-container violation connects to the dog sniff. (Perhaps it was a boozehound?)
12. Texas criminalizes paid ballot harvesting, defined as in-person interactions with voters in the physical presence of a mail ballot, intended to deliver votes for a specific candidate, in exchange for compensation. Fifth Circuit: The statute targets paid, trained operatives haranguing voters while they fill out ballots, not volunteers handing out swag or glasses of water. Not vague, not overbroad, and can even survive strict scrutiny. (Also, with raised eyebrow, noting that the district court gave an interview suggesting he used AI to help decide the case).
13. This Sixth Circuit opinion is about the legality of the CDC’s restrictions on importing foreign (and thus potentially rabid) dogs, but it’s also how your summarist learned that through widespread vaccination the United States officially eliminated dog-transmitted rabies in 2007.
14. Mentally ill Michigan man with a history of assaulting women and girls bludgeons his female neighbor to death—because (the complaint alleges) county authorities systematically denied police protection to women facing violence and had therefore failed to respond to any of his previous crimes. Sixth Circuit: Even if that’s true, though, that just means the county discriminated against those other women, not against the victim here (who never called the police).
15. There is apparently significant evidence that the Undesirable Aliens Act of 1929 was enacted with invidious discriminatory motives, which the Sixth Circuit says does exactly nothing for this defendant who was convicted for violating a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.
16. A defendant who posts a Facebook photo of a rat in the crosshairs of a riflescope says he still deserves a sentencing reduction for accepting responsibility, but the Sixth Circuit understands, like, metaphors.
17. Two Cleveland police officers respond to a call about an armed man in a boarding house. One officer testifies he saw the suspect aiming a gun. So he shot twice. Whoops—he accidentally shoots his partner. (For nearly a year, prosecutors pursue attempted murder charges against the suspect on the belief that he shot the penetrating bullet.) Shot officer sues the city and the other officer. Qualified immunity? Sixth Circuit (2023): To discovery! Sixth Circuit (2026): She was indeed seized by his bullet but caselaw wasn’t clear until after the shooting. So qualified immunity. (It is now clearly established, though.) Dissent: That she wasn’t his target means she wasn’t seized. This puts us on the wrong side of a split with seven of our sister circuits.
18. Prisoner on dialysis is kept in un-airconditioned Arkansas prison cell for weeks in the heat of summer, eventually losing his kidneys—but the Eighth Circuit explains that the Cruel & Unusual Punishment Clause forbids deliberate indifference, and prison officials here (who consulted with a doctor and brought in portable air conditioners) were at worst just not good enough.
19. And in en banc news, the Eleventh Circuit will not reconsider its decision to deny habeas relief to a prisoner where the jury was initially split on whether to impose a death sentence.

New lawsuit! Short Circuit readers may remember that last July, George Retes, a U.S. citizen and Iraq combat veteran, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies for three days and three nights. He was denied access to an attorney, not allowed to shower or make a phone call, and not presented to a judge. He missed his daughter’s third birthday. He was never charged with a crime. U.S. citizens cannot be detained for immigration violations, and the government presumptively may not hold people for more than two days without a probable-cause hearing. Now, after a federal agency rejected his claims for unlawful detention, George has sued to vindicate his rights with the help of IJ.

The post Short Circuit: An inexhaustive weekly compendium of rulings from the federal courts of appeal appeared first on Reason.com.

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Since we prevailed in our tariff case at the Supreme Court today, and even before, I have gotten many questions about tariff refunds. US importers who paid illegally collected IEEPA tariffs are eligible for up to $175 billion in refunds. As I see it, justice requires repayment of every penny – with interest! Administration claims that repayment is too difficult ring hollow. They shouldn’t have illegally taken much money in the first place. And, in the litigation in the lower courts, they argued for stays of the injunctions against them on the grounds that – if we won – the businesses victimized by the tariffs would be eligible for refunds once the litigation reached a conclusion.

However, I am not an expert on the tariff refund process. I became involved in this case because of my expertise in constitutional law and issues involving emergency powers. A tariff refund specialist I am not. Thus, I am not the right person to ask about how to get back the illegally collected tariff payments.

However, I would like to refer anyone interested in this issue to an excellent September 2025 Lawfare article by Joshua Claybourn. Josh helped organize some important amicus briefs for our case, and – unlike me – he really does have expertise on the issue of refunds.  His article  provides a valuable overview of the tariff refund process. Here is an excerpt from it:

This piece examines the core legal obligation of the U.S. government to refund unlawfully collected tariffs, including (a) the statutory framework under 19 U.S.C. § 1514, governing the finality and correction of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) decisions; (b) judicial precedents confirming the government cannot retain illegally exacted duties; (c) administrative mechanisms available for importers seeking tariff refunds; and (d) procedural implications arising from recent and historical court decisions mandating refunds.

There is a strong legal basis for importers to recover duties unlawfully collected under IEEPA. However, importers must comply with statutory deadlines and administrative procedures—such as timely protests or claims—to preserve refund rights. The government’s obligation to refund such amounts, along with any applicable interest, will arise once courts definitively invalidate these tariffs, subject to any procedural bars under 19 U.S.C. § 1514.

Finally, I should note that – as of today – I am no longer involved in the tariff litigation as an attorney (my part of the case is over), and thus have no plans to be involved in refund litigation.

The post A Note on Tariff Refunds appeared first on Reason.com.

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A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Arizona state prison system’s health care services to be put under the control of a court-appointed receiver after finding it was still subjecting incarcerated people to unconstitutional medical neglect, despite a decade-old lawsuit settlement to fix the problems.

Judge Roslyn Silver of the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona ruled that—after years of litigation, numerous findings of neglect and preventable deaths, and over $2 million in contempt fines—the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry (ADCRR) remained out of compliance with both a 2015 lawsuit settlement and the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.

Allowing the ADCRR to continue to control medical services, Silver wrote, would expose Arizona inmates to “an intolerable grave and immediate threat of continuing harm and suffering because the systemic deficiencies pervade the administration of health care.”

Silver wrote that her attempts to gain compliance from the ADCR through less-severe means had “not only failed completely, but, if continued, would be nothing short of judicial indulgence of deeply entrenched unconstitutional conduct.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Arizona, the Arizona Center for Disability Law, and the law firm Perkins Coie LLP, filed a federal class-action suit in 2012 alleging grossly inadequate medical care inside the ADCR. The suit followed media investigations and persistent allegations of fatally inadequate medical care by the ADCRR’s medical provider. 

“We are relieved the court has taken this critical step to protect the health and lives of people in Arizona prisons,” David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, says in a statement to Reason. “The appointment of a receiver marks a turning point in a crisis that has persisted for far too long, despite multiple court orders and over a decade of litigation. This decision means that an independent authority will be able to implement the systemic changes necessary to ensure that medical and mental health care meets constitutional standards. This is a life-saving intervention, and it brings hope that the preventable suffering and deaths that have haunted Arizona’s prison system for over a decade can finally end.”  

The ADCRR agreed to settle the suit in 2015 by taking steps to improve medical care inside its prisons. But since then, the ACLU and other law firms have repeatedly accused the ADCRR of failing to abide by the settlement agreement, and federal judges have agreed.

A federal magistrate judge fined the ADCRR $1.4 million in 2018. Silver held the department in contempt in 2021 and fined it another $1.1 million for failing to meet the benchmarks for proper medical care.

In 2022, Silver ruled that Arizona prison officials were deliberately indifferent to “grossly inadequate” medical and mental health care, violating inmates’ Eighth Amendment rights. 

The ruling came after an expert witness report filed in the case described appalling and fatal delays in medical care for incarcerated people inside the ADCRR: A paraplegic man was left to physically deteriorate until his penis had to be amputated; a man with undiagnosed, untreated lung cancer lost 90 pounds and died “slowly and agonizingly” without pain medication; a woman’s multiple sclerosis was ignored and misdiagnosed until she was left, at age 36, nearly completely paralyzed.

“No legitimate humane system would operate in this manner,” Silver concluded.

The ADCR agreed to substantial reforms in response to Silver’s 2022 ruling, but by 2025, a court-appointed monitor reported that the agency was still out of compliance with requirements to fix severe understaffing and other problems with its health care services.

For instance, the monitor noted one case where a patient with potentially curable liver cancer waited nine months for treatment, “resulting in progression of cancer, and decreased overall rate of survival.”

Lawmakers in Arizona have tried to get the state prison system under control, but with mixed success. Last year, the Arizona Legislature passed a bipartisan bill to create an independent office to act as a watchdog over the ADCRR. However, funding for the office was stripped from the state budget, and it remains unfunded this year.

Lauren Krisai, the executive director of the Justice Action Network, a criminal justice advocacy group that lobbied in favor of the oversight office, says that “having an independent correctional oversight office is essential for identifying issues inside prisons before they become widespread problems and systemic failures.”

“Seeing a judge place the state’s prison health care system into federal receivership underscores why making this office operational is so urgently needed,” Krisai continues. “We urge Governor [Katie] Hobbs to include funding for the independent oversight office established in statute last year in this year’s budget so it can begin its work immediately. Proactive, independent oversight is a far smarter investment of taxpayer dollars than costly federal intervention when conditions have deteriorated.”

Unfortunately, the problems in Arizona prisons are part of a national crisis of medical neglect behind bars. Last year, a federal judge stripped control of the infamous Rikers Island jail complex from New York City because of similar failures to curb violence, suicides, and wretched conditions.  

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The Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Trump responded with…more tariffs.

The president said Friday he would sign an executive order to impose a 10 percent “global tariff” under the auspices of a 1974 law that allows presidents to impose tariffs of up to 15 percent for a period of 150 days.

“I’m going to go in a different direction,” Trump said during a press conference at the White House, “which is even stronger than our original choice.”

The tariffs struck down Friday by the Supreme Court were imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Even though Friday’s ruling seems to shut the door on Trump’s use of that law to impose sweeping tariffs on nearly all imports for vague reasons, there are a number of other laws that could allow Trump to set tariffs on certain goods or imports from specific countries, as Reason‘s Jacob Sullum explained earlier today.

The first of those alternatives that Trump is reaching for is Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. That law allows the president to address “large and serious” trade issues by imposing tariffs or setting other restrictions on imports.

While speaking to the media on Friday, Trump said the new tariffs would take effect within three days. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the executive order to implement those tariffs would be signed later on Friday.

There are some limitations on Section 122 tariffs, however. These new tariffs would expire after 150 days unless Congress votes to extend them. That flips the dynamic between the Trump administration and Congress, which, under IEEPA, was required to vote to disapprove tariffs—something that much of the Republican majority had been unwilling to do.

“How much of a constraint this is, however, remains to be seen,” notes Clark Packard, a research fellow at the Cato Institute. “If Congress declines to act, the administration could, at least in theory, allow the tariffs to lapse, declare a new balance-of-payments emergency, and restart the clock. The maneuver would raise serious separation-of-powers concerns, but nothing in the statute clearly forbids it.”

In other words, Friday’s ruling is not the end of the battle over Trump’s tariffs. It may not even be the end of the legal aspects of that fight.

During Friday’s press conference, Trump also signaled that he would begin the process of imposing more tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which Trump used during his first term to tax some Chinese imports. That law requires the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to conduct an investigation into supposedly unfair foreign trade practices and then allows the president to impose tariffs as a remedy. Exactly which imports and what goods could be targeted by those tariffs remains unclear for now.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday morning offered a reprieve to Americans who have been paying the cost of Trump’s tariffs over the past year. That relief, however, looks to be short-lived. More tariffs are on the way.

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When Sarah Wells, the founder and CEO of a designer breast-pump bag company in Alexandria, Virginia, heard that the Supreme Court had struck down President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs on Friday, she felt a “huge relief.” The decision “doesn’t fix things overnight, but it finally gives me the ability to plan a way out of survival mode,” Wells tells Reason.

For Wells and thousands of small business owners like her, Trump’s trade war has brought unprecedented levels of chaos and confusion to daily operations. Instead of reshoring jobs, Wells says she was “forced to make layoffs and operational changes because of sustained tariff costs.” 

The tariffs, imposed on “Liberation Day” last April, invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to set a minimum universal 10 percent tariff on imports. The so-called “reciprocal tariffs” were modified and postponed until they finally went into effect on August 7. Since then, these rates have continued to fluctuate as countries brokered deals with the Trump administration. 

The unpredictability of these tariffs, coupled with the high costs they imposed on intermediate goods, made “rational business planning impossible,” according to an amicus brief submitted by Crutchfield Corporation, a family-owned electronics retailer based in Charlottesville, Virginia. We Pay the Tariffs, a coalition of over 700 small businesses, also filed a brief opposing Trump’s IEEPA tariffs. The group reports that American businesses and consumers paid $223 billion in tariffs from March to December 2025.

This includes Kacie Wright, one of the owners of Houghton Horns, a musical instrument retailer based in Keller, Texas.* Wright says that roughly 60 percent of her products are imported, primarily from China, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. With the double-digit tariffs imposed on these imports, Houghton Horns has had to increase retail prices on most of these products in order to maintain its 2024 profit margins. Still, “having to pay thousands out-of-pocket in advance to receive inventory…has hit our cash flow very hard,” Wright says. 

Now that these duties have been struck down, Wright is optimistic about what lies ahead: “We are happy that we can save our business tens of thousands of dollars, and that we can offer our customers, who are mostly students and career musicians, more affordable pricing.” (Wright plans on “reconfiguring and lowering most of the prices on our website 10-30%.”)

But even for those who don’t own businesses, Friday’s decision is a cause for celebration. 

Americans are in for a windfall of effective tax relief following the Court’s ruling. The Tax Foundation estimates that the average household would have paid $1,300 more in taxes. Now that the IEEPA tariffs have been enjoined, the Tax Foundation estimates an average tax increase of only $400.

Ilya Somin, who won a unanimous decision from the Court of International Trade alongside Liberty Justice Center in V.O.S. Selections v. U.S. (one of the two consolidated IEEPA cases which the Supreme Court ruled on on Friday), tells Reason that the Court’s decision is “a major victory for the constitutional separation of powers, for free trade, and for the millions of American consumers and businesses enduring the higher taxes and higher prices as a result of these tariffs.” 

Neal Katyal, co-counsel at Liberty Justice Center and one of the attorneys who argued the consolidated IEEPA cases before the Supreme Court, said that the “Supreme Court stood up for the rule of law and Americans everywhere” by affirming that “only Congress can impose taxes on the American people.” 

While there is great cause for celebration, business owners are still concerned about non-IEEPA tariffs.

Wright says she is “worried about tariffs on incoming shipments” because there’s “no good way to know what [is owed] until [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] sends us the invoice.” She’s also concerned Trump might invoke Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 or Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allow the president to impose tariffs under the pretense of responding to unfair trade practices or national security risks presented by foreign imports, respectively. Wright’s fears were realized on Friday afternoon when Trump said he would impose a 10 percent global tariff for 150 days via Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.

Wells tells Reason that “whether small businesses can truly recover will depend on what happens next, and issuing refunds will be critical to getting businesses like mine back on track.” While the IEEPA tariffs are unambiguously defeated, further legal fights over tariff refunds between businesses and the administration are anticipated. Tom Wetzel, owner of Red Raven Games, a board game retailer based in Draper, Utah, echoed Wells’ sentiment, saying, “Getting some or all the tariff money back would be great.” However, not all of the damage done can be refunded: “Our market has taken significant losses due to our customers’ job loss and inflation.”

In the wake of the Court’s decision, Trump may turn to other statutes that actually do grant him the authority to modify the tariff schedule. Jessica Riedl, a budget and tax fellow at the Brookings Institution, predicts that Trump “will just illegally reimpose most of those tariffs under one of the other tariff sections and then wait a year for the court to litigate it.” 

If he does, the avenue by which he imposes tariffs will change, but the impact they have on businesses and consumers will not. 

*CORRECTION: This article originally misstated Wright’s role at Houghton Horns.

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