The US Supreme Court on Friday quashed President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs that he had imposed on almost every trading partner of the country, citing a doctrine called “major questions”. The full nine-judge bench gave a split 6-3 verdict to strike down the tariffs as unlawful.
This is one of the biggest blows to Trump’s policy from the judiciary since he took office in January last year.
But what exactly is the “major questions doctrine” that the SCOTUS used to strike down Trump’s tariffs on almost the entire world?
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What is the ‘major questions doctrine’?
The “major questions doctrine” is a conservative framework which requires actions by the government’s executive branch of “vast economic and political significance” to be clearly authorised by the US Congress. It is one of the most important legal principles embraced in conservative jurisprudence in the United States.
The SCOTUS ruled that the Donald Trump administration’s interpretation that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) law grants the President the power he claims to impose tariffs would intrude on Congress’s authority and violate the “major questions” doctrine.
Trump is not the first President to have his executive action struck down under the doctrine. The Supreme Court had also used the principle to stymie some of his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden’s key executive actions.
US Chief Justice John Roberts, citing a prior Supreme Court ruling, wrote in the tariffs verdict that “the president must ‘point to clear congressional authorisation’ 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 done so expressly – as it consistently has in other tariff statutes.”
Donald Trump’s tariffs
Donald Trump has maintained that the tariffs are vital for US economic security, predicting that the country would be defenceless and ruined without them. In November, he told reporters that without his tariffs, “the rest of the world would laugh at us because they’ve used tariffs against us for years and took advantage of us.” Trump said the United States was abused by other countries, including China, the second-largest economy.
The US Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the authority to impose taxes and tariffs. But Trump instead turned to statutory authority, invoking IEEPA to impose tariffs on nearly every US trading partner without congressional approval.
Trump has imposed some additional tariffs under other laws that are not at issue in this case. Based on government data from October to mid-December, those represent about a third of the revenue from Trump-imposed tariffs.
The IEEPA allows a US President to regulate commerce during a national emergency. Trump became the first president to use IEEPA to impose tariffs, one of the many ways he has aggressively pushed the boundaries of executive authority since he returned to office in areas as varied as his crackdown on immigration, the firing of federal agency officials, domestic military deployments and military operations overseas.
