In a Serious Challenge to Trumps One-man Rule, Federal Appeals Court Strikes Down Trump Tariffs.

by Rod Williams, Aug. 31, 2025- On Friday, those of us who still believe in following the Constitution and are concerned about Trump's increasingly authoritarian rule had a victory when the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a lower-court decision that had ruled that most of the Trump Tariffs were illegal. 

The power of the purse belongs to Congress. The Constitution clearly gives Congress the power to set tariffs. This is what it says: 

Article I, Section 8, Clause 1:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; . . .

Trump imposed his tariffs under a 1977 law known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The Court ruled that the president overstepped his authority under that act. This is significant. So far, Trump has been hesitant to directly defy a court ruling. He has played games with the court, sort of complying or delaying compliance, but he has avoided clear defiance. This may be the crisis that has been coming. If Trump defies the Court, we can then say without hyperbole that we are living under an authoritarian government. 

Tariffs, along with mass deportation, have been the signature issues of Trump's second term. So much effort has been expended on tariff policy that I do not see the President quietly backing down and returning to previous tariff levels. 

One possible way out of this for Trump is for Congress to pass a bill approving the tariffs. So far, the Republican majority has voted in lockstep to give the President anything he wants, and I guess they could do that with tariffs. However, I suspect there are still some orthodox conservative free-traders in Congress who would have a hard time voting for Trump Tariffs. I am not sure there are enough real conservatives left in Congress to make a difference, but voting for Trump tariffs would be a direct repudiation of things they have long believed. This would require more ideological pretzel-twisting than voting for an unqualified cabinet pick, for instance. Also, various trade groups would be lobbying Congress hard for a carve-out for their industry. Everyone from wine retailers to computer chip makers to pharmacists to auto manufacturers would ask for special consideration. If Congress does not act to make the tariffs legal, Trump might could use a different emergency power to impose some of the same tariffs and thus comply without changing policy.

If Congress does not act to make the tariffs legal, I assume this go to the Supreme Court. Since the vote from the Court of Appeals was a 7-4 vote, there must be valid arguments that the President did not overstep his authority. After all, one could reason, Congress could vote to curtail the President's power to set tariffs, or Congress could clarify what constitutes an emergency, and Congress has not done so. Congress has acquiesced. So, there seems to be a case justifying Trump's authority to set tariffs. So, conceivably, Trump could win a case before the Supreme Court on this issue. 

In my view, for decades, Congress has given too much power to the executive branch by giving the President broad power to declare an emergency and act unilaterally, and by passing vague laws and leaving it up to executive agencies to fill in the blanks. Congress set the table for a president with authoritarian impulses to feast. Congress should take back those powers. Unfortunately, with a Republican boot-licking majority Congress with no backbone, Congress is not about to reclaim its legitimate power. Often, the Courts feel they should not intervene to fix something that is a political issue with a legislative fix. We will see what happens. 

A lot rides on how this is resolved. This issue deserves to be watched closely. This is the most significant challenge to Trump's authority yet. Below are articles from two trusted sources that explain more about this issue:

 Appeals Court Rejects Trump’s Global Tariffs

By Louise Radnofsky, Jess Bravin, and Gavin Bade, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 29, 2025 - A federal appeals court late Friday struck down the Trump administration’s signature tariffs, finding that the president had gone too far in his use of emergency powers to rewrite U.S. trade policy.

...Trump railed against the decision in a post on Truth Social. “ALL TARIFFS ARE STILL IN EFFECT! Today a Highly Partisan Appeals Court incorrectly said that our Tariffs should be removed, but they know the United States of America will win in the end,” he wrote. .... The levies voided by the decision include baseline tariffs of 10% on virtually all countries, as well as steeper tariffs on countries the administration considers bad actors on trade—and an additional set of tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico.

.... In ruling against Trump, the appeals court majority, in an unsigned opinion, said Ieepa “bestows significant authority on the President to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency, but none of these actions explicitly include the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax.” Nowhere in the statute does the term “tariff” or synonyms like “tax” and “duty” appear, the court observed.

When “Congress intends to delegate to the President the authority to impose tariffs, it does so explicitly,” the court said. “This is no surprise, as the core Congressional power to impose taxes such as tariffs is vested exclusively in the legislative branch by the Constitution.”

.... The court didn’t break along partisan lines; judges appointed by presidents of both parties were on each side. (read more)

Divided Federal Circuit Gets It Right on Trump's Unlawful Tariffs

By Dan McLaughlin, National Review, Aug. 31, 2025- .... Tariffs are taxes; they are also trade policy and foreign policy. As such, they implicate a vast array of competing interests in our economy. They also need to be predictable in order that businesses can plan around them. These are all sound reasons why Congress, not the president, decided tariff questions for most of our history, dating back to the Tariff Act of 1789 and the McKinley Tariff of 1890. It’s why Article I, Section 8 begins its enumeration of the powers of the legislative branch by stating that “Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” — while Article II, listing the powers of the president, says nothing about taxes, tariffs, or foreign trade. As a result, as our editorial laid out in May when the first decisions came down on court challenges to the tariffs, Trump has only those powers in the tariff area that Congress has properly delegated to him by statute.

The bulk of Trump’s headline-grabbing tariffs (the global 10 percent tariff, the country-by-country “Liberation Day” tariffs, and the specifically drug-trade-related tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China in spite of our existing trade agreements with those countries) were justified by the administration by invoking emergency tariff powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA). The three judges of the CIT found unanimously, with good reason, that the worldwide and retaliatory tariffs “lack any identifiable limits” and are “unbounded . . . by any limitation in duration or scope” and thus did not fit IEEPA’s statutory definition of an emergency tariff. ... 

Trump supporters have argued that Congress has delegated broad authorities to the president to set tariffs under a variety of statutes. But each such delegation has different conditions and limitations; what matters is that these tariffs have been justified and defended in court as national emergencies under IEEPA. The courts have been unpersuaded that we live in a state of permanent national emergency that is global in scope and decades-long in duration, requiring swift executive action on the theory that Congress could never assemble in time to address the issue.

As the court noted, it’s not even obvious that the statutory language delegates any tariff power at all. Consider what the statute empowers the president to do: (read more)

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