Will wonders never cease…the Supreme Court actually did something right for almost the first time since the Roberts court came into session. In addition to the three liberal justices, Sotomayor, Kaplan and Ketanji Brown, those in favor of restricting Trump from using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as justification for using tariffs as a cudgel against other countries, were Roberts, Gorsuch and Coney Barrett. The voting patterns of SCOTUS make the Roberts and Coney Barrett votes not entirely surprising, but the Gorsuch vote is quite astonishing. That left the 6-3 vote minority represented by the usual suspects of Thomas and Alito as well as Kavanaugh, who took an unusually strong stand in support of Trump in this instance. There are people who spend way more time than I do figuring out the voting patterns and reasons for the individual justices actions, but I think its safe to say that the swing votes are usually in the Gorsuch/Kavanaugh/Roberts/Coney Barrett camp with Thomas and Alito firmly ensconced on the right and Sotomayor/Kagan/Ketanji Brown equally dug in on the left. Understanding the whys and wherefores of those swing voters is a complex causation equation which is almost as far beyond me than understanding all the nuances of precedential law that gets used most often at the SCOTUS level of adjudication. What I care most about is that the instructions we rely on so much for our constitutional democracy are finally showing signs of backbone and resistance to the steamroller of the Trump Administration.
The rest of the judicial system (other than the Department of Justice itself, which is beyond hope with its uber-partisan stance) has done a regular job of standing up to Trump’s antics, but we have mostly become immune to those ruling because we know that the Administration will just take their case eventually up to SCOTUS and the buck is forced to only stop there on most of the big issues. And until recently, starting with the abortion issue and climaxing with the Presidential immunity issue, those decisions have decidedly gone in favor of Trump.
According to SCOTUS blog’s review through end of 2025, the Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration four times on the emergency docket out of 24 cases. One early loss was on federal funding cuts — in Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the court voted 5-4 against Trump’s request to stay an order requiring the executive branch to pay nearly $2 billion in reimbursements to foreign aid recipients. But despite these losses, the court overwhelmingly sided with Trump in 2025 overall, ruling in his favor 20 out of 24 emergency docket cases, and granting him a major win in Trump v. CASA, holding 6-3 that federal district courts cannot issue nationwide injunctions.
So the tariff ruling today is by far the most consequential rebuke and it came not from the liberal wing but was led by Roberts with the full liberal bloc plus the other two conservatives. Trump reportedly called it a “disgrace” and said he was “ashamed” of the justices who ruled against him. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling says that Trump violated federal law when he unilaterally imposed sweeping tariffs across the globe. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion. The court found that the IEEPA “cannot bear such weight,” noting that no previous president had read the law to confer such tariff power. Kavanaugh in his aggressive dissent reminded us that the ruling doesn’t eliminate all of Trump’s tariffs — only those imposed under IEEPA, which represent about half of what the government was collecting monthly. Tariffs under other statutes remain. He even implied that the ruling is a mere “speed-bump” in Tump’s tariff program.
Do I care or should any of us care so much about tariffs? Yes and no. Tariffs have always been a really bad idea and economists have ample evidence from over more than a century of damaging tariff policies enacted under various Republican attempts to avoid income taxes (my personal interpretation of that motivation). They hurt the economy and disproportionately hurt working class Americans in the same way that reverting to a VAT or sales tax approach to revenue generation would. Trump has added another spin to the bad effect of tariffs, and that’s the global cudgel he loves wielding instead of more civilized diplomatic and sucky coercive tactics in international relations. He doesn’t even seem to care that it hurts his reputation the way he threatens and then backs down…sometime due to insufficient preparation and study and most often due to some combination of adverse public opinion, retaliatory threats or thinly veiled payoffs to him. His tariff policy is, after all, what coined the term TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) which is now known and used globally to denigrate Trump and American policy initiatives. But despite all those reasons to care about tariffs, there are reasons to shrug over this new ruling. The impact on normal Americans’ live is de minimus. We are not going to see prices go down or for rebates to find their way into our pockets. This ruling will not change the way our ex-allies now view us. They still think we are a bunch of enabling idiots being led by a ridiculous idiot-in-chief. They have already decided to move on from the American dirty of influence and form their own new alliances and dependencies well away from America. No SCOTUS ruling or change in tariff policy will change that shift. That Pandora’s Box has opened and flooded the world with a new reality with regard to the reliability of the great American savior and icon of stability for the last 80 years. that reality is that America is no more…at least not as a dependable leader.
But overall, I choose to think of this latest SCOTUS decision as extremely impactful in the way that people see any seemingly unstoppable force of nature when it first becomes obvious that it can, indeed, be stopped. The Trump dynamic was always destined to end at some point, just as all extraordinary phenomenon do. We must all admit that it has taken a shockingly long amount of time for America to recognize this fact…and there is probably still some ways to go for all Americans to see that light. But the light is shining regularly now. People are tired of his antics and tired of having their lives regularly disrupted for the sake of his ego plays. On both international and domestic fronts, his following is shrinking and the recognition of his waning power is becoming more and more apparent. The pack of dogs is feeling stronger by the day and the worm is turning…to mix many old metaphors. In the end and on balance, I feel that the SCOTUS decision, regardless of why the swing vote went as it did and despite the best effort of Kavanaugh in dissent, is a piece of tariffic news that we should all herald as another sign that the end is near. Praise the Lord.