President Trump Asks Supreme Court To Uphold Tariffs

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Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Ashley Lopez.

I cover politics.

I'm Danielle Kurtzlaban.

I cover the White House.

And I'm Mara Lyasson, Senior National Political Correspondent.

And today on the show, will the Supreme Court let President Trump continue with his current tariff policy?

Danielle, a federal appeals court recently ruled that some of Trump's tariffs are illegal.

Can you catch us up though on how we got here?

All right, let's start with the very basics.

This term, Trump has imposed a lot of tariffs.

We all know this.

And there are two main types of tariffs he has imposed.

There are tariffs on specific goods, like his aluminum and steel tariffs, automobiles.

Those are called Section 232 tariffs.

That's named for the particular part of a particular law that authorizes them.

We're going to set those aside.

Those are not the ones we're talking about here.

The other types of tariffs he's imposed are on different countries' goods.

So those are authorized under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEPA.

That's what I'm going to be calling them today.

You're going to hear IEPA a lot.

So when Trump had that big rose garden ceremony in April that he called Liberation Day, he held up that big table.

Those are IEPA tariffs.

When he posts a letter on social media saying I'm imposing 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods, That's IEPA.

That is what we are talking about.

So Trump imposed all of those tariffs on all of these countries.

And then a handful of businesses and state attorneys general, they took the case to the Court of International Trade.

And that court found earlier this year that, yeah, these tariffs are unlawful.

They're too sweeping.

They are not authorized under IEPA.

So the Trump administration brought it to a federal appeals court.

And they found seven to four that, yeah, these tariffs are unlawful.

So now the White House has taken this to the Supreme Court and said, you really need to judge on this right now.

Yeah, yeah.

And the Supreme Court, we should say, has been kind of on a run siding with the administration so far.

So Mara, I mean, I wonder what big questions the court will be taking up as it looks at this case.

Well, one of the things that

people who think the Trump move is unconstitutional say is that IEPA doesn't mention the word tariffs and that tariffs are a congressional job.

They're a legislative branch responsibility.

Now, over time, Congress has given a lot of tariff power away to the executive.

So that's one of the things they say.

In the past, when presidents have used IEPA, they've used them for sanctions

and not tariffs, although Donald Trump's really conflating tariffs and sanctions because he often uses tariffs as a kind of punishment for things that have nothing to do with economic policy at all.

So the biggest question overriding this entire case is whether the Supreme Court is willing to give Trump the additional expansion of the executive that he wants.

In many dozens and dozens of ways, Donald Trump has been expanding the power of the executive.

And the Supreme Court has yet to rule on all of that.

They have given him almost total control over the executive branch.

They've allowed him to fire heads of independent agencies.

They've allowed him to fire tens of thousands of federal workers.

But they haven't said whether he can take over powers that the Constitution specifically grants to Congress.

Aaron Powell, yeah, that's right.

I mean, there are a lot of questions that the Supreme Court theoretically could take up in this case.

For example, what constitutes an economic emergency?

Right.

And is Trump correct in naming particular things an economic emergency?

For example, some of these tariffs he has imposed saying this tariff is to get China, Mexico, and Canada to crack down on the fentanyl trade.

And the Court for International Trade said that's not an economic emergency.

Like that is not a valid use of IEPA.

You can't do that.

From what I understand talking to legal experts, the Supreme Court is not going to be focused so much on the what is an emergency.

The Supreme Court is going to be focused on what the White House has asked.

And what the White House has asked is, did IPA authorize these tariffs?

And if so, did IPA unconstitutionally delegate legislative authority to the president?

So they could get at that constitutional question that Mara is talking about right there.

We We don't know exactly what the scope of the ruling could be.

I mean, they could find all the tariffs unlawful.

They could find all of the tariffs totally fine.

Or they could find something in between.

They could say certain ones are fine, certain aren't.

Here's the scope we're okay with.

We don't know what they could do.

And one of the things to keep in mind is something that they did in Trump's first term.

When he tried to put in the Muslim ban, to ban people from Muslim countries coming to the United States, the Supreme Court didn't say, no, you can't do that.

They just said, you have gone about this in the wrong way.

And he had to come up with a different law to justify it or a different plan, which might very well happen here.

We might end up with most of the same tariffs in effect, but not through IEPA.

Aaron Powell, yes.

That's one of the possible outcomes.

That is a possible outcome, yes.

If the Supreme Court, let's say the Supreme Court did the most extreme possible thing and said, none of these tariffs are lawful.

Get rid of them all.

If that happened, I asked one economist, okay, how big of a blow is that to Trump's economic agenda?

He said, big, but not really fatal, because

it would, first of all, it would strike down these country-by-country tariffs, those 232 tariffs on aluminum, steel, all those different goods, those would stay in effect.

Those are not affected here, right?

But also, there are a number of other laws Trump could use to try to impose tariffs.

Now, those tariffs might not be as sweeping as IEPA tariffs.

There's one law, for example, that allows you to impose tariffs of up to 15% for up to 150 days.

So some of these laws might limit the tariffs.

But there are a number of ways Trump could still put these tariffs in place, or this is a key point, threaten tariffs.

Because a big part of what he's doing is threatening tariffs, saying, hey, EU, if you don't do XYZ, I'm going to impose these tariffs.

He's using them in many ways as a stick.

And with these other laws, he could still do that.

Yeah.

I do want to pivot away a little bit from the legal stakes here and ask about the political stakes for Trump.

Like, what do we think

are the sort of political ramifications if the court sides either way?

Aaron Powell, well, if the court sides with Trump,

huge victory.

And as he's been saying all along,

he's almost saying it doesn't really matter what these lower courts do because my Supreme Court is going to be for me.

So I think it would be a big victory if they vote for him.

If they vote against him, it would be also huge that they were willing to break with Trump.

So that would be a big deal, too.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Just to pivot off of that, one fascinating thing about all of this though is that, yes, the Supreme Court has been very, very, very willing to side with President Trump.

Tariffs are, however,

not a neatly ideological

topic.

Like, for example, abortion.

I mean, justices are asked at their confirmation hearings, how do you feel about abortion?

How did you feel about Roe v.

Wade?

That sort of thing.

Tariffs have never, at least not in recent memory, split neatly among ideological lines.

The MAGA movement really likes Trump's tariffs, but old school Republicans, Chamber of Commerce Republicans, very much do not.

So I am quite curious how these justices, especially the conservative justices, feel about these tariffs.

All right.

We're going to take a quick break.

More in a moment.

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And we're back.

Mara, tariffs have been a central part of Trump's policies, and as I should say, we're still waiting to see if the Supreme Court will take up this case.

But let's say the courts do knock back this part of Trump's economic policy.

Like, what would that impact actually be?

Aaron Powell,

it might not be very much if he can find another way to impose tariffs, just like with the Muslim ban.

He figured out a different way to do it because the Supreme Court told him to.

But if they do rule against him, that would be a big deal because he expects they'll rule for him.

And it would be the first time that the court has actually pushed back against Trump's effort to expand the powers of the executive.

So that would be a big deal.

Powell, now the other way that Trump could get his tariffs through is the old-fashioned way by asking Congress to pass tariffs because the Constitution gives Congress the power to impose duties, to levy taxes.

So he could ask them.

Now,

how would that go?

On the one hand, the Republican Congress has been very compliant, has kind of rolled over for pretty much anything Donald Trump wants.

On the other hand, I personally am quite curious how that would go because tariffs raise prices.

There are a lot of businesses that are very nervous about tariffs or past nervous.

They're upset about them.

And so should prices go up?

Should this make life more difficult for people economically?

You can bet that in 2026, a bajillion campaign ads would come out and say, Senator so-and-so voted for Trump's tariffs and now your groceries are more expensive.

Do you really want to vote for them?

I would be surprised if Donald Trump asked Congress for that, because that would mean that he acknowledges their Article I preeminence in this matter.

And that's not part of his view of the presidency.

As he says, Article II gives me the right to do whatever I want.

Yeah, and I am the president.

And well, that does bring me, though, to a point that you made, Danielle.

Like, the big question here is, well, how popular is this going to be?

We are getting a better sense now of how the tariffs are impacting the economy.

I mean, what do we know about how this is working and what the political costs might be for this plan to continue?

Well, we know a limited amount, but look, Trump had a few goals for these tariffs when he first laid them out.

One was increase government revenue, and that is the one that we can answer the most concretely.

Yeah, tariffs have led to more government revenue.

Right now, they're bringing in around $30 billion a month, which is a lot.

In all of 2024, the government brought in around $100 billion in tariff revenue.

So long story short, the government is taking in in a few months right now what it took in in all of last year.

From American consumers.

Correct.

They've

raised taxes on imports.

So of course they're getting more revenue.

Yes, that's absolutely right.

So let's go to the macroeconomic side of it then, because that's very pertinent to this.

It's hard to know exactly what tariffs are doing right now because all of this other stuff is happening.

For example, we have fewer immigrant workers in the U.S.

right now.

There are fewer government jobs than there were before Donald Trump took office.

So there's a lot of cross-currents.

But long story short, it does not appear, I'm going to caveat this a lot, it does not appear from the evidence we have that these are doing what Trump wants.

For example, manufacturing employment, which is dead center of what Trump cares about here.

It is not climbing.

The Institute for Supply Management, which is a group that keeps an eye on manufacturing, in their latest report, they said that the manufacturing sector contracted in August for the sixth consecutive month.

Wow.

And in the qualitative section of that report, where they said to manufacturers, business owners, hey, how are things going?

A lot of them responded, well, tariffs are making life harder.

So right now it doesn't appear tariffs are doing a lot positive.

Now that said, if you're Donald Trump, the argument you would make is, well, it takes a while for factories to get built.

We might see these benefits come in the future.

But

most mainstream economists would tell you we do not expect that.

Well, it's not just that they take a long time to be built.

We would see investments in factories, even if they haven't been built yet.

We're not seeing that.

And this is something that Donald Trump promised.

The other thing is that polls show that the American people don't like tariffs.

They seem to understand that they're going to pay for them.

And that doesn't mean that this is going to hurt Donald Trump politically because polls are much less important for our understanding of Trump's political strength.

But the American people are against this particular policy.

The other question we have here is like, What happens if, let's say, the Supreme Court says, yeah, you can't do this?

What happens if the administration has to repay tens of billions of dollars in tariff revenue?

Like, what can you tell us about how this would actually work, Danielle?

This is very thorny, and we don't know a lot about it.

And also, what this might look like has changed over the last few months because the Court of International Trade released that ruling that said, hey, these tariffs are illegal.

And then later, the Supreme Court said that universal injunctions can't happen, which means a federal court can't lay out a decision that affects everybody everywhere.

The long story short is this.

This has raised legal questions about how paying back tariffs would work.

That could make this a massive logistical headache because

it might not be that the tariffs are ruled illegal and then customs and border protection, which takes in the tariffs, just spits out a whole bunch of money to a bunch of businesses, which would be hard in the first place.

Instead, it might be that businesses that have paid these tariffs would have to individually go to court and say, hey, we paid $50,000 in tariffs in the last few months.

We would like that back.

You can imagine the logistical nightmare that that could be.

Again, this is a possibility.

We do not know how this might look.

But

what we do know from what legal experts say is that

it could just be logistically crazy.

Trevor Burrus: So, Danielle, can you give me

a big picture of where tariffs are right now?

What does the landscape look like?

sure.

So, there is a list of those product-by-product tariffs that are in place.

For example, steel and aluminum, certain copper products, that sort of thing.

Then, there are all of these country-by-country tariffs.

While these court cases have been going through the judicial system, those country-by-country tariffs are still in effect.

Aaron Powell, and a very important point, he has not yet made a single formal trade agreement on any of these tariffs.

These are handshake deals.

These are things that Trump has been able to announce.

Oh, X country is going to be investing X trillions of dollars in the United States.

These are not like the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.

These have been announced by Trump.

There's no formal legal paperwork on them.

These are not treaties.

These are handshake agreements.

Right.

In most cases, we have not even seen details.

We've seen some stuff on paper regarding the UK, regarding the EU.

But in general, there have been, you know, Trump's announcements.

There have been some news reports.

There has has been reporting from other countries about other countries disputing what Trump has said.

But no, we have not seen written down, here are what Vietnam and the U.S.

have agreed to, or many of these other countries.

All right, let's leave it there for today.

I'm Ashley Lopez, I cover politics.

And Danielle Kurtzlaban, I cover the White House.

And I'm Mara Lyasson, senior national political correspondent.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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