Yesterday, the U.S. Court of International Trade delivered a unanimous and sweeping ruling that blocked most of President Donald Trump's global tariffs, finding that he exceeded his constitutional authority. The three-judge panel ruled that the President's use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose "Liberation Day" tariffs violated the Constitution's separation of powers and lacked proper statutory authorization.

The court handed down a permanent injunction blocking all IEEPA-based tariffs; tariffs already collected must be "vacated". Existing sector-specific tariffs under Section 232 (steel, aluminum, autos) remain unaffected. The Trump administration immediately filed an appeal.

This stunning decision merits closer attention.

First, the law. The court grounded its decision in two fundamental legal principles. First, the court emphasized constitutional separation of powers, noting that the Constitution assigns Congress exclusive powers to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises" and to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations," asserting therefore that "we do not read IEEPA to delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the President". Second, the court applied "strict statutory interpretation" to IEEPA itself, finding that the law's provision allowing regulation of imports must include "meaningful limits" and that Trump's "worldwide and retaliatory tariff orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA." The court specifically ruled that IEEPA powers may only be used "to deal with the threats set forth in those orders" and cannot serve merely as leverage for negotiations, making Trump's tariffs both constitutionally impermissible as an unlimited delegation of legislative power and statutorily unauthorized under the emergency powers act he invoked.

This strikes this non-lawyer correspondent as strongly problematic in two ways.

First, our understanding is that it has been uncontroversial in standing American constitutional law that Congress can delegate powers to the Executive Branch. Some disagree, but to decide otherwise would, if nothing else, put an end to the entire structure of administrative law as it has existed for over a century. It has been uncontroversial that Congress has, through statute, delegated a umber of tariff authorities to the President. Congress can, of course, take those authorities back any time it wants—by passing another statute.

The second issue, and it's interesting how we always end up here, has to do with the theory of the state of exception. President Trump invoked an economic emergency to activate those IEEPA powers. The court disagrees that the emergency he has invoked is in fact an emergency. The problem with that is that it is intrinsic to emergency powers that the determination of the emergency is discretionary. If an emergency arises that justifies exceptional measures, by definition, it is not the kind of situation that can be jusdiciable by courts after the fact, and the broad body of Western law, going back indeed to Roman times, has recognized this. As far as we know, the President's power to invoke emergency powers extant in law (which is hardly the same thing as inventing them) has always been seen as discretionary and it is a very dangerous precedent for a court to second-guess the President's authority in this matter.

That being said, it should be worth paying attention to anti-tariff economist Phil Magness: "The USCIT was the handpicked court that the Trump DOJ wanted to hear this case. The Trump DOJ spent the last month filing motions to move other tariff challenges to the USCIT for the same reason, including as recently as this week. The 3-0 ruling came from two Republicans and one Democrat appointee. One of the Republicans was Trump-appointed & recommended to him by Trump's own arch-protectionist tariff guru Robert Lighthizer. The court's rationale drew on the nondelegation doctrine and major questions doctrine - two centerpieces of conservative judicial philosophy."

So, what happens now?

As we noted, the Trump administration has already filed an appeal, and the case will proceed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in DC, and could thence reach the supreme Court. The Administration will also most likely seek an emergency stay, which would reinstate the tariffs at least temporarily.

There are at least seven pending American federal court cases challenging Trump's authority to impose tariffs under IEEPA, filed by U.S. state officials, businesses, and political groups. The Court of International Trade has not announced whether other cases will be consolidated or put on hold pending the outcome of this case. There are also three cases challenging the tariffs filed in Federal District Courts that may be transferred to the Court of International Trade. The proliferation of challenges across multiple jurisdictions creates potential for conflicting rulings, which makes it likely that the Supreme Court will be forced to step in and resolve the fundamental constitutional questions at play here.

It's still early innings…

Policy News You Need To Know

#NEPA — The Supreme Court just handed down its decision on NEPA, and it's a banger. In a unanimous ruling authored by Brett Kavanagugh, the court found that a lower court should more narrowly tailor NEPA analyses. The biggest holding is that agencies conducting NEPA reviews do not need to analyze indirect or remote impacts, but instead should focus on the project at hand. The Court emphasized that judges should give substantial deference to agency expertise and not "micromanage" the scope of environmental analyses, as long as the agency's choices fall within a "broad zone of reasonableness." The ruling reaffirms that NEPA is a procedural law meant to inform agency decision-making, not to serve as a substantive barrier to project approval. "NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock," Kavanaugh wrote.

#Immigration #HigherEd — Outstanding statement from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio: "The U.S. will begin revoking visas of Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields."

#DEI #HigherEd — The Trump Administration's "pour encourager les autres" approach to higher ed reform seems to be bearing at least some fruits. Brown University has adopted a new policy on institutional neutrality. Meanwhile, CNN: "MIT is shuttering DEI office amid Trump administration’s push to end diversity programs" MIT has always been the least pro-DEI of the big elite US universities. That being said, as Manhattan Institute's John Sailer notes, MIT is giving itself wiggle room in the fine print.

#HigherEd — Speaking of, at City Journal, John Sailer has an article making a very astute observation, to our mind entirely accurate: "The challenge of higher education reform can be boiled down to one issue: the talent pipeline." He writes: "If we can reconfigure the academic talent pipeline and ensure that those who believe in the classical mission of the university both choose academia and prosper in it, then the reform movement will succeed. If not, no list of policies, from securing campus free speech to dismantling DEI offices, will restore public trust in our universities."

#HigherEd — Also in higher ed policy writing today, AEI's Preston Cooper calls for deregulating the supply of higher education options, pointing out that that should be part of any "abundance" agenda as some left-of-center personalites are calling for.

#Politics — Speaking of "abundance," the problem with this agenda for the left was always that it's unpopular with actual Democratic voters, as a new poll shows.

#Economics #TheMarkets — JD Vance wrote a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal defending his position against market fundamentalism.

#DEI #VibeShift — Interesting! Yesterday, we flagged San Francisco's new "grading for equity" public schools plan as an example that the so-called "vibe shift" away from woke is not complete. Well, here's a headline from today: San Francisco schools back down on "grading for equity" plan following backlash. Consider the vibe shifted!

#MAHA — Given MAHA and also a renewed interest in environmentalism from certain segments of the online rights, it's worth very carefully parsing the information and the studies out there. Which is why we thought we would flag this thread from the excellent statistics blogger Crémieux on glyphosate. Glyphosate, a fertilizer, is a bugbear of environmentalists, who claim that it is "linked to cancer." That's not true, says Crémieux. "The acute toxicity of glyphosate is considerably less than that for common substances like vitamin D, caffeine, aspirin, and even table salt."

#AI — DeepSeek, the Chinese frontier AI lab, has released a new version of its open source model, which, according to their release, is equal to or better than other frontier models on widely-used benchmarks.

#FamilyPolicy — The great folks over at the Institute for Family Studies have a new study out on marriage, and specifically on the husband-wife income gap. Hypergamy is still real. "In most income brackets, women marry men who earn more." However, the spousal income gap "has been narrowing in recent years." According to their study, "in 2023, 63% of recently married young women were outearned by their husbands, 32% earned more, and 5% had the same income."