One of the first big Ls of the second Trump administration was just handed to him by an unlikely source: The Supreme Court of the United States. After years of Trump-friendly rulings—upholding the travel ban, permitting ICE to racially profile, and OKing his freezing foreign aid, to name just a few—the Roberts court has finally found one of Trump’s power plays too much to bear. In a landmark 6-3 decision, the court struck down the sweeping global tariffs Trump imposed by executive order last year.
A quick recap: last April, Trump declared the state of the economy to be in such shambles that it rose to the level of national emergency. Then, invoking the Emergency Powers Act, he imposed through executive order a baseline 10% tariff on a wide range of goods plus an additional “reciprocal” range of penalties to specific targets like China, the EU, and others. The tech industry, like so many others, was hit hard by the edict as so much of the manufacturing in that sector takes place abroad. At the time, many were saying, “Hey, he can’t do that.” And now they’ve been vindicated by the highest court in the land.
Despite dissent from Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas, the other six justices agreed that the Constitution does not, in fact, give a sitting president the power to tax other nations unilaterally. That’s a job for Congress. “The Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch,” explained Roberts in his decision.
Though many of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful business leaders were happy to cozy up and kiss the ring at the beginning of Trump’s second term when it cost them a relative pittance, their tunes began to change after the capricious tariffs were announced last year. Immediately recognized as “monstrously destructive” by several leading economists, Trump’s tariffs quickly proved themselves just that. By September, CEOs were gathering behind closed doors to decide how best to address the issue of one guy tanking the global economy by fiat. One might say the seeds of today’s SCOTUS ruling were planted then.
And therein lies the schism between MAGA and classic conservatism. When you’re only LARPing as a populist, and not truly swept up in a cult of personality like the base, fealty to the leader will always be less of a priority than the making and retaining of wealth.
Following this morning’s decision, the fate of the billions of dollars already collected by the unconstitutional tariffs remains up in the air. Scores of lawsuits are already underway by affected big box retailers hoping to recover refunds. According to the non-partisan Penn-Wharton Budget Model, the U.S. government is now on the hook for over $175 billion in refunds after this morning’s ruling. Justice Kavanaugh, stating the obvious, noted that the process to help these importers recover damages is likely to be a complicated “mess.”
Pretending for a moment that this administration won’t find a legal loophole to keep the tariffs in place or enact new “different” ones and start running out the clock, today’s court’s decision is no economy-fixing silver bullet.
Even with these tariffs struck down, tech prices are likely to remain at their current exorbitant levels or continue to skyrocket, thanks in no small part to the AI industry. Far from producing anything of real value, the AI industry is more an insatiable, cavernous maw consuming the planet’s tech components and energy in a government contract-fueled divebomb into a mirage of unrealized future gains. No court ruling is going to rescue us from that economic and existential threat. We’ll have to tackle that ourselves.
