WASHINGTON, DC – Following oral argument at the Supreme Court this morning in Learning Resources v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, consolidated cases in which the Court is considering whether President Trump has the legal authority to single-handedly impose tariffs, Constitutional Accountability Center Legal Fellow Simon Chin issued the following reaction:

The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) was never intended to give presidents the unilateral power to impose tariffs by declaring emergencies. As we explained in our amicus brief, the Constitution gives Congress, not the President, the power to impose tariffs, and nothing in IEEPA’s text or history indicates that Congress meant to abdicate this fundamental power by passing this law.

As our brief explains, the Government’s theory rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how emergency powers evolved. The Government argues that when Congress passed IEEPA, in 1977, it carried forward authority over tariffs from an older law called the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA). But as Neal Katyal, counsel for the private challengers, emphasized at oral argument today when citing our brief, a 1933 amendment to TWEA severed that law from its original war powers foundations.  That year, during the Great Depression, Congress changed the law so President Roosevelt could close the nation’s banks to stop a financial panic—a domestic crisis that had nothing to do with war or foreign trade. This transformation turned what had been a wartime law into a tool for peacetime emergencies.

IEEPA gives presidents legitimate emergency tools, like freezing assets or imposing quotas, when hostile actors threaten national security. It was never meant to let presidents usurp Congress’s tariff authority and remake the country’s trade policy by executive decree.