With members of the U.S. Supreme Court looking on, President Donald Trump attacked the justices for striking down his broad claim of emergency tariff powers last week, calling the ruling “very unfortunate” and lamenting the court’s involvement in the entire matter.
Speaking from the House of Representatives chamber during the first State of the Union speech of his second term, Trump falsely claimed that foreign countries are “now paying us hundreds of billions of dollars” in the form of tariffs that are actually taxes paid by importers and passed on to American consumers as higher prices.
“And then just four days ago, an unfortunate ruling from the United States Supreme Court. It just came down. Came down, very unfortunate ruling,” he said.
As he delivered his remarks, four members of the court — Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — sat in the front row.
None of the justices reacted to the president’s diatribe, even as he continued slamming the court’s “unfortunate involvement” that had come about after importers sued to challenge his claim to use a Carter-era law that did not even mention tariffs as justification for his sweeping import taxes.
“So despite the disappointing ruling, these powerful country-saving tariffs ... will remain in place under fully approved and tested alternative legal statutes, and they have been tested for a long time,” he said.
They're a little more complex, but they're actually probably better, leading to a solution that will be even stronger than before. Congressional action will not be necessary,” Trump added, seemingly ignorant of the fact that one of the authorities he has claimed to impose new 10 percent tariffs on all imports requires Congressional approval to keep them in place longer than 150 days.
“It's already time tested and approved, and as time goes by, I believe the tariffs paid for by foreign countries will, like in the past substantially replaced the modern day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love,” he said.
The president’s attack on the court’s decision comes just days after he lashed out at the justices at a hastily convened press conference at which he slammed two of the three justices he’d appointed as “disloyal” — also claiming they were beholden to “foreign interests” — while vowing to find other ways to levythe import taxes on which he has based much of his domestic and foreign policy.
“They're just being fools and lap dogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats ... they're very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” Trump said, employing an acronym indicating that the three conservatives who’d ruled against him — Chief Justice John Roberts, and his two appointees, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett — were “Republicans In Name Only.”
Roberts, an appointee of George W. Bush, has been on the court since 2005, while Gorsuch and Coney Barrett were named to the court by Trump during his first term.
The chief justice, Gorsuch and Coney Barrett joined with the court’s three Democratic appointees — Justices Elena Kagan, Sonya Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson — in finding that he could not impose tariffs by invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, because the Carter-era law didn’t explicitly give him the authority to impose import taxes for any reason.
Writing for the court, Roberts said Trump had failed to “identify clear congressional authorization” for the emergency powers he’d claimed.
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