While a ruling could be weeks or even months away, many legal analysts said a majority of the court appears likely to invalidate Trump’s unprecedented use of a 48-year-old economic sanctions law to slap tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner in response to a claimed emergency involving trade deficits.
Here are POLITICO’s key takeaways from the much-anticipated high-court showdown:
Are tariffs taxes?
The whole fight over Trump’s tariff policy could come down to one crucial question of nomenclature: Are tariffs taxes?
If the justices see them that way, Trump’s policy seems doomed. For a court obsessed with what the founders thought, the key role unfair taxation played in the American Revolution clearly makes the justices wary of letting presidents impose taxes at will.
So, the lawyers challenging the tariffs insisted they are obviously taxes, while the administration insisted they are not.
“Tariffs are taxes. They take dollars from Americans’ pockets and deposit them in the U.S. Treasury,” said Neal Katyal, a former Obama administration acting solicitor general who argued on behalf of private companies challenging the tariffs. “Our founders gave that taxing power to Congress alone. … This is obviously revenue-raising.
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