United States | News & Politics

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for six justices: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett. All six agreed on the core holding. Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett formed a three-justice plurality on the major questions doctrine rationale; the other three declined to join that section.

As Roberts wrote, the government’s reading of two words in the statute, “regulate” and “importation,” claimed for the president the power to impose tariffs “of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time.” The majority’s response was direct: “Those words cannot bear such weight.”

The statutory argument is simple once you see it. Tariffs are a tax. The Constitution assigns the taxing power to Congress in Article I, Section 8. The framers, as Roberts put it, “did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch.”