The US Court of International Trade Made the Right Call

June 17, 2025

by Dominic Pino

To hear Trump tell of it, the U.S. Court of International Trade’s decision striking down the tariffs he imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) was motivated by personal animus. It was just another case of biased left-wingers afflicted by Trump Derangement Syndrome engaging in judicial activism to stop him.

  In reality, the decision was anything but that. The judges were sober and even-handed, and the decision should help inform the justices of the Supreme Court when they inevitably hear the case on appeal.

  First, there are a few things to note about the court and its judges. The U.S. Court of International Trade is based in New York City. It is not an international body. It is an Article III court, created by Congress in 1956 to rule on trade issues. Every judge is an American, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, serving for life like any other federal judge. This isn’t some kind of international tribunal ruling against America.

  Two of the three judges who ruled on the tariff case were appointed by Republicans. Jane Restani, who previously was chief judge of the court, was appointed by Ronald Reagan. Timothy Reif was appointed by Trump himself. Only Gary Katzmann, an Obama appointee, could be construed as having a partisan motivation against Trump. Regardless, the decision was unanimous.

  After the decision, Trump fumed that the Federalist Society had tricked him into nominating bad judges. But the Federalist Society had nothing to do with Reif’s appointment. In fact, Reif was recommended to Trump by Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative from Trump’s first term who is one of America’s staunchest protectionists.

  Before the decision, the administration believed that the Court of International Trade would be favorable to its arguments. There were a few different cases brought against the administration’s tariffs. Some of them were brought in district courts. The attorneys for the administration requested that those cases be moved to the Court of International Trade. The administration would not have asked for that if it thought the court was biased against it.

  The decision itself does not reflect personal animus against Trump, or even animus against tariffs. It does not contain any denunciations of Trump or sanctimonious warnings about the future of democracy. The judges do not pretend to be economists or apply any economic reasoning to justify their decision. (This is a good thing. Judges are usually bad economists.)

  Instead, it quotes the Federalist Papers. It sticks to the text of the Constitution and the statute. And it uses precedent to come to its conclusions.

  That’s notable because what Trump did was unprecedented. The decision is careful to note that it is about interpreting IEEPA, not about the president’s tariff powers in general. In Trump’s first term, he imposed tariffs unilaterally under Section 232 and Section 301, laws that several presidents have used to impose tariffs in the past. The court in no way suggested those tariffs were unconstitutional, and it did not strike down tariffs Trump has imposed under those laws.

  IEEPA has been on the books since 1977. It has never before been used to impose tariffs. The word “tariff” does not appear in the statute. The court did not even say that IEEPA could never be used to impose tariffs. Its concern was with the scale of what Trump did.

  The court applied a very basic principle that has been used for many years: When Congress delegates an enumerated power to the executive branch, it can only do so in a limited way.

  For a non-trade example, it is an enumerated power of Congress to “lay and collect taxes.” Congress has created the Internal Revenue Service, which is part of the executive branch, to do that job. The IRS has considerable power, but it is limited. It cannot change the tax brackets, create new tax credits, or invent a different kind of tax. When the IRS misbehaves (which it does), it is accountable to Congress, because that is ultimately where the constitutional authority lies.

  It is not possible that Congress, in writing a law to delegate power to the executive branch, could completely cede its enumerated power in the Constitution. Any statute that it passes doesn’t change what the Constitution says. This becomes an issue for courts when the statute is vague.

  The administration argued that because IEEPA says the president has the power to “regulate . . . importation,” that means Trump’s tariffs were permitted. IEEPA does say those words, and tariffs are one way to regulate importation, but such a power can’t be unlimited, because the Constitution says that only Congress has the power to levy tariffs.

  What Trump did was essentially unlimited. He imposed tariffs on nearly every country in the world at the same time at very high rates and claimed unilateral authority to adjust them at will. That basically is the power to levy tariffs, which the Constitution says is a power reserved exclusively to Congress. The IEEPA, then, cannot allow unlimited tariffs.

  The court relied on precedent from tariffs that Richard Nixon imposed under the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA). It then noted that the tariff power under IEEPA is more limited than under TWEA, and that was part of the reason that Congress passed IEEPA in the first place. It was careful to note that it was not overturning the precedent from the Nixon case, but was using that precedent to inform its decision.

  A court that was biased against conservatives would not have cited the cases that the Court of International Trade cited in the Trump tariff case. It cited West Virginia v. EPA (which limited the EPA’s power under the Clean Air Act), Biden v. Nebraska (which struck down Biden’s student loan cancelation efforts), and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (which overturned Chevron deference), all of which were written by conservative justices currently on the Supreme Court and were seen as major wins for conservative jurisprudence.

  “The court does not pass upon the wisdom or likely effectiveness of the President’s use of tariffs as leverage,” the Court of International Trade said. “That use is impermissible not because it is unwise or ineffective, but because [IEEPA] does not allow it.” This is exactly what conservatives have always said judges should do: Interpret the law, not impose their personal policy preferences.

  In ruling against Trump’s tariffs, the Court of International Trade did not overturn any precedent. It did not rely on economic analysis or its assessment of foreign policy. It only ever used Trump’s name twice, in neither instance disparagingly. The decision was an example of judicial restraint, not activism, and was completely in line with the common law tradition of using past decisions to help understand new situations.

  The court wrote a plain vanilla decision to answer a plain vanilla question: Does the president have effectively unlimited power to unilaterally impose tariffs and change them at will? He doesn’t, so the court said so.

Dominic Pino is the Thomas L. Rhodes Journalism Fellow at the National Review Institute and National Review.