Did ‘Activist Judges’ Derail Trump’s Tariffs?
In the immediate aftermath of Wednesday’s federal court ruling that blocked the Trump administration’s tariffs on nearly all imports, the president’s allies have turned to a predictable excuse for the sweeping legal defeat.
“It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency,” said Kush Desai, the White House’s deputy press secretary, in a statement. “President Trump pledged to put America First, and the Administration is committed to using every lever of executive power to address this crisis and restore American Greatness.”
“With activist judges, what is even the point of having a president?!” posted conservative pundit Charlie Kirk (in a tweet that inaccurately characterized just about every aspect of the legal ruling).
“The judicial coup is out of control,” wrote Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, on X.
These reactions are as inaccurate as they are lame. In Miller’s view, apparently, a “coup” occurs when judges tell the president that he has overstepped the bounds of his powers under the law—rather than when a president seizes those expansive powers. That’s a very silly definition of a coup.
More importantly, it’s also a misleading description of what the Court of International Trade ruled on Wednesday. In this case, it was the Trump administration, not the court, that was claiming to be able to exercise unlimited, unchecked power by invoking a law. Trump had used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs on nearly all imports to the U.S., even though that law narrowly authorizes presidential actions only in response to “an unusual and extraordinary threat.”
International commerce is plainly neither of those things, as the court concluded in its ruling. “We do not read IEEPA to delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the President,” the judges wrote. “We instead read IEEPA’s provisions to impose meaningful limits on a
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