This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
In a major setback to President Trump, the conservative Supreme Court in a 6-3 ruling struck down his global tariffs in a decision that has major implications for the global economy. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “The president asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it.” Trump responded to the ruling on Friday by announcing a new 10% global tariff. Then on Saturday he increased it to 15%. President Trump also personally attacked the justices for striking down his polices.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The Supreme Court’s ruling on tariffs is deeply disappointing and I am ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed, for not having the courage to do what is right for our country. They also are a, frankly, disgrace to our nation, those justices. They are an automatic no. No matter how good a case you have, it’s a no. You can’t knock their loyalty. One thing you can do with some of our people. Others think they’re being politically correct, which has happened before far too often with certain members of this court and it’s happened so often with this court. What a shame. Having to do with voting in particular. When in fact they’re just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats and not that they should have anything at all to do with it. They are very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution. It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.
AMY GOODMAN: Three conservative justices joined the liberal justices to reject the tariffs—Chief Justice Roberts and two justices appointed by President Trump, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. He was asked about them on Friday.
REPORTER: Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, are you surprised in particular by their decision today—
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I am.
REPORTER: —and do you regret nominating them?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t want to say whether or not I regret it. I think their decision was terrible.
REPORTERS: [overlapping shouts]
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think it’s an embarrassment to their families, if you want to know the truth. The two of them. Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: “An embarrassment to their families,” he said about Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch. Soon after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker sent a letter to President Trump demanding tariff refunds for every family in his state. The letter reads, “The Supreme Court has ruled this is yet one more unconstitutional act by you and your administration. This letter and the attached invoice stand as an official notice that the compensation is owed to the people of Illinois and if you do not comply we will pursue further action,” Governor Pritzker said.
We are joined now by Lori Wallach, director of the Rethink Trade program at the American Economic Liberties Project. Lori, there’s a lot to unpack here, not to mention what’s going to happen with these tariffs that President Trump reimposed. Start off with his attack on his own justices, two of the justices he appointed.
LORI WALLACH: That unhinged rant was truly terrifying. It sounded just like a dictator talking about the “loyalty” of judges to the king. But what it reflects is the real impact of that ruling, which is much more on Trump’s power than on what the tariff rates in the United States are likely to be. What the court said is that Trump does not have tariff authority under the particular statute that he has been using most frequently, which is a statute that had no limitations that allowed him to target with punishment or reward particular companies, whole economic sectors, reward friends and family, torture whole countries. And it really reduces Trump’s ability not being able to use that authority to hurl tariffs around like some Zeus-like lightning bolts.
But the reality is that there are a lot of other statutory authorities where Congress has delegated tariff rights to presidents. And so as you reported, immediately Trump announced other tariffs. So the tariff rates aren’t likely to change, rather the use of the tool as a really leverage power tool by Trump. And so he’s furious about it because a court that has been otherwise willing to expand his authority endlessly drew a line.
I want to note it kind of drew a line at the place where under the hands of a different president, tariff authority could be something that actually limits bad corporate conduct, not rewards it. So it’s sort of an interesting place where they drew the line. But they took away a bunch of his power.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what he did, the 10%, applying it under different rules and then increasing it to 15%.
LORI WALLACH: Just to step back for one second, the Constitution has one of its starkest checks and balances on trade. The Constitution gives exclusive authority over tariffs to Congress. The only way a president can impose a tariff is if the Congress has delegated authority. So the question is, what authority does the president have? And what he used is a thing called Section 22 which refers to part of the 1974 Trade Act. Section 122 basically says if you have a balance of payments problem, you can put up to 15% tariffs in place—Mr. President, automatically, no other showing—for up to five months. And that’s the statute he has used for these tariffs.
Now, he started out at 10% which honestly made kind of sense if you’re trying to reestablish his baseline tariffs which applies to a bunch of countries. Then he used discretion in that statute—tariff chaos strikes again—literally overnight to raise it to 15%. The irony is by raising it to 15%, the max under that particular statute, he ends up raising tariffs in a bunch of the countries that either always have had only 10% tariffs since so-called “liberation day” and with some of the countries that made deals with him. Now they have higher tariffs after this than before the Supreme Court. Chaos.
AMY GOODMAN: In a 63-page dissenting opinion, conservative justices—Trump’s appointee Brett Kavanaugh, and then Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—claimed the majority’s decision could lead to short-term chaos. Justice Kavanaugh wrote, “The United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others,” Kavanaugh said. So, talk about this issue—I mean, he is warning about this but he was in the minority—this critical point that the SCOTUS decision left unanswered, how the Trump administration may have to refund more than $100 billion in tariff revenues and what, for example, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said the population of his state is owed.
LORI WALLACH: What’s very interesting about this Supreme Court ruling—which goes on to 170 pages, it’s clear they were all battling over what to do and how to do it—is that it doesn’t speak to what to do about tariff refunds. If you’ve just said all these tariffs are not legal, then the question is, there has almost been $150 billion paid in by most estimates, so then what do you do with that money?
And it’s very tricky, because the likely scenario, particularly without more direction and guidance, is the biggest companies—the Costcos, the Walmarts—they have monopoly power in the market that they could force their foreign suppliers to eat the tariffs. So they charge them less for the imported good or they paid them for the tariff, but on the books at the U.S. Customs department, they are listed—Costco or Walmart—as paying the tariffs. So if they get paid back it’s a windfall because their supplier probably paid most of it upfront, plus a bunch of them passed on those expenses to consumers. Small businesses are going to be totally stiffed if there is some horrible long process or you have to go through a lawsuit to get the money, because they can’t put the resources into that.
Then what happens to everyone who paid more? That’s even trickier, honestly, because a bunch of prices went up for things that weren’t charged tariffs. So some of the big companies didn’t pay tariffs and they raised prices, because they made their supplier pay. In other instances, things that didn’t have tariffs, we are paying for more. I just want to talk about beef. Eighty percent of beef eaten in the U.S. is raised in the U.S. Of the other 20%, half of it comes from Mexico and Canada and never had tariffs. So all this talk by Trump about cutting tariffs on beef to bring down prices—we’re paying more for beef, we’re hearing it’s from trade, but there were no tariffs! So how in that mess you actually figure out how to send the money back to the right people is a real pickle that the Court was silent on.
AMY GOODMAN: On Friday, President Trump claimed the Supreme Court had been swayed by “foreign interests.” This is U.S. trade representative, Ambassador Jamieson Greer, speaking on Face the Nation on CBS Sunday.
AMBASSADOR JAMIESON GREER: What I’m telling you is that when the president talks about foreign influences, at a minimum what we see is that foreign companies are involved in the coalitions, the PR effort, they’re involved in the cases, and they don’t want these tariffs. It’s not a secret!
AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to this, Lori Wallach?
LORI WALLACH: Like many things the president says, the basis is in his head. He’s just trying to be insulting. The reality is that there is no evidence that there is foreign influence on the court per se. It is also true that companies in other countries don’t want to pay these tariffs and, frankly, U.S. multinational companies, who offshore U.S. jobs to low-wage countries, have an interest in not paying these tariffs. So I don’t know, the subsidiary of one of the big automakers in another country probably is unhappy about it. Is that a foreign company or is that a domestic company? The issue is really corporate power.
There are two things to think about that. One is because Trump so abused the IEEPA tariff authority, he lost it for good for all presidents. It was just shut down. No, IEEPA has no tariff authority. A different kind a president might have been able to actually use that, and we might have wanted a different kind of president to use that authority judiciously in an emergency, for the sake of protecting U.S. workers, our environment, food safety, whatever. That’s gone because of Trump’s abuse.
And the abuse is things like he is cutting tariffs on China where there really is a serious trade problem and mercantilist abuses that have led to huge deficits. Not just for us. I mean, the whole world has tariffs on China right now. Mexico, Brazil. At the same time, he put 50% tariffs on Brazil because he didn’t like the fact they were holding the former wannabe dictator accountable for his coup. So those kind of abuses lost this authority altogether.
The other piece of it is to what end is the Trump tariff program working? He promised it was to create more manufacturing jobs and balance trade. But literally the day before this ruling, the trade data for 2025 came out and we saw 88,000 more U.S. manufacturing jobs lost in the 11 months since Trump came back, and we saw the manufacturing trade deficit up in 2025 by $60 billion, almost 4%. So that’s the opposite of the outcome. Tariffs can be a very useful tool if strategically deployed. If used as a weapon to go after political opponents, to threaten to tariff Europe over Greenland, absurd abuses of tariffs and/or to corruptly reward family, friends, companies.
Think about it. They threatened Europe with high tariffs if Europe doesn’t deregulate Big Tech monopoly abuses, doesn’t give up having privacy protections, and then offered to cut those tariffs if—I’m sorry, on U.S. steel, real manufacturing tariffs—if Europe would give a favor to Big Tech. That is no trade policy. That’s just coercion. And that’s what the Supreme Court has taken away. But we’re still going to have more tariffs because there are other statutes he can apply tariffs using.
AMY GOODMAN: Lori Wallach, we want to thank you for being with us, director of the Rethink Trade program at the American Economic Liberties Project. Coming up, a new study in the British medical journal the Lancet concludes Israel’s war on Gaza killed far more Palestinians than initially reported. We will speak to the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mosab Abu Toha who managed to leave Gaza with his family. Stay with us.
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