Supreme Court Shocks World by Correctly Declaring Trump’s Global Tariffs Unconstitutional

Gizmodo · Feb 20, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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One of the first big Ls of the second Trump administration was just handed to him by an unlikely source: The Supreme Court of the United States. After years of Trump-friendly rulings—upholding the travel ban, permitting ICE to racially profile, and OKing his freezing foreign aid, to name just a few—the Roberts court has finally found one of Trump’s power plays too much to bear. In a landmark 6-3 decision, the court struck down the sweeping global tariffs Trump imposed by executive order last year. A quick recap: last April, Trump declared the state of the economy to be in such shambles that it rose to the level of national emergency. Then, invoking the Emergency Powers Act, he imposed through executive order a baseline 10% tariff on a wide range of goods plus an additional “reciprocal” range of penalties to specific targets like China, the EU, and others. The tech industry, like so many others, was hit hard by the edict as so much of the manufacturing in that sector takes place abroad. At the time, many were saying, “Hey, he can’t do that.” And now they’ve been vindicated by the highest court in the land. Despite dissent from Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas, the other six justices agreed that the Constitution does not, in fact, give a sitting president the power to tax other nations unilaterally. That’s a job for Congress. “The Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch,” explained Roberts in his decision. Despite this ruling, the fate of the billions of dollars already collected by the freshly-deemed-unconstitutional tariffs remains up in the air. Scores of lawsuits are already underway by affected big box retailers hoping to recover refunds. Kavanaugh, stating the obvious, noted that the process to help these importers recover damages is likely to be a complicated “mess.” This is a breaking news story and will be updated as further developments come in.