The legal establishment in Washington has convinced itself that the Supreme Court is about to ride to the rescue of the global trade status quo. Lawyers at white-shoe firms are telling their multinational clients to hold tight: the courts will strike down the President’s tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), and the whole trade rebalancing project will collapse.
They’re wrong. Not because the Justices won’t strike down the tariffs. They might. But because the administration has a path forward that doesn’t depend on tariff authority at all, one that rests on powers the statute expressly grants in plain English, and one that may actually be more effective than tariffs at forcing surplus countries to the table.
Here’s the thing the trade establishment doesn’t want to think about: IEEPA doesn’t just let the president regulate imports. It lets him prohibit them. And it lets him issue licenses as exceptions to that prohibition. Those aren’t implied powers or creative readings. They’re right there in the text of the law: the president may “prevent or prohibit” importation and may act “by means of instructions, licenses, or otherwise.” That language points to a mechanism that could reshape the global trade landscape even if every tariff the administration has imposed gets struck down tomorrow. President Donald Trump holds up a display of reciprocal tariff rates during his “Liberation Day” event in the White House Rose Garden on April 2, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) (Read More)
