Why the US Supreme Court’s tariff verdict offers lessons for India’s Supreme Court on SIR’s constitutional validity
The SCOTUS’s rejection of Trump’s tariff regime highlights the judiciary’s role in safeguarding constitutional limits on executive power, offering lessons for the Indian Supreme Court’s review of the SIR process.
S.N. Sahu
Published on: 22 February 2026, 05:38 am
THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES (SCOTUS), in a landmark 6-3 verdict, has declared the tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump on other countries without congressional approval as unconstitutional and illegal.
Reasons behind Trump’s tariffs
It is pertinent to recall that after assuming office as the President of the United States, Donald Trump declared a national emergency to deal with two foreign threats. He attributed the first to the massive inflow of illegal drugs from Canada, Mexico, and China to the US. The second, he traced to the “large and persistent” trade deficits that were causing the “hollowing out” of the American manufacturing base, undermining “critical supply chains.”
While Trump considered the influx of drugs into the US a major public health crisis, he firmly believed that the spiraling trade deficit constituted a gigantic stumbling block to fulfil his vision of Making America Great Again (MAGA). He justified the declaration of emergency on the ground that these two threats were “unusual and extraordinary” and invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 legislation, which he claimed authorized the President to impose tariffs during emergency.
The Chief Justice, delivering the judgement of the Court, affirmed that the Constitution mandates only the American Congress to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.”
President Trump felt that the grave crisis caused by drug trafficking could be addressed by imposing a 25 percent duty on most Canadian and Mexican imports and a 10 percent duty on most Chinese imports. To deal with the mounting trade deficit, he levied the so-called “reciprocal tariffs” on all imports from all trading partners ranging from 10 percent to 50 percent, which includes penal tariffs.
SCOTUS judgement upheld the Constitution
The central point of the SCOTUS judgement is that only Congress has the power to impose tariffs, and that the IEEPA provisions mandating the President to “regulate” imports were never intended to authorise the President to impose tariffs “unbounded in scope, amount and duration” on any product from any country.
