Tariff Decision Does Little to Check Trump’s Unilateral Actions

Last week’s landmark tariff ruling makes clear that the Supreme Court intends to rein in Democratic and Republican presidents alike, sending a message that both parties will need unusually clear authority to take unusually significant actions.

In this era of acute division, this partisan symmetry is important: The legal system’s legitimacy may depend on maintaining rules that equally restrain both sides. Presidents nevertheless will continue to seek ways to make policy unilaterally, and the decision will do little to alter this dynamic. Indeed, immediately after the decision, President Donald Trump implemented new 10% tariffs under a different statute.

Trump’s tariffs—both the new ones and the ones the court struck down—fit a depressingly familiar pattern of recent presidential behavior.

By design, the US Constitution’s legislative process requires substantial consensus for major policy changes at the federal level. In general, legislation can win sufficient support between the House, Senate, and President only if a broad and geographically distributed majority supports changing the law.

But given the country’s deep, partisan divisions, assembling such majorities is difficult, particularly for measures demanded by one party’s base but vehemently opposed by the other. Presidents therefore go looking for ways to accomplish their goals on their own.

That was the story of Trump’s tariffs. It also was the story of President Joe Biden’s border policies, student debt relief, and vaccine mandates, as well as President Barack Obama’s clean energy rules and immigration relief programs, not to mention some of President George W. Bush’s national security policies.

The major questions doctrine applied by three key justices in the tariff case (and also embraced by three justices in dissent) aims to curb this practice. By requiring clear legal authority for unusually significant actions, the doctrine limits adventurous statutory interpretations—ones that seek to accomplish major changes of the sort that Congress should need to approve.

The tariff decision signals that the Supreme Court will strive to enforce this principle in a neutral and politically symmetric fashion.

The doctrine’s biggest problem has always been that the standards for deeming a question “major” are amorphous and manipulable. There was a risk that the high court’s conservative majority would apply it selectively to reject policies like climate change rules that Democrats favor but not policies like tariffs and immigration restrictions that Republicans support.

The tariff decision puts that fear to rest, at least for now. By ruling against Trump just as it ruled against Biden, the justices showed that they understand that the rule of law requires treating like cases alike—and that the partisan outlook of the president adopting a policy isn’t a difference that should matter.

That’s all good news. The bad news is that this decision will probably do little to halt our slide toward executive-centered governance—and that some other recent decisions by the Supreme Court may have made that problem worse.

Although Trump’s tariffs and aggressive immigration enforcement have recently gotten more attention, the second Trump administration’s most significant challenge to the separation of powers system has been its systematic effort to weaken Congress’s “power of the purse,” meaning the power to control federal spending.

In a pattern two coauthors and I have called “appropriations presidentialism,” the administration has cancelled or delayed spending, cut staff at multiple agencies, transferred funds between agencies, unilaterally terminated research grants to universities, imposed new conditions on other grants, offered employee buyouts without congressional funding, and otherwise sought to control federal outlays, often with scant regard for applicable laws.

This assault on Congress’s authority over spending is important because the annual appropriations process is Congress’s main tool for reacting to presidential initiatives. Even without adopting strained interpretations of the sort that trigger major questions scrutiny, presidents can employ existing statutory and constitutional authorities to change policy unilaterally. Yet Congress can push back by limiting or denying funds in the next fiscal year.

That is just what Congress is attempting to do right now with immigration enforcement by allowing Department of Homeland Security funding to lapse without any new appropriation. In spending-related cases, however, the Supreme Court has handed the administration a series of important wins, often in the form of terse emergency orders offering little coherent explanation.

It’s great that the justices care about keeping presidents from stretching statutes to resolve “major” questions on their own. But keeping the political branches in balance requires more than stopping high-profile presidential actions. It requires shoring up Congress’s day-to-day influence over administration.

And doing that will require reinforcing the other side of Congress’s power of the purse—its power to control spending as well as taxation.

The case is Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, U.S., No. 24-1287, 2/20/26.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Zachary Price is a professor at the University of California College of Law, San Francisco.

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