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WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to decide the legality of Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs, setting up a major test of one of the Republican president’s boldest assertions of executive power that has been central to his economic and trade agenda.
The justices took up the Justice Department’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that Trump overstepped his authority in imposing most of his tariffs under a federal law meant for emergencies. The court swiftly acted after the administration last week asked it to review the case, which implicates trillions of dollars in customs duties over the next decade.
The court, which begins its next nine-month term on October 6, placed the case on a fast track, scheduling oral arguments for the first week of November.
The justices also agreed to hear a separate challenge to Trump’s tariffs brought by a family-owned toy company, Learning Resources.
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington ruled on August 29 that Trump overreached in invoking a 1977 law known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to impose the tariffs, undercutting a major priority for the president in his second term. The tariffs, however, remain in effect during the appeal to the Supreme Court.
The levies are part of a trade war instigated by Trump since he returned to the presidency in January that has alienated trading partners, increased volatility in financial markets and fueled global economic uncertainty.
Trump has made tariffs a key foreign policy tool, using them to renegotiate trade deals, extract concessions and exert political pressure on other countries.
Trump in April invoked the 1977 law in imposing tariffs on goods imported from individual countries to address trade deficits, as well as separate tariffs announced in February as economic leverage on China, Canada and Mexico to curb the trafficking of fentanyl and illicit drugs into the US
The law gives the president power to deal with “an unusual and extraordinary threat” amid a national emergency. It historically had been used for imposing sanctions on enemies or freezing their assets. Prior to Trump, the law had never been used to impose tariffs.
Trump’s Department of Justice has argued that the law allows tariffs under emergency provisions that authorize a president to “regulate” imports.
“The stakes in this case could not be higher,” the Justice Department said in a filing.
Denying Trump’s tariff power “would expose our nation to trade retaliation without effective defenses and thrust America back to the brink of economic catastrophe,” it added.
Trump has said that if he loses the case the US might have to unwind trade deals, causing the country to “suffer so greatly.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported in August that the increased duties on imports from foreign countries could reduce the US national deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade.
The appeals court ruling stems from two challenges. One was brought by five small businesses that import goods, including a New York wine and spirits importer and a Pennsylvania-based sport fishing retailer. The other was filed by 12 US states — Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Vermont — most of them governed by Democrats.
The US Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the authority to issue taxes and tariffs, and any delegation of that authority must be both explicit and limited, according to the lawsuits.
The Federal Circuit agreed. “It seems unlikely that Congress intended, in enacting IEEPA, to depart from its past practice and grant the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs,” it said in a 7-4 decision.
The appeals court also said that the administration’s expansive view of this law violates the Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine, which requires executive branch actions of vast economic and political significance to be clearly authorized by Congress.
The New York-based US Court of International Trade, which has jurisdiction over customs and trade disputes, previously ruled against Trump’s tariff policies on May 28.
Another court in Washington ruled that the law does not authorize Trump’s tariffs, and the administration has appealed that decision as well. At least eight lawsuits have challenged Trump’s tariff policies, including one filed by the state of California.

KYIV: A Russian strike on Tuesday killed 24 people waiting for pension payments in a front-line town of eastern Ukraine where Russian forces are massing forces for a large-scale offensive, officials said.
President Volodymyr Zelensky posted video showing several corpses strewn on the ground alongside a burned-out minivan and playground — images AFP could not independently verify.
“A brutally savage Russian airstrike with an aerial bomb on the rural settlement of Yarova in the Donetsk region. Directly on people. Ordinary civilians. At the very moment when pensions were being disbursed,” Zelensky wrote online.
Moscow has claimed the industrial region as part of Russia despite not having full control over it.
Kyiv says the Kremlin has massed 100,000 troops at a key part of the front line for a fresh offensive.

The interior ministry said 24 people were killed, while the army said Moscow had dropped a glide bomb — weapons fixed with wings to help them fly over dozens of kilometers.
They are part of an arsenal developed by Russia to hit deeper into Ukrainian territory and stretch the front line.
Yarova is about eight kilometers (five miles) from the front line and had a pre-war population of around 1,900 people.
AFP journalists in eastern Ukraine saw mourners weeping outside a morgue where staff had laid out at least 13 corpses in black body bags.
Zelensky urged Ukraine’s allies to issue a response to the attack.
“A response is needed from the United States. A response is needed from Europe. A response is needed from the G20,” he said.

- ‘Strong actions’ -

“Strong actions are needed to make Russia stop bringing death,” Zelensky added, while the prosecutor general said it had opened a war crime investigation.
There was no immediate comment from Moscow or the Kremlin on the strike.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius meanwhile announced that Berlin would provide Ukraine with “several thousand long-range drones” to help it repel Russia’s invasion.
Germany was “expanding Ukraine’s capabilities to weaken Russia’s war machinery in the hinterland, providing an effective defense” by boosting support for the procurement of long-range drones, he added.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also said Tuesday that the United States is willing to take “strong measures against Russia” over Ukraine, but added that “our European partners must fully join us in this to be successful.”
US President Donald Trump has said he has tried to find a way to end the war in recent weeks, including threatening on Sunday to impose more sanctions on Russia, but has little to show for his efforts.
Following an EU-US meeting hosted by Bessent on Tuesday, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko urged allies to further tighten sanctions that have cost the Russian economy billions of dollars.
“Only decisive measures can reduce Russia’s capacity to wage war and bring its daily atrocities and terror to an end,” she said on X.
In Ukraine, a spokesman for the postal network, Ukrposhta, confirmed that one of its vehicles was damaged in the attack and that its department head, identified as Yulia, had been hospitalized.
Ukrposhta, which delivers public services in front-line regions, said it would change how it distributes pensions and basic services there.
Russia has been steadily advancing in the eastern Donetsk region for months, concentrating its firepower on the territory and deploying troops from other parts of the front line, Kyiv has said.
Authorities in Donetsk have been appealing to civilians to flee the fighting since the early days of Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrsky said this week that Russian forces outnumbered Ukrainian troops threefold in some areas of the front, and by six times in regions where Moscow has concentrated its forces.
The strike comes just days after a Russian missile crashed into the Ukrainian government headquarters in central Kyiv, the first time the complex had been hit in the three-and-a-half-year war.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions forced from their homes in Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.