Illegal. That’s Donald Trump’s tariffs. At least when levied under The International Emergency Economic Powers Act which, the Supreme Court said Friday, doesn’t authorize the president to impose sweeping trade duties.

I should note, up front, that the Court gave the Trump administration more than enough time for contingency planning before striking down the IEEPA tariffs. This decision was expected last month, and even if it had come down “on schedule,” the White House had eight months to develop a new strategy for replicating the trade measures.

The first adverse ruling on the IEEPA justification came on May 28, 2025, when the US Court of International Trade sided with a group of businesses and blue states who alleged, among other things, that the trade emergency was “a figment of [Trump’s] own imagination.” The three-judge panel side-stepped that argument, instead finding that tariff actions “exceed any authority granted” under IEEPA.

Fast forward to February 20, 2026, and the Supreme Court concurred. “The president asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration and scope,” a skeptical John Roberts wrote for the majority. “In light of the breadth, history and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it.”

And just like that, a majority of Trump’s tariffs are… well, looking for another excuse, I’ll put it that way. IEEPA won’t work.

Of course, IEEPA was (probably) never going to work. The administration’s approach to the tariffs was the same as its approach to everything else in Trump’s second term: Go ahead and do it, even if it’s illegal, because the worst that can happen is an unfavorable SCOTUS ruling which isn’t guaranteed and will anyway take forever, leaving us free to do what we want in the interim.

In this case, “what we want” meant hitting anybody and everybody — allies, adversaries and everyone in-between, penguins included — with draconian trade levies the original scope of which threatened to set the global economy back by roughly a century.

In the months after the botched “Liberation Day” unveil, Trump set about cataloguing a dizzying array of MOUs with countries far and wide. He called those bilateral frameworks “deals” despite the slapdash nature of the negotiations and the conspicuous absence of enforceable commitments.

Now, at least some parties to those MOUs have an excuse to renegotiate while they wait on Trump to elaborate a new, legal, excuse for tariffs. I’d suggest — and this isn’t a joke even though it’s grimly funny — most countries won’t be too demanding in light of Trump’s growing penchant for military threats.

Domestically, the fate of some $125 billion in CBP-collected customs duties under IEEPA-related tariffs is unclear. Businesses who paid those levies — i.e., US businesses — want refunds, and they want them now.

“The administration’s only responsible course of action is to establish a fast, efficient and automatic refund process that returns tariff money to the businesses that paid it,” a collective of some 800 businesses declared on Friday.

I, um, hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s not going to happen. They’ll have to sue Trump for a refund, he’ll fight in court, the litigation will be expensive and while it plays out, the administration will work to reinstitute the tariffs under new authorities.

It’s been plain for a few months now that SCOTUS would likely rule against the IEEPA levies. Oral arguments in November didn’t go well for the administration, and although Trump’s surrogates put on a brave face during TV cameos, they begrudgingly conceded the possibility of an adverse outcome.

On Friday morning, for example, Kevin Hassett told Fox that Trump has a “backup plan that’s just as good.” Or just as “bad,” I guess, depending on who you are and how you’re situated vis-à-vis Trump’s macho mercantilism.

“The Government reads IEEPA to give the President power to unilaterally impose unbounded tariffs and change them at will [a] view [that] would represent a transformative expansion of the President’s authority over tariff policy,” Roberts wrote, in the 21-page opinion.

It’s “telling,” he went on, “that in IEEPA’s half century of existence, no President has invoked the statute to impose any tariffs, let alone tariffs of this magnitude and scope.”

“The President claims that Congress delegated to him… the power to impose tariffs on practically any products he wants, from any countries he chooses, in any amounts he selects,” Neil Gorsuch marveled, in a full concurrence.

“As the [majority] opinion demonstrates, the most natural reading of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not encompass the power to impose tariffs,” Amy Coney Barrett said, in her own concurring opinion.

Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito both dissented. That’s so unsurprising I dare say no one cares, which is probably why they left it to Brett Kavanaugh to pen the principal dissent, which closes with this line: “The tariffs at issue here may or may not be wise policy, [b]ut as a matter of text, history, and precedent, they are clearly lawful.”

Except not. Maybe they’re “clearly lawful” to Kavanaugh, and just like anything else Trump might want to do, the tariffs are self-evidently lawful to Thomas and Alito whose spouses are — how should I put this? — very sympathetic to the MAGA cause, but for the court’s other six justices, IEEPA simply doesn’t confer upon Trump the authority he claimed for himself in the statute’s name.

In any event, and as Hassett noted, Trump has a fallback plan. Besides, he’s got bigger things on his mind than tariffs this week. Like war with Iran. And ET. On Friday, Trump announced he’s directing Pete Hegseth to “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to aliens and extraterrestrial life.”

Full SCOTUS opinion