President Donald Trump's agenda just got dealt a "monumental" defeat by the U.S. Supreme Court, according to a legal expert.
The court ruled 6-3 against the 79-year-old president's sweeping tariffs by finding that his invocation of an emergency statute to regulate global trade was unlawful, and CNN's Elie Honig explained the implications of the decision on "The Situation Room."
"It's a monumental ruling," Honig said, "and the bottom line is that the tariffs Donald Trump announced back in April on 'Liberation Day' are gone. They have been ruled illegal by this U.S. Supreme Court. An interesting array of justices here in the majority ruling that the tariffs are illegal, as Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, three conservatives who teamed up with the three liberal justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson, to rule these tariffs unconstitutional."
"The dissenters are justices Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh, and the basis for the ruling is this: Congress, not the president, Congress typically holds the tariff power," Honig added. "Now, Congress passed this law back in 1977 called the International Economic Emergencies Act, and Donald Trump tried to use that law to say, 'Well, I'm declaring an international economic emergency, therefore, I'm imposing tariffs.' But the majority here said, 'No, that law does not authorize you to impose tariffs, and no, there is not a valid international economic emergency here.' So the end result, we are still going through this, but the end result is that Donald Trump's tariffs have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court."
However, the legal analyst said the White House has already signaled that Trump could continue his trade war by other means.
"Donald Trump has said, various White House officials have said, if he loses on this basis, he will try to reimplement other tariffs through other laws, which he can try to do," Honig said. "However, those other laws are much more restrictive. They would not allow him to apply the type of sweeping massive, across-the-globe tariffs that he tried to impose here, but have now been struck down. Look, Donald Trump said these tariffs are the single most important thing he has done in his presidency. He said that, and now they've been struck down by the court."
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