The Supreme Court granted an unusually quick hearing on President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs this week, putting a policy at the center of his economic agenda squarely before the nation’s highest court.
The justices will hear the case in November, a lightning-fast timetable by the Supreme Court’s typical standards, and rule at some point after that. The tariffs will stay in place in the meantime.
The court agreed Tuesday to take up an appeal from the Trump administration after lower courts found most of his tariffs illegal.
The small businesses and states that challenged them also agreed to the accelerated timetable. They say Trump’s import taxes on goods from almost every country in the world have nearly driven their businesses to bankruptcy.
The Supreme Court will hear a case brought by Learning Resources and Hand2Mind, family-owned toy makers based in Vernon Hills near Chicago. The companies filed a lawsuit against Trump and his administration in April.
“A lot of companies are in pain now, and customers are in pain because of inflation from tariffs,” Elana Woldenberg Ruffman, Hand2Mind’s vice president of marketing, said. “It’s gratifying that the Supreme Court is willing to take the case. It’s a case with tremendous economic implications.”
Learning Resources and Hand2Mind, run by the same fourth-generation family owners, make interactive educational products and toys that are sold in more than 100 countries.
This holiday season, the companies might have shortages of some toys due to tariffs, Ruffman said. Learning Resources and Hand2Mind are being cautious about over-ordering products when costs keep rising and changing.
“Tariffs continue to be highly, highly disruptive. We don’t know what our costs will be on a given day,” Ruffman said.
For example, Hand2Mind planned to make a yoga product for kids called BubblePlush in China. But when Trump threatened 145% tariffs on China this spring, the toy maker scrambled to move manufacturing.
“We reached out to every company we’ve ever talked to,” Ruffman said. Hand2Mind decided to make the products in India on a “very expedited timeline” to have it in time for Walmart to stock this holiday season.
But in August, Trump raised tariffs on goods from India to 50%. “Now tariffs in India are higher than in China,” Ruffman said. That’s just one of many examples of unpredictable changes the toy makers are coping with, she added.
“Congress, not the President alone, has the power to impose tariffs,” Jeffrey Schwab, attorney with the Liberty Justice Center, said. Schwab is representing plaintiffs in a separate lawsuit challenging Trump’s tariffs that the Supreme Court will also hear. The lead plaintiff in that case is VOS Selections, a New York-based family-owned wine distributor and importer.
Two lower courts have agreed that Trump didn’t have the power to impose all the tariffs under an emergency powers law, though a divided appeals court left them in place.
The Trump administration asked the justices to intervene quickly, arguing the law gives him the power to regulate imports and striking down the tariffs would put the country on “the brink of economic catastrophe.”
The case will come before a court that has been reluctant to check Trump’s extraordinary flex of executive power. One big question is whether the justices’ own expansive view of presidential authority allows for Trump’s tariffs without the explicit approval of Congress, which the Constitution endows with the power to levy tariffs. Three of the justices on the conservative-majority court were nominated by Trump in his first term.
While the tariffs and their erratic rollout have raised fears of higher prices and slower economic growth, Trump has also used them to pressure other countries into accepting new trade deals. Revenue from tariffs totaled $159 billion by late August, more than double what it was at the same point a year earlier.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer has argued that the lower court rulings are already affecting those trade negotiations. If the tariffs are struck down, the U.S. Treasury might take a hit by having to refund some of the import taxes it’s collected, Trump administration officials have said.
A ruling against them could even threaten the nation’s ability to reduce the flow of fentanyl and efforts to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, Sauer argued.
The administration did win over four appeals court judges who found the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, lets the president regulate importation during emergencies without explicit limitations. In recent decades, Congress has ceded some tariff authority to the president, and Trump has made the most of the power vacuum.
The case involves two sets of import taxes, both of which Trump justified by declaring a national emergency: the tariffs first announced in April and the ones from February on imports from Canada, China and Mexico.
It doesn’t include his levies on foreign steel, aluminum and autos, or the tariffs Trump imposed on China in his first term that were kept by President Joe Biden.
Trump can impose tariffs under other laws, but those have more limitations on the speed and severity with which he could act.