After the president spent months talking about how much money his tariffs would generate, Trump’s Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the nation’s highest court Wednesday that the import duties are solely focused on regulation, not raising revenue.
Even the conservative wing of the Supreme Court was skeptical.
“The vehicle is imposition of taxes on Americans. That has always been the core power of Congress,” Chief Justice John Roberts said.
Robert’s remark came early in the hearing, which was slated for 80 minutes, but ran almost three hours.
“The justification is being used for the power to impose tariffs on any product, from any country, for any amount, for any length of time,” Roberts said. “I’m not suggesting it’s not there, but it does seem like that’s major authority.”
Twelve states, five small businesses and two Illinois-based toymakers have challenged Trump’s authority to impose tariffs under a 1977 law without Congressional approval. That law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, doesn’t mention the word “tariff” and has never been used to impose tariffs. Trump’s legal team argues that the law is a clear delegation of emergency power, granting the president broad authority to act in times of crisis.
Phillip Magness, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, said the justices showed they had reservations about Trump’s claimed power under the law, frequently called IEEPA.
“It’s always hard to predict from questions, but it was clear to me that several of the justices were not buying the arguments of Trump’s attorney John Sauer – particularly his claim that tariffs are regulations and not taxes,” he told The Center Square.
Justices also shot difficult questions to the attorneys representing the states and small businesses that are challenging the tariffs.
Justice Samuel Alito asked Neal Katyal, the attorney representing the small businesses, if Congress had given the president power to regulate admission to a national park, would that also grant the president the power to charge an entrance fee. Katyal said the president could charge an entrance fee so long as the fee was not intended to raise revenue. Alito also had sharp questions for Katyal on other issues.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett posed a stickier question to Katyal and Oregon Solicitor General Ben Gutman, who is representing the 12 states that challenged Trump’s tariff authority. Barrett asked if the International Emergency Economic Powers Act gives the president the power to block all imports, why would it not grant the seemingly lesser authority of allowing the president to impose a tariff on all imports. Several other justices piled on with variations of these questions, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh asked Gutman if that would leave a “doughnut hole,” as the government put it. Gutman said it was about protecting taxpayers.
“It’s not a doughnut hole, it’s a different type of pastry,” he replied, saying that when the government can reach into the pocketbooks of the people, the stakes are higher, which is why the Constitution gave taxation power to Congress and not the president.
Cato Legal Fellow Brent Skorup said “most justices appeared attentive to the risks of deferring to a president’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute and the executive branch, ‘discovering’ new powers in old statutes.”
“The government’s reading of IEEPA not only stretches the text beyond recognition, but it also threatens the separation-of-powers principles central to our constitutional design,” he said.
Magness said he sees a path for Trump to win, but not much of one.
“The Trump administration went all-in on its claim that tariffs are not taxes, but rather regulations. I believe that they did so because they see this as the only path to victory since the court has historically given more leeway to presidents in the foreign policy arena,” he told The Center Square. “I think the administration has a difficult path ahead, given how poorly their argument about tariffs not being a tax was received. Their best remaining argument is to hope that some justices grant them expansive foreign policy leeway in spite of the clear domestic tax policy implications. That path appears to have narrowed quite a bit in today’s hearing.”
Trump has said the future of America is on the line.
“Tomorrow’s United States Supreme Court case is, literally, LIFE OR DEATH for our Country,” Trump said Tuesday afternoon in a social media post. “With a Victory, we have tremendous, but fair, Financial and National Security. Without it, we are virtually defenseless against other Countries who have, for years, taken advantage of us.”
For Alex Jacobsen, a second-generation family business owner in Nashville, Tenn., who makes the speakers used to record Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album, the problem has never been with the tariffs.
“It’s how they’re implemented, without any due process, without any Congress or input from the public,” he told The Center Square ahead of arguments.
The court is expected to hand down a decision by the end of June if not sooner.
Last week, the U.S. Senate narrowly voted to end the national emergency Trump used to impose global tariffs. Four Republicans joined Democrats in the effort, which is largely symbolic because the U.S. House has agreed not to take up the issue until March.
In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a previous lower court ruling saying Trump did not have the authority, but said Trump’s tariffs could remain in place while the administration appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 7-4 decision, the majority of the Federal Circuit said that tariff authority rests with Congress.
An August report, from the Congressional Budget Office, estimated tariffs could bring in $4 trillion over the next decade. That CBO report came with caveats and noted that tariffs will raise consumer prices and reduce the purchasing power of U.S. families.
Trump has said he wants to use tariffs to restore manufacturing jobs lost to lower-wage countries in decades past, shift the tax burden away from U.S. families and pay down the national debt. Economists, businesses and some public companies have warned that tariffs will raise prices on a wide range of consumer products.
A tariff is a tax on imported goods.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
