French wine is displayed at a store in the District of Columbia on March 13, 2025. The Supreme Court will hear a case challenging President Donald Trump’s tariffs on November 5, 2025. One of the plaintiffs is a wine importer. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court will hear one of the first major cases of President Donald Trump’s second term on Wednesday, as the administration defends the president’s emergency tariffs that American small business owners say are upending their livelihoods.
At the heart of the case is the question of whether Trump can authorize sweeping tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the first time a president has used the law to impose taxes on imports.
The lawsuit, which challenges the limits of Trump’s presidential power, is the administration’s first appeal to the Supreme Court that is fully argued on its merits. So far, the justices have dealt with Trump’s numerous appeals on other issues in the so-called “shadow docket,” a quick way to make a decision without detailed arguments.
The president initially said he would attend the negotiations in person, but has since changed course and will go to an economic forum in Miami on Wednesday.
The Supreme Court convenes at 10 a.m. Eastern Time and arguments will be broadcast live the court’s website.
Finance Minister Scott Bessent said he plans to attend the negotiations, “hopefully in the front row to get a ringside seat,” he said told Jesse Watters of Fox News on Monday
The tariff case is “a case for the ages,” said Michael McConnell, a professor and faculty director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and a member of the legal team representing the small businesses challenging Trump’s tariffs.
“The president has important powers that flow directly from the Constitution, but he does not have the authority to impose taxes on American citizens without authorization from Congress, and tariffs are taxes on American importers,” said McConnell, who sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit from 2002 to 2009.
“IEEPA simply does not apply here,” he told reporters during a virtual press conference on Oct. 28. “It is a law to impose various forms of sanctions, economic sanctions, on countries with which we are in conflict. It has nothing to do with imposing taxes on Americans for engaging in perfectly lawful trade with friendly nations.”
Tariffs a “terrible and unsustainable weight”
Victor Schwartz, founder and president of VOS Selections, a family-owned wine and spirits importer for four decades, said Trump’s tariff policies are an “existential threat.”
Schwartz is the lead plaintiff in one of two consolidated cases filed by small business owners and Democratic state attorneys general challenging the tariffs, which can range from 10% to 50% depending on the product’s origin.
“These tariffs threaten the existence of small businesses like mine and make it difficult to survive, let alone grow,” Schwartz told reporters during the Oct. 28 virtual press briefing.
“Let me be clear, Americans are paying these tariffs, not foreign companies, and the tariffs are a terrible and unsustainable burden. We have to pay the tariffs immediately at the port of entry, and we don’t see revenue from these products for at least five or six months,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz said he and his daughter, with whom he runs the business, can no longer import wines from South Africa because tariffs on products from that country are at 30%.
Other companies that have joined Schwartz in the lawsuit include a Utah-based plastics manufacturer, a Virginia-based maker of children’s electricity learning kits, a Pennsylvania-based fishing equipment company and a Vermont-based women’s cycling clothing company.
Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon were among the states that also filed suit, led by Democratic attorneys general.
The U.S. Court of International Trade and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sided with the plaintiffs and found Trump’s IEEPA tariffs unconstitutional.
The justices will also hear from two Illinois-based toy companies that challenged Trump’s emergency tariffs in a separate case. Learning Resources Inc. and hand2mind manufacture most of their educational toys in China, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand and India. Imports from these countries are subject to taxes ranging from 15% to over 50%, which was unpredictable in the case of China.
Trump says: “The country is rich again”
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday that the case was “one of the most important decisions in the history of our country.”
In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday night, Trump said the economy will “go to hell” if the Supreme Court invalidates his emergency tariffs.
“Because of tariffs, our country is rich again,” the president told CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell, arguing that his employ of tariffs as a negotiating tool will attract billions of dollars of investment from other countries in the United States. Many of the framework trade agreements that Trump announced, including with the European Union, South Korea and Japan, have not yet been finalized.
According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the government has collected $195 billion in tariffs so far this year through the end of September monthly billing.
In a September request to the Supreme Court to expedite the case, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote to the US would face “Catastrophic” financial consequences of up to $1 trillion if emergency tariffs were lifted.
In the same filing, U.S. Attorney General John Sauer argued that the import tariffs were Trump’s “most significant economic and foreign policy initiative … that President Trump has deemed necessary to correct America’s devastating trade deficits and stem the flow of fentanyl across our borders.”
The government faces opposition to these arguments.
Scott Lincicome, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said a ruling against the tariffs “would not lead to financial ruin, as the administration has said.”
“The administration also claims, ‘With tariffs, we are a rich nation. Without tariffs, we are a poor nation’ – except that studies of the United States’ fiscal performance both with and without IEEPA tariffs show that in both cases we are drowning in debt,” Lincicome told reporters at the tardy October press conference.
Cato filed a lawsuit in the case opposing the tariffs.
Some Republicans are breaking ranks
The case has drawn nearly two dozen briefs from court friends urging the justices to declare Trump’s IEEPA tariffs illegal, including one signed by hundreds of Democrats in Congress and one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
The lawmakers argued that the IEEPA “does not contain any of the hallmarks of legislation that delegates tariff authority to the executive branch, such as restrictions tied to specific products or countries, caps on the amount of tariff increases, procedural safeguards, public participation, cooperation with Congress, or time limits.”
In the days before oral arguments, four Republican senators broke ranks and joined Democrats in passing joint resolutions ending Trump’s emergency declarations that triggered tariffs.
One of the bills was passed on October 28th. targeted Trump’s emergency declaration, which led to 50 percent tariffs on Brazilian goods, including the country’s most crucial export: coffee. The symbolic bills are not expected to pass in the Republican-led House, but represent a shift from Republicans’ blocking of a similar measure in the Senate in April.
In his Supreme Court filing, Cato argued that the government’s interpretation of IEEPA “not only stretches the text beyond recognition, but also undermines the framers’ plans for separation of powers. Accepting the government’s theory would mean that Congress can, through ambiguous text and silence, transfer broad legislative authority to the President – an outcome that this court has warned against.”
In an amicus brief supporting Trump’s trade strategy, the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank that was heavily involved in Trump’s second presidential campaign, defended the tariffs as a “pillar of the current administration’s America First policies” and argued that the president had the unilateral power to raise the taxes under a Depression-era law.
Executive Orders and more
Trump began imposing tariffs under the IEEPA in February and March through a series of executive orders and proclamations on products from China, Canada and Mexico, blaming those countries for illegally smuggling fentanyl into the United States
The President escalated In the following months, emergency tariffs were imposed on goods from around the world, declaring trade imbalances a national emergency. In addition to a 10% base global tariff, Trump specifically targeted countries that export more goods to the U.S. than they import from U.S. suppliers.
Just in tardy August, Trump imposed an additional 25% tariff on goods imported from India, bringing the total tariffs on Indian products to 50% because the country uses Russian oil.
In early August, Trump imposed a 40% tax on all Brazilian goods after disagreeing with the country’s prosecution of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro Plotting a coup to stay in power in 2022.
