The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), in a 6:3 ratio judgment, declared that President Donald Trump overreached his authority to unilaterally impose unbounded tariffs and change them at will using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977 during peacetime.
Mr. Trump criticised the Supreme Court for being “very unpatriotic and disloyal to the Constitution”, suggesting the ruling was influenced by “foreign interests”.
Also read: U.S. Supreme Court rejects Trump’s global tariffs highlights
But the ruling of the Supreme Court was grounded in the interpretation of Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, which recognises the unique power of the Congress to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises”. It read that the taxing power “very clearly” included the authority to impose tariffs. The majority opinion of the court held that the Constitution Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch.
The court reasoned that any delegation of powers to the Executive must be expressly stated in the statute, in this case, the IEEPA. The Bench rejected the government’s interpretation that IEEPA authorised the President to impose tariffs of unlimited amount and duration on any product from any country. Instead, the court invoked the Major Questions Doctrine to hold that the Congress itself “cannot delegate highly consequential legislative powers to the Executive through ambiguous language. It has to be a specific delegation with strict limits”.
The Supreme Court found that Mr. Trump acted beyond the legitimate reach of his office to indulge in a “transformative expansion of the President’s authority over tariff policy”. The Bench said neither historic precedents nor the breadth of authority of the President’s office supported the use of IEEPA to impose “any” tariffs, let alone tariffs of such magnitude and scope. The IEEPA’s half-century of existence has never witnessed the national emergency law being used by the Executive to such a distinct and sweeping extent. Three of the Judges on the Bench, Justices Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson, went on to observe that the court need not even invoke the Major Questions Doctrine to back its reasoning against the President’s tariffs. Ordinary tools of statutory interpretation would suffice to come to the same result.
In the Indian context, the Supreme Court has consistently held that the Executive cannot arrogate to itself essential legislative functions. The Executive has to operate within the bounds of the statute. The principle that the Executive cannot add to existing statutory provisions through Executive orders is anchored in the Occupied Field Doctrine.
The Basic Structure Doctrine, which has shades of the Major Questions Doctrine invoked in the Learning Resources versus Trump, President of The United States case by the U.S. Supreme Court on February 20, called for separation of powers among the three branches of governance — the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary — as judicially interpreted in the Kesavananda Bharati case. A plethora of Supreme Court judgments holds that the government cannot take sweeping economic policy decisions without a statutory foundation, as, like the U.S. Supreme Court said, only the Congress, or in the Indian case, the Parliament, has “access to the pockets of the people.” Though, unlike its U.S. counterpart, the Indian Supreme Court has normally restrained itself from adjudicating on economic policy; it has time and again held that only Executive decisions which affect fundamental rights, are manifestly arbitrary or are taken in bad faith would be subject to judicial review.
In May 2025, the Supreme Court held in the R. Ranjith Singh judgment that the Executive instructions can only “supplement a statute or cover areas which the statute does not extend. They cannot run contrary to the statutory provisions or whittle down their effect”.
The Supreme Court of India found it trite law that the government cannot amend or supersede statutory rules through administrative instructions. But if rules are silent on any particular point, it could fill up the gaps and supplement the rules and issue instructions “not inconsistent with the rules already framed”.
However, the Supreme Court has been restrained, even deferential, when it came to judicially reviewing government policies in the economic arena, even when the Executive act did not have statutory backing as in demonetisation and Aadhaar cases.
The U.S. Supreme Court did not shy away from reviewing and rejecting President Trump’s authority to impose tariffs even though the President had argued that the economic policy decision to impose sweeping tariffs was meant to counter two foreign threats in the form of a public health crisis due to the influx of illegal drugs from Canada, Mexico and China and large and persistent trade deficits which are hollowing out the American manufacturing base and undermining critical supply chains.
In November 2016, the Indian government issued a gazette notification imposing the demonetisation policy on the country, terming it a necessary step to address the infusion of fake Indian currency notes and generation of black money. A Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court upheld the policy. It held that the Reserve Bank of India Act allowed the Executive power to demonetise currency denominations without the requirement of a separate Act of Parliament.
The Constitution Bench in its judgment in the demonetisation case, referring to judicial precedents, said “we do not think that it is the function of this Court or of any Court to sit in judgment over such matters of economic policy as must necessarily be left to the government of the day to decide”. The court did not want to supplant the “feel of the expert” by its own views in economic policy matters, a reiteration of its earlier decisions like in the R.K. Garg and 2022 Balco Employees Union cases.
In the 2009 Aadhaar project, the government went a step further, issuing Executive orders empowering private parties to collect biometric data from the people.
The government argued in the Supreme Court that ‘privacy’ is an elitist concept and Aadhaar enrolment was voluntary. This was despite the apparent situation that Aadhaar had an ostensibly “compulsory element”, as public welfare schemes and banking, among other essential activities, were linked to the 12-digit unique identity card.
The Supreme Court, in a judgment after the government finally enacted the Aadhaar Act in 2016, simply referred to the ‘saving clause’ of Section 59 of the statute to validate the en masse collection of personal data between 2009 and the commencement of the law seven years later.
Published – February 21, 2026 11:30 pm IST
