Supreme Court tariff decision that will help Kansas, Missouri has a dark side | Opinion
At least for now, the “Liberation Day” tariffs are dead after a fractured Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Congress did not delegate the power to tax imports according to presidential whim in a 1977 law about international economic emergencies passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by Jimmy Carter. The court adopted the common sense position that when Congress says the executive branch has the power to “regulate” something, that does not include the power to tax it.
Farmers and manufacturers throughout the Midwest, including those here in Kansas and Missouri, can breathe a sigh of relief as the erratic Trump administration trade policies come to an end, though that might not be for long. Donald Trump told governors visiting Washington, D.C., Friday morning he has a “backup plan.”
It is not clear where Kansas City families, who the Federal Reserve estimates paid $1,000 extra for goods they bought this year, go to get their money back. Likewise, the damage to international relations and the U.S. economy can’t be so easily undone.
But as reassuring as the seemingly solid 6-3 Supreme Court decision appears to be, behind the scenes, the justices’ multiple explanations of their decision reveal a court dominated by jurists who put their opinion about Trump above their role as nonpartisan referees of American government. The next time Trump’s unprecedented assertions of executive power are put to the test, I fear the result might not be so salutary.
It all concerns an arcane bit of Supreme Court precedent called the “major questions doctrine.” The idea is simple: The court has used the doctrine to decide major cases in recent years by asserting that if the executive branch wants to do something big with what it claims are delegated legislative powers, the delegation of those powers should be crystal clear and unambiguous.
Conservatives love this because it puts a limit around creative White House policymaking that stretches the laws Congress has written giving it regulatory powers. The Supreme Court has invoked this principle when laws have allowed the executive branch to make regulatory policy about pollution, the spread of infectious disease and student loans for instance.
Liberals hate this because it meant that the Environmental Protection Administration’s regulation of pollution couldn’t include simply shutting down coal-fired power plants; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention couldn’t tell apartment owners how to run their business during COVID-19; the Department of Education couldn’t invoke a vague emergency to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars of student loans.
In the decision today, the court’s three Democratic appointees and three of its Republican appointees have flipped their position, creating the chaos that led to a fractured decision in which different sets of justices signed on to different opinions, concurring only in part or having completely different reasons for why they agreed or dissented.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who abhor the major questions doctrine, wrote opinions that said they were not invoking the doctrine, but then hijacked many of the legal arguments behind it.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito and Brett Kavanaugh dropped the doctrine they had previously championed to read immense powers hidden in vague statutory language. They had previously chastised Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson for such logic in previous cases.
I fear that just as the Trump phenomenon has broken the presidential e Cabinet and turned it into a band of mouth-breathing sycophants, and transmogrified Congress into nothing more than a partisan rubber stamp, so, too, a two-thirds majority of the Supreme Court has become unmoored from the principles that put them on the court to begin with.
Even a good decision that protects constitutional congressional powers could come to be seen as a sign that the Supreme Court is now nothing more than a partisan super-legislature standing athwart the democratic branches of government with crumbling legitimacy and without elections.
I hope the justices prove me wrong.
David Mastio is a national columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
This story was originally published February 20, 2026 at 1:17 PM.
