President Donald Trump holds a chart as he announces a plan for tariffs on imported goods during an event April 2, 2025, in the Rose Garden at the White House.
Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images
A federal appeals court on Thursday is hearing arguments on whether to kneecap President Donald Trump’s global tariff regime.
The oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit are being livestreamed on the court’s Youtube page.
Trump has held up the case as a life-or-death moment for his trade agenda. The plaintiffs in the case say the president has usurped the power of Congress to set tariffs.
“To all of my great lawyers who have fought so hard to save our Country, good luck in America’s big case today,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday morning.
“If our Country was not able to protect itself by using TARIFFS AGAINST TARIFFS, WE WOULD BE ‘DEAD,’ WITH NO CHANCE OF SURVIVAL OR SUCCESS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” he wrote.
Neal Katyal, the lawyer who is arguing against the Trump administration, said earlier Thursday, “The president is saying he on his own with his say so can impose these tariffs.”
“And that is something no president in 200 years has ever thought. The tariff power goes all the way back to the Revolutionary War and, you know, the protests in the Boston Tea Party and the like,” Katyal said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“And our Constitution was very clear in saying, you know, there’s one branch that has the power to tariff and it isn’t the president and it isn’t the courts. It’s the Congress of the United States,” Katyal said.
The case, known as V.O.S. Selections v. Trump, centers on whether the president exceeded his authority by invoking an emergency-powers law to impose a slew of far-reaching tariff policies.
Trump had cited that statute, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, to justify his massive “reciprocal” tariff plan, which set a nearly global 10% baseline duty while slapping higher rates on dozens of individual countries.
Trump rolled out that policy in early April, but after markets convulsed in response he quickly delayed the higher tariffs from taking effect.
Many of those tariffs — including revised rates for countries that have struck agreements with the U.S. or have been targeted by one of Trump’s recent trade letters — are set to snap back into place Friday.
Trump also invoked IEEPA as his authority to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China over alleged cross-border threats.
The last court to hear the case, the U.S. Court of International Trade, struck down both Trump’s reciprocal and “trafficking”-related tariffs in late May.
But the Federal Circuit quickly paused that decision, keeping Trump’s tariffs in effect while the legal challenge plays out.
There are numerous other active lawsuits challenging Trump’s tariffs, but V.O.S. is the furthest along and its outcome could dictate how the other cases fare.
“We will continue to defend President Trump’s executive authority in courtrooms across the country,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on social media before the arguments began.
This is developing news and will be updated.
