The Court Said No. Again. The President Said He Doesn’t Care.
For the second time this year, a federal court has ruled President Trump’s signature economic policy unlawful. For the second time, the president has shrugged. The pattern — illegal action, judicial rebuke, public defiance — is no longer policy disagreement. It is something else.
On Thursday, May 7, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of International Trade ruled that President Donald Trump’s 10 percent global tariffs are unlawful. In a 2-1 decision, judges Mark A. Barnett and Claire R. Kelly found that the administration had no statutory authority to impose the levies under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. The president’s proclamation, the majority wrote in plain language, is “invalid” and the tariffs are “unauthorized by law.”
It was the second time in four months a federal court has voided the centerpiece of Trump’s economic agenda. In February, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 does not authorize the president to impose tariffs — invalidating the sweeping “Liberation Day” duties he had announced a year earlier. The federal government is now preparing to refund more than $166 billion to importers.
The president’s response to losing in court? He called the judges in the majority “radical left.” Asked whether the ruling would alter his trade strategy, he told reporters: “We always do it a different way.” Six days later, on May 12, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit temporarily paused the lower-court ruling to give the White House time to respond — a procedural reprieve that does not address the underlying legal infirmity.
This is the pattern: act, lose, regroup under a different statute, lose again, refuse to accept the result. The casualties of that pattern are not abstract. They are American families.
1. What The Court Actually Ruled
The legal question before the Court of International Trade was narrow but consequential. Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 authorizes the president to impose temporary tariffs of up to 150 days, but only “to deal with large and serious balance-of-payments deficits.” The administration argued that the country’s roughly $1.2 trillion annual goods trade deficit satisfied that requirement.
The majority disagreed — emphatically. “It is clear that Congress was aware of the differences in the words it chose,” they wrote. A balance-of-payments deficit is a precise economic term referring to the total flow of money in and out of a country. A trade deficit refers only to goods and services. The administration itself, the court noted, had earlier acknowledged the distinction in court filings before pretending it did not exist.
In other words: the White House attempted to reroute a tariff regime the Supreme Court had just struck down through a statute that, on its face, did not apply — and asked judges to pretend two different economic terms meant the same thing. The court declined the invitation. Judge Timothy C. Stanceu, a George W. Bush appointee, dissented on procedural grounds; the two judges in the majority were appointed by President Obama. The reasoning is hardly partisan. It is statutory reading at its most elementary.
“Defendants do not explain why they should be permitted to continue the unlawful collection of Section 122 duties from Importer Plaintiffs.”
— U.S. Court of International Trade, May 7, 2026
2. The Cost To American Families
Strip away the procedural language and the legal architecture, and the substance of the case is simple: the tariffs are a tax — and Americans, not foreign exporters, are paying it. The right-leaning Tax Foundation, which generally advocates lower taxes, concluded that the cumulative tariff regime represents the largest U.S. tax increase as a share of GDP since 1993. The Senate’s Joint Economic Committee Democratic staff, drawing on Treasury data and Congressional Budget Office estimates, calculated that American families paid an average of $1,745 in tariff costs between February 2025 and January 2026.
Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, put it bluntly: “President Trump’s tariffs have been a disaster for American families, driving costs up at the worst possible time.” The committee projects the per-household cost will climb to over $2,500 in 2026.
Average tax increase per U.S. household attributable to Trump tariffs, per the right-leaning Tax Foundation.
Amount the federal government must refund to importers after the Supreme Court’s February ruling.
Share of tariff costs Goldman Sachs estimates will be passed to American consumers over time.
Those numbers translate into the texture of daily life. The Center for American Progress reported that, in 2025, electricity prices rose at 2.5 times the annual inflation rate — the steepest annual increase since 2014. ACA marketplace premiums are projected to rise by a median of 18 percent nationwide in 2026, with insurers in New York, Maryland, and Oregon explicitly citing tariff impacts on drug pricing as a driver. Families grilling between Memorial Day and Labor Day will spend, on average, about $44 more on sirloin steak alone.
Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, delivering the Democratic response to the State of the Union in February, told viewers that the president’s “reckless trade policies have forced American families to pay more than $1,700 each in tariff costs.” PolitiFact rated the claim Mostly True. It is the rare political assertion that survives a fact-check intact precisely because it is calibrated to the data.
3. A Timeline of Refusal
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4. The Question of Capacity
It is one thing for a president to pursue an aggressive economic agenda and lose in court. Presidents from both parties have done so, accepted the result, and reformulated their approach within constitutional bounds. It is something different for a president to lose at the Supreme Court, immediately recycle the same policy under a thinner legal theory, lose again, and respond by attacking the judges as “radical left” while announcing that he will simply find another statute to abuse.
That is not policymaking. It is the procedural equivalent of a person who has been told no by every available authority and continues to do the thing anyway. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, writing on his Substack last month, observed that the president “has come unglued in the face of a war he cannot win — a war that could be the world’s economic undoing and his political unraveling.” Murphy was speaking of Iran, but the diagnosis travels.
“President Trump’s tariffs have been a disaster for American families, driving costs up at the worst possible time.”
— Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Joint Economic Committee
The constitutional question this raises is not partisan. It is structural. The framers built a system in which the president is bound by statute and subject to judicial review. When a president responds to two consecutive judicial rulings against the same policy by announcing he will simply do “it a different way” — when his Treasury must now refund $166 billion because his administration ignored what Congress wrote — the system has reached a place the drafters anticipated and the 25th Amendment was designed to address.
The 25th Amendment and the Question of Fitness
Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, provides that the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet may declare a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” transferring those powers to the Vice President. If the president disputes the finding, Congress decides — with a two-thirds vote in both chambers required to sustain the removal.
The mechanism was drafted in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination but was deliberately written to encompass more than physical incapacity. Its scope is the discharge of duties — the actual fulfillment of the office’s constitutional functions.
What Lawmakers Are Saying
In April, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) introduced legislation creating a 17-member commission authorized by Section 4 to assess the president’s fitness, declaring that Congress has “a solemn duty to play our defined role.” More than 85 House and Senate Democrats — including Senators Ed Markey, Chris Murphy, and Representatives Ro Khanna, Joaquin Castro, and Dan Goldman — have publicly called for either impeachment or 25th Amendment action.
The Constitutional Argument
The argument is not that a president loses fitness because he loses in court. It is that a pattern of conduct — repeatedly imposing policies the courts have ruled unlawful, denouncing federal judges as “radical left,” and announcing in advance an intent to circumvent any adverse ruling — describes a refusal to discharge the office’s central duty: to faithfully execute the laws. Combined with the volatility documented in the Iran rhetoric earlier this spring, the question becomes whether the office is being discharged at all.
The Practical Barriers — Honestly
The barriers are real and substantial. Section 4 requires Vice President JD Vance and a majority of the Cabinet to initiate the process. As CNN reported, there is no indication Vance — a Trump loyalist whose political career was made by the president — would do so, nor any cabinet officer publicly considering it. The Raskin commission bill faces a Republican-controlled Congress and a presidential veto. As a matter of immediate politics, the path is essentially closed.
But the closure of one constitutional path does not erase the case for it. The 25th Amendment was written for moments when the holders of executive power are unwilling to act on what is in plain sight. The historical record matters even when the present-day arithmetic does not. The argument deserves to be made — in Congress, in the press, in the country — because the alternative is to allow a precedent to harden in which a president may ignore court rulings, denounce the judiciary, and pay no institutional price.
5. The Pattern, And The Stakes
The tariff rulings do not stand alone. They are part of a pattern that includes the rhetoric on Iran that produced more than 70 lawmaker calls for removal in April, the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, the deportation operations targeting agricultural labor in industries already facing shortages, and the chaos that the Center for American Progress dubbed the “turbulence tax” — the cost paid by consumers and businesses simply because they cannot predict what the administration will do next.
Jay Foreman, CEO of Basic Fun! — the toy company that was one of the plaintiffs in the Court of International Trade case — captured the practical reality. Targeted tariffs on strategic imports make sense, he told reporters. A blanket 10 percent levy on products from everywhere hurts businesses and consumers. Foreman expects to collect roughly $7 million in refunds for Lincoln Logs and Tonka Trucks his company imported.
That is the inversion at the heart of all of this. A president elected in part on a promise to lower costs for working families has, by every credible analysis — including those from groups that generally favor his economic worldview — imposed the largest tax increase as a share of GDP in a generation, and done so through legal mechanisms two separate federal courts have now rejected. When asked about the most recent ruling, he attacked the judges. The cost is paid in higher electricity bills, higher premiums, higher grocery prices, and a federal Treasury that must now refund $166 billion it should never have collected.
Editorial Conclusion
Two federal courts have now ruled that the central economic policy of the Trump presidency is unlawful. The Treasury will refund $166 billion. Families are paying $1,700 to $2,500 a year for a economic policy the law does not permit and the Constitution does not protect.
The question is no longer whether the president’s economic agenda is failing the American people. It is whether the office is being discharged. The 25th Amendment exists for moments when that question has an answer. The political path to invoking it is, for now, closed. The constitutional and moral case for asking it has never been more open.
Sources & References
- NPRTrade court strikes down a second round of Trump tariffs (May 7, 2026).
- CBS NewsU.S. trade court rules against Trump’s 10% tariffs (May 7, 2026).
- ABC NewsTrade court says Trump’s 10% global tariffs are unlawful (May 7, 2026).
- NBC News / APFederal court rules against new global tariffs Trump imposed (May 7, 2026).
- CNN BusinessTrump’s attempt to impose new 10% tariffs struck down by panel (May 7, 2026).
- The HillTrade court strikes down Trump global tariffs imposed after Supreme Court loss (May 7, 2026).
- Al JazeeraUS trade court rules against Trump’s 10 percent global tariffs (May 7, 2026).
- Al JazeeraUS court pauses decision blocking Trump’s 10 percent global tariff (May 12, 2026).
- U.S. Court of International TradeSlip Op. 25-66 — Court Nos. 25-00066 & 25-00077 (the ruling itself).
- Tax FoundationTracking the Economic Impact of the Trump Tariffs.
- NewsweekTrump tariffs predicted to cost American families $1,300 in 2026.
- U.S. Senate Joint Economic CommitteeAmerican Families Have Paid More Than $1,700 Each in Tariff Costs.
- Yahoo FinanceHere’s how much Trump’s tariffs will cost your family in 2026.
- Poynter / PolitiFactTrump says tariffs help America. Estimates suggest they cost families about $1,700.
- Center for American ProgressA Year in Review: How Trump’s Economic Policies Made Life Less Affordable.
- Center for American Progress8 Ways Trump’s Turbulence Tax Is Costing the Economy.
- AxiosHouse Democrats file long-shot 25th Amendment bill targeting Trump (Apr. 14, 2026).
- CNN Politics25th Amendment: Democrats and right-wing voices call for removing Trump (Apr. 7, 2026).
- NewsweekLawmakers Demand 25th Amendment Be Invoked Against Trump.
- NBC NewsDozens of Democrats call for Trump’s removal after Iran threats.
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