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After Supreme Court defeat, Trump says he’ll increase new tariff to 15% from 10%

President Trump said Saturday that he was raising the global tariff he wants to impose to 15%, up from 10% he had announced a day earlier after the Supreme Court declared most of his tariffs to be illegal.

Trump said in a social media post that he was making the decision “Based on a thorough, detailed, and complete review of the ridiculous, poorly written, and extraordinarily anti-American decision on Tariffs issued yesterday.”

After the court ruled he didn’t have the emergency power to impose many sweeping tariffs, Trump signed an executive order Friday night that would allow him to bypass Congress and impose a 10% tax on imports from around the world. The catch is that those tariffs would be limited to 150 days unless Congress agrees to extend them.

Trump’s post, significantly ratcheting up a global tax on imports to the U.S. yet again, was the latest sign that despite the court’s check, the Republican president was intent on continuing to wield in an unpredictable manner his favorite tool for the economy and to apply global pressure. Trump’s shifting announcements over the last year that he was raising and sometimes lowering import taxes with little notice jolted markets and rattled nations.

Saturday’s announcement seemed to be a sign that Trump intends to use the temporary global tariffs to continue that pattern.

“During the next short number of months, the Trump Administration will determine and issue the new and legally permissible Tariffs, which will continue our extraordinarily successful process of Making America Great Again,” Trump wrote in his post.

Under the order Trump signed Friday night, the 10% tariff was scheduled to take effect starting Feb. 24. The White House did not immediately respond to a message inquiring when the president would sign an updated order.

In addition to the temporary tariffs that Trump wants to set at 15%, the president said Friday that he was also pursuing tariffs through other sections of federal law that require investigation by the Commerce Department.

Trump leveled pointed personal attacks on the Supreme Court justices who ruled against him in a 6-3 vote, two of whom he appointed during his first term, Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. Trump, at a news conference Friday, said of the court majority: “I think it’s an embarrassment to their families.”

He was still seething Friday night, complaining on social media about Gorsuch, Barrett and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who wrote the majority opinion.

On Saturday morning, Trump issued another post declaring that his “new hero” was Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, whom he also appointed and who wrote a 63-page dissent. He also praised Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., who joined Kavanaugh in the minority.

The president said of the three dissenting justices: “There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that they want to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Price writes for the Associated Press.

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Supreme Court rejects Trump’s tariffs as illegal import taxes

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that President Trump’s sweeping worldwide tariffs are illegal and cannot stand without the approval of Congress.

The 6-3 decision deals Trump his most significant defeat at the Supreme Court.

Last year, the justices issued temporary orders to block several of his initiatives, but Friday’s ruling is the first to hold that the president overstepped his legal authority.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., speaking for the court, said Congress has the power to impose taxes and tariffs, and lawmakers did not do so in an emergency law that does not mention tariffs.

“The President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it,” he wrote.

“And until now no President has read the International Emergency Economics Act to confer such power. We claim no special competence in matters of economics or foreign affairs. We claim only, as we must, the limited role assigned to us by Article III of the Constitution. Fulfilling that role, we hold that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs,” Roberts wrote.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch in a concurring opinion stressed the role of Congress.

“The Constitution lodges the Nation’s lawmaking powers in Congress alone,” he said.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito and Brett M. Kavanaugh dissented.

Trump claimed his new and ever-shifting tariffs would bring in trillions of dollars in revenue for the government and encourage more manufacturing in the United States.

But manufacturing employment has gone down over the past year, in part because American companies have been hurt by higher costs for parts that they import.

Critics said the new taxes hurt small businesses in particular and raised prices for American consumers.

The justices focused on the president’s claimed legal authority to impose tariffs as responses to an international economic emergency.

Several owners of small businesses sued last year to challenge Trump’s import taxes as illegal and disruptive.

Learning Resources, an Illinois company which sells educational toys for children, said it would have to raise its prices by 70% because most of its toys were manufactured in Asia.

A separate suit was filed by a New York wine importer and Terry Precision Cycling, which sells cycling apparel for women.

Both suits won in lower courts. Judges said the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 cited by Trump did not mention tariffs and had not been used before to impose such import taxes.

The law said the president in response to a national emergency may deal with an “unusual and extraordinary threat” by freezing assets or sanctioning a foreign country or otherwise regulating trade.

Trump said the nation’s long-standing trade deficit was an emergency and tariffs were an appropriate regulation.

While rejecting Trump’s claims, the lower courts left his tariffs in place while the administration appealed its case to the Supreme Court.

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