After the Supreme Court announced February 20 it was striking down President Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariff regime, audiences could see in real-time as some right-wing personalities struggled with the basic fact that tariffs are import taxes paid by Americans. Trump himself has also repeatedly and falsely claimed that tariffs are paid by foreign countries and companies for the privilege of entering the U.S. market.
On Friday, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision nullifying a large part of Trump’s tariff policy agenda, finding that he had exceeded his authority by imposing tariffs on dozens of countries around the world. In its ruling, the Supreme Court made clear that “the power to impose tariffs is ‘very clear[ly] ... a branch of the taxing power’” and that Trump had far overstepped his legal authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act by imposing these taxes without prior authorization from Congress.
The fact that tariffs are taxes has been clear to most observers since Trump unveiled his full agenda during a so-called "Liberation Day" celebration last April, with at least one scholar describing his plan at the time as “the largest peacetime tax increase in American history.” Nonetheless, some of Trump’s fiercest sycophants just learned the lesson today.
When discussing the Supreme Court’s decision on Megyn Kelly’s podcast, the Federalist Society's Will Chamberlain noted that per the ruling, “everybody who paid a tariff is probably entitled to a refund.”
Kelly asked in response, “So are we going to get sued by other countries? Is that who's going to sue us, saying, ‘I want a refund of all the tariffs I paid to the United States’?”
Chamberlain simply responded, “No. It's going to be the actual people who paid the tariffs, and, remember, that’s United States citizens and importers.”