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By Suzanne Blake
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A new Supreme Court ruling has struck down Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs, and now political leaders, including California Governor Gavin Newsom is calling on the president to issue tariff refund checks.
Why It Matters
Trump’s tariffs raised prices across a wide range of items, affecting everything from food and electronics to homebuilding.
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The tariffs, implemented to boost the U.S. trade position globally and restore American manufacturing, resulted in American consumers paying significantly more for everyday items.
How the Supreme Court Ruled on Tariffs
The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 against Trump’s sweeping global tariffs, holding that he did not have the legal authority to impose them under a national emergency law. The justices said the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), originally passed in 1977, does not authorize a president to impose tariffs.
Under the U.S. Constitution, the power to impose taxes and tariffs belongs to Congress, not to the president acting alone, the new decision holds.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said the president must point to clear congressional authorization to impose tariffs, and the IEEPA does not provide it.
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How Did Newsom Respond to the Supreme Court Decision?
The California governor released a statement Friday following the Supreme Court decision, arguing that the Trump administration needs to immediately issue refund checks for the illegal tariffs, paid with interest.
“Time to pay the piper, Donald. These tariffs were nothing more than an illegal cash grab that drove up prices and hurt working families, so you could wreck longstanding alliances and extort them,” Newsom, a Democrat, said in a statement on Friday. “Every dollar unlawfully taken must be refunded immediately — with interest. Cough up!”
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker made a similar demand for the Trump administration, releasing a letter to the president with an attached invoice for $8.68 million following the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“Your tariff taxes wreaked havoc on farmers, enraged our allies and sent grocery prices through the roof,” Pritzker said. “This morning, your hand-picked Supreme Court justices notified you that they are also unconstitutional.”
What Are IEEPA Tariffs?
IEEPA tariffs are import taxes imposed by a U.S. president under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
The IEEPA allows a president, after declaring a national emergency, to regulate or block certain economic transactions with foreign countries when there is an “unusual and extraordinary threat” coming from abroad that affects national security, foreign policy, or the economy.
Trump is the first president ever to use IEEPA to impose tariffs.
By using emergency declarations tied to drug trafficking, illegal immigration and trade deficits, the administration imposed tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico as well as a broad “reciprocal” tariff on nearly all U.S. trading partners.
However, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump using the law to authorize his wide sweeping tariffs, and legal repercussions are still to come.
Are Trump Tariff Checks Coming?
Trump previously said that the U.S. was bringing in “trillions of dollars” and that a “dividend of at least $2,000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”
However, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget previously predicted that such payments would cost $600 billion per year, compared with the roughly $300 billion that Trump’s tariffs are expected to raise each year.
On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she did not have an update on the timeline for the promised tariff rebate checks but added that it’s something that the president and his economic team “continue to very seriously discuss.”
During a news briefing on Friday, Trump expressed his frustration that the Supreme Court didn't rule on what to do with the billions the U.S. has raised as a result of his tariffs.
"They take months and months to write an opinion and they don't even discuss that point," Trump said. "We've taken in hundreds of billions of dollars, not millions, hundreds of billions of dollars. And so I said, well, what happens to all the money that we took in? It wasn't discussed? Wouldn't you think they would have put one sentence in there saying that, keep the money or don't keep the money, right. I guess it has to get litigated for the next two years."
Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor for the University of Tennessee at Martin, told Newsweek that "while refund checks to Americans who have [borne] the brunt of these tariffs would be a logical step to make, the issue of the legality of these tariffs may, in fact, be only the beginning. The administration could still seek to reinforce tariffs under the Smoot-Hawley Tax Act of 1930 and perhaps argue the act could be retroactively applied to the previously implemented tariffs.”
Beene said that if the Supreme Court ruling stands and the Trump administration likely looks to other laws for tariff authorization, it's unlikely consumers will see a refund on the tariffs they've already had to pay unless further legal action is taken.
But he added: “Given the rise in costs on certain items for Americans, it's possible we could start to see legal action taken in an attempt to gain some type of financial retribution for the past year.”
Update 2/20/26, 3:01 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
Update 2/20/26, 4:36 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
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