(Reuters) -A small business on Tuesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to decide the legality of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, saying the court should take the rare step of hearing the case before appeals fully play out in lower courts.
Learning Resources, which makes educational toys, challenged Trump’s tariffs and won a court ruling on May 29 that Trump cannot unilaterally impose tariffs using the emergency legal authority he had cited for them.
But that ruling – along with a similar ruling in another case – has been stayed while the Trump administration appeals, leaving the tariffs in place for now.
The ultimate financial impact of the tariffs, which have often been changed or put on hold early in Trump’s second term, remains unclear.
One JPMorgan analysis said they could be viewed as raising taxes by $660 billion a year. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an April interview with Tucker Carlson that the tariffs could raise between $300 billion and $600 billion in annual revenue for the federal government.
The Supreme Court should act quickly to stop U.S. businesses and consumers from being forced to pay extra for imports based on an unlawful tariff policy, Learning Resources CEO Rick Woldenberg told Reuters.
“That’s a tax and it’s a huge number,” Woldenberg said. “If I go in the Supreme Court now and if they accept the case, it could save American businesses $100 billion or $150 billion just by advancing the date at which the Supreme Court will rule.”
White House spokesman Kush Desai said that the Trump administration was confident it would prevail if the Supreme Court took the case.
“The Trump administration is legally using the powers granted to the executive branch by the Constitution and Congress to address our country’s national emergencies of persistent goods trade deficits and drug trafficking,” Desai said.
Two district courts have ruled that Trump’s tariffs are not justified under the law he cited for them, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Both of those cases are on appeal, and another appeals court is weighing a more limited question of whether lawsuits against the tariffs must be filed in the New York-based federal trade court. No court has yet backed the sweeping emergency tariff authority Trump has claimed.
An appeal in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, seen as the leading case on tariffs, is scheduled for oral argument on July 31, while the appeal in Learning Resources’ case has not set a date for argument.
While the tariffs remain in effect, businesses that rely on imports are essentially being pressed into involuntary service as tax collectors for the federal government, Woldenberg said.
“They hit us with an unbearable bill and then they force us to raise our prices to collect the taxes for them,” Woldenberg said. “This is a way to hide the fact that the federal government is imposing a $600-billion tax, a tax increase with almost no parallel in the last century.”
The Supreme Court rarely exercises its authority to take a case before appeals play out. But it sometimes acts quickly in cases with widespread impact, as it did when it accepted an early appeal and blocked then-President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.
Trump has claimed broad authority to set tariffs under IEEPA, a 1977 law historically used to impose sanctions on enemies of the U.S. or freeze their assets. Trump is the first U.S. president to use it to impose tariffs, and the court cases have challenged two sets of IEEPA tariffs.
Trump has said that the tariffs imposed in February on Canada, China and Mexico were to fight illegal fentanyl trafficking at U.S. borders, denied by the three countries, and that the across-the-board tariffs on all U.S. trading partners imposed in April were a response to the U.S. trade deficit.
(Editing by Rod Nickel and Nick Zieminski)
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