Three judges on the U.S. Court of International Trade just tried to seize the nation’s trade desk. In V.O.S. Selections v. United States (May 28, 2025) Judges Timothy Stanceu, Gary Katzmann and Jane Restani permanently blocked President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, declaring that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not let a president raise duties beyond the narrow caps of the 1974 Trade Act. With one opinion they proclaimed themselves de facto secretaries of Commerce and Treasury, rewrote 90 years of constitutional precedent, and signaled to every future president that customs policy now runs through their chambers.
The ruling misreads the statutes and ignores the Constitution’s foreign-affairs framework affirmed by the Supreme Court since United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. (1936). It is less a judgment than a power grab—an attempt to turn a specialty court created to settle duty disputes into a super-agency that can veto national-security trade tools whenever it dislikes the occupant of the Oval Office.
Trump’s Liberation Day plan imposed tiered tariffs on imports from nations that refuse reciprocal market access. The authority: IEEPA, which allows the president to “investigate, regulate or prohibit” transactions with foreign nationals during an international economic emergency. Congress passed IEEPA in 1977 precisely to give presidents speed and flexibility when hostile states exploit trade channels.
The panel said that flexibility ends at tariffs. While a president may freeze assets or block deals, it ruled, he cannot raise duties without an “intelligible principle” from Congress. Lacking such a principle, the judges tried to shoehorn Trump’s action into Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, which caps tariffs at 15% for 150 days. Anything beyond that, they said, exceeds statutory and constitutional bounds. They did not merely remand; they permanently barred Customs and Border Protection from ever collecting the duties. Pending cases, future cases—same proclamation.
IEEPA’s text is not ambiguous: the president may “regulate” any import or export transaction during an economic emergency that “threatens the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” Regulate means alter terms—freeze, license or tax. Congress knew that; the conference report said the final wording left presidential powers “substantially unchanged.” Courts have upheld that breadth for nearly half a century. The panel dodged that history by demanding an “intelligible principle,” yet the Supreme Court upheld far broader delegations in Algonquin (1976), which allowed unlimited fees or quotas under the Trade Expansion Act. If Congress can give carte blanche to defend steel mills, it can give carte blanche to defend the whole economy under IEEPA.
The opinion also defies Curtiss-Wright, which calls the president “the sole organ of the nation in its external relations.” Foreign commerce is diplomacy; therefore Congress may vest wide discretion in the executive. Later high-court rulings—Dames & Moore, Zivotofsky, Trump v. Hawaii—reaffirmed that logic. The trade judges mention those cases only to wave them away, an extraordinary stance for a lower court.
By voiding the tariffs retroactively, the panel invites importers to demand refunds that could total tens of billions of dollars. Customs would drown in claims, Treasury would lose revenue, and industries already battered by predatory dumping would face a flood of underpriced goods. The injunction also guts U.S. leverage just as Washington renegotiates critical-minerals access with China and rare-earth supply chains with Africa. Trade lawyers in Beijing are already advertising the ruling to clients.
The damage will not stop with Liberation Day duties. Plaintiffs are lining up to challenge the steel, aluminum and auto tariffs the White House re-imposed under Section 232. The panel tried to assure readers those measures remain safe, but its logic—no tariff without a numeric ceiling—undercuts Section 232, Section 301 and every emergency tool presidents have used since Franklin Roosevelt.
Some defenders say the court is merely applying the non-delegation doctrine. Yet the same bench routinely upholds antidumping margins calculated under mathematical “gaps” Congress never codified. Only when a president named Trump acts does the doctrine spring to life. The timing is suspect: plaintiffs filed in early May, and less than three weeks later the judges granted not a preliminary injunction but final judgment. Compare that to the years-long slog steel users endured before the court even agreed to hear challenges to the 2018 tariffs.
The Justice Department has appealed to the Federal Circuit and will seek an emergency stay. Given the stakes—national security, billions in customs revenue, separation of powers—Chief Judge Kimberly Moore is likely to grant it. From there the case heads to the Supreme Court, where the panel’s disregard for Curtiss-Wright will face a chilly reception.
Congress can act faster. A one-sentence clarification—“Tariff authority is an included power under IEEPA”—would vaporize the opinion. Democrats tempted to cheer the ruling should think twice: tomorrow’s president could be theirs, facing a hostile court that refuses to defend pharmaceutical patents or intellectual-property injunctions abroad.
The Court of International Trade exists to adjudicate classifications and duty rates, not to set grand strategy. If the panel wants to rewrite trade law, it should run for Congress. Until then its job is to apply precedent. The executive alone has the intelligence briefings, diplomatic context and electoral accountability to decide when tariffs serve national security. Three judges in downtown Manhattan do not.
Trump’s tariffs will stand or fall on the merits—economic, diplomatic, electoral. But who decides is already settled by the Constitution and nearly 90 years of Supreme Court authority: the president, subject to congressional override, not an unelected trade court. V.O.S. Selections is a judicial coup disguised as statutory hygiene. The other branches must refuse to surrender before three judges reduce U.S. trade policy to a footnote in their résumés.
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