US Court of International Trade Voids Trump’s Section 122 10 % Tariffs

Judicial slap-downs of executive tariff gambits echo the Supreme Court’s 1935 Schechter Poultry decision, which curbed New Deal price codes, and the 1952 Youngstown steel-seizure case—each time courts reined in a president claiming emergency economic powers. Section 122 was created in a fixed-exchange-rate world beset by real balance-of-payments crises (think Britain’s 1967 sterling devaluation); resurrecting it in 2026 to police trade deficits shows how the long post-1970s drift of tariff power from Congress to the White House is now colliding with a judiciary newly wary of broad delegations. On a century scale, this ruling is less about one tariff tranche than about whether the United States continues the 90-year arc from Smoot-Hawley (1930) through post-war liberalization toward today’s populist retrenchment: court pushback may signal institutional limits on unilateral de-globalisation, shaping how future presidents weaponise trade amid geopolitical competition and supply-chain nationalism.