The Supreme Court of the United States struck down President Trump’s tariff regime for the third time on Thursday. The administration announced replacement tariffs while the ruling was still being read aloud.
The sequence, which legal scholars have struggled to describe using existing constitutional vocabulary, is as follows. In April 2025, the president imposed tariffs on nearly every country on earth under emergency powers. The Supreme Court struck them down in February 2026, ruling that the president does not have the authority to unilaterally restructure global trade by declaring a national emergency at breakfast. The administration responded by imposing temporary 10% tariffs under a different legal authority, with a 150-day timer. On Thursday, as the timer expired, the administration announced new tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on 60 countries under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, citing forced labour. The forced labour investigation was launched in March, three weeks after the Supreme Court ruling, and concluded in four months, a timeline trade lawyers described as “ambitious for a probe covering 60 countries and suspicious for anything else.”
A constitutional law professor at Georgetown, asked to characterise the legal dynamic, said: “Imagine telling a child they cannot have a biscuit. The child puts the biscuit down. Then the child picks up the same biscuit with the other hand and says it is a different biscuit. You take the biscuit away. The child produces a third biscuit from a pocket you didn’t know existed. You are now in a biscuit war you did not plan for and the child has more pockets than you have patience.”
The new tariffs cover 99% of US imports from the targeted countries. The administration has described this as “the most sweeping international labor rights action any country has ever taken.” Trade analysts have described it as “the old tariffs in a hat.”
The EU has said it is “studying the announcement,” a phrase it has now used in response to seven consecutive rounds of US tariffs since April 2025. When asked what the EU had concluded from studying the previous six announcements, a spokesperson said: “We have concluded that there will be a seventh. We were correct.”
The tariffs take effect at 12:01 a.m. Friday. Legal challenges are expected by 12:02 a.m. Friday. The administration has begun drafting replacement tariffs for the replacement tariffs, described internally as “Section 301(b),” and informally as “the one after the next one gets struck down.” A source within the Office of the US Trade Representative confirmed that the drafting schedule now operates on a “rolling basis,” with each new tariff authority being prepared simultaneously with the one currently being announced, “to ensure continuity of tariffs at all times, regardless of judicial interference.”
The Supreme Court has not commented. A clerk was seen carrying a very large stack of paper into the building on Thursday afternoon.