Supreme Court Declares Trumps Tariff’s Illegal (Transcript)

 Supreme Court declares Trumps tariff’s illegal

Hi, Bob Barney with the Plain Truth today, and the story today we’re going to do for this broadcastis all about the Supreme Court and knocking down tariffs. I have been railing against tariffs sincethey were imposed. I said they were unconstitutional.

Only Congress has the right to tax, and the tariffs were nothing but a tax on American corporations and American public. That’s the plain truth. And all of those people who really believed that China or these other countries were going to pay the tariff in order to do business with America were being fooled, and in my opinion, being lied to.

And I am grateful that the Supreme Court finally bellied up to the bar and kind of limited the power of the presidency, because the power of the presidency is being right now out of control, and we need to have a Congress do their job, and we’ll get into some of their reaction in a minute. But here is the story from Ben Shapiro about what he has to say, and he was against tariffs as well on a constitutional basis. But this is his story that we’re playing.

It’s about, I guess, four or five minutes long. Alrighty, folks, so huge breaking news. As someone had predicted, that would be me.

When President Trump pushed forward his so-called Liberation Day tariffs, the Supreme Court struck down those Liberation Day tariffs today. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court basically struck down the 10% baseline tariff on all trading partners. It struck down higher reciprocal tariffs, what he called reciprocal tariffs, on dozens of countries.

They weren’t actually reciprocal tariffs because those countries were not actually charging usthose tariffs. We just were charging them higher tariffs on the basis of trade deficits. Drug trafficking tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China, those are gone.

And the 145% effective rate on most Chinese goods is gone as well. The Supreme Court says that the president does not have the unilateral authority or ability to actually just impose broad-scaletariffs. Now, the president does have some specified tariff powers.

We’ll get to that in a minute. But the reason that I had said originally that these tariffs were unconstitutional is because Article I powers of the purse belong to Congress. They do.

That includes, obviously, the power to tariff. Article I of the Constitution specifically names the powers of the purse. And it says that the Constitution includes the authority to tax, borrow money, regulate commerce, coin money, establish post offices, declare war, and raise armed forces.

That is what is in the tax and spend and commerce powers of Congress. Now, the question is what can be delegated, what can’t be delegated, and what also has been delegated. So obviously, in certain specified contexts, Congress has delegated specific tariff authority to the president.

But at any point, did Congress just say to the president, you can tariff anybody for any reason,interminably, at any rate that you want? And the answer there, says the Supreme Court, is no. Now, it’s sort of a fascinating breakdown. I agree with the decision legally.

I think this is obviously a correct decision from the Supreme Court. We’ll get to sort of thefascinating dissents in a second because the breakdown, which was six to three, in my opinion,should have been nine-nothing. But it was six to three for a couple of interesting reasons.

Justice Roberts wrote the opinion. It was joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Jackson. The more traditionally textualist-leaning members of the court actually voted in favor of upholding the tariffs.

That would be Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh joined with them. And I just want to break into this before we continue with Ben Shapiro. And I wanted to use Ben Shapiro.

I’m not a Ben Shapiro fan, particularly, but he was a big Trump supporter. And with the tariffs and some of the things that were going on, he started to at least follow the constitution and follow what should be the right direction of a presidency. And at least he had the nerve to stand up against it when other people and most of the people you see on TV news, businesses especially, refused to stand up against it, even though they knew the tariffs were inflationary.

The tariffs were going to be paid by the American public. The tariffs were going to be also paid byAmerican corporations. And the money raised, at least when it comes to the corporations, they’re just deducting off their income taxes.

And so, therefore, the money really wasn’t raised when the corporations paid for it. The only money raised is what you and I as individuals paid for. And I wanted to get into the three dissenting Supreme Court leaders, Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh, was that they proved again that they are not conservatives.

They are people on the court that claim to be strict reading of the constitution, and that’s how they make their decisions. Clarence Thomas has proven one decision after another. Even sometimes when he’s right about his decisions, his way of getting there is always not conservative and not American.

These people are really playing politics. They are Republican in name only, just like Donald Trumphas been in this Trump 2.0. And they side with Donald Trump. I think if Donald Trump said he wasa dictator and he was going to take full power away from Congress, I think those three wouldactually find a constitutional basis for it.

I really do. And I want to go on with this Ben Shapiro comment, and then we’ll go on to more on this subject. Now, as you know, I’m a Clarence Thomas stan, his biggest fan.

So it takes a lot for me to disagree with Justice Thomas. It’s a rare case where I disagree with Justice Thomas, and also a huge Alito stan, a rare case where I disagree with Justice Alito. The question under consideration here was whether the president of the United States is the unilateral authority under the IEPA, which is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which is the power cited by the president of the United States, to levy tariffs on the entire world at once.

That is the question at issue. The text of the IEPA that was at issue says this, quote, at the times and to the extent specified in section 1701 of this title, the president may, under such regulations as he may prescribe by means of instructions, licenses or otherwise, and here are the key words, investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit any acquisition, holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in or exercising any right, power or privilege with respect to or transactions involving any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest by any person with respect to any property subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. So what the majority found is that that does not include broad scale unilateral gigantic tariff power.

That includes, for example, embargoes for national security reasons, that it includes regulations on the basis of violation of international treaty, for example, but it does not include the ability of the president to simply wake up one morning, print out a gigantic poster board and say there is now a 45% tariff on the Solomon Islands. That was not delegated in the IEPA and I think that is pretty obviously correct. The IEPA does not actually authorize tariff power to the president in the way that the president has done this.

Again, this doesn’t mean the president doesn’t have alternative tariff power. We’ll get to that in a minute. There are other ways the president, if he wants to, can impose tariffs, although in much more specified and targeted ways.

So that’s what Ben Shapiro started. It’s a 54 minute show. You can go onto YouTube and you can find this and we’re not going to put it up, but I 100% agree with his take on this.

And I’ve been saying this on these broadcasts. I don’t think it’s been very popular with a lot of thepeople that listen to this broadcast because too many people think Donald Trump can do no wrong. And that is just simply not the case.

Donald Trump in 2.0 especially has done a lot wrong. And a lot of things that he’s done has actually increased his family wealth at the expense of you and I. And if Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton did this, the same people right now who say he had the right to do all these tariffs would be going crazy with the other side. And that’s how you know that this was a right decision and how you know that Donald Trump was doing the wrong thing.

And I think the reactions of Congress, which we’ll pay here in a minute, also shows a big thing about the Republicans in Congress refuse to do their jobs. And the problem that I have with that is this probably will lead to a really terrible 2026 election for Congress this year. And that’s not what I want.

I’ve said this over and over and over again. I want President Trump to be corralled in like he was in Trump 1.0 to follow the constitution and follow the law. And he needs a cabinet, which he does not have, that will stand up to him, which is just not going on right now.

And he needs a Republican House and Senate to call him out when he is doing wrong and his arrogance is getting the best of him. And that is really what’s going on here. Again, I have to say that this decision was long overdue.

My biggest problem with this decision of the Supreme Court is this should have been announcedearly in January and not this long into the 2026 year. Too many companies are just having troublefiguring out what they’re going to do for their supply chain, including my own. I’ll be right back with a brief message about the plain truth.

Theplaintruth.com is the place to go to to find out what’s going on in today’s news, if God has anything to do with it, what you can do to plan for your future, what investment advice maybe you should think about, what’s going to happen to the United States of America, your family and your future. You can get a lot of that if you go to the theplaintruth.com every day. Thank you.

Well, we’re back and I wanted to talk about this do nothing Congress right now, because that’s the next problem that we really have. Here is a brief one minute show or news broadcast about what members of Congress thought about the Supreme Court decision. Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s global tariffs in a 6-3 decision on Friday, handing him a stinging loss on an issue crucial to his economic agenda.

In the ruling, the majority found that it’s unconstitutional for the president to unilaterally set and change tariffs because taxation power belongs to Congress. Soon enough, reaction quickly poured in from both sides of the political aisle. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell said in a statement, the empty merits of sweeping trade wars with America’s friends was evident long before today’s decision.

Others said- By the way, I very rarely support Mitch McConnell and I’m glad he’s going into retirement. I think in some things he got a lot of Supreme Court nominees of Trump and Trump 1.0 through because he is a politician’s politician, but he was accurate about these tariffs and I will give him his due. But let’s go on to some other reactions.

There’s also chimed in approvingly, including Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and John Curtis of Utah. House Speaker Mike Johnson backed Trump’s use of tariffs, saying they have brought in billions of dollars and created immense leverage for America’s trade strategy. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said the ruling will finally give families and small businesses the relief they deserve.

The court’s decision did not address whether businesses could get refunded for the billions they have collectively paid in tariffs. US Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington state, is asking Treasury Secretary Scott Besant for a plan to be made. So the payback to the corporations is probably going to happen over years and I am again surprised.

Even Donald Trump, and I agreed with what he said, was they should have at least said, yes, people get their money back or no. And he said what they did was they left this off and didn’t mention if they should have to pay it back or not. So it could go through the courts for another two years.

And he was right about that because that uncertainty and also it’s just like the Supreme Court, a bunch of lawyers want to make sure another bunch of lawyers who’s going to represent all these corporations and rob them blind overcharging them. It’s litigation. It seems like our court system, everything to do with our legislative body, our president, everything is about making lawyers more money.

And this is going to make lawyers a lot of money now suing the government, which we didn’t need. The Supreme Court could have answered this right now and not have to go through all the court system and all of the lawyer fees that the American public is going to pay for in order to find out in two years from now, yes, corporations deserve their money back. The problem is, how about the little guy? How about the people like you and I who went to Walmart or our local store and paid for the tariff unbeknownst to us, but you did, and you’re not going to get your money back.

There’s no way you can put in a claim. How do you put in a claim that you were overpaying for your pizza or you’re overpaying for toys you bought for your children for their birthdays? You can’t prove anything. So the American consumer, like always, is just absolutely, what’s the right word without swearing, just cheated, cheated out of their money like always.

So next I want to get into small business people like myself and my wife. We have a paying company we talk about all the time and how many small businesses reacted to the decision. And as you can bet, they were very happy the way the decision went, but they are also worried about restitution of their money that they want.

But what is not being reported in too many cases, there are literally thousands of small family manufacturers and businesses. A lot of those are on Etsy or eBay or small vendors on Amazonthat just could not face the tariffs. They could not raise the prices to their customers and theyended up going bankrupt.

We had the highest bankruptcy. I believe we reported this on a Friday wrap-up about a month ago. The highest bankruptcies last year in 2025 since 2009.

You have to go back to the horrendous Obama years before we had to bankrupt. Not even Joe Biden had the bankruptcies, for example, that we had in 2025. And who are their bankruptcies? Small mom and pop businesses on Main Street that you know who they are.

You maybe buy from them and you wondered why they closed their doors. You couldn’t figure it out, but that’s the reason, the tariffs. And nobody wants to talk about this.

I’m glad to see that our Supreme Court has stepped up for America today and is hearing the people and seeing actual constitutional issues and addressing those. But the price is already up. So I don’t think my roses from Germany are going to suddenly be $2 less next year.

I think everything’s going to pretty much stay as it is. And we’re all going to have to continue to eat these costs. And that is a problem.

And I see this in my business. I’ll give you an example. There is a particular resin that I make that’s made in Kansas City, Kansas.

And very few resins are still made in the paint industry in America. Most all of them because of the EPA and because of the Democrat leadership in Congress and in the executive office, the presidency, chased these businesses over to China 25 years ago and beyond, even in the Bill Clinton years. And so we have a meeting with a salesman from this company who jacked the price of this particular resin up by 30%.

And when we asked him why in the meeting, he said, because of tariffs. And we said, you don’t make anything in China. This particular resin that we use, it’s an industrial resin, but it is used in automotive and it’s a very good resin.

This resin you make totally in Kansas City. And his reaction was, well, we had the costs and thetariffs allowed us to recoup a lot of costs that we were not able to pass on in the Biden yearsbecause of inflation. Does that tell you something? It tells you exactly what we played Ronald Reagan saying what happens when you subsidize weak businesses with tariffs.

They use those tariffs as an excuse to raise their prices. And that woman just said her prices are not going to come down. She already knows they’re not going to come down because once big companies have passed off the tariffs, now it’s a windfall if they don’t have to pay these tariffs anymore.

Now it’s a windfall and they’re just going to keep the prices up there. So inflation is not going to be under control. Say about 50% of our ingredients are imported.

A lot of it’s from Germany, New Zealand, England. The cost to operate is just so much higher than if you were a big brewery with a large facility. This is a small hometown brewery.

Everybody wants these micro breweries. They actually add to the small towns business structure and they’re very good and they’ve been very successful over the last 20 years. And they’re the ones, not Budweiser, owned by South Africa, not Budweiser, not Heineken, not Miller Beer.

They can absorb all of these cost increases, but the little guy is what went out of business here. Here’s another story I want to show you. I feel like the price is going to flip now.

The Chinese parts are going to go cheaper and the OEM price is going to jump up. We were kind of happy that the OEM price dropped and they were a lot cheaper than the Chinese parts and they’re manufactured here. So that was a big plus for us.

But now I feel like more of the parts are going to come out of China. I’ve spent hundreds of hours trying to find substitutes for products that are no longer affordable. In the Italian market, people come in and they expect Italian products.

Right now we’re still stuck with the stock that we’ve paid high prices for. So it’s going to be a long time before a small business like ours starts to see the benefits of the tariffs again. The product,we don’t import any of our products.

We’re happy that all of our products are made here in the United States, extruded here, and sent to us. There have been effects from the tariffs on us, primarily on domestic pricing. Our extrusions have gone up 40 to 50 percent just because the price of aluminum is expensive because it’s made elsewhere and imported into the United States.

So what he’s saying is just what I said here. Although he is 100 percent using American aluminum, American steel, and he’s 100 percent American small business making metal products, they had a 40 to 50 percent increase in their cost of raw materials from American-made aluminum and steel because the tariffs allowed those companies to raise those prices using protectionism instead of good, sound marketing principles in order to raise their prices. What this does, as Ronald Reagan pointed out, and we played these back, I don’t know, what, seven, eight, nine months ago now, we played all the Ronald Reagan tapes on the problems with tariffs.

Like he said, when you give protectionism to American corporations, you make them weaker. They depend on artificial price increases to artificially show a profit. What you have done is take those American businesses and make them uncompetitive throughout the rest of the world.

I got news for those mega people who think everything is about America. This is a world economy. This is an absolute world economy, if you like it or not.

92 percent, believe it or not, 92 percent of goods and services that are going to be bought in the next 50 years are not going to be bought in America. Does American corporations want to shut the door to selling to overseas, to Europe, to Africa, to India, to China, to Japan? That’s what these tariffs have done. I know that.

We started, Tamco started an international division back after the election in 2024, thinking that Donald Trump was going to be very good for manufacturing and represent us for overseas markets. We have not been able to sell one dime of products to any country overseas. Now, in 2025, before the tariffs were announced, we were in the process of closing about five or six container load deals, which would be several million dollars, which for a small company like us would be a lot.

It would have been helping American jobs because I have all American employees. I don’t even have Hispanic or undocumented employees. I have all American-born employees.

What it did was it took away the sales we thought we were going to have, and we just did not get those sales because of the retaliation from around the world. I don’t know how many times my export senior vice president, who’s done this, by the way, for some 38 years, he knows all the players around the world. He travels to over 68 countries every year and has a lot of friends in Africa, Asia, Malaysia, India, Europe, the Middle East.

All of a sudden, people that were really happy to think they were going to buy Tamco products in Europe or the Middle East or in Africa or in India, all of a sudden, they had this, we really don’t want to buy from you if you’re going to ship it from America. It forced us to move more of our manufacturing to China and to Italy where we have a factory, and that is not what I want to do. I do not want to do this, but I got to survive.

I got to survive and compete against the PPGs of this world, the sickens of this world, the BASFs of this world, all the major automotive paint companies who have such a greater advantage than I do because most of them manufacture all of their products in China, and they’re able to get those products almost duty-free into America by either exceptions that the government gave them, you’re picking winners and losers, but the biggest reason is they could produce, let’s say they could produce, and I said this in a show last week, they could produce something that cost them $100 to produce, but they could say it cost them $7 to produce, ship it to America, pay 100% duty on $7 when I have to pay $150 and now $300 for that same product. You see what that’s doing to small businesses in America? There’s a reason that 72,000 restaurants closed last year. There’s a reason, I don’t know the number, but I think it’s something like 20 or 25,000 small American businesses went bankrupt last year, and I know quite a few people on the bankruptcy right now, and it’s all because of these tariffs, and these tariffs were unconstitutional.

If you’re going to say you are a believer that we have to follow the letter of the law of theconstitution, and that’s why you hate Democrats, then you should realize what Donald Trump didwith these tariffs is what Democrats historically have always done with tariffs, protectionism ofunion jobs, and weakening of American corporations who therefore are able to make money on the bottom line by robbing the consumer who cannot go anywhere else to buy something, and that’s the plain truth. That’s what’s happened, and unfortunately, Donald Trump did not take this decision as he should have as a correction to his bad policies. Now, he doubled down, and he’s trying to push tariffs through even in spite of what the Supreme Court did, and then he calls the Supreme Court out as traitors.

A court that finally followed the constitution to the letter of the law, according to Donald Trump, are traitors. I think they’re heroes, but listen to this. This administration is not interested, and in fact is opposed to the very concept of institutions, and every other institution has already been challenged.

The Supreme Court’s all that’s left. You are our expert on matters near and afar. It’s been fascinating to talk to you.

I just wonder, given how closely you watch global affairs, geoeconomics, geopolitics, whether or not you think that what we’re going through at the moment is a consequence of Trump’sneosyncrasies reflected on a fragile and volatile political situation, or whether actually irrespectiveof Trump, the world is now just very, very different, and we’re accelerating towards something even more dangerous, even more chaotic. It’s absolutely both. Remember, I mentioned that we had seven elections in a row here, where the United States, from a global point of view, picked the wrong guy.

We had a chance 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, to come up with a system that was more sustainable for the post-Cold War world, and we never did it. We couldn’t be bothered. So we always knew that the break in the strategic environment was going to happen because it doesn’t work without the United States maintaining freedom of the seas for everybody.

So what he went on to say, and we’re running out of time, what he went on to say is, after Ronald Reagan, we had one president after another that joined NAFTA, that did the WTO, that did all of these things that actually sent jobs out of America. Ross Perot was the only presidential candidate that actually predicted the situation we’re in today. Nobody talks about his name except on this program and that program I just played for you.

But we’ve had the first George Bush administration, then two of Clinton, then two of the second, I always call them King George II administration, then two of Obama. I think we had somewhat of areprieve under Trump 1.0. Our business boomed. I know every single person in the paint businessboomed for four years under the first Trump administration.

He did selective tariffs where they were needed against China and against some of the places that were not playing fair. But this time around, he just, he went total rhino. He went total Democrat.

Tariffs are a Democrat ploy. They are a Democrat way to help pick winners and losers. And that’s all this was about.

And Donald Trump now is trying to pick winners and losers. And unfortunately, and we’ve beenfollowing this with the plain truth, it just so happens that his family businesses are making billions of dollars when he picks winners and losers, because his family is always on the winning side. Think about that.

Because I think this is going to be a problem when we have elections and the Democrats take over. We have a mess coming, a mess like we have never seen in our lifetime. That’s my opinion.

And that’s where I’m going to end the show today. This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com. I thank you for listening. Please keep coming back here because this is a place, I tell you right now, we don’t take advertising.

Nobody controls what we say. They may someday take us off the air and ban us. I don’t know if they can do that or not, but who knows? God’s will.

God wants to get the message out, it’ll get out. Not, I’m gone. That’ll be the end.

But until tomorrow, Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today, saying thank you for listening. Bye-bye.

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