Trump’s Justice Department argued that the doctrine does not apply to “foreign affairs,” attempting to gerrymander a massive exception to accommodate its trade policy. But Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett rejected this contention, particularly when those “affairs” implicate “the core congressional power of the purse.” The trio therefore applied the doctrine to confirm the court’s reading of IEEPA. Kagan, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson, wrote that there was no need to invoke “major questions” in this case. Rather, she wrote, “the ordinary tools of statutory interpretation amply support today’s result,” without any resort to rules that put “a thumb on the interpretive scales.” (In dueling concurrences, Gorsuch and Barrett also battled about the true meaning of the “major questions doctrine,” which confirms that the liberals were right to resist legitimizing this slippery, ill-defined rule here.)
Thomas’ separate, lone dissent is even worse: The justice has long endorsed the “non-delegation doctrine,” which holds that Congress cannot delegate its core powers to the executive branch. Yet on Friday, he revised his view, writing that this doctrine does not apply to former “powers of the Crown.” Those powers, Thomas wrote, include tariffs, which are ostensibly not “within the core legislative power.” It is difficult to read this dissent as anything other than Thomas amending his views to accommodate Trump’s power-grabs.
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