On February 20th, the US Supreme Court delivered a major legal setback to the cornerstone of Donald Trump's economic strategy

by striking down about two-thirds of the tariffs that the administration had imposed.

Specifically, the court ruled that the Liberation Day duties imposed under the International Economic Powers Act, or IEPA, were illegal.

This was not a huge surprise to anyone who had been paying attention.

Before reaching the highest court in the land, these duties had been ruled unlawful by the

Court of International Trade and by a Federal Appeals Court.

The legal issue isn't that the President can never impose a tariff, it's that the power

to tax belongs to Congress under Article 1 of the Constitution, and they've only delegated

that power to the executive through very specific limited laws.

The Supreme Court essentially ruled that the Act, which doesn't even contain the word tariff,

was never intended to be a blank check for trade policy.

Because investors had spent months watching this slow-motion car crash in the lower courts,

there was no major market spike when the verdict finally landed.

In fact, the outcome was so predictable that even the family of one of the men helping run

the policy was seemingly profiting from it. While Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik was championing

the tariffs in public, his sons who now run his firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, were

reportedly buying up the rights to hundreds of millions of dollars in potential tariff

refunds at a deep discount.

Lutnik has denied being involved in these trades, but Wired Magazine reported seeing a letter

from the firm explaining how they were willing to pay

20 to 30 cents on the dollar to buy up tariff refund claims.

The reaction from the White House to the Supreme Court judgment was equally predictable.

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