Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. We've got some breaking news just now on the central

economic policy of this Trump administration in a huge blow. So the White House and its agenda,

and a big win, I would say for everyone else, a federal appeals court has just ruled that Trump's

sprawling tariffs are unlawful and invalid.

Of course, the president has been obsessed with imposing his willy-nilly tariffs on Americans.

In fact, it has been the central plank of his entire economic agenda.

Now, it has been wildly unpopular.

It's polling underwater. It is costing consumers and corporations

billions and billions of dollars by the day. It's stopping the Fed from cutting interest rates by

driving inflation. It has, on the whole, been really bad economic policy. And most of the

discussion of these tariffs have been focused on that.

But there's also something about these terrorists, which is that from the jump, they've been pretty clearly illegal.

I mean, think about it for a second.

Can the president just by himself create tariffs that raise hundreds of billions of dollars with zero congressional input?

These tariffs are a violation of the law that they purport to use as the justification

and a violation of the spirit of the Constitution of a country, which was quite literally

founded on the belief.

The executive cannot unilaterally just impose a tax without representation, specifically tariffs.

Now, the Trump administration has claimed that its tariff regime and the reciprocal tariffs that

it has and those on China and Mexico and Canada, that those are an emergency measure under

a 1974 law and that that made it legal. Well, when this was challenged in a district court,

the district court judge said, no way, this does not comport with the law. So the Department

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