President Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Saturday morning to single out Justice Brett Kavanaugh for praise after the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to strike down the president's tariff authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

"My new hero is United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and, of course, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito."

All three justices voted with the minority. Trump added that there was no doubt in anyone's mind that they want to "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN."

As reported by Fox News, the praise came one day after the Court handed down its Friday ruling, rejecting the sweeping tariff powers the president had exercised under IEEPA. It was a significant legal setback, but the dissent from Kavanaugh laid bare just how fractured the reasoning behind the majority opinion really is.

Kavanaugh's dissent exposes the majority's logic problem

Kavanaugh did not mince words. He called the majority's interpretation of IEEPA "illogical," and his dissent read less like a polite disagreement and more like a blueprint for why the ruling will create downstream chaos.

His core objection was straightforward: the statute empowers the president to regulate imports during national emergencies using tools such as quotas, embargoes, and tariffs. The majority's reading, Kavanaugh argued, severs tariffs from that toolkit while leaving the more extreme measures intact.

"As they interpret the statute, the President could, for example, block all imports from China but cannot order even a $1 tariff on goods imported from China."

Read that again. Under the majority's framework, the president can impose a total embargo on a foreign adversary but cannot levy even the smallest tariff. A complete economic blockade is permissible. A modest duty is not.

Kavanaugh wrote that the statute itself does not draw "such an odd distinction between quotas and embargoes on the one hand and tariffs on the other." The plain text, in his view, treats all three as instruments available to the executive when a genuine emergency exists. The majority invented a line the law never drew.

The practical fallout

Beyond the legal theory, Kavanaugh zeroed in on something the majority seemed content to ignore: consequences. The ruling doesn't just reset trade policy. It potentially unravels transactions already completed under the previous tariff regime.

"The United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others."

Think about what that means in practice. Importers collected higher prices from American consumers to cover tariff costs. Now those tariffs may be deemed illegitimate, triggering refunds to the importers. But the consumers who actually absorbed the price increases? They see nothing. The money flows back to corporations, not to the families who paid more at the register.

Kavanaugh acknowledged what both sides conceded during oral argument: the refund process is likely to be a "mess." He also warned that the ruling would "generate uncertainty" across trade deals worth trillions of dollars with foreign nations.

Uncertainty is a gentle word for what happens when the legal foundation beneath an entire trade architecture gets pulled out mid-negotiation.

The broader stakes

Last year, President Trump bypassed Congress and unilaterally levied tariffs on nearly every country in the world by invoking IEEPA. He argued that an influx of illicit drugs from China, Mexico, and Canada, combined with a trade deficit that has decimated American manufacturing, constituted emergencies that justified the tariffs.

That argument resonated with millions of Americans who watched factory towns hollow out over decades while Washington told them free trade would lift all boats. The boats lifted. Just not theirs.

The question the Court answered on Friday was not whether tariffs are a wise policy. It was whether the executive branch possesses the statutory authority to impose them under IEEPA. Six justices said no. Three said the text plainly says yes.

What the majority did not do is offer a workable alternative. If the president can embargo but not tariff, can blockade but not levy, the tool that causes the least economic disruption is the one taken off the table. The blunter instruments remain. That is not judicial restraint. It is judicial incoherence dressed up as textualism.

Where this leaves trade policy

The ruling forces the tariff question back toward Congress, an institution that has spent decades outsourcing hard economic decisions to the executive branch precisely because taking clear positions on trade is politically expensive. Senators who quietly benefited from presidential tariff action without having to cast a vote now face a choice they spent years avoiding.

Foreign governments watching this unfold learn a specific lesson: American trade commitments can be reversed not just by elections but by judicial intervention mid-stream. That does not strengthen the country's negotiating hand. It weakens it.

Kavanaugh understood this. His dissent was not a partisan exercise. It was a warning about what happens when courts reshape executive authority without accounting for the wreckage left behind.

Three justices saw it clearly. The other six looked away.