Your right. it's a legal and Constitutional issue. The Trump administration used a very specific law as justification for his across the board tariffs. The court acknowledged that there are areas under the law, like national security, where a President has the right to impose tariffs. An across the board tariff of 10% based on trade deficit concerns isn't one of them.
"The
Constitution assigns Congress the exclusive powers to ‘lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,’ and to ‘regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,’" the court opined. "
The question in the two cases before the court is whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 ("IEEPA") delegates these powers to the President in the form of authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world. The court does not read IEEPA to confer such unbounded authority and sets aside the challenged tariffs imposed thereunder," the court continued.
""The court holds for the foregoing reasons that IEEPA does not authorize any of the Worldwide, Retaliatory, or Trafficking Tariff Orders. The Worldwide and Retaliatory
Tariff Orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs," the panel wrote. "The Trafficking Tariffs fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders."