The three-point framework issued by the scholarly Justice Robert Jackson of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. Ltd. v. Sawyer, popularly known as the Steel Mills Seizure case (1952), resonates today with renewed relevance, as we pore over the pages of the judgment delivered on February, 20 2026, in Learning Resources, Inc., v. Trump, President of the United States, where the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the tariff orders of President Trump on imports..
Triumph Of The Jackson Legacy-
In that case, during the crucial Korean war effort, the negotiations between the steel industry and the United Steelworkers Union hit a deadlock, and the strike by six hundred thousand workers had paralysed the production of weapons, which President Harry Truman perceived as an imminent danger to the American Troops serving in Korea. After all other conciliatory efforts failed, the President issued the seizure order to seize all the steel mills and ordered his Secretary of Commerce, Charles Sawyer to take over the mills and run them. The seizure order was challenged. The legal question involved was whether an executive order of the president, without being based on any specific statutory authority, but made in purported pursuance of the powers vested in the President by the Constitution as the President of the United States and Commander of Chief of the Armed Forces was constitutionally valid. Rejecting the defence of the government that the President had acted in exercise of his powers as the Nation's Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, the Supreme Court delivering its opinion through Justice Hugo Black held in unambiguous and unequivocal terms that without the approval of statue or an act of congress or the constitution itself the President has no such independent power, and thus that the seizure order cannot stand in law. In his inimitable style Justice Jackson delivered a compelling concurrent opinion where he distinguished the powers of the president in the backdrop of three different fact scenario and laid down the respective conclusions thereto. Thus, came about the three-point framework which has to the present day, been treated as the touchstone of presidential powers.
First, when the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority and power are at the zenith;
Second, where the President acts in the absence of congressional grant or denial of authority but depends on its own independent powers, such a situation represents a twilight zone where his powers may be uncertain; and
Third, when the President takes measures incompatible with the express or implied will of the Congress, his powers are at its lowest ebb.
Justice Jackson even went further to state that the military powers of the President even as Commander-in-Chief can never be exercises in a manner that supersedes the representative Government in matters of Internal Affairs, holding that such was the import of the constitutional provisions.
Congress, Not President Has Power On People's Pockets -
In Learning Resources, while dealing with the validity of the tariffs imposed on imports by the President made allegedly pursuant to the provisions of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, (IEEPA), the Supreme Court of the United States observed that the Constitution of USA did not vest any part of the taxing power in the executive branch but that the power to tax has been granted to the Congress specifically under Article I, Section 8, which power certainly includes the power to impose tariffs as laid down in Gibbons v. Ogden, and that the framers
gave Congress alone access to the pockets of the people, which is clear from Federalist No. 48 (James Madison). Relying extensively on the Federalist Papers of James Madison as well as Alexander Hamilton, the Declaration of Independence along with Article I, Section 7, which lays down that “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the house of representatives…..”, the Supreme Court held that the President enjoys no inherent authority to impose tariffs during peace time, and it was not even the case of government that the impositions of the tariff were in the exercise of the wartime powers, as it is a fact that the United States was not at war with any nation of the world. The Supreme Court refused to lend its seal of approval to the actions of the President by reading into the provisions of the IEEPA any unilateral power to the President to impose unbounded tariffs. While acknowledging that the President enjoys some independent powers in matters of foreign affairs, the Court held that the President and the Congress do not enjoy concurrent constitutional authority to impose tariffs during peacetime. The Supreme Court went as far to state that even if the congress may intend to give the President broad powers and flexibility in matters of National Security and Foreign Affairs, the same can neither be done through vague language, nor can it relinquish its inherent power to impose tariffs, in favour of the executive, as it is the Congress which has been given that “one great power upon which the whole national fabric is based”, as stated in Nicol v. Ames (1899).
In sum and substance, the Supreme Court held in words clear as daylight, that without congressional authority, the President has no independent authority to impose tariffs either under the constitution or under the IEEPA.
Major Questions Doctrine-
Importantly, the judgment applied the Major Questions doctrine- a doctrine that is an off-shoot of a more fundamental tenet of constitutional and administrative law- Separation of powers- which implies that all major questions relating to economic impact, are to be decided by the elected representatives (Congress) rather than by other administrative agencies like the executive branch of the Government. The Major Questions doctrine, rooted in earlier cases such as Benzene (1980) and FDA v. Brown (2000), came to be consolidated in West Virginia v. EPA (2022) which dealt with EPA's climate regulations, where it was observed that the doctrine is indeed a protection of Article I of the Constitution which vests all federal legislative powers in the Congress. In the case of Biden v. Nebraska (2023), which involved the validity of the forgiveness of the federal student loans by the Biden administration, the Court had held that the Secretary of Education did not have the power to forgive loans under the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act. In Nebraska, like in the case at hand in Learning Resources, the Court had rejected the arguments that the Major Questions doctrine does not apply to emergencies. Rather the Court has restated with approval the erudite satire of Jackson when he said “Emergency powers, after all, tend to kindle emergencies”, to drive home the point that emergencies often offer the pretext for usurpation of power.
The judgement delivered by 6-3 majority, the majority including the Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative colleagues, - Niel Gorsuch and Amy Barett along with the liberals, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Bown Jackson is particularly significant for that very reason. The dissent of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in applying the framework of Robert Jackson in Youngstown by affirming the Government's stand that since the IEEPA had authorised the President, the latter's action is protected under category one, has the cascading effect of turning the law on its head as such an interpretation would mean affirming that the statute had indeed given such powers to the President, which the Government themselves could not point out with certainty. Moreover, Kavanaugh's dissent seems to draw inspiration from the opinion in Youngstown that the limitations on the power of the President in internal affairs do not apply with equal rigour to external or foreign affairs and in that sense, the Major Questions doctrine does not dilute the validity of the President's powers. Such a proposition would indeed disturb the delicate balance of powers envisaged by the Constitution and envisioned by its framers. The logic behind it is further belied by the fact that power of the president in relation to foreign affairs in peacetime, is fundamentally different from that during wartime in the capacity of a Commander in Chief.
The majority opinion made no secret of its judicial conviction in the thought that usually whenever the Congress granted the power to impose tariffs, it has done so with precision and with carefully crafted constraints, both of which have been absent here. The IEEPA's grant of power and authority to “regulate” foreign imports does not contain any such limits, and if it was to be read to have given such a power to the executive from the available statutory text, it would- in the words of Justice Roberts, mean that the President was “free to issue a dizzying array of modifications at will.” The Roberts Court analysed this fact scenario in the historical as well as constitutional context to arrive at the unimpeachable conclusion that the IEEPA which only speaks of regulation and not taxation, cannot be held to have handed such unrestrained freedom over to the executive, and nowhere in the laws of the United States, “regulation” has been treated as being synonymous to “taxation”, the latter being a preserve of the legislature.
The Court Redeemer-
President Trump has often treated the Supreme Court as a political ally, or even worse, a subsidiary of the White House, always confident of its conservative majority. In 2018, when Trump had sourly quipped- “An Obama Judge” on a decision of a lower court judge to accept asylum claims from migrants, no matter how they entered the United States, Chief Justice Roberts who usually contented himself speaking through his judgements, retorted with seething disappointment at such branding and issued a statement. He said “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
The force behind this statement came to be somewhat lost in vigour when the Supreme Court decided Rucho v. Common Cause where the Court in a 5-4 majority,
including Chief Justice, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Thomas and Alito, threw its hands in the air in despair, to state that it was incapable of invalidating partisan gerrymandering, with Justice Elena Kagan pointing out in one of her finest dissents that “the practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government”, stating in no unclear terms that the role of the Court was to defend its foundations, and that “None is more important than free and fair elections.”
What was lost in Rucho seems to have been regained with renewed vigour in Learning Resources, where the Supreme Court has redeemed its neutral image, and sent out a lasting message that it is not a Trump Court, but the Supreme Court.
The author is a practicing advocate at the Madras High Court and Supreme Court
Views Are Personal.