Rule of Law Clinic Files Amicus Brief in Supreme Court Tariffs Case

[Passages]

October 27, 2025

A bipartisan group of former government officials who served in senior positions across eight presidential administrations filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to strike down President Trump’s invocation of emergency powers to impose sweeping tariffs, which they say are unlawful.

The former officials are represented by the Peter Gruber Rule of Law Clinic at Yale Law School and by Susman Godfrey LLP.

In the Oct. 24 brief, the officials, who have decades of combined experience in national security, foreign policy, and economic affairs, argue that the president has failed to meet the clear statutory requirements Congress imposed for invocations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

Read the amicus brief

Read an appendix to the amicus brief

According to the brief, to accept the use of IEEPA in this case would grant the president “standardless, unilateral tariff powers” that would “dangerously shift the constitutional balance between the legislative and executive branches” and invite precisely the kind of executive overreach the Constitution’s framers sought to prevent.

Officials who signed the amicus brief have addressed national emergencies at the highest levels of the U.S. government dating back to the Ford administration. Signatories include a former federal judge, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, two former ambassadors, a former White House counsel, two former State Department legal advisers, a former deputy secretary of state, a former acting attorney general, a former general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, a former head of import administration at the Department of Commerce, and other former senior foreign policy and national security officials.
https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/rule-law-clinic-files-amicus-brief-supreme-court-tariffs-case

You can read the brief at the link.

[slightlv]

1. This is going to be a real interesting one to watch.

Will SCOTUS continue to act as trump's rubber stamp, regardless of the clarity of the law surrounding IEEPA? That would definitely be the easy way out, as well as pleasing their lord and master, trump.

IF they follow the rule of law, tho, unwinding all this tariff money is going to be a total clusterf*ck. As well as tearing down the one policy trump constantly brags about, even as everyone else is beginning to wake up to what it means to the pocketbooks. And one thing I've not heard anyone mention a word about, is what about replacing the tariff money if his actions are deemed to be as illegal as the law has already stated they are? He's killed about every other policy that could fund the government with tax dollars... including the IRS. And we know his mobster friends aren't going to chip in THAT much money just to have him save face!

I don't know what it would do the U.S.... and I suspect it'll be horrible no matter which way they rule. But I REALLY hope this law is as transparent to everyone to such a degree SCOTUS can't cover trump's backside on this one. Add to that, the tariffs are really dragging down the economy, and hurting his billionaire friends' bottom lines. So even THEY may not have his back with SCOTUS on this one. There is only one thing I know for sure... ETTD. And it's looking more and more like that includes our Country.

Frankly, should SCOTUS rule WITH the law (as they should, and in accordance with the way the lower courts have all ruled), I think we should claw back all that money from Trump, himself. After all, he's done nothing but steal OUR money since he walked into the office. And all these shenanigans with the crypto and meme coins, etc., should cover a bunch of the deficit he'll have caused by giving the lower courts the raspberry and blowing off the Rule of Law, IMO.