Executive Summary
The Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (consolidated with Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc.) marks an important test of the United States’ separation-of-powers framework. Although the central dispute is statutory and focused on whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) empowers the president to impose sweeping tariffs during a declared national emergency, the core issue is fundamentally constitutional. The court has to navigate a direct clash between two constitutional values: the Hamiltonian imperative for executive agility in responding to complex, multi-vector hybrid, or irregular threats, and the Madisonian commitment to decentralized power and legislative oversight in the regulation of commerce.
By agreeing to hear this case, the court has also placed itself at the center of a conflict between three distinct eras of jurisprudence regarding presidential powers over foreign affairs. The oral argument, held on November 5, 2025, revealed a bench somewhat divided not just on the meaning of the word regulate, but on the fundamental architecture of the US system of divided powers in an era where national security threats are no longer purely military.
The specific context of this case involves a two-pronged executive action: the so-called trafficking tariffs, aimed at curbing the lethal inflow of fentanyl, and the reciprocal tariffs, aimed at reversing chronic trade deficits with hostile nations. The administration’s argument is based on the underlying premise that both the drug epidemic and the hollowing out of the American industrial base are forms of foreign aggression that Congress is apparently either too slow or too unwilling to address. The challengers respond that invoking these crises to rewrite the tax code amounts to a legislative usurpation, effectively nullifying Article I, Section 8’s explicit grant of taxing power to Congress
The decision will ultimately turn on how the court triangulates the relationship between the “sole organ” doctrine of United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. (1936), the rigid structural analysis of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), and the modern synthesis of Zivotofsky v. Kerry (2015). As evidenced by the pointed inquiries from the justices, the resolution of this triangulation will determine whether the modern presidency transforms into an office of economic sovereignty—merging the power of the sword with the power of the purse—or remains tethered to the legislative checks envisioned by James Madison.
1. The Context: Hybrid Warfare and the Redefinition of “Threat”
To understand the constitutional questions raised in Learning Resources, it’s important to first look past the dry statutory language of IEEPA and confront the facts-on-the-ground reality driving the executive branch’s action. The administration operates on the assumption that the United States is currently under attack by hybrid warfare, a strategy employed by adversaries like China that blends kinetic potential with economic degradation and social destabilization.
The “unusual and extraordinary threat,” required by IEEPA and declared by the president, is twofold:
- The Biological Threat (Fentanyl). With overdose deaths exceeding 70,000 annually, the administration characterizes the influx of synthetic opioids and their precursors not as a law enforcement issue, but more recently as a chemical weapon attack. The argument is that traditional interdiction has failed, and the only remaining leverage is to impose crushing tariffs on nations that fail to police either their chemical industries or, in the case of Canada and Mexico, the use of their borders to allow these drugs to be transported into the US.
- The Structural/Economic Threat (Trade Deficits). Simultaneously, the administration argues that chronic trade deficits, some with hostile powers, act as a slow-motion siege. By subsidizing their own industries to undercut American manufacturing, adversaries are eroding the US defense industrial base. The logic is that a nation that cannot make its own steel, semiconductor chips, or pharmaceuticals cannot fight a war. Therefore, the reciprocal tariffs are not merely economic policy; they are essential measures of national self-preservation.
This dual framing creates the central constitutional tension. If the fentanyl crisis is a foreign attack on the population, and the trade deficit is a foreign attack on the economy, does the president’s inherent power to repel national security threats override Congress’s specific authority to regulate trade? This framing almost dares the Supreme Court to prioritize abstract separation-of-powers principles over the concrete reality of saving lives and industries.
2. Curtiss-Wright and the Pursuit of Efficiency
The Trump administration’s legal defense rests on a foundation laid in 1936, in the wake of the bloody Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay. Seeking to contain the violence, Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to ban arms sales to the belligerents. When the Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation was indicted for violating the subsequent embargo, the company challenged the resolution as an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power. The District Court agreed with the company, but the Supreme Court reversed, holding that the president possesses inherent plenary powers in foreign affairs, independent of Congress, thereby upholding the embargo and affirming broad executive authority in international relations.
Justice Sutherland’s opinion in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. provided the executive branch with its most potent constitutional weapon. Sutherland famously described the president as the “sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.” The court reasoned that unlike domestic powers, which are carved out by specific constitutional grants, the power to conduct foreign relations is an inherent attribute of national sovereignty. Citing the president’s unique capacity for “secrecy and dispatch,” Sutherland argued that “the President requires a degree of discretion and freedom from statutory restriction in foreign affairs that would not be admissible were domestic affairs alone involved.”
The Hamiltonian Logic of 2025
Curtiss-Wright established the constitutional value of efficiency. It suggests that because the world is dangerous and fluid, the government must be able to speak with one voice and act with speed. In Learning Resources, the administration applies this logic to the modern economy, adding to Sutherand’s “secrecy and dispatch” the argument for negotiating leverage. In 1936, the foreign threat was a specific military conflict involving machine guns. In 2025, the threat is a complex web of supply chains, currency manipulation, and chemical precursors.
If the president is the sole organ of foreign relations, and foreign relations are now conducted through the regulation of global markets, the Hamiltonian logic of Curtiss-Wright dictates that the president must possess the capacity to levy tariffs without waiting for the slow machinery of Congress. The administration posits that IEEPA is merely the statutory vehicle for recognizing this inherent power. By authorizing the president to regulate commerce during an emergency, Congress was acknowledging the reality that Sutherland described: only the president has the intelligence, the unity, and the speed to manage a global crisis.
This highlights the seductive power of the efficiency argument. In a world of crisis, the deliberative process feels like a liability. The administration argues that the “deliberation” the challengers call for is actually a form of policy paralysis that results in American deaths and American bankruptcy.
3. The Steel Seizure Case
The sweeping sole organ theory faced a challenge 16 years later in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer. Amid the Korean War and facing a threatened steelworkers strike that could cripple the war effort, President Harry Truman issued an executive order seizing the nation’s steel mills. He justified the action by citing his inherent powers as commander-in-chief and the aggregate of his powers under the Constitution. It is noteworthy that, unlike in Curtiss-Wright, Congress did not grant the president comparably broad discretion in Youngstown. Indeed, when debating the Taft–Hartley Act, Congress had considered—but ultimately rejected—authorizing the executive to take actions like President Truman’s seizure of the steel mills.
Truman’s argument in 1952, however, mirrors the administration’s argument in 2025. In his executive order seizing the mills, he asserted that “steel [was] an indispensable component” of the “weapons and materials” essential to the war effort, just as the current administration argues that a solvent industrial base is essential to national security. Truman argued that a strike was an emergency, just as the current administration argues that the trade deficit and trafficking in fentanyl are emergencies.
The Supreme Court rejected Truman’s claim, ordering the mills returned to their owners. Although Justice Hugo Black authored the majority opinion, Justice Robert Jackson’s concurrence became the definitive operating manual for the separation of powers. Jackson rejected the “loose and irresponsible use of adjectives” like “inherent,” instead proposing a tripartite framework that measures presidential power against congressional will.
Justice Jackson defined three categories or zones under which to evaluate presidential actions:
- Maximum Authority. When the president acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum.
- The Zone of Twilight. When the president acts in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority, there exists a “zone of twilight” where, according to Justice Jackson, the “actual test of power is likely to depend on the imperatives of events and contemporary imponderables, rather than on abstract theories of law.”
- Lowest Ebb. When the president takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb.
Youngstown affirmed that “emergency” is not a magic word that suspends the separation of powers. Even during a (albeit undeclared) war, the president could not seize private property (a legislative function) simply because it was “efficient” to do so.
Representing the challengers before the Supreme Court in Learning Resources, Attorney Neal Katyal anchored his argument in this Youngstown framework. He argued that the reciprocal tariffs and trafficking tariffs are not just regulating threats; they are taxing the entire American economy—consumer goods, electronics, raw materials—under the pretext of security.
Katyal’s argument echoed Justice Jackson’s admonition that “men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations.” If the president can declare a trade deficit an emergency that justifies bypassing Congress, then he has effectively dissolved Article I, Section 8.
4. Zivotofsky and the Search for Exclusivity
The clash between Curtiss-Wright’s emphasis on executive efficiency and Youngstown’s insistence on separated powers remained largely abstract until the court confronted it directly in Zivotofsky. The case involved a collision between a congressional statute and executive diplomacy regarding the status of Jerusalem.
In Zivotofsky, the Supreme Court ruled for the president, striking down the congressional statute. The reasoning, however, was a careful synthesis of the previous eras. The court accepted the executive branch’s argument, but not on the broad Curtiss-Wright grounds of inherent authority. Instead, it applied the Youngstown framework. Even though the president was in Zone 3 (acting against the will of Congress), he prevailed because the court found he possessed an exclusive power granted by the text of the Constitution—specifically, the Reception Clause, which implies the power to recognize foreign nations.
Crucially, while giving the president a victory, Zivotofsky reinforced the walls around the executive. The court explicitly noted that this exclusivity was rare. In areas where the Constitution does not grant exclusive power—such as the regulation of passports, immigration, and commerce—the court affirmed that Congress retains its authority. In Justice Kennedy’s words, “Curtiss-Wright [does] not hold that the President is free from Congress’s lawmaking power in the field of international relations,” and that the president “is not free from the ordinary controls and checks of Congress merely because foreign affairs are at issue.”
Three members of the current court—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas—participated in the Zivotofsky case. Importantly, all three would have cabined the dicta on presidential powers in foreign affairs from Curtiss-Wright even more than the majority opinion. Chief Justice Roberts, in a dissent joined by Justice Alito, argued that the court’s precedents [had] never accepted [Curtiss-Wright’s] sweeping understanding of executive power.”
Zivotofsky, therefore, creates a massive hurdle for the administration in Learning Resources, and it is a bit surprising that the challengers did not mention it during the oral argument before the Supreme Court. Unlike the Reception Clause at issue in Zivotofsky, which belongs to the president, the power to regulate foreign commerce belongs explicitly to Congress. There is no “exclusive” executive power to tax imports, regardless of the lethality of the goods being imported or the size of the trade deficit.
This exposes the administration’s core weakness: it seeks Curtiss-Wright deference without meeting Zivotofsky’s demand for clear textual grounding. They are relying on a statute (IEEPA) to do work that the Constitution reserves for amendments.
5. The Major Questions of Categorization
Zivotofsky makes clear that Youngstown, and not Curtiss-Wright, governs questions of executive authority. Therefore, the threshold legal question becomes where the IEEPA tariffs fall within Justice Jackson’s Youngstown framework. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, representing the Trump administration, told Justice Thomas, “We are in the area of Youngstown Zone [or category] 1.” In Sauer’s view, Congress expressly empowered the president when it enacted IEEPA in 1977, granting the president authority to “regulate” foreign commerce during national emergencies. Because this statutory delegation is clear, the president is exercising power with the “maximum” constitutional and statutory support.
The challengers argue the opposite—that this is a Youngstown Zone 3 case. They maintain that the authority to “regulate” foreign commerce is different from the authority to “tax” through tariffs. Since IEEPA never mentions duties or tariffs, and because Article I, Section 8 squarely assigns the power to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, and Imposts” to Congress, the president is asserting a legislative power that has not been delegated. In their view, Congress authorized the blocking of transactions and seizure of assets in emergencies, not the unilateral imposition of duties to combat issues like drug trafficking or budget deficits.
6. Strategic Implications: The Imperial Presidency vs. the Shackled Giant
The oral arguments revealed that the Supreme Court is likely to use what has become known as the Major Questions doctrine to resolve this categorization dispute. Under this approach, the court holds that in cases of “vast economic and political significance,” it will not assume that Congress delegated power unless it did so clearly. If the court concludes that Congress granted the president effectively blanket tariff authority—and further holds that IEEPA’s definition of a national emergency constitutes an intelligible principle sufficient to defeat a non-delegation challenge—then the case falls within Youngstown’s Zone 1, and the administration will prevail. If, however, the tariffs are deemed outside the scope of Congress’s authorization, the analysis shifts to Youngstown’s Zone 3, and the tariffs must be struck down as unlawful. After Zivotofsky, simply arguing that the actions—tariffs in this case—are “foreign facing” does not remove Congress from the equation.
Scenario A: The Victory of Efficiency
If the court upholds the tariffs, the Hamiltonian vision will have clearly won. It would symbolize a return to Curtiss-Wright’s sole organ understanding of presidential authority, where the complexity and speed of the modern global economy and the lethality of modern asymmetric threats like fentanyl have rendered the slow deliberation of Congress impractical and dangerous.
Future presidents would be able to use IEEPA not just for targeted sanctions, but for broad protectionism, industrial planning, and revenue generation, all under the guise of “national emergency.” As was alluded to during the oral argument in Learning Resources, if a trade deficit justifies a 10 percent tariff on all goods, climate change might justify a carbon tax imposed by executive order. The check on this power would henceforth be political, not legal.
Scenario B: The Victory of Deliberation
Conversely, if the court strikes down the tariffs, it will be a strong reaffirmation of both the Zivotofsky and Youngstown principle, with the “inefficiency” of the legislative process understood to be a feature, not a bug, of the American republic. A ruling for the challengers would clarify that Zivotofsky’s “exclusive” powers are narrow and that the president cannot invent new economic powers, even to fight a drug war or a trade war.
The decision would also force a return to deliberative democracy. To fight the fentanyl crisis or the trade deficit via economics, the president would be required to build a political consensus in Congress, explaining to the people’s representatives why higher prices are necessary for national security. This path would undoubtedly make the US slower to react. A sudden shift in precursor manufacturing routes or a currency devaluation might go unanswered for months while the House Ways and Means Committee holds hearings. Yet this slowness preserves the foundational logic of the republic: the power to tax and the power to war must be kept separate, lest the executive use the pretext of foreign danger to dominate the domestic population. It forces the executive to persuade, rather than dictate.
Conclusion
In Learning Resources, the Supreme Court faces a choice between two uncomfortable prospects. On one hand, a potentially disabled America, unable to pivot quickly in an era of ruthless hybrid warfare, bound by the procedures of the eighteenth century while its adversaries operate at the speed of the twenty-first. On the other hand, an unbound executive, effectively holding the power to tax by decree, transforms the sole organ of diplomacy into the sole master of the economy.
The oral arguments of November 5 suggest a court wary of the latter. While the justices recognize the horror of the fentanyl epidemic and the strategic peril of trade deficits, the skepticism from both the conservative and liberal wings suggests a reluctance to abandon the structural safeguards of Youngstown. The court appears poised to rule that, while the president must protect the nation, this doesn’t absolve him from legislative checks. The “imperative of events” may be strong, but the imperative of the Constitution—deliberation, separation, and checks—remains the supreme law of the land.