Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced on Monday that he would attend the Supreme Court arguments this week over President Trump’s power to levy many of his tariffs, emphasizing how pivotal the case could be to Mr. Trump’s signature economic policy.
“I’m actually going to go and sit hopefully in the front row and listen, have a ringside seat,” Mr. Bessent said on “Jesse Watters Primetime” on Fox News.
Mr. Trump, who has called the case one of the most important in the nation’s history, had mused about attending the arguments himself before backtracking. Had he shown up in court on Wednesday, he would have been the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court.
Mr. Trump has made no secret that he would take a decision against him as a personal affront, and critics had said that his presence could have been seen as an attempt to intimidate the justices. But Mr. Bessent dismissed the idea that his own presence had any such purpose.
“I am there to emphasize that this is an economic emergency,” he said. “National security is economic security. Economic security is national security. As the Treasury secretary of the United States, I’m in charge of maintaining both.”
That is an argument the administration hopes resonates with the court as it considers the case, which could invalidate Mr. Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose sweeping tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner. The effects of the decision, which is considered a tossup by legal experts, could ripple through Americans’ wallets and around the globe.
The challengers to the tariffs say the 1977 law Mr. Trump is using to impose them was never meant to give the president such sweeping powers. The law, called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, has typically been used to impose sanctions and embargoes against other nations. While it allows the president to “regulate” imports, it does not mention the word tariffs, and the Constitution gives taxing authority to Congress.
But Mr. Bessent, repeating the administration’s arguments, said the law did convey sweeping powers in national emergencies.
“This is a matter of national security,” he said, before arguing that the tariffs had motivated China to better police production of ingredients for fentanyl and backpedal on plans to curtail the export of rare earth minerals. “If fentanyl is not a national emergency, what is?”
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