The February Supreme Court decision striking down the IEEPA tariffs got treated like a major win in some coverage. For the auto industry it changed almost nothing that matters operationally. The tariffs that are actually driving our cost structure are Section 232 tariffs. Those are based on a completely different legal authority and the court did not touch them. Imported vehicles from Europe, South Korea, and Japan are still at 15 percent. Steel and aluminum tariffs are still in force. The $35 billion in cumulative costs that have hit OEMs since the tariff program started are not going away because of that ruling. Cox Automotive was clear about this immediately after the decision. The authority where the real impact sits was never the authority the court reviewed. Anyone who communicated to their leadership team that the ruling would provide meaningful cost relief needs to go back and correct that message.
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Even if the court had…
Even if the court had touched Section 232, the administration would have simply re-enacted the same tariffs under a different statutory hook within weeks. The legal vehicle is not the constraint here. The political will is. Treating any court ruling as durable cost relief in this environment is a fundamental misreading of how this White House has operated every time a trade restriction got challenged.
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