Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s seismic ruling last week against U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, there is little evidence of a Republican clamor on Capitol Hill to make those import taxes legal, even as the president claims that congressional action isn’t necessary.

It’s too early to tell if Republicans have taken to heart the admonishment they received from the high court, particularly in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, for failing to offer any strong protest to the president’s usurpation of their constitutional prerogatives on trade and tariffs. But Trump’s continued search for other novel tariff authorities will eventually likely come to Congress’s doorstep, regardless of some Republican lawmakers’ preferences to not have to take a stand.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s seismic ruling last week against U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, there is little evidence of a Republican clamor on Capitol Hill to make those import taxes legal, even as the president claims that congressional action isn’t necessary.

It’s too early to tell if Republicans have taken to heart the admonishment they received from the high court, particularly in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, for failing to offer any strong protest to the president’s usurpation of their constitutional prerogatives on trade and tariffs. But Trump’s continued search for other novel tariff authorities will eventually likely come to Congress’s doorstep, regardless of some Republican lawmakers’ preferences to not have to take a stand.

After the Supreme Court deemed it unlawful for the president to use a national emergency sanctions law as the basis for most of his tariffs, Trump swiftly responded by imposing new global tariffs of 10 percent (with threats to go to 15 percent) under a different presidential authority.

But that authority—Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act—only allows the tariffs to be imposed for 150 days; extending them beyond that requires congressional action.

“If the president stays on the Section 122 tariffs, that’s 150 days, then Congress does have to speak, and the president has to be able to lay out a plan on that,” said Republican Sen. James Lankford, who despite sometimes criticizing the Trump’s tariff policies, has yet to vote against them in his second administration. “So, this will require more if he stays on that path.”

In Trump’s State of the Union address to Congress on Feb. 24, Trump said that despite the judicial overturning of some of his tariff authorities, “almost all” of the countries that previously agreed to trade deals while under pressure from his tariff threats “want to keep the deal that they already made” and so “congressional action will not be necessary” to uphold his trade strategy.

Regardless of Trump’s bluster, the Supreme Court ruling has in fact undermined significant aspects of his trade leverage, which in turn was underpinning much of his geopolitical strategy for coercing other countries into agreeing to concessions on things like increasing their foreign investments in the U.S. economy, accepting migrants deported from the United States, and as a substitute for sanctions and export controls.

“He’s really used tariffs as a catch-all geoeconomic weapon,” said Edward Fishman, a former State Department sanctions expert in the Obama administration, during a Council on Foreign Relations press call. “This is what we’ve seen with secondary tariffs on India for buying Russian oil or threatening tariffs on trading partners of Iran or Venezuela. That is no longer possible. He can no longer credibly threaten to impose tariffs at the stroke of a pen on a country because they’re not doing what he wants them to do.”

But Republicans are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to tariffs. American voters are generally strongly negative on the president’s tariff policies. But if Republican lawmakers vote against the Trump administration’s tariffs, they risk the wrath of a president who has threatened to support primary challenges against Republicans who defy him.

Still, a small number of Republicans in both the House and Senate have already voted against the president on Democratic-led resolutions to end the tariffs on Canada. And other Republicans who declined to vote with Democrats in their earlier attempts to block the president’s tariffs have now said that they agree with the Supreme Court’s ruling that Trump’s interpretation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) was unconstitutional.

“He is saying that these countries have already reached a deal and that everything is fine,” said Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, a recent House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman. “I would argue that if it was done under IEEPA, it’s vitiated, and he’d have to come back to the Congress for a vote.”

Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno has been one of the few in his party to call for Congress to legalize Trump’s overturned tariffs.

The Supreme Court’s “outrageous ruling handcuffs our fight against unfair trade that has devastated American workers for decades,” Moreno wrote in a post on X. “This betrayal must be reversed and Republicans must get to work immediately on a reconciliation bill to codify the tariffs that had made our country the hottest country on earth!”

But Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson was quick to throw water on the idea of passing partisan legislation this year to codify the administration’s tariff policies. “It’s going to be, I think, a challenge to find consensus on any path forward on the tariffs, on the legislative side,” he told reporters this week.

“Most members of Congress in both parties realize the totally chaotic approach that the president has taken so far has been a disaster,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Warner. “It’s a tax on the American people and frankly limits our ability to work with allies, so it would be hard for me to imagine a world where there’s a majority that would support the president’s tariff policies.”

Added Democratic Sen. Chris Coons: “I’m relieved that the Supreme Court read the law clearly and applied it. … It is clearly a power assigned to Congress in the Constitution, and in my view recent votes taken by narrow majorities in the House and Senate to oppose Trump’s tariffs on several of our close allies started moving us in the right direction.”

However, Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz said that even as she wants Congress to assert itself more on matters of trade and tariffs, she despaired of that happening.

“Congress should be voting more and proposing legislation. If we don’t, administrations will do things,” she said. “I think there are some reasons the tariffs could be useful, some not. We just need to do a better job, but the institution is a lost cause.”

This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration. Follow along here.