Federal courts have been tightly restricting President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda over the past several months and have now moved on to choking the president’s trade policy, but an appellate court was quick to step in and shield Trump’s tariffs — at least for now.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) issued an unsigned per curiam opinion late Wednesday to virtually the same effect, halting the Trump administration’s much-touted tariffs program. “The Constitution assigns Congress the exclusive powers to ‘lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,’ and to ‘regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,’” the judges wrote. They explained that the question “before the court is whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (‘IEEPA’) delegates these powers to the President in the form of authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world.” The judges concluded, “The court does not read IEEPA to confer such unbounded authority and sets aside the challenged tariffs imposed thereunder.”

In a press conference Thursday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the president will employ alternative mechanisms and tariff authorities “to ensure that America’s interests are being restored around the world.” She further said that the federal judges “abused their judicial power to usurp the authority” of the executive branch. Leavitt added, “These judges failed to acknowledge that the President of the United States has core foreign affairs powers and authority given to him by Congress to protect the United States economy and national security.”

The Trump administration appealed the “unprecedented and legally indefensible injunction” almost immediately, pledging to place yet another case on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket if an appellate court did not stay the order. Late Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a temporary stay of the CIT’s injunction, allowing the president’s tariffs to remain in effect. “The request for an immediate administrative stay is granted to the extent that the judgments and the permanent injunctions entered by the Court of International Trade in these cases are temporarily stayed until further notice while this court considers the motions papers,” the appellate court wrote.

While campaigning, Trump discussed his intended tariffs agenda at great length, noting the substantial trade deficits the U.S. has accumulated with foreign nations, which he said have been taking advantage of American manufacturers, farmers, and innovators for decades. In order to rectify this issue, Trump turned to tariffs, a form of import tax, which has, historically, been used to bolster domestic and local manufacturing and production.

In the late 14th century, the English king Edward III imposed tariffs on wool in an effort to increase English production of wool-based textiles. About a century later, the Tudor monarchs — namely Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I — increased import and export taxes to safeguard the English woolen industry. Starting in 1721, Britain’s de facto first prime minister, Robert Walpole, broadened the scope of tariffs beyond just the woolen industry and imposed heavy tariffs on most manufactured goods coupled with export subsidies in a bid to invigorate and sustain British manufacturing. Such policies would be continued for over a decade.

The British long barred large-scale manufacturing in the American colonies and also forbade colonial authorities from imposing tariffs. But, after the colonies won the American Revolutionary War, the second bill signed into law by President George Washington was the Tariff Act of 1789, imposing a flat 5% tariff on all imported goods. The Embargo Act of 1807, imposing de facto tariffs on European imports, soon incited a rapid rise in domestic manufacturing, particularly in fields such as textiles. Benefitting from those tariffs, American manufacturers beseeched Congress to make those tariffs permanent, which lawmakers did in 1816.

From the early 19th century until the end of World War II, the U.S. maintained high tariff rates, bolstering its own economy and industry and eventually becoming the world’s largest exporter, responsible for producing over half of all goods across the globe. Economic historian Paul Bairoch wrote that the U.S. distinguished itself as “the mother country and bastion of modern protectionism” from 1816 until the 1940s.

President William McKinley, who Trump has upheld as a tariff-wielding hero, was emblematic of the Republican Party’s economic policy for over a century, leveraging high tariffs to protect American industry and workers’ wages. Democrats were largely opposed to high tariffs and, upon taking power in the early 20th century, moved to gut them. The outbreak of World War I, however, scuttled the Democrats’ plans as tariffs were needed to fund war efforts. Starting in 1947, legislators began significantly reducing tariffs, dropping rates from 14% to less than 5% by 1980. Even historically-tariff-happy Republicans began agreeing to diminish the import duties, in a bid to combat the influence of the Soviet Union and bolster what was called “free trade” globally.

The U.S. subsequently racked up significant trade deficits with foreign nations, often keeping tariffs on foreign goods below 5% while other nations imposed tariffs on U.S. goods ranging from 10% to over 70% and, in the cases of many Asian nations, well over 90%. Since the mid-1970s, the U.S. has accumulated a trade deficit of roughly $25 trillion, importing significantly more than it exports and subsequently driving down U.S.-based manufacturing and production. The trade surpluses built by the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century slowly eroded in the 1960s and 1970s, and deficits began rapidly accelerating in the 1990s, leaping from $106 billion in goods deficit in 1992 to nearly $800 billion just two decades later. As cheap imports from foreign nations like China grew, U.S. manufacturing jobs plummeted, with over 80% of manufacturing job losses between 1992 and 2012 being linked to increasing reliance on foreign imports.

During his first term, Trump strategically raised tariffs on goods in specific sectors, such as steel and aluminum, often citing national security concerns, related both to U.S. manufacturing independence and the threat of communist China. Even Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, raised tariffs on Chinese imports, especially technological parts. The ever-expanding trade deficit serves as Trump’s basis for invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in order to significantly raise tariffs. In its appeal to the circuit court, Trump administration attorneys explained that the president’s tariff adjustments are intended “to eliminate our exploding trade deficit and reorient the global economy on an equal footing.”

In a separate case, Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction Thursday halting the Trump administration from imposing tariffs on a pair of companies that filed a lawsuit. “This case is not about tariffs qua tariffs,” the Obama-appointed judge cautioned in his opinion. Instead, he wrote, the case is centered on whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which the president invoked as the basis for his tariff restructuring, “enables the President to unilaterally impose, revoke, pause, reinstate, and adjust tariffs to reorder the global economy. The Court agrees … that it does not.”

“The President has no independent discretion to impose or alter tariffs. … Any Presidential tariffing authority must be delegated by Congress,” Contreras wrote. Although he admitted that the IEEPA grants the president the authority to regulate imports, he added that “the power to regulate is not the power to tax.” Unlike many federal judges over the past several months, Contreras did not issue a universal injunction, instead limiting the injunction to shield only the two companies that filed the lawsuit to begin with. The Trump administration has nonetheless already appealed Contreras’s injunction.