Major Questions Doctrine Rises Again: Coinbase CLO Ponders Similarities Between Trump Administration’s Tariff Stance and SEC’s Crypto Oversight Posture
The recent decision of a U.S. Federal Appeals Court to strike several tariffs enacted by President Donald Trump has analysts observing similarities in the stance that the President has taken and the behavior of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding digital assets regulation.
Paul Grewal, CLO of Coinbase, explained on social media that the major questions doctrine, a pivotal argument part of the exchange’s filings in its now extinct case against the SEC, also applied to how the Trump Administration enacted tariffs.
The ruling against several bilateral tariffs enacted under the current administration explains that no president before Trump had invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs on imports or adjust their rates.
The decision states that “whenever Congress intends to delegate to the president the authority to impose tariffs, it does so explicitly.”
Grewal stressed that the court’s reasoning “squarely rejects the Gensler SEC’s ahistorical usurpation of Congress’s authority to regulate crypto transactions as securities.”
“The Court grounded its ruling that the [major questions] doctrine applies in the historical anomaly of the breadth of the government’s exercise of its authority under IEEPA,” Grewal assessed.
Grewal explains that this is the same thing that Gensler’s SEC tried to do, usurping the authority to “regulate transactions as investment contracts that involved no contractual undertaking, no obligation, no anything.”
To avoid this kind of controversy, Grewal urged U.S. lawmakers, both the Senate and the House, to join and pass a market structure bill to bring clarity to the industry. “The absurdity of that era grows clearer and clearer even as it recedes into history,” he concluded.
