The Supreme Court appeared very hostile to President Donald Trump’s emergency tariff system during oral arguments this week. However, it’s unlikely they will delve deeply into the issue of what constitutes an emergency, legal expert Lisa Rubin told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Thursday.
According to Rubin, there is a much easier and less politically fraught way for the Court to strike down the tariffs.
Scarborough commented on the hearing, saying, “I’m curious… the portions of the hearing I talked about, the portions I didn’t hear as much about were lines of questions about the administration’s really specious use of the word emergency, of the term emergency.”
He added, “This is a president who is claiming that when he gets pissed off while he’s watching the World Series because there’s a commercial about Ronald Reagan, that that constitutes an emergency. And the next day, he can jack up tariffs on Canada.”
Scarborough continued, “This is a president who can get angry because his political ally, who tried to overthrow an election in Brazil, is actually being tried. And so he gets angry at judges down there and then jacks up tariffs to 50 percent. That’s his emergency. It has nothing to do with anything that’s in this statute.”
Rubin responded, “I’m curious, did they press the Solicitor General on that point? Not so hard.”
She explained, “Justice Kagan mentioned it at one point, and I think the reason they didn’t pursue it further, despite its appeal to just common sense, is that there’s an easier way out of this.”
Rubin highlighted Justice Barrett’s approach, saying, “Justice Barrett is known on the Court right now for being the person who seeks a solution that as many people as possible can glom onto, that solves a problem before the Court in as few steps as possible, with as few repercussions as possible—really deciding the issue squarely before her and nothing more.”
She concluded, “Right now, I think the easiest way to resolve this dispute is on that plain language of what does it mean to regulate importation? If the authority that the president is seeking is nowhere in the statute to begin with, Joe, then you don’t even have to have that conversation about whether or not there is an emergency, much less a conversation about how much deference is the president owed when he alone has authority under a statute to decide whether there’s that emergency.”
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-tariffs-2674270672/