Month: November 2025

The Supreme Court appeared very hostile to President Donald Trump’s emergency tariff system during oral argument this week, but it’s unlikely they’ll delve that deeply into the issue of what constitutes an emergency, legal expert Lisa Rubin told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Thursday. That’s because, she argued, there’s a much easier and less politically fraught way they can strike down the tariffs.”I’m curious . the portions of the hearing I talked about, the portions, I didn’t talk hear as much about were lines of questions about the administration’s really specious use of the word emergency, of the term emergency,” said Scarborough.”Like, 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. 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. I’m curious, did they press the solicitor general on that point? Not so hard,” said Rubin. “Justice Kagan mentioned it at one point, and I think the reason they didn’t mention it, despite its appeal to just common sense, right, is that there’s an easier way out of this. Justice Barrett is sort of known on the court right now for being the person who seeks a solution that as many people as possible can glom onto, and that solves a problem before the court and is few steps as possible, with as few repercussions as possible. Really deciding the issue squarely before her and nothing more,” Rubin continued. “And 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,” she added. YouTube www. youtube. com.