Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump

Hey everyone, this is Leon from Prologue Projects.

“On this week's episode of 5-4, Peter, Rianan and Michael are talking about learning resources”

V-Trump. Early last year President Trump issued a series of executive orders imposing tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada, and China. In the spirit of inclusivity, he expanded the tariffs to include every other country on earth. My fellow American just is liberation day waiting for a long time.

To issue these tariffs without congressional approval, Trump relied on a statute called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows the President to impose economic sanctions and regulate importation during national emergencies. When the tariffs took effect, two small businesses sued the administration, and just a few weeks ago, on February 20, Supreme Court ruled against Trump.

Now, a shame, don't certain members of the court absolutely ashamed.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks, even when they get it right.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have chased away our civil rights, like Iran chasing influencers out of Dubai. I'm Peter. I'm here with Rianan and Michael. I've only loosely seen this story.

“I mean, I've seen the hedge fund guy being like, "This wasn't the trade.”

We wanted when we moved to Dubai. It was to be involved in foreign relations." I came here for a crypto conference. I have no comment. I'm smiling.

I'm rosy-cheeked. I'm laughing. I have anime eyes, but I have no comment. All of our thoughts are with. The influencer is trapped in Dubai.

Prodo by-bling. The next season. Fum. It's going to be off the chain. All of the Dubai real housewives are thoughts are with you.

I mean, imagine having to flee back to America and having no slaves. Just having to pay your service to do stuff. I mean, again, they are at the forefront of my mind. Today's case folks, learning resources, the Trump is a big case from a few weeks back about tariffs and it's unusual for us because it is sort of a good one in that the court ruled

against Trump and struck many of his tariffs down, but we wanted to cover it regardless because it produced many opinions and many reactions from the media. All of them reveal various mental diseases that need to be discussed. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Bring a lecture. I like to take it away. That's it.

That's it. That's as much intro as we're going to get because yeah, this one is just opinions on opinions and then what you get on top of the opinions on opinions is media commentary on media commentary and it's all hot garbage. So let's get into this tariffs.

You know, I sat down to read this case, I sat myself down, I sat to myself self, what's a tariff?

And so our president never learned and you shouldn't have to either say that.

That's what I'm thinking. You know what I mean? But just to give you a very basic rundown of what part of the economy we are talking about here, what did the president try to do, right? In a very basic sense, tariffs are a kind of tax, but there are tax imposed by one

country on goods imported from another country. All right. Goods coming from China, for example, Trump imposing a tariff on that means the American buyer, the corporation by those goods pays a tax on those goods coming from China. Right.

Now, one purpose of tariffs is to ostensibly theoretically like protect domestic businesses from lower priced foreign competition. Hey, China's trucking out those goods and services cheaper than American corporations can do. So we want to protect American corporations.

So we impose a tariff on those imported goods. But unfortunately, there's a huge downside risk with tariffs, of course, in today's global economy.

“I'm going to imagine the amount of things that the American economy imports, right?”

And so a ton of US companies, all of the big ones and many of the small ones are highly,

And so when the United States imposes high tariffs on all of these goods and services,

“it raises the cost of production for American companies, right?”

It increases the cost of the product, and then to keep production costs down that American company has to find the required components from another source, often that other sources not available. So it really fucks things up. Let's just keep it basic, right?

Let's just keep it really basic. We're not getting into nerd, it's pretty simple. But of course, Trump was promising tariffs from the time he was running in 2024. The campaign promise was tariffs, and he's talking in 2024 and through 2025, the justifications for these tariffs being more like foreign policy goals, right?

More stuff around reducing fentanyl in the United States, and, of course, just being aggressive

and wielding a sledgehammer through the global economy. And a trade deficit for our listeners is just an imbalance in the import export volumes between two countries. So, for example, America almost certainly imports more from India than India imports from us, and that's because the cost of manufacturing is very low in India.

So a lot of companies outsource their manufacturing and offer their manufacturing to India. And the result is we have a trade deficit with them, but also you get lower prices on the goods. And also, I mean, it's not just where the manufacturing is, it's also we have more money. So we buy more shit.

Oh, for sure. Yeah, we're buying from other countries, and they're producing things, and they're exporting for their economy, and we are not a big exporter for our economy. I mean, we do export some things, corn, for example, cryptos, ideas, the real housewives. So Trump doesn't understand trade deficits.

He also perhaps is not really understand what a tariff is. He views tariffs as a way to like even these out because he believes that trade deficits mean you're losing money or something. Yeah. And this is sort of lurking behind the whole tariff policy discussion, just like Trump

not actually understanding what a trade deficit is, and perhaps not understanding what a

“tariff is, that gets completely ignored in this opinion, which I think we should talk about”

a little bit later, but this needs to be out there. Right. Right. No, I think this is key. But let's talk about the implementation of these specific tariffs that are at issue

in this case. So in February 2025, Trump announced tariffs on Canada and Mexico, separate category of tariffs on China, but the justification for these, at least the statutory justification, the thing that Trump and the Trump administration are saying allows him to do this under the law is a law called the IEEPA, that's the international emergency economic powers act.

It empowers the president during emergency times to make economic decisions. Right. And we can all recall Trump talking about these tariffs. He's talking about efforts to stop illegal drugs like fentanyl coming into the United States.

He's talking about stemming the flow of undocumented immigrants. He's by imposing tariffs and he's sort of to the like this recall thing back to the 19th century gilded age saying we're going to, we're trying to get back to that by doing today. Yeah.

Well, the federal income tax doesn't exist until the early 1900s, and before that the primary source of revenue was tariffs, right, for the federal government. So he's sort of like, weren't we doing great back then, which feels like itself controversial, but also besides the point and like weird. Yeah.

And so he's sort of doing a few things, like he's very typical of Trump, like a lot

“of justifications just sort of floating in the ether, right?”

Right. It's so typically Trumpian that like you know that somebody told him a story about the gilded age, right? Right. And he's like, you know what?

William McKinley. Like, yeah, let's let's do that, you know? Right.

These are executive orders were issued first in February 2025, then another executive

order in April 2025, that one he called the day that executive order came out liberation day, and under that, this new tariff plan, basically nearly all incoming goods were set to a 10% tariff from those countries I mentioned earlier, and then with about 60 additional countries setting even at higher tariff rates and Trump also stated his intent to use reciprocal tariffs that we're going to be calculated based on countries trade surpluses that trade deficit

sue the Trump administration, and this is how we get to the Supreme Court. Yeah, you sort of have these two categories of tariff, one are like the national security tariffs, right, against China, and Canada, and Mexico, in particular, and Trump's like they're doing fentanyl, and they're doing illegal immigration, and we're punishing them with tariffs, and the other is the reciprocal tariff idea, where all these countries

that we have these trade deficits with need to receive tariffs that are quote-unquote reciprocal so that everything evens out, but for purposes of this case, it's all functionally the same, at least for this issue, so he imposes these tariffs under the IEEPA, this 1977 law, which allows the president to quote "regulate importation during national emergencies." And Trump has declared that this is an emergency, that you got the fentanyl emergencies,

and then you have the trade emergencies, and the question here is whether quote unquote regulating importation, includes imposing tariffs.

“Does this law give him the ability to impose tariffs?”

John Roberts writes the majority opinion here, joined by Barrett Gorsuch Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, and he says no, no tariffs. First he says that the word "regulate" is not ordinarily used to include taxing. There are a lot of laws that allow the president to regulate something or other, but they are not generally understood to give him the power to tax.

Plus the law itself never references tariffs or duties of any kind, plus the court points

out that no president has ever interpreted the law to allow for the imposition of tariffs, so as a matter of historical practice, there's no indication that the law allows the president to do this. And lurking underneath all of this legally is the fact that the constitution expressly grants Congress, not the president, the power to impose duties and taxes, and so a law should

be pretty clear if it's going to delegate that power to the president, right? That's the first part of the opinion.

“That's the one that the liberals join, but there is a second part of the Roberts opinion,”

and that is only joined by Barrett and Gorsuch, the Libs' jump ship here. And this has to do with the major questions doctrine. The major questions doctrine is something that we've talked about before that conservatives really manifest it during the Biden administration in order to, like, thwart much of his agenda.

They created this rule where if there is a so-called major question of policy, they will assume that Congress did not delegate its authority to the president, unless, you know, the law very expressly says otherwise. So the court used this Biden to strike down his student debt relief program, for example, saying Congress did not delegate him that power expressly enough.

The Libs have always opposed this rule because it's basically just a made-up way to defang

the administrative state, so they do not join this portion. Right.

“And just, you know, a reminder, we've talked about this before, but the, the major questions”

doctrine is sort of opposed to the administrative state because it applies a higher burden to Congress to delegate some of the authority to these agencies, and it does so after the fact, like, Congress, you know, delegated their authority 40, 50, 60 years ago for some of these agencies, and now the court is coming in and saying, well, you need it to be more clear.

You need it to be more explicit about what authority you were delegating, which makes it harder for the agencies to function and requires Congress to go back and pass updated statutes and things like that. So that's the Robert's opinion, and then you have three concurrences. So the amount of opinions here, guys, a little bit unwieldy.

And wieldy. It's fucking annoying. That's excessive. Three concurrences.

One each from Cagan, Jackson, and Barrett, Barrett basically dispends for concurrence in

a little slap fight with Gorsuch about the major questions doctrine. Don't care about that. We'll skip that. I was skipping that. You're welcome.

By the way, then you have concurrences from Cagan and KBJ, Jackson. Cagan is joined by the other two liberals. B basically writes to say, hey, we don't need to do the major questions doctrine. We can just interpret the law like normal people in a normal way and it shows that Trump loses, right?

Yeah. Jackson has a solo concurrence, no one joins it, and it's actually kind of interesting. She talks about the legislative history of this law, the IEEPA.

Additional reports are prepared by committees, and they are about a law. They contain things like the reason for the legislation, findings of fact about the legislation. And she's saying, hey, we can look at this stuff and realize that this is not intended to include terrorists. Now, for a layperson, you might think, well, this is sure.

There are congressional reports.

“You look at the congressional reports and you figure out what the law means, right?”

But this is actually very controversial. Conservatives believe that this is sacrilegious. For many years, they railed against the use of these materials, legislative history. They believe that they are unreliable. They're produced by a handful of members of Congress and their staff, you know, what

Conservatives say is like, well, you never know the actual intent of every senator, every

representative who signs off on something, right? So KBJ is doing something kind of interesting here. She's saying, we shouldn't abandon this as a tool for figuring out Congress's intent. She's sort of resurrecting this idea. And she's right, too.

Yeah. I think it's interesting. I mean, Kagan famously said, we're all textualists now. And KBJ comes along like, well, maybe you are, dipshit, you know, not me. This concurrence, very old school clearance Thomas in the sense that it's for law students,

right? She's saying, hey, we lost this battle 30 years ago, three decades ago, everyone said that we were wrong. But we were right. We should have lost that battle.

Take a run with it. Yeah. Yeah.

“So, you know, fuck these other lips who won't join this concurrence.”

Let's do this. Yeah. It rocks. Now, let's go. Let's go.

Yeah.

She's saying, listen to five for.

Right. Yeah. Speaking of old school, Thomas opinions, we've got an instant classic, Thomas dissent here. He comes in hot. He wants to talk about the non-delegation doctrine, which is this idea that Congress

cannot assign certain of its powers to the executive branch, like it does when it creates agencies, administrative agencies. And he says, well, when you're talking about core legislative powers, they can assign those. But that only has to do with the deprivation of life, liberty, and property.

Where does he get this? I don't know. He makes it up. He doesn't cite anything. He's like, well, I know where the Constitution, which says, here are all the legislative

powers. And then just lists all the legislative powers that's like differentiated between any of them. What the fuck are you talking about, dude? But he's like, well, taxing and duties and tariffs, that's not core legislative powers. I don't know about that.

And he's like, so Congress can assign it. Not only can they assign it, they can assign it entirely without limit to the executive

indefinitely to the degree where it can never be peeled back.

Yeah. Right. I don't understand the whole taxing is not a core power thing. What are you talking about? How much more core could it get?

It's right there, right? What if Congress is enumerated? Powers. Exactly. Yes.

I seem to remember so many Supreme Court cases that established that taxation that the tax power is a core power of Congress, right? There's, I don't know.

“I was thinking a lot about like, I was thinking a lot about the Obama care case, right?”

Like, they, John Robert says the Supreme Court says, I mean, I know conservatives don't agree with that, right? Don't agree with that decision. But there are so many cases where it's like, no, it's Congress that has the power to tax.

Like, this is, this is very clear. Right. He justifies this by like going into like British common law and talks about like the king, the king's power to tax, which gets. I just like, Gorsuch, Gorsuch talks about this in his concurrence.

So I don't want to like take too much of this thing out of it. But it's like, yeah, we, we fought a fucking war about that dude. Right. I fought a war about that. We don't have a king that's the difference.

I don't want to get too nerdy, but these natural law purverts, you know what I mean? These weirdo natural law guys, like, Clarence Thomas comes from this school of thought that are rights emanate from God, right, like natural law. And so like the roots of them are felt all throughout the common law, and you can go back to fucking 1547 or whatever, and and maybe glean some wisdom because God, God put

that there. Now, of course he abandoned this all the time. It's like it's very strategically deployed, but it's important to understand that it

you had the king and it's like right, and then we wrote the constitution, right, right.

Right. What's your job? We wrote a car situation to be like, declaration independence, we'd, yeah, right. Like, it's insane. We wrote the constitution so that the head of state wouldn't be like that anymore.

Right. And it, like, again, it's, it's, it's, it's right there, article one section eight. It's like, yeah, the stuff that Congress can do, you know, and like this is pretty clearly one of them. So I, I don't, I don't get it, instant classic tops, instant, yeah.

Yeah. That's right.

You know, we're, we're jumping around a little bit here between concurrences and

descents. Like we said, there's a lot of different opinions here, but we're taking it in this order intentionally. I'm going to talk about the cabinet descent here. Let's, let's spend a little time on this 63 pages of hot, fecal matter 63 pages.

But that's so we can set up the sort of Gorsuch Cudagra concurrency here, where he is so mad at, at every boy at every boy at every boy at every boy at every boy at every boy. That's right. Um, okay. So, Kavanaugh, this descent is, is bad folks.

Kavanaugh is joined by Thomas and Alito. We'll talk in a little bit about how they each get a special boy shout out from Trump

when this decision comes down.

“But I think what characterizes this whole descent, Kavanaugh's entire opinion here.”

Is how wrong it is, and Gorsuch calls this out, but Kavanaugh is like straight up doing like Trump pandering, like supporting Trump policy on tariffs in this descent. Kavanaugh's big arguments here are that tariffs are, quote, a traditional and common tool to regulate importation that the president has the power in lots of different ways by different federal statutes to impose tariffs.

And in fact, you know, under those other laws, those other routes, those, quote, might justify most if not all of the tariffs at issue in this case, Kavanaugh says. So, Kavanaugh saying, well, you know, there are other laws that would green light, Trump imposing these tariffs, well, bitch, that's not the law that is cited as the justification for doing these tariffs.

Well, he's trying to, he's talking to his boy. That's right. He's like Donald. He's winking it Donald being like, hey, hey, hey, this might be legal baby in a different statutory scheme, you know what I'm saying?

This is so, he also makes as part of his argument. He says that that the tariffs have helped Trump's foreign policy since they quote, "helped facilitate trade deals worth trillions of dollars, including with foreign nations from China to the UK to Japan and more."

“So, like, just sort of baldly saying, like, I think this was good foreign policy.”

Trump is doing good business here, you know? We love our daddy Trump. That's right. That's right. Maybe some more technical arguments, although they are all on their face.

Long, Kavanaugh says we shouldn't be extending the major questions doctrine to foreign affairs, like says that's like that major questions doctrine apparently should just be limited to domestic policy. Well, the doctrine that we just made up. Exactly.

That actually has a limitation you might not have heard of. Yeah. Because there are no major questions in foreign affairs. That's right. He also says that the majority is applying the major questions doctrine in an elevated fashion.

To the taxing power. So, you guys are, you guys are changing the major questions doctrine. You're elevating it to something else. Really ridiculous stuff, just completely arbitrary. Hollow arguments here, you know, the IEEPA, the law here that Trump is using to justify

imposing these tariffs says that the president can regulate imports in certain circumstances. Kavanaugh says that the word regulate effectively in all circumstances is a synonym for taxation.

“It says like I think regulate in this statute means taxing.”

Right. He's reading the IEEPA to say the president can tax imports except that's not what it says baby girl. This is something that the Robert's majority touches on, but like this is one of those things where it's like, okay, you might believe that taxation falls under the umbrella of

regulate. Right. Right. When you're talking about laws, there are clear reasons to be specific, right? Which is why, and there are a ton of laws that grant the president the power to, quote

Right.

It's a huge part of any law in which Congress is sort of outlining the scope of an administrative

agency, for example. Right. Right. Right. Right.

It's like automatically means tax. It's just a little bit wild. It's just a hyper aggressive reading, and it doesn't really make any practical sense. Right. Because we have examples of tons, countless examples of Congress also delegating taxation or

tariff or duty responsibility to the executive. And we know what language they use when they do that. Right.

We know how they structure it.

We really put time and like monetary caps on the delegation, like you can do it for X number of years and you X percent. And they use words like duties, levy, duties, and tariffs and shit like that. They don't say regularly.

“Like we know what it looks like when they do this, and it doesn't look like this, right?”

Yeah. And I think that gets to the last argument I'll mention from Kavanaugh's descent, which goes to this separation of powers concerned, right? Big overarching concern about the president imposing tariffs in this way is that it's a massive power grab for the executive branch, right?

Where there's no accountability mechanism and no sort of oversight by Congress, Kavanaugh's trying to like reassure everybody that that like permanent worldwide emergency economic power

can still be constrained because he says that Congress can show its disapproval by, quote,

not approving annual appropriations necessary for the executive branch to continue to implement the tariffs. This is wrong. This is wrong. Congress cannot fight back when the president is raising revenue outside of congressional approval.

From like doing tariffs and handing the cash to his son-in-law, no, this is, this is right. Who collects tariffs? And CBP, it's customs and border patrol. There's no appropriations here. There's no rules, Congress that there's no oversight.

“Look, this is a slush fund for the president, right?”

And Congress has no accountability mechanism here, no oversight, and Kavanaugh's just saying that they do. Yeah. Yeah. There's a weird thing going on here, and it's what I mentioned earlier.

And I wish that one of the lives brought it up, but like the part of the law that this case is really about is whether or not tariffs are included in like the regulating importation under this law. But the other part of this is the fact that Donald Trump has declared these emergencies, right? Right.

And there is something kind of weird going on where the emergency power is very broad under our laws, right? Presidents have a lot of leeway to be like national emergency, right? Yeah. Now, that gives them certain powers under certain laws, including this one, but the, the weird

lurking problem here is that Donald Trump is illiterate, and doesn't understand any of this shit. There's like, you know, these countries are shipping fentanyl in, and it's like, okay, sort of, right, like that's there's like the tiniest sliver of truth to that, then the other emergency is like this economic emergency, and that's just trade deficits, which

“he couldn't pass like a junior year business school exam about, you know, right?”

I also saw in reading about this that like the United States has had a trade deficit for decades, like, yeah, well, I mean, so of course, like, how is it an emergency now, right? Right. I mean, so, you know, there are certain nations where the trade deficit is inherent, right? Right.

I mean, like, or almost inherent, right. It's just sort of like a natural function of the relative size of the two economies. It's one of those things where the reason he has this power is so that like, we have, you know, the ability to act decisively when emergencies actually happen, right? You don't have to fucking operate through committees when a real emergency occurs.

When the homeland is attacked, right? Yeah. Something like 9/11 or an asteroid, right? You need a deep impact sort of president, right? The need for that sort of leeway to be like, it's an emergency.

It's kind of apparent in those cases, but I feel like it's worth just throwing a footnote somewhere. It's like, hey, maybe we should think about what happens when the president can't read. Maybe that's an emergency of a different kind, and we have to voting some resources

Yeah.

Maybe we need a different system.

Maybe we need a system that's more like when you give your sibling the controller that doesn't work. You know what I mean? Let's thank creatively here. Oh, okay.

Yeah, let's get to this gorsage concurrence. That's a good point at the end, the kind of the kind of dissent.

“So yeah, let's move to the gorsage concurrence, which I think is interesting, like to”

be clear, he doesn't disagree with the majority. He signs onto it, and he doesn't have anything different to say about why this case should be decided the way it is.

This is a true haters opinion.

This is an opinion to answer every other concurrence and dissent to be like, no, you're all fucking wrong. I think what's going on here between Cav and Gorsage is that when Cavino was, before he's on the Supreme Court, when he was on the court of appeals, he had this opinion where he coined the term, he called it the major power of doctrine, which is, well, eventually

he would become the major questions doctrine, and I think, I think he might feel a little bit of ownership over it, and he's sort of being like writing this big, principal dissent being like, I'm the major questions guy, and you guys are doing it wrong and stupid. And Gorsage is like, no, you're a fucking deletant and a political hack and you're sucking Trump's dick.

I hate the administrative state. I am the major questions guy, check this out, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you to everyone. And everybody, Amy Cody Barrett, you're a fucking coward, fuck you, you're a squish. That's, that's, yeah, it's like one section, nobody's catching strays here, everybody's in the crosshairs.

Directly. The lips, he's like, you're hypocrites, you're fucking hypocrites, Europeans, you say you're not doing the major questions doctrine, you are, look, look at this, you're doing the major questions doctrine, fuck you, Cavino, he's like, your history's shoddy, your reasoning shoddy, this is a shoddy opinion, and your foreign affairs exception, are you

“fucking on drugs, like, what are you talking about?”

It's great. Before we get to Thomas, I want to talk about a paragraph, he wrote, that gets to my problem with the major questions doctrine, really well, when he's calling Barrett a squish. He's like, look, take FDAV Brown and Williamson tobacco core, there, the question was whether the FPA could regulate tobacco products, looking only to common sense, the answer

would have been yes, Congress authorized the FDA to regulate drugs as a matter of common sense, nicotine qualifies as a drug based on the statutory definition, it's a might even as a matter of everyday speech. Still, we held the FDA, it could not regulate tobacco products. Other cases follow suit, we have ruled that the term "air pollutant" does not include

greenhouse gases, even though those greenhouse gases pollute the air. We have held that the phrase "regulations" necessary to prevent the spread of communicable diseases does not include eviction moratoriums, even without questioning that eviction moratoriums were necessary to prevent the spread of COVID-19, a communicable disease. And we have said that closing coal power plants is not the best system of emission reduction,

even while acknowledging that closing them would reduce emissions. And it's like, yeah, bro, why is this a brag? Why is this like, you sound like fucking moratoriums, you sound like it's like when you're talking about, you're like, yeah, they can regulate drugs, where you said not this drug, and not these greenhouse gases, we have created an elaborate series of excuses to ignore basic

human language.

It's incredible paragraph, it's an incredible paragraph, and it's just like, it's been like

so each hit Amy Coney Barrett, yeah, he's so distinctful, which is great.

“This is the first time I think I've seen another justice respond directly to one of Thomas's”

crazy opinions. I might have missed one, but I'm pretty sure this is it. We were recently talking about this, of course it's just so up his own ass that if he really feels confident about something, he will go at you very directly. And I think Thomas, he is probably losing his minds on Twitter or whatever, like we've

talked about Thomas's solo opinions in the past, he'll do some weird dissents, but they're mostly like internally coherent, and this one is like, you're like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, yeah, and I think, Gorset sort of, like, just smells blood in the water, like, he's ready to be a snarky little bitch.

Thomas has just, like, sort of chummed the waters enough for him that he feels comfortable going out there. Yeah. You can, like, hear the sarcasm dripping off his writing, right? He's like, just as Thomas suggests that Congress may hand over most of its constitutionally

vested powers to the president completely and forever. Yeah.

Yeah. That's so like so. Yeah.

Like, I don't even need to expand on that.

“Like, anybody reading that is like, yeah, that sounds dumb as shit, right?”

Yeah, he does like a lot of what we were doing, and he's like, and of course it was duties on foreign tea that triggered the Boston Tea Party. Are we really to believe that the Patriots that night in Boston Harper considered the whole of the tariff power, some kingly prerogative? He's like, I don't need history.

Fucking use common sense. We fought the war for independence over this, like literally over tariffs, over the king-leving tariffs, like, fuck you, like, what are you talking about? It's great. I loved it.

The opinion is terrible, his position is terrible, and I loved reading every paragraph a bit. Yeah. I enjoyed that.

Which is so different from, like, the experience of reading Thomas, right?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

“It's worth mentioning that the court didn't really specify a remedy here and kicked”

it down to the district court, and so there's a question of, like, well, a lot of tariffs have been collected, like billions upon billions of dollars, what happens to that. You know, companies are suing, saying, we want our money back. There's a question of, well, some companies passed on at least some of that cost to consumers. Right.

So our consumers are going to have a way of recouping the money they paid into tariffs, basically. And the Trump administration has suggested that they're going to fight any efforts that refunds in court. Right.

But the other side of that is that this case originally came to the Supreme Court on the shadow dock at last year, and they let the tariffs remain in effect. Right. They created this huge mess. The argument against doing that was that it creates exactly this mess.

Right. Now half a trillion in refunds is owed to fucking who knows who, but probably a little bit you and me. Yeah, if you're listening to this, they probably owe you 20 bucks, at least, you know.

“And the question is how could you possibly recoup that who recoups in?”

And it's a big fucking cluster. And part of the reason that the Supreme Court said, okay, we'll leave the tariffs in place last year was because the government had expressed that they were theoretically open to refunds. Oh, we can just do a refund.

Now, of course, that the Supreme Court has said, these are illegal. The government's like, go fuck yourself. We're doing, like, you know, talshebets with this money. So you can't have it. I'm betting on the air strikes as we speak.

There's been some developments on the question of remedies after the Supreme Court decision. So I'll happening in the court of international trade, which is a very specific jurisdictionly limited court set up by Congress that geographically covers the United States, because the Constitution says tariffs and duties have to be uniform. And it's one judge who's handling all of these tariff cases under the IEPA that we're

talking about here.

So the judge was like, you know what, fuck this, I don't want a million different cases.

The first case he heard for someone asking for a refund, he was like, yeah, you get your refund. So does everybody else, everybody gets a refund, CBP, you are ordered to give everyone a refund, a very funny moment at conference or whatever where the government got the sense he was going to order this and was like, can we get some time to brief the merits on that

and he just replied, there are no merits, like fuck you. You got nothing to brief, you've lost, like fuck off King. So since then, CBP has submitted a filing basically being like, we can't strictly comply with your order because of the way all this is done, it's all automated, but basically we can reprogram it if you give us like a month and a half, two months, we can reprogram

our entire system and create like a functionality where importers who paid the tariffs can make a claim and we can process them quickly and get those all paid out. And so it does seem like all the companies are going to get their refunds and none of the consumers are. Some pan tariffs on international subscribers.

Do we need to make a claim with CBP? No, I don't think we're going through ports of entry. No, because even that would just be Apple passing the cost of the fee of the tariff to us or like or a patreon, right, so they would get the money. And other small business screwed by Donald Trump, you may have paid some pass through a

cost suntrek. It's possible, it's gotten, got knows how affordable the trick would have been without tariffs. So we're like an only dream of.

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The president's response to this case, the media's response to this case,

law professors response to this case.

So starting with Trump, President Trump had lots of psychotic, lots of, absolutely psychotic, petty, immature things to say about this decision coming down. A reporter at a press conference on February 20th, asked Trump if he regrets nominating Gorsuch and Barrett, he said, quote, "I don't want to say whether or not I regret. I think their decision was terrible.

“I think it's an embarrassment to their families."”

You want to know the truth, the two of them, and embarrassment to their families. Oh, he's such a caddy little bitch. It's so great. And embarrassment to their families is fucking hilarious. Then next day, he posted on truth social. "My new hero is United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh."

And of course, Justice is Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. "There is no doubt in anyone's mind that they want to make America great again." I agree with him on that. "There is no doubt in anyone's mind that they want to make America great again. They are back up built." He had so many truth social posts about this case, like he was losing it.

He was losing it. Some of them are lost. We can't even read them to you. They're just so long. They're rambling in the way that his posts often are, lots of random capitalization and shit like that. A few days later, he said, "The recent decision of the United States Supreme Court concerning tariffs, all caps tariffs, could allow for hundreds of billions of dollars to be returned to countries and companies that have been, quote, ripping off

the United States of America for many years." A little bit later, he says, "Is a rehearing or rejudication of this case possible?" Question mark question mark question mark question mark.

“He wants an appeal from the Supreme Court. Where's it going to go?”

"A appeal to God, dude." Yes, it's so good. It's so good. I think we're all sort of used to it now, but his thing where he just like randomly puts quotes around something or capitalizes something. If one of your friends started talking like this, you'd be like, "Oh no, it's an episode of some kind." They're mentally ill and need to figure out what it is so I can help them. Now it's just like, we've been looking at

a for 10 years and say you're sort of like, "Yep, that's a Trump post, all right." Yeah, yeah. Last thing I'll say in Michael, you made the point when we were talking about Kavanaugh's dissent that Kavanaugh was clearly spotlighting other statutory routes that other statutory justifications that Trump could take for imposing these tariffs and Trump, himself, said that. "Our country is the hottest anywhere in the world." Right, hottest.

Our country is the hottest anywhere in the world, but now I'm going in different direction, which is even stronger than the original choice. As Justice Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent, and he quotes Kavanaugh's dissent saying the other statutes that Trump can use, "Thank you, Justice Kavanaugh." Thank you, Justice Kavanaugh. And so that's our president losing his mind, folks. Yeah. And Justice Kavanaugh losing his mind.

moderate block. 33-3-3-4-3. Yeah. Yeah. It's a New York rubber team. Yeah. He's a Lincoln Trump tank. Let's talk

“about the media response because we got some good ones. Speaking of mental illness.”

After a full year of the Supreme Court, citing with Trump in statistically anomalous rates, right? Yes. Like, two degrees that would shock experts and no one could explain other than bias. A single Trump loss has emerged. And you know that the dipshits at the New York Times are all over it. Right. The democracy saved everybody. Chief legal correspondent at the Times, Adam Liptack wrote a piece called, "The Supreme Court's Declaration of Independence."

Like, God, I didn't know that was the headline. Yeah. Yeah. He said it's a lot like when we declared independence from the British. I see. Yeah. That's the comparison in case you're unfamiliar. He's comparing this to the revolution. So, he says, starting with the 2024 decision that gave President Trump's substantial immunity from prosecution and continuing through a score of emergency

orders provisionally greenlighting and array of his second term initiatives. Mr. Trump has had an

extraordinarily successful run before the Supreme Court. Mm-hmm. That came to a sudden jolting halt on Friday when Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. I don't want to say anything. You've been middle initial. Writing for six members of the court, roundly rejected Mr. Trump's signature tariffs program. It was the Supreme Court's first merits ruling, a final judgment on the lawfulness of an executive action on an element of the administration's

second term agenda. It amounted to a declaration of independence. So, again, he admits that President Trump has been on a roll in front of the Supreme Court and then he loses one case. It hurls a new era. And it's a declaration of independence. Unbelieveable. Unbelieveable. And also, like, we don't even know how this is going to shake out. What if they uphold the new tariffs? Right? Like, what? Right. No one has any idea. What if the district court is like these remedies are like not administrative and the

Supreme Court is like, okay. Yeah. Right. Like, you know, we don't know what's going to happen. We also don't know what's going to happen with the feet. He says it like this means the court is going to

“start painting Trump else. Right. Maybe, maybe, but maybe not, maybe not. Like, who are you to say that?”

Like, based on one fucking case. Like, it's just bizarre. I mean, so he also said in his first

administration, Mr. Trump did poorly in the Supreme Court in argued cases, he prevailed only 42% of the time, the lowest rate since at least Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. In other words, a fundamentally conservative court with a six justice majority of Republican appointees that included three named by Mr. Trump himself had not been particularly receptive to his arguments. I posted about this on blue sky and just to point out that there was not a six justice

conservative majority during his first term. And I know, you know, I posted, like, I think that, like, the chief legal correspondent for the New York Times should know that. Right. It just feels simple to me. Right. Should know that it was a five four court literally until like during the election, like, October of the election. Right. And then, so like two hours after I posted that,

“there was a correction, which I will take credit for, I think that's right. But I also want to point out”

correction aside, if you're going to like write a piece about the courts independence from Trump, and like, how about some data from this term? Like, right. You're like, yeah, back in 2017, they actually didn't quite agree with him that much. It's like, all right. What, what, what's happening now? Surely, surely the new data would be interesting to look at. No. Right. Another Supreme Court watcher over at the New York Times, Linda Greenhouse, the headline Roberts' losing

patience with Trump, or there's an alternate headline, John Roberts sent Trump a message. Wow. It starts off with chief justice, John Roberts doesn't waste words. His majority opinion in last week's tariff ruling was characteristically a model of succinctness. Where where? Now false. Which where? Similar to how Adam Lippax should know that it was not six to three

during Trump's first term. Maybe even worse, because that was probably a brain fart. You know what I

mean? Right. Like, he, he, he just brain farted that. He could have answered that question.

the court. Right. He just brain farted because he's, because he's stupid and old. Now,

“Linda Greenhouse saying that Roberts is like, typically succinct is outrageous too.”

Does it make sense? Nobody has ever said that. Nobody has ever described John Roberts as succinct. Also, this is one of those things that's relatively verifiable empirically. There's like empirical scotists, which is like a blog that tracks like random Supreme Court

data shit. And they've always found that Roberts is one of the more of her posts in the sense

that his opinions tend to be longer. Right. So like what, you can't just say this. You can't just say this in the New York Times. You don't fuck what are you talking about? Anyway, that piss me off as someone who has to professionally read John Roberts opinion. You know what I mean? I was just like, don't fucking talk if he does too. Yeah. You would think, but now I feel like maybe she doesn't say. But maybe not, maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe reads his private press releases that he sends

“to his favorite reporters. No, she's asking Chad, GPT. Here is some of these substantive”

portions of this piece. For the past year, the Trump administration has trolled the Supreme Court sending up one emergency application after another to demand temporary relief from adverse lower court rulings. The administration frequently got what it wanted, a stay of the ruling while on appeal preceded. Chief Justice Roberts was usually in the majority on these unsigned and generally unexplained orders. Obviously, he thought the stays were called for,

but he probably isn't happy with the drip drip drip of public perception reflected in polls and social media chatter that the court was handing the president a blank check. So step back here,

the court spends basically all of 20, 25 siding with the Trump administration on shadow

docket cases in numbers that again are statistical improbabilities. It records actually unbiased. But then Roberts sides against Trump in one case and that becomes proof that he secretly bristles about Trump, that he's upset about the image of the court and that he's sending Trump a message. Right. Like that. This is all inferred from this one case. But you can't possibly infer anything from the dozens of cases that preceded it. Right. And for anything from Roberts writing

the immunity decision. Right. Right. Right. Like, what are we talking about? Like, what the fuck are you talking about? These guys are all, they love Trump. They fucking love Trump. Exactly. What are you talking about? She goes on. This is how she wraps up the piece. Mr. Trump has helped create Nat Misfiren, which judges appropriately fear for their personal safety and that of their families. Many people expected the Chief Justice to address this issue directly

in his year-end report in December, but he did not. In two decades as the nation's top jurist, he has at times spoken directly in defense of the judiciary as in his 2024 report. But these occasions have been infrequent as if the only messages this notably self-possessed and buttoned down man cares to send are those his opinions deliver noted. Go home. So the fact that Roberts did not address Trump's attacks on the judiciary in his year-end report somehow is transformed

into more evidence that Roberts is at odds with Trump, right? It's fucking bizarre. This isn't just like seeing things where they don't exist. It's seeing the opposite of what's happening. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So there was also another New York Times opinion piece by David French. Thank God they got a third one in. Yeah. Yep. Is it better? No. No. No. There's no way David

“French has the best of us. Right. Right. Right. Right. Headline is this the most important supreme”

court case of this century. Let me tell you guys, I can answer that before you're right now. No. No.

It's not the most important case of this term. Yeah. Right. Right. What's the rule that the

journalistic rule that every every headline that asks a question can be answered with no? Yeah. Exactly. But yet, it doesn't matter how they rule on birthright citizenship one way or another. That'll be more important. It doesn't matter how they rule on the voting rights act. That'll be more important. Like they're just going to be more important cases this term to say nothing of Jewish people. Even if citizens united, Shelby County, Windsor and Trump for you as a fellow.

Like they're just so many more like they're so many more cases. Even if he abandoned tariffs entirely, that would just send us back to where we were for every part of American history before last year. He's talking about that. It doesn't change. It doesn't change. It doesn't change. Oh, it's just insane. It's insane. Oh, it's so stupid. It's so stupid. I don't want to get into the piece

declared. Yeah. Which is just like based on a projection of what you hope will happen. Right.

“Should we read from our rivals podcast? Yes. Over at Slate, there's a Supreme Court podcast called”

Amicus with our friend, Mark Joseph Stern and his colleague. So in this episode, Dahlia says quote, "It's such a funny, corrective to our constant complaint that some members of the Supreme Court have no idea what's happening in Congress. No idea about the enormity of the insurrection that happened across the street a few years back. No idea about those rendition flights

to El Salvador. No idea about anything." Today was their equal opportunity to have no idea of what's

really going on with Donald Trump. And weirdly, it saves the day. If he wanted this to feel like an existential threat to them, they're not having it. They're just going to do egg-headed

“judicial construction all day long. Yeah. Yeah, that's what the Supreme Court's doing. All right,”

just sure. Judicial construction all day long. Mm-hmm. Thank God we've got you on the beat, Dahlia. So what she's saying here is that like the court is unfazed by political constraints. They

essentially do not see the politics of the day. And so Trump can try to intimidate them on this

and they're not having it. Like they're dumb, but they're independent. Right, which is just saying that they are oblivious to politics. Right. And that's why they ruled for Trump on like, see coat, right, functionally. Let me tell you, if Donald Trump was not the Republican nominee for president at the time, Trump the United States would have gone a different way.

“It's fucking insane. It's fucking insane that she cites that as an example of them”

not being aware of the political atmosphere and the political implications of the decisions. It's true that they are not good at assessing the political atmosphere per se. Because their brains are cooked. Right, because they're dumb, but it seems like she's saying that like the defining characteristic of the Supreme Court is that they're not paying attention to politics. And I'm trying to think of a worse conclusion to draw

from what's been happening. From somebody who writes and comments and follows the Supreme Court. It's insane. That's, I mean, it's up there with John Roberts' succinct, you know? Yeah. But like, materially worse. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, at the end of the day, we're the only good ones. That's nothing more to it than that. All right, folks. Next week, we're going to be talking about the war. War powers. What does it mean to declare a war? What does it mean to authorize

military force? Which one? There are so many. There are so many, but a lot of them are just kind of one legally. That's correct. So, yeah, we're going to talk a bit about what's going on in Iran and the legal questions there. And maybe, and hopefully, it's shed some light on why nobody ever just declares a war anymore. You know? Right. Follow us on social media at five four pods. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/54Pod all spelled out for access to

premium and ad-free episodes, special events, our Slack all sorts of shit. See you next week. Bye, everybody. Bye y'all. Five to four is presented by prologue projects. This episode was produced by Allison Rogers. The onnafoc provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chipston Y and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. This season on the Real Housewives of Dubai.

Where's the hole? Where's my holes?