00:00Why is it such a big deal that the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump's tariffs?
00:03Well, the Supreme Court hasn't struck down such an important policy initiative in around 90 years,
00:09since 1935, which is when they struck down FDR's first New Deal.
00:13And this is also the first time that this Supreme Court has ever genuinely stood up
00:18to Donald Trump's overreach in executive power.
00:20Trump himself now has two options.
00:22He can moan and groan but accept the Supreme Court's opinion,
00:25in which case he will probably continue to get conservative opinions from the court,
00:29upholding a lot of what he has to do in the future.
00:31Or he can double down and try to defy the Supreme Court, not only rhetorically, but also by disobeying it.
00:37And if he goes down that road, then it's very probable that this could be a turning point
00:41in the Supreme Court's approach to Trump, in which he loses a majority of the court
00:45and they extend their attempts to block him from acting unlawfully.
00:49The tariff case was actually a great opportunity for the Supreme Court to stand up to Trump.
00:53Imagine they had tried to stand up to Trump in, say, a detainee deportation case.
00:56They issue an order telling the president to bring someone back to the United States
00:59and the president ignores them.
01:01That looks terrible for the Supreme Court because it shows that they're not very powerful in practice.
01:05In this case, however, you can only collect tariffs by a legal process.
01:08So if the Supreme Court says that the tariffs are unlawful,
01:11then Trump really, in fact, has to listen.
01:13And the lower courts are going to enforce the Supreme Court's decision.
01:16The three liberal justices, of course, joined the opinion striking down the tariffs.
01:19But the opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts,
01:22who has been increasingly skeptical of Trump's overreach in recent years,
01:25and also by Justice Amy Coney Barrett,
01:28who has become, despite her deeply conservative jurisprudence,
01:31effectively the swing vote on this court,
01:33with four justices to her right and four justices to her left.
01:35Finally, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who's a dyed-in-the-wool conservative,
01:39also joined the opinion because he is concerned about what he calls
01:42non-delegation doctrine, by which he means
01:44the delegation of congressional powers to the president.
01:47He thinks that the power to tax, which it really is, is a power of Congress,
01:51and he considered that the delegation of that power to the president
01:54in the form of a tariff was itself unlawful.
01:57As of this moment, when I'm recording this video a couple of hours after the Supreme Court decided,
02:01Donald Trump held a press conference in which he called the opinion a disgrace,
02:04and he called some of the justices fools and lapdogs.
02:07The justices don't like to be insulted, but frankly, they can take it.
02:10What they can't take is a direct opposition to their authority to actually make decisions.
02:14It's possible that Trump really could try to defy the Supreme Court's order here.
02:18If so, that would be a serious threat to the rule of law.
02:20It will alienate Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett further,
02:23and it could mark the beginning of a period of more aggressive enforcement of the law
02:27by the Supreme Court against the Trump administration.
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