Trump’s tariffs appear to be in trouble.
The Supreme Court’s Wednesday morning argument on President Donald Trump’s ever-shifting tariffs went better for him than the 2025 elections, but only slightly so.
At least two of the Court’s Republicans — Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — appeared very likely to join the three Democratic justices in striking down those tariffs, and they will likely be joined by Chief Justice John Roberts. Though that does leave three votes for Trump, three is not enough.SCOTUS, Explained
Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.
If the tariffs do, indeed, fall, it will be a dramatic turn from a Supreme Court that has largely behaved as lickspittles to the Republican president. This is, after all, the same Court that held that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. And it’s spent most of the last year handing down dozens of unexplained decisions in favor of Trump on the Court’s “shadow docket.”
But one thing that sets the tariffs cases, known as Learning Resources v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, apart from those other Trump-related cases is that there are many voices within the Republican Party — and especially within its de facto legal arm, the Federalist Society — that oppose Trump’s tariffs. One of the lead lawyers challenging the tariffs is Michael McConnell, a former George W. Bush appointee to the federal bench. At a Federalist Society conference last spring, many speakers doubted the tariffs’ legality. Several prominent Republicans joined briefs attacking the tariffs.
It’s worth noting that the strongest argument against the tariffs involves the Supreme Court’s “major questions doctrine,” a limit on presidential power that was recently invented by the Court’s Republicans, and that is so new that it has only ever been used against one president: Joe Biden. V.O.S. Selections and its companion case potentially give the Republican justices a chance to legitimize this doctrine by applying it to one of their fellow Republicans — potentially in an opinion joined by all three of the Court’s Democrats.
In any event, it is always dangerous to predict that this Supreme Court will break with Trump, given the extraordinary loyalty its Republican majority has shown toward him in the past. It is always possible that, once the justices meet to discuss this case in private, they will retreat into their partisan camps and Trump will eke out a victory.
