Rachel Abrams

They stretched for almost three hours, and a lot of time was spent really digging into the statute that you mentioned, IEPA.

So where do you think we should begin?

Because the idea here being the statute doesn't actually include explicit instructions that the president can tax or tariff.

So the government is making the argument that regulate includes the ability to tax and tariff.

So Adam, talk a little bit about how the justices drilled down into what the statute said.

Right.

It almost felt like the liberal justices were trying to speak the languages that we often hear from conservative justices, which is to stick to an extremely literal interpretation of the text.

Even for the Supreme Court, this seemed like an unbelievably close parsing of specific words.

So why do you think that happened in this case?

So obviously the justices spent a lot of time parsing the meaning of a few specific words.

But one thing that they didn't spend a lot of time parsing, which I thought was kind of interesting, was whether or not the fentanyl crisis and the trade deficits actually constituted an emergency.

Did that strike you as interesting also?

So Adam, before the break, you told us that some of the justices were quite skeptical that the administration would be able to overcome some other major hurdles in order to keep their tariff authority.

Walk us through what those hurdles are.

In other words, even if the justices rule that the word regulate includes tariff authority, there's this whole separate question of, did Congress actually tell the president that he could use this power?

And what does the government's lawyer say to that kind of questioning?

Why would it be the case that foreign affairs would be exempt from the major questions doctrine?

And so I guess in this case, the question then becomes, do tariffs actually count as foreign policy, right?

We have never applied it to foreign affairs, but this is a tariff.

This does seem to raise a genuinely interesting question, which is whether tariffs are domestic policy or foreign policy, right?