Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Oh, volume. Too loud. There we go.
Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. I'm sure you recognize that sigh. I'm joined today by Kai Rizdal. Welcome back, Kai.
It is so good to be here. How you been?
I've been good. Missed you. But there's a reason that you're here because not only did we both have like mutual brain explosions on Blue Skies, we were listening to the State of the Union, but also obviously on Friday, the Supreme Court. struck down some of President Trump's tariffs, which has been a huge story that the both of us have been covering.
Since then, it's been chaos as people have been trying to figure this out. So, of course, we had to bring you back to help make us smart about it and get through it all. So welcome back. Let's get into it. We have been waiting on the SCOTUS ruling for months. A lot of false alarms in terms of prepping the newsroom for it when it didn't drop. What was your reaction when it finally came through?
A couple. In no particular order, they go like this. Number one, the fractured nature of that opinion reveals why it took so long, right?
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Chapter 2: What recent Supreme Court decision affected Trump's tariffs?
There was obviously a lot of backing and forthing between the three dissenters and even amidst them and then the concurrences on the... on the majority side. So that was really interesting. What was not interesting in terms of actually being shocking was the result, because I think if you were listening to the oral arguments, as we both were, you kind of had a sense of how this was going to go.
So those were my two gut reactions, right? Now I understand why it took so long. And other than that, totally understand this ruling.
I was surprised that the president didn't say more about it in the State of the Union.
Well, so look, we know that Donald Trump does not like direct face-to-face confrontations, right? I mean, you know, he enjoys yelling at Ilhan Omar from, you know, 15 rows of seats away. But the justices were right in front of him. And it would have taken a measure of – um, in your faceness that I don't think he possessed in that moment, you know?
Um, and, and he, he, he vented his spleen that Friday of the ruling. He went to the, uh, the press room at the white house and, and said all those things that he said about, you know, them, I mean, being under foreign control and how they ought to be ashamed and, you know, all of that, a ridiculous and B BS stuff. Um, and I think he got it out of his system.
So then in the decision itself, the justices' decisions, you said it was fractured, but what about it really jumped out to you?
What about it jumped out? A couple of things. Number one, I think it's really interesting. The chief wrote the opinion. So that was I think that's positive. Right. The chief, you know, whatever you say about Roberts himself, the chief carries some symbolic authority when speaking for the court and a majority. So I think that was good.
It was interesting to me not to get into the legalese thing, but the whole discussion about the major questions doctrine. was, you know, tangentially interesting and how that's being applied and how, interestingly, it applies to a Democratic versus a Republican president with this particular court. Kavanaugh, interestingly, raised the issue of refunds and how it's going to be messy. And it is.
But you know what?
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Chapter 3: What were the immediate reactions to the Supreme Court ruling?
If a statute says something is illegal, like the president did, the whole refunds thing doesn't really matter. So the fact is he misused IEPA in an illegal way. Those tariffs cannot stand. And if somebody has taken your money illegally, they have to give it back no matter how messy it is.
Now, interestingly, of course, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besson and his mothers have said, well, we're going to we're going to just leave that and figure it out later. And that's not the right answer. Right. The right answer is we took your money illegally. We're going to try to give it back to you. Now, it will, of course, be messy.
There are more than 100 lawsuits filed already by major companies and smaller companies seeking to get those refunds, to lay those claims. The problem, of course, is that the way tariffs work is that those costs get passed through to American businesses. Some of those businesses pass through those costs to consumers.
So I had to pay an extra, you know, two bucks for the box of Wheaties that I'm making that up. Wheaties aren't important, but you know what I mean, right? I had to pay an extra $2 for this product that I bought that was tariffed.
The problem is that I'm not going to get that $2 back because the refund will go to the company, and the company, I will bet you, bottom dollar, will not go to the extent and the trouble of trying to find all the people that paid the extra $2 for the box of Wheaties. So consumers aren't going to get jacked.
So this is really interesting because this came up in our editorial meeting yesterday, this idea of all these costs that companies had to pay because of the tariffs that were not the tariffs themselves. Like you talk to a customs broker all the time, right? That person charges a fee for her services. Yep.
That is probably much higher now that companies had to eat as they're navigating these tariffs. So some of these costs are non-refundable. That money is gone.
You betcha.
That money is gone. On the other hand, from a consumer perspective, I ordered a whole bunch of tea from this place that I really, really like in Sri Lanka, right? And then...
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