Supreme Court poised to rule on tariffs, birthright citizenship and more
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Hi, this is Juliana in Seattle, Washington, and I'm currently on my way to my first day of law school. Ooh, congratulations. This podcast was recorded at 1.22 p.m.
on Wednesday, the 7th of January.
Things may have changed by the time you listen to this, but I will still be in the library, nose deep in my massive law books. Enjoy the show.
There's so much reading in that first year. May the force be with you. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department.
And I'm Mara Liason, Senior National Political Correspondent.
And today on the show, we are talking about some of the major decisions expected to come from the U.S. Supreme Court in the days, weeks and months ahead. The court has indicated it could release its first opinions of the year as early as Friday. Kerry, one opinion that we are watching for and could get on Friday concerns President Trump's tariffs policy. Remind us of the key issue here.
Yeah. Central part of Trump's agenda, the sweeping tariff plan. He put it into place early in his administration and he's relying on a law from the 1970s called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. even though that law does not mention the word tariffs and it has not been used for that purpose since it was established by Congress. And so the big question here is whether that law can carry the weight of all of these tariffs the president has imposed. It's important to note that when this case was argued before the Supreme Court, even some of the conservative justices expressed concern about it and how much power it gave the executive branch. Of course, Congress is really supposed to be in charge of appropriations and things like that.
So it's a big question moving forward how or if this will survive Supreme Court review.
Appropriations and taxation. So yeah, and President Trump is clearly very, very concerned about this case. He has been posting on social media at a very regular cadence, including this post from January 2nd saying, quote, tariffs are an overwhelming benefit to our nation as they have been incredible for our national security and prosperity like nobody has ever seen before, exclamation point. Losing our ability to tariff other countries who treat us unfairly would be a terrible blow to the United States of America. Mara, it would certainly be a terrible blow to his agenda, or would it?
Well, the big question is... about all these cases is how far will the Supreme Court go to help Donald Trump in his overall political project, which is to vastly expand the powers of the executive. And what's interesting about the tariff case politically is, ironically, if they rule against him on this, they could be helping his party because Republican candidates in the midterms are being hurt by the economic effects of Trump's tariffs, which are to raise prices. But the Supreme Court could also rule – and I want to hear what Kerry has to say about this. They could also say, just go back and do your homework. You can expand tariffs. You just can't use IEPA in this way, kind of like what they did with the Muslim ban in his first term.
Just say there are other ways you can do this. You could get a vote in Congress. use another statute, there is another way for you to get your tariffs done. So we'll see what they do. But the political implications of anything that lessens the effect of tariffs is probably good for Trump's party, even if it would be considered a loss for him.
Yeah, it's been remarkable to me how existential he is treating this, even though, Carrie, I think there are potentially other options if the court rules against him.
What major Supreme Court decisions are expected this year?
There are a bunch of off-ramps the court could take here. They could rule very narrowly, allowing Trump to use different laws or statutes to reimpose tariffs. And they could rule in ways that would only affect monies moving forward.
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