The Michael Knowles Show - February 20, 2026


Michael REACTS： Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump's Tariffs


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

161.10864

Word count

1,087

Sentence count

76


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Trump's tariffs are struck down by the Supreme Court in one of the biggest rulings of the entire Trump administration. It's a blow to the credibility of the administration and the economy, and a huge blow to Trump's economic agenda.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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00:00:32.140 So I'm in an airport, but leave it to the Supreme Court
00:00:36.020 to totally screw up my show today
00:00:38.080 by issuing one of the biggest rulings of the entire Trump administration
00:00:42.100 right after my show already goes out.
00:00:44.820 What happened?
00:00:45.920 The Supreme Court struck down President Trump's tariffs.
00:00:49.020 The tariffs are one of, if not the central part,
00:00:52.760 of his entire economic agenda.
00:00:55.180 The case is Learning Resources Center,
00:00:58.620 the ruling was 5-4, it was 6-3.
00:01:04.020 You had the squishy conservatives plus all the liberals
00:01:08.060 in the majority opinion going against Trump.
00:01:11.140 You had the more hardcore conservatives,
00:01:14.180 especially Alito and Thomas, joined by Kavanaugh,
00:01:16.740 in the dissent.
00:01:17.340 What were the arguments?
00:01:19.260 The majority opinion, John Roberts, Chief Justice,
00:01:23.640 argues that Congress did not clearly delegate the power
00:01:28.360 to implement these tariffs to the executive branch
00:01:31.280 using the law that was at issue here,
00:01:33.860 which is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
00:01:38.740 It's from the 1970s.
00:01:40.160 He says, because Congress did not clearly delegate this power to the president,
00:01:44.620 he has no right to implement these tariffs.
00:01:46.980 Now, the conservatives in the majority relied on the major questions doctrine.
00:01:52.520 The major questions doctrine was first really articulated in the 1980s,
00:01:57.060 but it doesn't really pick up steam until 2000.
00:01:59.660 It's not really articulated seriously in scholarship until 2008,
00:02:04.120 and then it gave its winespring currency in 2013.
00:02:06.260 So it's a relatively recent idea,
00:02:09.040 namely that common sense impels us to conclude
00:02:12.620 that on major questions of economic and political importance,
00:02:17.060 the Congress has to really clearly delegate these certain powers.
00:02:20.280 Okay, the liberals who joined the squishy conservatives in the opinion,
00:02:26.300 they say, look, we agree with the ruling,
00:02:27.980 but we don't agree on the major questions doctrine,
00:02:30.100 so they differ in their reasoning.
00:02:31.720 And then you get to the good stuff,
00:02:33.000 which is Clarence Thomas and Alito and Kavanaugh.
00:02:36.860 And Clarence Thomas just gives a master class in his dissent.
00:02:39.760 I haven't gone through the whole opinion, obviously, yet,
00:02:42.220 but I've looked at these key parts.
00:02:44.640 Clarence Thomas cites precedent going back to 1790
00:02:47.400 that Trump did, in fact, have the right to implement these tariffs.
00:02:51.360 He even looks at, from the 1970s onward,
00:02:55.200 Nixon's tariffs, Ford's tariffs,
00:02:57.080 which are based on similar reasoning to the tariffs that Trump implemented.
00:03:01.380 Courts had upheld those tariffs.
00:03:03.680 So he gives this really beautiful historical precedent,
00:03:07.720 legal precedent, judicial reasoning.
00:03:10.340 Kavanaugh and Alito agree there as well.
00:03:13.680 We don't have time to get into everything,
00:03:15.620 and obviously I want to dig a little bit more into the text.
00:03:17.760 This decision just came out.
00:03:19.680 But it's really unfortunate for Trump.
00:03:21.440 Now, practically, it doesn't mean that all of his tariffs are struck down,
00:03:24.300 and it doesn't mean that he can't even maintain the tariffs that he currently has,
00:03:29.920 albeit using different laws and different reasoning.
00:03:32.040 But it's a blow,
00:03:33.460 and it's a huge blow to the credibility of the United States.
00:03:36.880 We've been negotiating all sorts of trade deals predicated on these tariffs,
00:03:40.260 the tariffs which, in many ways,
00:03:41.540 were being used as negotiating leverage by Trump.
00:03:43.840 The Supreme Court just totally blows that up for what is, in my opinion,
00:03:48.340 kind of bogus reasoning.
00:03:50.360 Now, the squishy Republicans in general, not on the court, just in public,
00:03:55.160 are going to love this because the squishy Republicans hate the tariffs
00:03:57.860 because the squishy Republicans basically just want to go back to 1990s Democrat liberalism.
00:04:03.600 And they think that's the high point of human civilization.
00:04:06.260 And so they're actually probably going to be cheering it,
00:04:08.180 and some of them are going to argue that actually the Supreme Court just helped Trump
00:04:11.320 because by striking down his tariffs, they gave him better economic policies,
00:04:15.480 and that's going to work out better for Trump in the end.
00:04:18.140 I'm a little skeptical of that because I think tariffs can have really strong economic power.
00:04:23.160 And I think Trump's proven that because he's beaten all of the expectations over the past year.
00:04:28.860 It's a little over a year now of his administration
00:04:31.080 where all the experts said that the tariffs were going to destroy the economy.
00:04:35.020 The stock market hit record highs.
00:04:36.600 GDP consistently outperformed expectations.
00:04:38.800 The tariffs just beat the experts' opinions.
00:04:42.780 So the Trump agenda on economics is not totally destroyed,
00:04:47.140 but this is a major blow.
00:04:50.160 And for those who are not lawyers, I'm not a lawyer.
00:04:53.780 I didn't go to any fancy law school.
00:04:55.600 I haven't even finished reading the whole opinion yet
00:04:57.120 because it just came out and it's very long.
00:04:58.120 But a good rule of thumb is when Justice Sam Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas
00:05:05.660 agree on a matter of law and the judiciary, they're probably right.
00:05:11.380 Those are the guys who tend to be right.
00:05:13.720 And then if you read their dissents in this case, you will be persuaded of that.
00:05:17.540 And the libs are always wrong and the squishy people in the middle are often wrong.
00:05:24.200 So an unfortunate decision to come from the Supreme Court creates a diplomatic nightmare
00:05:29.440 for the Trump administration, might cause a lot of economic chaos.
00:05:34.280 It's legally not quite sound if you read the majority opinion versus the dissents.
00:05:41.400 But there you have it, a major setback.
00:05:46.940 And maybe if there's any silver lining in the storm cloud,
00:05:50.460 maybe a little more reason for the Republicans to be concerned about November
00:05:55.940 because the wins that we've secured over the last year are anything but stable.
00:06:00.820 You know, they could turn in a minute.
00:06:02.140 More on Monday, but for now, coming live from an airport.
00:06:08.600 That's my take on the biggest Supreme Court decision in a very long time.
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