The Supreme Court’s brutal slap down of Donald Trump’s tariff authority “could not have been a bigger loss” for the president, legal experts say.
CBS News’ chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford, said the court’s 6-3 ruling against Trump marked the most significant U.S Supreme Court loss for a U.S. president “in modern history.”
“It is invalidating what is the cornerstone of President Trump’s economic policy, ruling that he does not have authority under this federal law—The International Emergency Economic Powers Act—to levy these sweeping tariffs on almost every global trading partner worldwide,” she said.
The stunning loss blindsided the president, who was having breakfast at the White House with state governors on Friday morning. Once the news reached him, CNN reported that he went on a foul-mouth tirade and cut the meal short to craft a response.
Crawford suggested the president is humiliated for good reason.
“I think you can put that right up there with some of the most significant Supreme Court losses by a U.S. president in history,” she said.
Likely adding to Trump’s ire is the fact that two of the conservative justices who sided with the court’s liberal wing, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, were both appointed to the high court by Trump in his first term. Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed by George W. Bush, also sided with the liberals in defying Trump.
Trump said Friday the trio were “fools and lapdogs of RINOs [Republicans-in-name-only] and the radical left Democrats.”
CNN’s chief legal affairs correspondent, Paula Reid, described the ruling as a “rare loss” for a president who has gotten much of what he has asked for this term, having the benefit of a conservative-majority Supreme Court and Republican control of both the House and Senate.
Reid said the big issue will not only be how Trump responds—and he has since vowed to defy the high court and enforce a new global tariff of 10 percent—but also what happens to the hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs already collected since they were implemented on April 2, 2025.
“That is going to be, to quote Justice Kavanaugh in his dissent, a ‘mess’ because the court offered no clarity on the practical questions about what happens to all that money the administration has already collected through the president’s tariffs,” she noted. “This is something that will likely need to be sorted out by the lower courts.”
Legal expert Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyal University in Los Angeles, told CBS News she was shocked to see the court rule against Trump by such a margin. A 6-3 ruling like Friday’s has been the margin in many cases during MAGA 2.0—but they are often 6-3 in favor of the administration, as the high court is composed of six conservative justices and three liberals.
“I think we tend to believe that when I get on air to talk to you about breaking news, and it’s a really big case, that the division will be six to three along ideological lines, and that’s not what we saw today,” Levinson said. “I think it’s important to remember that this really was a question about constitutional powers and the interpretation of a statute.”
She added, “This is going to be a mess in terms of people trying to get back the money that they paid in these tariffs, but whether or not something is a mass that’s not the question for the court. The question for the court is whether or not it’s constitutional and legal.”
Dallas Morning News Business editor noted on CBS News that the Dow reacted kindly to Friday’s ruling—a stark contrast to how the markets reacted on Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” last spring.
“February 20 might be the new Liberation Day, because markets are already breathing a sigh of relief,” he said.
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