Our first-ever Supreme Court-driven emergency pod! Oren Cass, the founder and chief economist of American Compass, and Peter Harrell, former Biden White House official, host of the Security Economics podcast and, as of a month ago, a Georgetown Law scholar, have joined to discuss:

• Why Trump’s most arbitrary tariff impositions might be the most easily defensible in the Supreme Court case,

• Why this Supreme Court case probably has no real bearing on negotiations with China,

• The USMCA as a template for negotiating with Asia,

• What tariff negotiations can tell us about Trump’s philosophy on decoupling from China,

• How the U.S. can compel allies to take defense seriously.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app or watch on YouTube:

Litigation Day

Jordan Schneider: Oren, why don’t you kick us off?

Oren Cass: I love the case as a legal matter. While partisans on both sides will tell you this is a clean-cut decision, I think there are actually many very close legal questions, which is fascinating.

The reality is that we are almost surely going to get a decision that attempts to put down some long-term markers for how the court thinks about these questions, while on the specifics of the tariffs, essentially trying to stall. The court will probably give a bunch of new guidelines and principles and then remand the case back to a lower court to figure out how to implement them. It’s a little bit like what you saw them do with the presidential immunity question.

The result will be that everyone will have a better sense of how the court would initially decide this, but there will be more time before anything is actually resolved. In the interim, the administration will have to figure out what it wants to move on through other authorities, what it wants to keep fighting on, and what, if anything, it wants to legislate. Anyone who’s looking for a clear-cut and decisive victory or devastating loss will almost surely be disappointed.

Peter Harrell: I might disagree a bit with you, Oren, on that. I heard a majority of the court was skeptical that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) authorizes at least all of the tariffs that Trump has imposed under IEEPA. While we could see a decision that holds that some IEEPA tariffs are authorized and then kicks the case to lower courts to sort ...