The United States is facing what experts describe as a potential financial crisis as the Supreme Court reviews the legality of President Donald Trump’s wide-reaching emergency tariffs.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett called this scenario ‘a mess’, warning that the government could face an administrative crisis of unprecedented scale.
Trade lawyers say the impact could be overwhelming. Many of President Trump’s tariffs changed multiple times, and shipments often contained goods subject to different rates. The result is years of tangled customs data
From the comments during the trial, he may very well lose this one.
The trouble is that conservatives hate taxes, and the old ones are just smart enough to know that tariffs are just another way of taxing things. If you go back through Project 2025, you’ll find two opinions on them. One took the libertarian view that tariffs are bad, period. The other took the protectionism view that some tariffs were necessary in order to beat China. Neither wanted such gigantic, across the board tariffs.
The old conservatives on the court were making some very skeptical questions of the Administration lawyers, and didn’t seem to be buying the answers. We’ll see what happens when the ruling comes out, but that sort of thing is a pretty reliable signal of where they’re going to land.
All that said, what’s going to happen is that after prices to average people rose due to tariffs, the payback will go to the companies that imported things, and they’ll pocket the money.
Also, the prices won’t go back down to pre-tariff levels.