Trump will seek workaround for Supreme Court's 'last word' on tariffs: expert

Donald Trump and his administration will seek a workaround for a Supreme Court ruling on tariffs, a legal expert has claimed.

Author and New York Times op-ed contributor Jeffrey Toobin suggested the president may be looking at rewording or reworking parts of the tariff policy. Speaking to The Daily Beast, Toobin said, "The Supreme Court in our country doesn’t have any individual enforcement powers. They don’t have an army. They don’t have a police force that can do anything except protect their members."

Toobin also believes that Trump will defy the understanding that the Supreme Court "have the last word" when it comes to government policy.

He added, "I think Donald Trump is not going to directly defy the court, but this administration has figured out ways to get around court rulings, and in a way that I don’t think it’s for certain. I don’t think it’s entirely clear how he would react to an adverse decision. But we’ll see."

"What he would do is he would say ‘I understand the Supreme Court has said these tariffs are unconstitutional, but I’m going to make some changes and these new tariffs will be different enough’, and [Trump will] then force litigation on those sets of tariffs."

Should Trump want to push through with the tariffs despite the Supreme Court ruling, Toobin has suggested he could.

"There are ways to play with the wording and play with the response so that you don’t seem like you are in direct defiance of the courts, even if you really are," Toobin shared.

Politico legal analyst Ankush Khardori suggested Trump could evade Supreme Court rulings late last year. He wrote, "Their seeming indifference, however, also obscures the new legal and political obstacles that the Trump administration would confront.

"The fallback effort would not be as simple or straightforward a matter as they have claimed. It is true that the administration could use other statutes to replicate (largely, though probably not entirely) the current tariff regime in the short term. But a new set of questions would immediately emerge."