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Supreme Court Rules Trump's Sweeping Emergency Tariffs are Illegal; Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump's Tariffs in 6-3 Vote. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired February 20, 2026 - 10:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:30:00]

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: We're following breaking news, important breaking news, very significant. In a 6-3 decision, the United States Supreme Court has strike down President Trump's emergency tariffs. A huge setback for the President of the United States.

CNN's Chief Legal Affairs Correspondent Paula Reed is joining us. You've been going through this lengthy document. I've got just a chunk of it over here and it's really long. But give us some more details that are emerging.

PAULA REED, CNN CHIEF LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Well, it has to be long because there are so many questions here, Wolf. But this is a rare loss for President Trump before this conservative Supreme Court. And in this 6-3 decision, the court ruled that the President had exceeded his authority to implement tariffs that were implemented under a law passed in 1977. This is something that has massive implications not only for the economy, but also for presidential power.

Now, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion. And in it, he writes, quote, "The president asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it."

Again, a significant loss for President Trump. But then it leads to the question of, OK, well, what happens to the billions of dollars that have already been collected by the government? And 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. This is something that will likely need to be sorted out by the lower courts.

This is something that Kavanaugh focused on in his dissent. He wrote, quote, "Nothing today about whether, and if so, how, the government should go about returning the billions of dollars that it has collected from importers." So, this is a big issue in the case. But here, this process Kavanaugh described is going to be, quote, "a mess." And I will note that in a couple of days, the president will give his State of the Union address. Often, many of the justices attend that. That will definitely be an interesting moment because President Trump, who we expect will respond to this decision in a truth social shortly, I am told, will likely not be happy about this. And we know he's not shy about expressing his frustration with judges or justices.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: That's right. And actually, we are going to go straight to the White House for some new reaction just coming in from there. CNN Senior White House Reporter Kevin Liptak is with us. Kevin.

KEVIN LIPTAK, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Yes. And when this ruling came down, as we were showing, the president was up on the state floor of the White House meeting with governors. We're told that he was informed of the decision. And he said in that meeting that it was, quote, "a disgrace." That's from two people familiar with the president's remarks.

He also said that he had a backup plan. So, suggesting that this is not the end of the road when it comes to his tariff regime. And certainly, the president in a lot of ways had been expecting this decision. He was just in Georgia yesterday bemoaning the fact that it was taking so long to come down. He said he had been waiting for weeks and weeks to see what was happening. You know, he had been warning for quite some time that a ruling like this would be extraordinarily damaging.

And I think it's worth pointing out, you know, the tariffs were the underpinning not only of the president's trade agenda, but of his entire foreign policy. When you look at what he was trying to use these tariffs to accomplish, whether it was trying to wean countries off of Russian oil, he applied tariffs on India to punish them for their purchases of Russian energy products. When it came to Brazil, he was trying to punish that country for its prosecution of the former president, Jair Bolsonaro. He applied tariffs there. When he's doing all of these items across foreign policy that don't necessarily have anything to do with trade or with reducing the American trade deficit, he relied on these tariffs and relied on this authority to put them in place.

So, in addition to the questions that it raises about how the president will continue going about trying to strike some of these trade deals, I think it also raises a lot of questions about what leverage the president will rely on to conduct the remainder of his foreign policy, because this was really sort of the structure and the scaffolding around which the president was trying to accomplish so many things around the globe.

Of course, the other thing that the president has mentioned when he's talking about this ruling is the difficulty in trying to make some of these repayments, which is something that we've heard about a lot now from Paula and others.

The other difficulty, an added difficulty, is that in addition to raising all of this revenue, according to the president's own calculations, some of it has been spent. You know, he said that that $12 billion farmer bailout that he announced late last year would be funded in part by these tariffs.

[10:35:00]

So, it's not just a question of repaying money that the government has taken in from these tariffs, there will also be questions about what will happen to the money that, at least according to President Trump, has already been spent. And so, a lot of questions at the White House now, as officials are absorbing this ruling and as they are going through some of the statutory elements of how they might try and resurrect at least some of these tariffs going forward.

BLITZER: Yes, the ramifications are going to be very, very significant. We'll watch all of that unfold. You can see in the bottom of your screen, at least right now, the Dow Jones' industrial average is pretty steady right now. Look, it's gone up just a little bit, gone up a little bit, and it hasn't gone down. I think that potentially could be very, very significant.

I want to bring in our chief Supreme Court analyst, Joan Biskupic. She's now here in the Situation Room with us. You were inside the Supreme Court for all of this. Give us a little flavor of how it all went down.

JOAN BISKUPIC, CNN CHIEF SUPREME COURT ANALYST: Sure. And I have to say, this is the most dramatic case we've had so far during President Trump's second term in office. It was the biggest showdown between this Roberts-controlled court and President Trump. And finally, they said no. And they said no for a lot of reasons, kind of competing reasons within the text.

But basically, the chief, when he comes in with all eight associate justices, he sits down, and I think he was trying to convey a bit of a matter of fact. This is no big deal. We interpreted the statute, and the statute just simply does not cover tariffs. The international emergency law that I'm sure you all have been talking about while I was rushing over here from the court simply does not go that far.

And it was classic John Roberts in a lot of ways. You know, he's just calmly reading his text, only a couple times even looking up at the spectators who included Solicitor General John Sauer, who argued this case for President Trump, and Neal Katyal, who happened to argue for the challengers. He was in the court for other business but was there to hear this ruling that favors these challengers that brought this case against these, you know, near trillion-dollar tariffs.

He -- the chief justice tried to really emphasize that, look, we ruled in a certain way when President Biden was in, and we're going to rule the same way here, that if the president wants to assume some authority in a congressional law, the law must state clearly that he has this authority. And the chief said, you know, essentially, we shut down President Biden's efforts on student loans. We shut down the vaccine requirements in different ways. You know, the environmental protection efforts that President Biden had tried to take, we closed those all down based on the same principle that if there's a major policy that's going to be taken by the president, it has to be clearly authorized by Congress. So, that was that kind of, look, we've been here before. This should not be a surprise to anyone was one thing.

The second thing was John Roberts went directly to the great Chief Justice John Marshall for some key quotes about the separation of powers. That Article I, Congress, Congress has this authority, and it specifically says in the Constitution that Congress has the authority to tax, and what is a tariff? The chief said, nothing but really a tax.

So, you know, he stressed that. And in the end, he also stressed in his first of all, this took just 20 minutes, high drama over just 20 minutes, 10 minutes, sorry, but the opinion itself was 21 pages. And he closed by saying the Trump administration had pointed to a 1981 case called Dames and Moore, where this statute was last interpreted when IEPA was last interpreted.

And the government had tried to say the Supreme Court had broadly read that statute then, and it should broadly read it here. And the chief happened to have been working as a law clerk to then-Justice William Rehnquist, who wrote that opinion. And as he closed out his own opinion, he didn't talk about this from the bench, but as he closed out his opinion today in this case, he said the court then said IEPA should be, that that decision in Dames and Moore from 1981, coincidentally dealing with the hostage situation in Iran, that that should not be read too broadly.

And he lifted lines from that opinion that he was aware of. And then as he closed, he said they could have said no, no, a thousand times no. They didn't, but that's the import there.

BLITZER: How much of a surprise, Joan, was this decision?

BISKUPIC: Well, it -- to a lot of people, it wasn't a surprise because we went into it thinking that, first of all, clearly the momentum was with the challengers. They had lost in lower courts. Across the board, they had lost. They had, you know, it appeared that the president had exceeded his authority.

[10:40:00]

But I actually thought it could be as close as 5-4. You know, 6-3 is not a landslide in any way, but I thought it was close just the way I heard it argued because often the president does get extra authority in dealing with foreign affairs. But the one thing I kept falling back on, even as I knew this court might have found grounds for President Trump to be able to do this, is that I think this court was looking for a place to say no. And this was an easy one to say no, Pam.

BROWN: I was going to follow up with you on that because we all remember the immunity case, right?

BISKUPIC: Right.

BROWN: That just expanded the presidential powers. And a lot of critics of the court at that time said that, you know, the conservative justices were in the bag for Trump, right?

BISKUPIC: Right.

BROWN: But some of those same justices who ruled in favor of the immunity for presidential immunity actually voted in favor of pulling back on the president's authority on tariffs with this ruling.

BISKUPIC: Right. In a ruling that affects so many people, and we were all waiting for it. It's a major pocketbook issue for so many folks. And, you know, a real signature initiative of President Trump. And I think that's why I think the chief sort of wanted to convey a kind of, of course, of course this is not -- we cannot stand for this. This is purely Article 1 congressional power that the president is trying to invoke here. There are other ways that the president can impose tariffs. He just cannot do it through this emergency powers.

And you're right, not just Chief Justice John Roberts, but Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who were with him 100 percent on giving him great immunity in the ruling in 2024, were this way.

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: And that's going to complicate the White House's reaction to this. The president, as we know, has called this a disgrace. But the reality is a 6-3 ruling with Amy Coney Barrett and Justice Gorsuch, and never mind the chief, who's often criticized by the White House. That's going to make it more difficult for the president to criticize this.

But the practical effect going forward, Wolf, as we were talking about before, the State of the Union address is on Tuesday. The justices are likely to be, or many of them, on the front row. And this just isn't a decision of the president. This was the whole thrust of his first term, his foreign policy. As David and I were talking earlier, he's going to China in a month. So, that is going to completely upend the U.S. trade policy with China. So, so many real-world implications from this decision today.

BLITZER: Unless, David Sanger, you're our analyst, and you write for The New York Times as well, so you understand what's going on. Unless they come up quickly with some other authorization for these tariffs when he goes to China or when he goes to Europe, there's not going to be any tariffs that the U.S. has imposed under the existing ruling.

DAVID SANGER, CNN POLITICAL AND NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST AND NEW YORK TIMES WHITE HOUSE AND NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Under the existing ruling, there won't be many. There'll be some. This is a president who's all about leverage, right? He was on the phone with the president of Switzerland, didn't like what she said, came off the phone and boosted their tariff numbers. He viewed this as something where he could just sort of set a number and go. And the Chinese, once he gets to Beijing, are acutely attuned to watching power seep out from their adversaries. So, they're going to make as much use of this as they can.

You know, in April, when the president announced all this, he called it Liberation Day. Well, to some degree, this is Liberation Day for many of the American allies and some adversaries who felt as if the president was using this indiscriminately. The Canadians, the European Union, China, obviously. And so, I think it's going to have a real effect as he goes around the world.

Now, he's going to come out with a list, probably today, of other ways that he can impose tariffs. Some of them, I think, will stand scrutiny. Others won't. But it's not going to be as neat and clean and broad as this. And as one of the justices said, it's going to be messy very, very quickly. Particularly if he has to return money. There are going to be, you know, rafts of suits now to go get that back.

And the president, as we just heard before from Kevin, he has promised to use tariff money to help farmers. He has promised to use it for $2,000 checks for taxpayers. He's promised to use this money to reduce the deficit. He's sort of way overpromised, and now he just doesn't have that pot of gold.

BLITZER: Yes, and I suspect that he's getting ready for Tuesday night when he's going to address the House and the Senate, a joint session of the House and Senate, for the State of the Union.

SANGER: Staring at the justices.

BLITZER: As all of us who have watched these State of the Union addresses over these many years, the nine Supreme Court justices, almost all of them, are sitting in the front row watching him closely. And I wonder if all nine are going to show up this time.

BISKUPIC: Well, I can tell you they won't.

BROWN: Really?

BISKUPIC: I can tell you right now. I know they won't. Sam Alito has not gone to a State of the Union since in 2010, when the Citizens United case had been announced a few days before.

[10:45:00]

Barack Obama stood before them, and he criticized Citizens United. And he mangled a little bit of its repercussions, and the camera flashed on Sam Alito saying, not true. And it became quite a moment. Most of them -- you know, Chief Justice John Roberts will try to get a critical mass. He'll try to have a majority, but it'll be close.

But the other thing I should say, I think the administration knew that this was going to go this way. I mean, just the signals we had gotten from both the lawyers and from the president himself, they have not been blindsided here. They have not been blindsided. They are ready with something.

So, Donald Trump could stand in front of them and say and complain. But you know what? Donald Trump is still getting plenty from the Supreme Court, and he will continue to get plenty.

BROWN: Right.

BLITZER: All right. We're not going away from this story. This is a historic moment right now. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling 6-3 against President Trump, ruling his tariffs are illegal. We're staying on top of this story. We'll continue our special coverage right here in the Situation Room right after this.

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BLITZER: We're of course staying on top of the huge breaking news today. The United States Supreme Court ruling that President Trump actually broke the law when he imposed sweeping tariffs on all these countries, raising prices for American consumers. He didn't have the authority to do so and it was a violation of the law, the Supreme Court ruling 6-3 against the President.

Jeff Zeleny, as we've been noting, he's going to be addressing a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, the State of the Union address. I assume he and his speech writers are rewriting big chunks of that speech right now.

ZELENY: I mean, they certainly are going to have to address this. The question, I guess, is how. But again, that 6-3 ruling makes it a little bit more difficult to completely blast the Supreme Court, who has been very friendly to him, I think, as an understatement over the last year. And they have many cases before them. But I think the president also has an opportunity to say what his plan B is.

And many people inside the White House, even though the president called this ruling a disgrace, were told the White House has been planning for this moment. So, look for him to quite quickly impose some new tariffs under different non-emergency clauses. Look for him to set a path forward. And I look for him to sort of downplay this, which will be a bit of a political gymnastics given the fact that as recently as last evening in Rome, Georgia, he was talking about how essential this is to his whole policy. But I think that will certainly be the biggest moment and opportunity for him to do something.

But going forward, I think, in terms of his relationship with China and his relationships around the world, David was talking earlier. The leverage that President Trump has carried in his second term over all foreign leaders, allies and adversaries alike, comes from his tariff policy. And now, that that has been effectively stripped away, there may be some silver linings for some other Republicans who are running out there in this midterm elections.

But for President Trump, it is one more example of, yes, there are checks on his power. Yes, there are limits to the ability that even the Oval Office, the executive branch, is able to do.

BLITZER: And, Joan, you cover the Supreme Court on a day-to-day basis. You know all the justices. You know what's going on. Does this historic decision today, by the Supreme Court ruling that Trump was violating the law by imposing these sweeping tariffs on all of these countries without formal congressional authorization, does it open the door for the Supreme Court to rule that other potential decisions unrelated to tariffs by the president, for example, going to war against Iran, without congressional authorization, potentially could be a violation of the law as well?

BISKUPIC: It's interesting you even raise the war example because one of the justices who ruled against him here was Neil Gorsuch, who happens to be the first individual that Donald Trump put on the Supreme Court in 2017 when he came to office the first time. You know, he's used to the chief being ambivalent about him. He's used to Amy Coney Barrett at times moving toward the middle. But Neil Gorsuch has been pretty much with him.

But I think what this goes to is what a dramatic move the president himself was making. He was usurping congressional powers. And one thing that Neil Gorsuch said during oral arguments back on November 5th is, you know, once Congress cedes its power, can it ever get it back? And he even raised the war power, Wolf. He was saying, you know, if Congress were to say -- if we were to allow, we, the Supreme Court, were to allow Congress to give up its power on tariffs, taxation, what would be next?

And those -- that kind of congressional authority, you know, in terms of war powers, in terms of taxing powers, this court, irrespective of what it thinks of Donald Trump, irrespective of how conservative it is, it wants to preserve certain boundaries in separation of powers.

BLITZER: Because the War Powers Act, which is the law of the land, requires the president of the United States, if he's going to go to war against a foreign country, has to seek congressional approval.

SANGER: That's right. Now, it has not been observed, Wolf, in many cases. I mean, obviously, in the Vietnam War, there was not -- and the Korean War was supposed to be a police action. Even going into Iraq, that was done under an authorization to use military force, but it was short of a war declaration.

[10:55:00]

What you're now seeing, though, mass off of Iran, at a moment that many in Congress are not really raising this issue, is bound to go raise anew the question of, is Congress doing its own job? And one of the most remarkable parts of this, and I think Joan got at it with this remarkable back-and-forth that Justice Gorsuch had, is that the president of the United States The court is more concerned right now about Congress losing its authority than many in Congress seem to be.

BROWN: Interesting point.

BLITZER: Yes, that's an important development. All right. We're going to stay on top of this historic day, this historic story. There's other major developments unfolding, as well. We'll be out all over all of that, as we always are, right here in The Situation Room. We'll be right back.

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