Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Trump’s Tariffs Overturned
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4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2026
⏱️ 75 minutes
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Summary
The Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on Friday, ruling 6–3 that they vastly exceed anything federal law allows a President to do. It was a massive loss for a signature component of Trump’s economic agenda, and a coalition of liberals and conservatives on the court agreed that the statute invoked to impose these tariffs was never intended to be wielded in this fashion. The 6 disagreed emphatically as to the reasoning. The dissenters were Big Mad. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern unpack the rationale behind the decision, and the implications for those seeking a remedy. And they ask what to make of this massive loss from a court that has yet to truly tell this President “no.”
Then, the press clause of the First Amendment, a once-cherished constitutional right, has fallen victim to neglect and sabotage in recent years, taking a back seat to the more vaunted love affair with individual “free speech.” But, as recent developments—including the arrest of journalist Don Lemon and the heavy-handed interview-spiking “guidance” of late night host Stephen Colbert—illustrate, the freedom of the press is no slam-dunk when it comes to saving democracy in Trump’s America. Dahlia speaks with First Amendment scholars Sonja West (University of Georgia) and RonNell Andersen Jones (University of Utah) about the health of the press clause and the themes in their book, The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law, and the News in Changing Times. They trace the ways in which the framers viewed press freedom as a core, structural “bulwark of liberty,” and why the Supreme Court has increasingly treated it as a neglected companion to free speech rights; leaving weakened and fragile protections for news gathering. The conversation contrasts Trump’s first-term rhetorical delegitimization of the media with a second-term shift toward tangible actions: access restrictions, funding cuts, agency leverage, and selective regulatory pressure.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts and the law. |
| 0:06.7 | I'm Dahlia Lithway. |
| 0:09.9 | Welcome and please be sure you have buckled your seatbelts. |
| 0:14.7 | This is going to be a hell of a show. |
| 0:17.1 | We're talking about the big tariffs decision first, and then we're going to be tackling the very wobbly press clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that is in the process of having its legs kicked out from under it. |
| 0:32.4 | On Friday morning, the long-awaited decision came down in learning resources versus Trump, the case that sought |
| 0:39.0 | to clarify whether the president has the power under a 1977 law called the International |
| 0:44.8 | Emergency Economic Powers Act, or AIPA, to impose sweeping, quote, reciprocal tariffs globally. |
| 0:53.4 | The tariffs were imposed on goods from just about every |
| 0:56.0 | country in the world, first Mexico, Canada, and China, and then just walloping trade partners |
| 1:01.3 | around the globe. Aipa tariffs represent about half of all the import taxes. The government |
| 1:06.6 | collects every month. Other tariffs were issued under different statutes. They were not challenged in this |
| 1:12.3 | case. Now, right before this case was argued at the court, we spoke to Rick Waldenberg. He's the |
| 1:18.6 | CEO of learning resources about why his small family-run business had opted to take the administration |
| 1:25.8 | all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. |
| 1:28.5 | You don't have to be actually one of the great historians to know from recent events that when |
| 1:35.2 | nobody stands up, sometimes bad things happen. If you're waiting for a postcard to come in |
| 1:40.4 | the mail that says, hey, Rick, it's your turn. That's not going to happen. Someone just has to |
| 1:46.1 | realize it's time to do something. On Friday, the high court by a six to three margin, agreed with |
| 1:53.5 | Rick Woldenberg and answered Donald Trump with a resounding no. They're just being fools and |
| 1:59.5 | lapdogs for the rhinos and the radical left Democrats, and |
| 2:03.2 | they're very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution. |
... |
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