Trump administration Solicitor General D. John Sauer, Image via Screengrab / YouTube

Trump administration Solicitor General D. John Sauer faced pointed and at times skeptical questioning from both conservative and liberal justices during Wednesday’s Supreme Court oral arguments over President Donald Trump’s asserted power to impose sweeping tariffs by declaring a national emergency.

The tariffs, unilaterally imposed on approximately 100 countries, have dramatically altered not only national commerce, but worldwide commerce. Some legal experts point to the U.S. Constitution to argue that Trump has overstepped and usurped Congress’ Article I powers.

“Sharp, skeptical questioning on Trump’s tariffs from at least two conservative justices so far: Roberts and Barrett,” observed All Rise News Editor-in-Chief Adam Klasfeld, referring to Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

“The Supreme Court is not friendly to the President today,” noted constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor took broad issue with Sauer’s assertions, telling him, “You say tariffs are not taxes, but that’s exactly what they are.”

At another point, Justice Sotomayor rebuked Sauer, who had been asked a question by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and told him to just answer Barrett’s question.

Sauer insisted that the intent of President Trump’s tariffs was not to raise revenue, despite countless times Trump and his administration having bragged about the “billions” of dollars (or more) that they are bringing in.

The New York Times summed up a critical lynchpin for Wednesday’s hearing:

“An expected point of contention is whether Mr. Trump’s tariff actions run afoul of the so-called major questions doctrine. It is a principle that boils down to: If Congress wants to give the president power to take major economic action, it will say so plainly.”

Justice Sotomayor, challenging Sauer’s arguments, said: “So [President] Biden could have declared a national emergency on global warming, and then gotten his student [loan] forgiveness to not be a ‘major questions doctrine’?”

“That’s all Biden would have had to do with any of his programs?”

Sauer disagreed on student loan forgiveness but did not answer the climate change question.

Justice Sotomayor also pointed to that doctrine in her early line of questioning.

“I don’t understand this argument,” she told Sauer. “That it’s equivalent, or that foreign powers, or even an emergency, can do away with the major questions doctrine. Didn’t we in the Biden case recently say an emergency can’t make clear what’s ambiguous?”

NBC News reported that “Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to be skeptical about the argument that the government is using to push for Trump’s tariffs.”

“Roberts said ‘the imposition of taxes on Americans’ has always ‘been the core power of Congress.'”

“Roberts also said the major questions doctrine ‘might be directly applicable.'”

“‘The statute doesn’t use the word tariff,’ Roberts said.”

Serving up a cautionary reminder, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, an MSNBC legal analyst, noted: “Don’t forget that it was Sauer, now the Solicitor General, who persuaded a conservative majority of the Court that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed while in office, even if he ordered Seal Team 6 to take out a political rival.”