At this time last year, President Trump warmly shook hands with Chief Justice John Roberts at the State of the Union address, thanking him for the opinion he authored granting Trump and other presidents in the future expansive immunity from prosecution for their official acts after leaving office. But on Friday, after the Supreme Court invalidated Trump’s tariffs, the president was singing a decidedly different tune.
At a hastily called press conference, an agitated Trump railed against the conservative Roberts and two of the courts other conservatives, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both Trump appointees.
“They’re just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats,” Trump said.
With his usual eloquence and fair-minded reaonability.
Trump called the three conservatives “disloyal, unpatriotic,” and at one point he launched into a rant about how the court should have invalidated the election results in 2020, which Trump lost to Joe Biden.
Disloyal, eh? Thus making it embarrassingly clear that he thinks the ones he nominated should rule the way he wants them to rule – that in short they owe him.
Trump suffered a massive defeat at the Supreme Court. Writing for a hefty 6-to-3 majority, Chief Justice Roberts said that the nation’s founders deliberately and explicitly placed the power to impose taxes, including tariffs, with Congress, not with the president.
As the Chief Justice put it, “Having just fought a revolution motivated in large part by taxes imposed on them” by the King of England without their consent, the Framers wrote a Constitution that gives Congress the taxing power because the members of the legislature would be more accountable to the people.
Try telling that to Trump.
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