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Going into Supreme Court arguments over President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Wednesday, it was genuinely difficult to guess how the justices would rule. Within minutes, that suspense vanished. The hearing was a bloodbath for the Trump administration: Six justices lined up to bash the Justice Department’s defense of the tariffs, barely disguising their annoyance with the government’s barrage of blustery nonsense. At the halfway point, it would’ve saved everyone time had the court just huddled, announced its decision from the bench, and recessed early for lunch. Trump’s signature trade policy—which he expected to raise trillions of dollars for him to use as he wished—looks dead on arrival at SCOTUS. We have spent 10 months waiting to see if, and when, this court would set a limit on Trump’s power. Perhaps we should’ve guessed that its extraordinary deference to this president could be outweighed only by its hatred of taxes.

Wednesday’s case, Learning Resources v. Trump, marks a direct challenge to Trump’s unprecedented, unilateral imposition of global tariffs on almost every foreign nation. Although the Constitution vests the tariff power in Congress, not the president, the Justice Department asserts that Congress delegated this authority to the executive branch. Specifically, it cites a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—a strange choice, since that statute does not mention tariffs, customs, duties, or anything else that would imply a license for taxation. Solicitor General John Sauer told SCOTUS that IEEPA permits tariffs because it allows the president to “regulate” foreign “importation” to “deal with” an “unusual and extraordinary threat” abroad. “Regulation,” Sauer argued, includes tariffs, and the word “threat” is capacious enough to include fentanyl smuggling and even our trade deficit (which is, in reality, not a problem at all).

From the outset, a majority of justices weren’t buying what Sauer was selling. He stumbled early by irritating Chief Justice John Roberts with a heavy-handed invocation of Dames & Moore v. Regan, a 1981 decision about IEEPA. Roberts, who may have helped draft the opinion as a clerk, was plainly displeased by Sauer’s distortion of it. “That argument surprises me,” he told Sauer sternly, before reeling off passages from the ruling that undercut Trump’s position—including its warning that........

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