After the Supreme Court struck down his emergency “Liberation Day” tariffs last month, Donald Trump had a public meltdown. The president delivered a 44-minute diatribe that expertly blended falsehoods (“the Court has been swayed by foreign interests”), ad hominem bile (the justices are “an embarrassment to their families”), and a Freudian non sequitur (“I want to be a good boy”).

Amid the toxic bluster, Trump did offer one cogent observation. When asked whether the federal government would refund the tariff money it had already collected, he responded, “They take months and months to write an opinion and they don’t even discuss that point … Wouldn’t you think they would have put one sentence in there saying keep the money or don’t keep the money, right?” On this point, Trump was spot-on. At stake was more than $160 billion already paid under the invalidated tariffs — exceeding the combined annual budgets of the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, EPA, and NASA.

In a 170-page ruling, a cross-ideological majority of the Supreme Court declared the tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act unconstitutional. But the justices conspicuously left unanswered a major question they knew would linger over the case. At oral argument in November 2025, they spent substantial time puzzling over what would happen to all that money if they were to strike down the tariffs. Yet when the decision dropped three months later, they decided not to decide. (Must be nice; if a thorny issue presents itself, just ignore it.) The only mention of the looming refund dilemma came in a dissent from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who correctly noted it would create “a........

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