Trump Lawyer Gets Cut Off by Sotomayor on Coney Barrett’s Behalf: ‘Could You Just Answer The Justice?’

Trump Solicitor General John Sauer got cut off as his answer to Justice Amy Coney Barrett wandered, with Justice Sonya Sotomayor stepping in to tell him to just answer the question in a tense moment at the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in a case challenging Trump’s authority to impose sweeping tariffs based on the invocation of emergency powers.

The arguments were carried live by CNN’s The Situation Room, during which Justice Barrett interrupted Sauer to ask a question that apparently sent him off on a tangent that Sotomayor found unresponsive:

JUSTICE AMY CONEY BARRETT: General Sauer, can I just ask you a question? Can you point to any other place in the code or any other time in history where that phrase “together, regulate importation,” has been used to confer tariff imposing authority?

SOLICITOR GENERAL D. JOHN SAUER: Well, as to regulated importation, that was held in TWEA, so obviously, and that’s–

JUSTICE AMY CONEY BARRETT: Okay, so an intermediate appellate court held it in TWEA, but you just told Justice Kavanaugh that wasn’t your lead argument, that your lead argument was this long history of the phrase regulate importation being understood to include tariff authority.

So my question is, has there ever been another instance in which a statute has conferred, used that language to confer the power? Putting aside Yoshida.

SOLICITOR GENERAL D. JOHN SAUER: I mean, as the other statutory example is just imports the cases we rely on our cases where, for example, in Gibbons, it’s Ogden and Justice–

JUSTICE AMY CONEY BARRETT: That just shows the word can be used that way. None of those cases talked about it as conferring tariff authority.

I understood you to be citing McGoldrick and Gibbons and those cases just to show that it’s possible to say that regulating commerce includes the power to tariff.

SOLICITOR GENERAL D. JOHN SAUER: I think our argument goes a bit further than that as interpretive matter, because if you look at that history, the history of delegations…

JUSTICE SONYA SOTOMAYOR: Could you just answer the justice’s question?

JUSTICE AMY CONEY BARRETT: Can you identify any statute that used that phrase to confer territory?

SOLICITOR GENERAL D. JOHN SAUER: Yeah, the only two statutes I can identify now are TWEA, as interpreted in Yoshida, and then closely related, not regulated importation, but adjust imports in section 232. I

JUSTICE AMY CONEY BARRETT: Well, I think Adjust imports this differently. So the answer is the contested application in TWEA and then now in IEEEPA.

SOLICITOR GENERAL D. JOHN SAUER: And then, of course, I mean, those are there’s a sort of direct line there.

JUSTICE AMY CONEY BARRETT: Yeah, I understand that. OK.

Watch above via CNN’s The Situation Room.