Can I get my tariff money back now?

deeply disappointing President Trump at a news conference yesterday.

And I'm Adrian Ma. After the break, a trade lawyer will help us break down the court's decision and we'll talk with a small business owner about what he's hoping will happen next now that tariff refunds might be on the table. So can you tell me just how you're feeling this morning?

Going to the decision this big comes down for somebody like you. Are you sort of like a kid on Christmas morning and you're like, I can't wait to tear open the box and see what's inside? Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. And wow, there were so many tariffs. There were the universal tariffs he placed on basically all imported goods. There were the so called reciprocal tariffs that he placed on specific countries. And of course, there were also the tit for tat tariff snafus that he got in with China, Mexico and Canada. And the legal justifications the Trump administration gave for many of these tariffs, which was a statute called the International Emergency Economic Powers act, or ieipa so Ted

And these powers, according to the statute, included language about regulating and importation. And even though the word tariff doesn't appear in the statute, the government argued that the words regulate and importation give it power to slap tariffs on the world. But then midway through last year, a couple of small businesses said, I don't think that's right. So they sued President Trump, and their cases wound up in front of the supreme court. And in yesterday's 63 decision, they ruled in favor of the businesses.

Doesn't say anything about the President.

Right.

He wanted to play like tariff jazz.

Now, the administration argued that the president is allowed to do this under his AIPA emergency powers. But in the end, a majority of the court said there is just no way that IIPA gives the president unilateral authority to impose tariffs with no limits.

And this gets us Back to the question we asked earlier. What real world effects should we expect to happen next? Well, for one thing, Ted says don't expect tariffs to just disappear. While the President can't impose tariffs under IIPA anymore, there are other statutes he could rely on.

Section122, by the way, is one of the statutes that Ted mentioned earlier, which give the President limited power over tariffs rather than the sort of carte blanche approach that he took under ieepa. So for now, it looks like there are other statutes the President will try to use, but that does not mean that the government is suddenly off the hook for the more than $100 billion worth of IIPA tariffs it's already collected.

So how would the refund process work?

Nobody knows, including, apparently, the President. When a reporter asked Trump whether the government has to issue refunds, this is how he responded.

Still, you could bet a lot of business owners wouldn't pass up the chance to get their money back if they could.

We also asked Daniel if his company did somehow manage to get a refund, would he pass those savings on to custom? He said, possibly.

This episode was produced by Corey Bridges and engineered by Jimmy Keighley. It was fact checked by Vito Emanuel. Cake and Cannon is our editor. And the indicators of production of npr.