After an impatient wait, the U.S. Supreme Court finally handed down its opinion in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the tariffs case, on Friday, Feb. 20. Much commentary has ensued about the decision, with more to come. I offer three takeaways: (a) The Court’s justices spent a lot of time talking about how to interpret statutes in a period of governmental upheaval; (b) the Court, perhaps wisely, did not talk about the connection between taxation and takings, an argument that I had pushed; and (c) the decision takes away President Trump’s favorite tool for dealing with the rest of the world but will not necessarily end his obsessive fixation on tariffs as an instrument of state power. The decision may represent a significant loss for the administration, but it is not a crushing defeat. The decision’s bottom line is one I supported in an amicus brief, on Lawfare, and elsewhere. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize tariffs (nor, it seems, any other kind of financial exaction). As IEEPA contains indefinite and potentially sweeping grants of presidential power, the Supreme Court’s tasks were to find evidence of Congress’s intended scope of the grant and decide which doctrine to apply in the absence of conclusive evidence. One such inference, the major questions doctrine (MQD), received much attention, to the satisfaction of law professors and the dismay, most likely, of everyone else. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor (Kagan writing for the three) thought the evidence of legislative intent was clear enough to make inferences unnecessary—that Congress had never intended to convey an extractive power. Justice Jackson added a soliloquy on the relevance of legislative history. Meanwhile, Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas (Kavanaugh writing for the three) also found the evidence compelling, but in the opposite direction. Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts, concluded that the evidence pointed toward no power and argued that the MQD bolstered that conclusion.