Trump would make US Supreme Court history by attending tariffs case

NEW YORK – President Donald Trump has said he feels an “obligation” to watch in person as the US Supreme Court weighs his powers to impose tariffs on much of the world. If Mr Trump does, he will make history as the first sitting president ever to attend oral arguments at the nation’s highest court.

There is no record in the Supreme Court’s 235-year history of a sitting president ever attending arguments, according to Ms Clare Cushman, director of publications and resident historian at the Supreme Court Historical Society.

Presidents have attended other events at the court. Mr Trump himself attended the investitures of two of his Supreme Court nominees, Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

He sought permission to attend oral arguments in 2024 in his presidential immunity case, but was denied, as he was scheduled to begin trial in New York on business fraud charges.

The Supreme Court is

scheduled to hear Mr Trump’s appeal on Nov 5

after the Federal Circuit ruled many of his “Liberation Day” tariffs exceeded the president’s emergency power to regulate imports.

Mr Trump has suggested on several occasions he would attend the arguments himself – part of a larger effort by his administration to pressure the judiciary into upholding the tariffs.

During an oval office press briefing in October, Mr Trump said tariffs had made the US a “strong, sound country”. Without them, he said, it would be a “big slog”.

“I think it’s one of the most important decisions in the history of the Supreme Court and I might go there,” he said. “I really believe I have an obligation to go there.”

Presidential appearances

At least one sitting president has addressed the Supreme Court in its own courtroom, Ms Cushman said.

In 1969, then-President Richard Nixon addressed the court to mark the occasion of the retirement of Chief Justice Earl Warren and the investiture of his selection to succeed him, Warren Burger.

Nixon, a member of court’s bar, dressed in the “formal cutaway coat” traditionally worn by government attorneys who addressed the Supreme Court, according to an American Bar Association Journal article noting the occasion.

Other presidents have addressed the court as litigators, both before and after their presidencies. At least eight future or past presidents argued before the court, Ms Cushman said, citing her own scholarship and an article for the Journal of Supreme Court History by the late US District Judge Allen Sharp.

The list includes Nixon, who argued the Time, Inc. v Hill freedom of speech case in 1967 between his term as vice-president and his election as president.

President James A. Garfield argued 13 cases before the Supreme Court prior to his presidency, including the landmark Ex parte Milligan case in 1866 that established the unconstitutionality of trying civilians before military tribunals.

Presidents Abraham Lincoln, James K. Polk and Grover Cleveland all argued one case before the court. President John Quincy Adams argued four cases before his election and one after in which he successfully defended a group of illegally enslaved Africans who mutinied aboard The Amistad.

The record for presidential arguments before the court is held by William H. Taft, who would later serve as the chief justice. Taft argued 39 cases before the court prior to his presidency, owing in no small part to his role as US solicitor general from 1890-1892.

It’s unclear whether Mr Trump actually intends to appear at the tariff arguments. He is scheduled to speak that same day at the America Business Forum in Miami, according to the organisation. Bloomberg