Lawyer in SCOTUS case against Trump’s tariffs says his clients want a refund

VPM | By Steve Inskeep and Destinee Adams

Published February 23, 2026 at 11:40 AM EST

(L-R) Allison Riggs, chief counsel of voting rights at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, Kathay Feng, national redistricting director at Common Cause, and Attorney Neal Katyal talk to reporters outside the U.S. Supreme Court after they attended oral arguments in the Moore v. Harper case December 7, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Updated February 23, 2026 at 13:48 PM ET

Neal Katyal, one of the attorneys who argued on behalf of plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court case against Trump’s tariffs, told Morning Edition that his clients want a refund from the federal government.

“There’s a pretty commonsense principle, which is if you’ve collected a bunch of money illegally and the court says it’s illegal, then you’ve got to give it back,” Katyal said. “It’s not a finders keepers rule in this country. We have a system of justice.”

Last week, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s sweeping use of emergency powers to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The 6-3 ruling is a major setback for the president’s economic policy agenda. The next day, Trump announced in a social media post that he would raise global tariffs from 10% to 15% under a different law. While discussing the ruling with NPR’s Steve Inkseep, Katyal, who represented U.S. businesses that objected to the tariffs, said that under the U.S. Constitution “it is up to Congress to set the tariffs and not the president acting on his own.”

Click the play button in the blue box above to listen to the full conversation.

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Steve Inskeep

Steve Inskeep is a host of NPR's Morning Edition, as well as NPR's morning news podcast Up First.

Known for interviews with presidents and Congressional leaders, Inskeep has a passion for stories of the less famous: Pennsylvania truck drivers, Kentucky coal miners, U.S.-Mexico border detainees, Yemeni refugees, California firefighters, American soldiers.

Since joining Morning Edition in 2004, Inskeep has hosted the program from New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, Cairo, and Beijing; investigated Iraqi police in Baghdad; and received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "The Price of African Oil," on conflict in Nigeria. He has taken listeners on a 2,428-mile journey along the U.S.-Mexico border, and 2,700 miles across North Africa. He is a repeat visitor to Iran and has covered wars in Syria and Yemen.

Inskeep says Morning Edition works to "slow down the news," making sense of fast-moving events. A prime example came during the 2008 Presidential campaign, when Inskeep and NPR's Michele Norris conducted "The York Project," groundbreaking conversations about race, which received an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for excellence.

Inskeep was hired by NPR in 1996. His first full-time assignment was the 1996 presidential primary in New Hampshire. He went on to cover the Pentagon, the Senate, and the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he covered the war in Afghanistan, turmoil in Pakistan, and the war in Iraq. In 2003, he received a National Headliner Award for investigating a military raid gone wrong in Afghanistan. He has twice been part of NPR News teams awarded the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for coverage of Iraq.

On days of bad news, Inskeep is inspired by the Langston Hughes book, Laughing to Keep From Crying. Of hosting Morning Edition during the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession, he told Nuvo magazine when "the whole world seemed to be falling apart, it was especially important for me ... to be amused, even if I had to be cynically amused, about the things that were going wrong. Laughter is a sign that you're not defeated."

Inskeep is the author of Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, a 2011 book on one of the world's great megacities. He is also author of Jacksonland, a history of President Andrew Jackson's long-running conflict with John Ross, a Cherokee chief who resisted the removal of Indians from the eastern United States in the 1830s.

He has been a guest on numerous TV programs including ABC's This Week, NBC's Meet the Press, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports, CNN's Inside Politics and the PBS Newshour. He has written for publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic.

A native of Carmel, Indiana, Inskeep is a graduate of Morehead State University in Kentucky.

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