COMMENTARY: Gorsuch and the Major Questions Doctrine — the Right That Brakes Trump

Introduction: the paradox shaking the American right

On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court breaks its own lines

On February 20, 2026, the United States Supreme Court delivered a stunning ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump: by six votes to three, it struck down the massive tariffs imposed by Donald Trump under the 1977 economic emergency law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The outcome stunned many observers — not because of its legal conclusion, but because of its political geography. Three conservative justices — Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and Justice Neil Gorsuch — voted with the Court's three liberals to block the outgoing Republican president. Meanwhile, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh, also conservatives, stood in dissent behind Trump.

This unprecedented configuration immediately triggered the president's fury. Trump called the ruling a "shame," declared he was "sincerely ashamed" of certain justices, and said Gorsuch and Barrett were "an embarrassment to their families." He warmly praised Kavanaugh for his "exceptional brilliance" in contrast. The United States just witnessed something rare: a president publicly insulting two of his own nominees after they refused to bend to his will. What does this moment say about the Court, about the American right, and about the state of constitutional democracy?

The major questions doctrine: ideological weapon or constitutional principle?

At the heart of the case lies the major questions doctrine, a jurisprudential principle requiring that Congress explicitly delegate to the executive any regulatory power of significant economic or political consequence. In plain terms: if a law is vague and the stakes are enormous, the Court refuses to let the president claim that power without clear legislative authorization. The debate over this doctrine has raged for years, but the Trump-tariffs case gives it a new, almost explosive dimension. Because the same doctrine had been wielded, from 2021 to 2023, as a shield against every major Biden administration initiative — vaccine mandates, student loan cancellations, carbon regulation. This time, it is Trump who finds himself in the crosshairs. And it is his own justices holding the gun.

Understanding this paradox requires tracing the doctrine's recent history, examining the internal fractures within the conservative camp, and measuring what all of this reveals about the real autonomy — and limits — of the most conservative Supreme Court of the modern era. This commentary is that analysis.

The major questions doctrine: genesis of a contested jurisprudential tool

Ancient roots, recent formalization

The major questions doctrine is not a recent invention, but its formalization as a standalone and robust doctrine is relatively recent. For decades, American courts applied the principle implicitly: if Congress did not explicitly authorize a sweeping action, one presumes it did not intend to. The Supreme Court began to systematize it in the 2000s, notably in cases involving federal agencies, but it received its clearest formulation in the West Virginia v. EPA decision of June 2022. The Court, in an opinion by Roberts, struck down the Environmental Protection Agency's plan to restructure the American electricity grid to reduce carbon emissions, finding insufficient explicit congressional authorization.

Roberts's reasoning was clear in its principle: Congress cannot implicitly delegate the power to massively transform the economy to an executive agency. The decision was celebrated by the right as a triumph of the separation of powers against what it called the unelected bureaucracy. It was, according to its supporters, a reaffirmation of legislative sovereignty against the hypertrophy of the administrative state. But from the outset, critical voices argued that the doctrine was less a neutral principle than a political tool — applied selectively to block progressive initiatives while sparing conservative ones.

A weapon used against Biden, systematically

The criticism found substance in the years that followed. Between 2021 and 2023, the conservative Court used the major questions doctrine to block, one after another, the Biden administration's major regulatory initiatives. In January 2022, the Court suspended the OSHA vaccine mandate for companies with more than 100 employees, finding that the agency lacked the power to decide a measure affecting 84 million Americans without clear congressional authorization. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh voted with the majority. In June 2023, in Biden v. Nebraska, the Court struck down Biden's federal student loan cancellation plan — a program estimated at $430 billion — ruling that the HEROES Act did not contain "sufficiently clear" authorization for such a measure. Again, Roberts wrote the majority, and Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh voted with him.

Amy Coney Barrett, in a concurrence, took care to defend the doctrine against the charge of ideological bias, presenting it not as a substantive canon but as an ordinary tool of textual interpretation — a way of deciphering the most natural meaning of a statute in its constitutional context. Her argument was sophisticated. But the practical result was clear: in every case involving Biden, the doctrine had been applied. Each time, the Democratic president's major policies had been invalidated. The right rejoiced. It did not imagine that the same doctrine would soon be turned against it.

The Learning Resources v. Trump case: when the boomerang returns

IEEPA and tariffs: an "extraordinary" claim, per Roberts

It all began with Donald Trump's decision, upon his return to the White House, to invoke the IEEPA to impose massive tariffs on global imports — officially to combat trade deficits and drug trafficking. The claim was audacious: Trump argued that the general wording of the 1977 law, authorizing the president to "regulate imports," gave him the power to levy tariffs of unlimited scope and duration. Affected American and foreign companies challenged this interpretation in court. The case reached the Supreme Court.

In his majority opinion of February 20, 2026, Roberts was categorical. The IEEPA "contains no reference to tariffs or customs duties." The government cited no precedent in which Congress had used the word "regulate" to authorize taxation. And, remarkably, no president before Trump had ever read the IEEPA as conferring that power upon him. For Roberts, this triple absence — textual, historical, and practical — was sufficient. The Court would not read into vague language an implicit delegation of the taxing power, one of Congress's most fundamental prerogatives under Article 1 of the Constitution. He framed the rule memorably: "There is no major-questions exception to the major questions doctrine."

The 6-3 vote and its internal fractures

The decision unfolded in layers. The six justices — Roberts, Gorsuch, Barrett, plus Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson — agreed on the central point: the IEEPA does not authorize tariffs. But the reasons diverged. Barrett and Roberts supported the portion of the opinion invoking the major questions doctrine, forming with Gorsuch a plurality of three voices on that precise question. The three liberals, led by Kagan, held that ordinary tools of textual interpretation were sufficient to decide the case — no need for the doctrine as a "thumb on the scale." Gorsuch, for his part, wrote a concurrence of more than forty pages, twice as long as the majority opinion itself, defending the doctrine in its deepest constitutional foundations. Dissenters Kavanaugh, Thomas, and Alito argued that the doctrine should not apply to foreign policy and international trade, where presidents have always enjoyed broad discretion.

Trump's reaction was immediate and ferocious. On Truth Social, he first claimed, against all logic, that the decision actually gave him even more tariff powers. Then, at a press conference, he attacked the justices personally, including two of his own nominees. This reaction — a president disparaging his own judicial nominations because they refused to serve him — says much about the Trumpian conception of justice.

Neil Gorsuch: the conservative who dared to look in the mirror

A forty-page concurrence, an act of intellectual courage

The contribution of Neil Gorsuch to this ruling deserves particular attention. Nominated by Trump in 2017 to replace Antonin Scalia — the great pope of textualism — Gorsuch is often presented as one of the most rigorous intellectual heirs of the conservative tradition in American constitutional law. He devoted his concurrence to defending the major questions doctrine not as a partisan tool but as a structural bulwark against the seizure of executive power. His most striking formulation: "Once this Court interprets a vague statute as conferring a specific power on the executive, that power may become nearly impossible for Congress to reclaim."

He then pointed to the inconsistency of his dissenting colleagues with surgical precision. Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh had, in previous cases, defended the major questions doctrine with conviction. In Biden v. Nebraska, they had voted to block student loan cancellation invoking precisely that principle. In West Virginia v. EPA, they had maintained that a climate crisis — described by dissenters as "the most pressing environmental challenge of our era" — did not exempt the EPA from obtaining clear congressional authorization. Gorsuch asked the question directly: how could one justify applying the doctrine in those cases and abandoning it here? The only observable difference was the name of the president involved.

Consistency as the test of legitimacy

Gorsuch also warned against reasoning capable of undermining the very legitimacy of the Court. If the major questions doctrine only applies when it is politically convenient for one side or the other, it loses all constitutional value and becomes what its critics have always said it was: an instrument of judicial power disguised as a neutral principle. Gorsuch did not want to be that kind of justice. He recalled that Americans had fought the Revolution partly because they refused to be taxed without representation. That founding principle, codified in the Constitution, cannot suffer presidential exceptions.

His gesture was all the more courageous because he knew perfectly well the reaction his position would provoke in Republican circles. His nomination was one of the strongest symbols of Trump's first term. Turning — in the strictly legal sense — against him in the name of the very principles Trump had supposedly embodied, meant assuming certain political isolation. Gorsuch did it anyway. And Jeffrey Rosen, in The Atlantic, wrote that this concurrence could become "the Roberts Court's most influential statement on how to prevent the gradual accumulation of executive power."

Amy Coney Barrett: the textualist who holds her line

A narrower vision, but the same decision

Where Gorsuch offered the most expansive vision, Amy Coney Barrett held a more modest but equally firm line. Nominated by Trump in October 2020, just weeks before the election, Barrett had been seen as the guarantee of an unshakeable conservative majority on the Court. Yet, as in the Trump v. Biden (2020) case — where she had refused to intervene to overturn the election results — she once again signaled that her loyalty was to the law, not to the president.

In her concurrence on the tariffs case, Barrett accepted the outcome but declined to fully endorse Gorsuch's approach. She accused him of attacking a "straw man" and risking sliding the major questions doctrine beyond textual interpretation and toward the creation of judicial policy. For Barrett, the doctrine must remain a tool of interpretation — revealing the most natural meaning of the legislative text in its context — and not a standalone substantive canon that presumes against executive power. Her position reflects the permanent tension, within judicial conservatism itself, between strict textualism and constitutional structuralism.

The price of consistency

But whatever the methodological nuance, Barrett voted with the majority. And that vote carries a political price that cannot be minimized. Trump said she was "an embarrassment to her family." That phrase — uttered by the man who nominated her — captures the crisis of the moment. Barrett was treated as a traitor for doing what every justice is supposed to do: apply the law independently of the preferences of those who appointed her. The fact that this posture has become scandalous in certain Republican circles says more about the state of the party than about the state of justice.

In the long run, Barrett's position may prove to be the most strategically sound. By keeping the doctrine within strict textual limits, she preserves her credibility with liberal critics who see it as a partisan tool, while allowing her to defend its legitimate applications. It is a balancing act — but balance is precisely what an independent Court is supposed to embody.

John Roberts: the architect of a Court that resists

A Chief Justice who chose the Constitution

John Roberts is not a political outsider. Nominated by George W. Bush in 2005, he has presided over the Court with a manifest sensitivity to its institutional image. He has at times seemed to practice what his critics call "strategic minimalism" — decisions calibrated not to disturb the political balance too greatly. In the Affordable Care Act case (2012), he surprised observers by saving the reform at the cost of tortured reasoning. In Trump v. Anderson (2024), on Trump's eligibility, he had assembled an unusually broad majority for a cautious procedural decision.

But on February 20, 2026, Roberts did something more direct. His majority in Learning Resources v. Trump did not seek a rhetorical escape hatch. He cited Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution — conferring on Congress the power to levy taxes and duties — said that tariffs are taxes, and concluded that Trump lacked legal authorization to act as he had. He affirmed, at the close of the opinion, his allegiance to the Constitution and to the authority of the judiciary to say what the law is. According to Salon, Roberts noted that before Trump, "no president had ever invoked the IEEPA to impose tariffs — let alone tariffs of this magnitude and breadth."

Institutional consistency as a legacy

What Roberts is building, decision by decision, resembles something more durable than party politics: an institutional legacy founded on consistency. The Court is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as the last bulwark of an eroded system of checks and balances. If it buckles under presidential pressure, regardless of which president, it ceases to be that bulwark. Roberts seems to have understood this. And while he is not always consistent — some of his past votes invite scrutiny — February 20, 2026 represents a line he chose not to cross. That matters, independent of everything that preceded it.

The Chief Justice also had the opportunity to clarify that the major questions doctrine admits no exception for emergencies or for foreign affairs. That double refusal of the carve-outs requested by the dissenters strengthens the doctrine in its most demanding version. It applies wherever an immense executive power is claimed without clear textual basis — whether under a Democratic or Republican president, in peacetime or in crisis.

Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh: the camp that chose its camp

A dissent that indicts itself

The three dissenting justices — Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh — provided a two-pronged argument. First, they argued that history and precedent show that tariffs have always been considered a means of regulating imports, and that the IEEPA therefore covers that power. Second, and most importantly, Kavanaugh advanced an exception for foreign policy and international trade: the major questions doctrine, he said, had "never applied in the context of foreign policy, including foreign trade." In that domain, he argued, courts read the text as written, without applying any presumption against the president.

Kavanaugh further offered what Salon described as a "roadmap for circumventing the decision" — predicting that the ruling would not durably limit presidential tariff authority. Thomas went further in a troubling direction: citing the historical origin of the power to impose customs duties in the British "royal prerogative," he suggested that this power should belong to the American executive. Austin Sarat, in Salon, noted the irony with biting acuity: Thomas seemed to be suggesting that what had been a prerogative of the British king should be that of the American king — a formulation that was doubtless not accidental.

Doctrinal opportunism as a confession

What Gorsuch illuminated in his concurrence — and what outside observers cannot ignore — is that Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh all used the major questions doctrine to block Biden, and now refuse to apply it to Trump. This asymmetry is difficult to defend intellectually. Kavanaugh argues that the context differs: foreign policy is different. Perhaps. But the doctrine in West Virginia v. EPA also had dimensions of sweeping national economic policy. And in Biden v. Nebraska, Roberts had explicitly indicated that the doctrine applies even to government benefit programs, because "among the most important of Congress's powers is control of the purse."

If control of the purse justifies the doctrine for $430 billion in student loan cancellations, why does it not justify the doctrine for tariffs representing $160 to $175 billion already collected? The asymmetry does not hold to any consistent doctrinal analysis. It holds to one variable: the name of the president. That is what Gorsuch had the courage to say. That is what Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh refused to hear.

Biden v. Nebraska (2023): the precedent that comes back to haunt the right

$430 billion and the required congressional clarity

To grasp the full extent of the paradox, one must revisit Biden v. Nebraska, decided on June 30, 2023, exactly one year after West Virginia v. EPA. In that case, the Biden administration had invoked the HEROES Act to cancel up to $430 billion in federal student loans. Roberts, writing for a 6-3 majority, ruled that the "waiver or modify" language of the statute did not give the administration sufficiently clear authorization for such transformative action. The plan had an economic impact "staggering by any measure." The major questions doctrine therefore applied. The Biden administration had not obtained explicit congressional approval.

Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh voted with that majority. Barrett wrote a concurrence defending the doctrine on textual grounds. Gorsuch voted with the group. The coalition was perfect, unanimous on the conservative side. But the practical result was to block a major progressive policy — relieving a colossal debt for millions of Americans — in the name of a principle that the right was unanimous in defending. At the time, no one in the Republican camp asked whether the major questions doctrine might one day strike their own president.

Institutional memory as a boomerang

It was precisely this reversal that Gorsuch documented with almost pedagogical thoroughness in his 2026 concurrence. Citing West Virginia v. EPA, Biden v. Nebraska, and the OSHA vaccine mandate case, he recalled that in each of those cases, the 2026 dissenters had not only voted with the major questions doctrine but had explicitly defended it. Kavanaugh, in particular, had in Biden v. Nebraska emphasized that the economic and political significance of a measure was the decisive criterion for applying the doctrine. Yet Trump's tariffs represented a burden of $134 billion according to the majority opinion — a considerable sum. If the doctrine applied to $430 billion in debt cancellation, why not to $134 billion in tariffs?

The institutional memory of the Court is its most precious asset — and its most exploitable vulnerability. Every vote leaves a trace. Every justification is inscribed in a web of precedents. When justices change position without changing principle, that memory becomes an indictment. Gorsuch chose not to forget. That choice placed him, paradoxically, in the camp of constitutional consistency alongside liberal justices with whom he disagrees on almost everything else.

The autonomy of the Court: myth or institutional reality?

The fundamental question raised by this decision

The February 20, 2026 ruling reignites with particular sharpness the question of the Court's real autonomy. For decades, political scientists and legal scholars have debated: is the Court genuinely independent, or is it merely the slightly delayed reflection of the political majorities that appoint its members? The "political Court" thesis holds that, over the long term, the Court's decisions never lastingly diverge from the dominant sentiment of the political elite that composes it. The "institutional autonomy" thesis responds that the Court develops its own logic — doctrine, precedent, consistency — that allows it to resist the political pressures of the moment.

The February 20 vote tilts toward the second thesis, at least partially. Three of the six Republican-nominated justices refused to follow the Republican president. But the other face of that image is equally telling: three of the same six Republican-nominated justices voted with Trump, at the cost of doctrinal inconsistency that Gorsuch himself exposed without mercy. The Court's autonomy is therefore not total. It is the result of an unstable balance between the individual convictions of the justices and the pressures of the political moment.

The Roberts Court between institutionalism and politics

Roberts has built, over his twenty years in the chief's chair, a Court that presents itself as above the fray — but is only partially so. The presidential immunity reform decided in 2024, in Trump v. United States, had largely favored Trump by granting him near-total immunity for his official acts. Some had seen in that decision a troubling signal about the Court's independence. The tariffs ruling complicates that picture. Roberts can, when the constitutional stake is sufficiently clear and the text sufficiently readable, vote against the president who seemed to have benefited from his goodwill in other cases.

What this reveals is a partial, selective autonomy, founded on thresholds: when the constitutional or statutory text is too clear to be circumvented, even politically aligned justices can vote against the president. When the text is ambiguous, ideological presuppositions reassert themselves. The major questions doctrine has the particular quality of being sufficiently formalized to make circumvention difficult to justify without visible inconsistency. That is why Gorsuch, Roberts, and Barrett could not abandon it without betraying themselves. And Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh chose to betray themselves instead.

Trump and the Court: the most toxic relationship in American politics

A president who believes he owns his nominees

Trump's reaction after the February 20 ruling reveals a deep misunderstanding — or refusal — of how independent justice works. Calling his own nominees an "embarrassment to their families" because they voted according to their legal analysis rather than his political interests is to confuse a justice with an employee. Trump has always treated the Supreme Court as a resource to be mobilized, not an institution to be respected. His public speeches, his attacks on federal judges over the years, his rhetoric about "Obama judges,""Clinton judges": all of this reflects a vision of justice as an extension of politics.

This vision is dangerous not only for American democracy but for the right itself. By putting maximum public pressure on his own nominees, Trump weakens the institution that the conservative right spent decades reshaping. If the Court loses its legitimacy — perceived as a partisan armed wing — it also loses its capacity to protect future conservative gains. Roberts seems to have understood this. Trump, manifestly, has not.

The American right confronting its contradictions

This moment reveals the internal contradictions of an American right deeply divided between two competing projects. On one side, constitutional conservatism — embodied by Gorsuch, Roberts, and, in her own way, Barrett — which sees in limiting executive power and respecting the constitutional text the founding values of the American conservative project. On the other, Trumpism — embodied by dissenters Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh — which subordinates those values to the service of a political agenda and a particular political personality. This fracture is not new, but it had never been so visible, so documented, and so clearly named by a justice of the Court itself.

The irony is total. The American right spent a generation building a Court to its liking — carefully calculated nominations, mobilized senators, costly political battles — only to arrive at a situation where its own most intellectually rigorous justices refuse to serve as political instruments. The system worked, but not as planned. The machine for nominating conservative justices also produced constitutional justices.

The legacy of West Virginia v. EPA and constitutional consistency

The founding moment of June 2022

To understand the 2026 fracture, one must return to West Virginia v. EPA, decided in June 2022. That case formally consecrated the major questions doctrine as a distinct constitutional principle. The Court had struck down the Obama-Biden plan to reform the American electricity grid, the Clean Power Plan, finding that Congress had not given the EPA sufficiently clear authorization to transform the national energy mix. Roberts wrote the majority. Gorsuch provided an expansive concurrence on the separation of powers. Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh voted with them. The liberals, led by Kagan, had denounced the doctrine as a judicial "invention."

In 2022, the doctrine was the right's victory. It allowed conservative justices to block the major regulatory policies of the administrative state — on the environment, on health, on the labor market — by requiring legislative precision that the polarized Congress of the 2010s and 2020s was rarely able to provide. The doctrine had, in practice, a conservative effect: it made it more difficult to expand the federal government's role in new domains. The right therefore adopted it with enthusiasm.

When a doctrine exceeds its intended use

But every doctrine has consequences that exceed its initial intent. The major questions doctrine, as formulated in West Virginia v. EPA and Biden v. Nebraska, does not discriminate between presidents. It demands congressional clarity whenever a claim of executive power is both immense and unprecedented — regardless of the political affiliation of the one making it. Trump made exactly that claim: tariffs of unlimited scope, for an indefinite duration, on the basis of a vague emergency law. It was the perfect textbook case for applying the doctrine. Refusing to apply it would have required either abandoning the doctrine or inventing an ad hoc exception. Kavanaugh chose the second path. Gorsuch refused.

The February 20, 2026 ruling thus confirms that the major questions doctrine, if applied consistently, is a limitation on executive power in general — not just Democratic executive power. And that is precisely why it provoked such a fracture: the right loved the doctrine when it blocked Biden. It no longer loves it when it blocks Trump. That is the revelation of a structural hypocrisy that only consistency can denounce.

The role of the West in this debate: a democracy under tension

What the ruling says to Europe and to the allies

The February 20, 2026 ruling does not concern only the United States. It has direct implications for all Western democracies that suffered the consequences of Trump's tariffs. European allies, Asian partners, emerging economies integrated into global value chains: all saw their exports to the American market suddenly and massively taxed. The Court's ruling represents not only an internal limit on American presidential power, but also a signal sent to the rest of the world: American institutions can still function as a counterweight, even under a presidency that claims near-unlimited authority.

For the West, that carries considerable symbolic and practical value. American leadership rests on institutional credibility — the conviction that the United States is governed by rules, not by the whim of a single man. Every decision that confirms that conviction strengthens confidence in alliances. Every decision that contradicts it erodes it. The Supreme Court, on February 20, 2026, helped restore a portion of that credibility, even if a single ruling cannot undo the damage of years of unilateralist rhetoric and chaotic tariff policy.

Trump, a necessary evil, remains an institutional problem

This analysis does not amount to absolving Trump of his attacks on institutions. His behavior toward the Court — public insults against his own nominees, baseless accusations of foreign influence on the justices, delusional reinterpretation of the ruling as a victory on Truth Social — confirms that his relationship with constitutional democracy is profoundly conflictual. The West may need American firmness against Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. It cannot afford a partner whose president treats his own institutions as obstacles to be dismantled.

This is the central paradox of the Trump era for the West: the military and economic power of the United States remains indispensable to collective security. But a president who undermines internal checks and balances ultimately weakens the credibility and durability of that power. The resistance of Gorsuch, Roberts, and Barrett is therefore, in this broader context, good news for the Atlantic Alliance as much as for the American Constitution.

Lessons for constitutional democracy worldwide

A precedent for wavering democracies

Beyond the United States, the Learning Resources v. Trump ruling offers a lesson for all democracies confronting the authoritarian temptation. It demonstrates that sufficiently formalized institutions, equipped with sufficiently precise doctrines, can resist the direct political pressure of a strong executive. The major questions doctrine is, in this sense, a constitutional locking mechanism: it imposes a clarity that populist majorities always struggle to obtain, because populist majorities prefer the ambiguity that leaves their hands free. Requiring legal clarity means requiring public debate, parliamentary deliberation, an assumed choice. It is the antithesis of government by decree.

For countries like Poland or Hungary, where populist executives have progressively eroded judicial independence, the American ruling serves as a reminder of what is at stake. This is not merely a question of technical doctrine. It is the question of whether a court can still say no to the power in place without suffering existential consequences. In the United States, Gorsuch, Roberts, and Barrett said no. They are still on the bench. That is a luxury their counterparts in some Central European countries no longer have.

Doctrine as a bulwark, not a weapon

The final lesson is this: a constitutional doctrine only has value through the consistency of its application. Used selectively, it is merely a partisan tool. Applied universally, it becomes a bulwark. The major questions doctrine, on February 20, 2026, was a bulwark. Three conservative justices chose consistency over partisan loyalty. Three others chose loyalty over consistency. And it is in that gap — in that fracture within the American right — that one can read the true state of health of a constitutional democracy: not perfect, not immunized, but still capable of producing individuals who choose the text over the chief.

It is fragile. It is insufficient. It is nonetheless what is, for now, most precious in the American system. And in a world where the alternatives to liberal democracy — Putin's Russia, Xi's China, the Iranian theocracy — are institutional nightmares, preserving this fragile residue of constitutional consistency is not a luxury. It is a strategic necessity.

Conclusion: partial autonomy as the only available horizon

What February 20, 2026 proved

The Learning Resources v. Trump ruling proved three things. First, that the major questions doctrine is a real doctrine, with sufficient internal logic to constrain at least some of those who built it. Second, that the American Supreme Court is not monolithically subservient to the political agenda of the president who nominated a majority of its members — it is traversed by doctrinal fractures and individual convictions that maintain a form of unpredictability. Third, that Trump treats justice as a political resource, not as an institution, and that this vision is incompatible with the constitutional system he claims to lead.

These three observations resolve nothing. They do, however, frame a complex reality that neither liberal enthusiasm nor conservative cynicism correctly captures. The Court is neither the savior of democracy nor its executioner. It is an imperfect institutional actor, partially autonomous, whose decisions depend as much on its members' principles as on their blind spots. On February 20, 2026, the blind spots of Gorsuch, Roberts, and Barrett happened to align with the Constitution. That is not always the case. That day, it was.

Toward a post-Trump right: the open question

The fracture exposed in Learning Resources v. Trump also raises the question of the future of American judicial conservatism. Trumpism has absorbed, over ten years, much of the political right. But within the Court, some conservative justices have maintained a vision of the law that precedes and transcends the Trump moment. Gorsuch is now the most visible figure of this resistant constitutional conservatism. The question is whether this resistance is a vestige in decline or the seed of a reconstituted right capable of distinguishing between defending institutions and defending the interests of one man. History will tell whether February 20, 2026 was an exception or the beginning of a trend. For now, it was already a great deal.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Sources

Primary sources

Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump — United States Supreme Court ruling — February 20, 2026

Trump denounces Supreme Court justices after tariffs ruling — Reuters — February 20, 2026

A detailed breakdown of the Supreme Court's tariffs ruling — SCOTUSblog — February 20, 2026

Secondary sources

Gorsuch's concurrence on tariffs is a warning — The Atlantic — February 25, 2026

Why conservative justices split on Trump — CNN — February 22, 2026

Gorsuch blasts Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh for favoring Trump's illegal tariffs — Reason — February 20, 2026

Supreme Court's tariffs ruling answers some major questions, leaves others open — Arnold Porter — February 20, 2026

Supreme Court's tariffs ruling reveals two political orders — Salon — February 21, 2026