Even for Solicitor General D. John Sauer, a man whose entire job is conjuring up half-baked legal theories to ratify President Donald Trump’s latest cartoonishly illegal stunts, Wednesday was a tough day at the office. Sauer’s task was to persuade the Supreme Court that as president, Trump enjoys “emergency” powers that allow him to unilaterally impose tariffs—taxes on imports—of any size, on any type of good, from any country, for any reason.

That would have been hard enough. But Sauer also had to do all that without undermining the six-justice conservative supermajority’s 2023 determination that, even in the midst of a pandemic-induced recession, President Joe Biden’s “emergency” powers did not allow him to offer partial student loan forgiveness to lower-income borrowers who badly needed it.

As you might expect, Sauer had a difficult time threading this needle: For different reasons, both the conservative and liberal justices sounded skeptical of Trump’s authority to unveil U.S. trade policy via randomly capitalized Truth Social post. But if the Court indeed invalidates the tariffs, how they do it will be just as important as the bottom-line result. And at oral argument, the conservative justices dropped plenty of hints about how they could hand Trump a narrow, technical loss in this case, while still preserving what matters most: their ability to reimpose sharp limits on executive power next time a Democrat is in the White House.

Biden grounded his student debt plan in a law that allows presidents to “waive or modify” legal obligations during “national emergencies.” But in Biden v. Nebraska, the Court ruled that this violated the major questions doctrine, which is the idea that presidents cannot use ambiguous statutory language to make “decisions of vast economic or political significance.” Writing for the six conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that surely, the enacting Congress would not have intended that “waive or modify” language to convey to Joe Biden the power to forgive billions of dollars in student loans. If Congress wants to let presidents “unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy,” Roberts said, it would have to “clearly” say so first.