Article I and the Major Questions Doctrine After Learning Resources

On Feb. 20, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s sweeping tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), and the headlines wrote themselves: The Court had reined in the president’s trade powers. That reading is accurate as far as it goes. But there may be a more consequential question embedded in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, other than whether the words “regulate importation” encompass the power to impose tariffs: whether at least some members of the Court have identified a structural constitutional principle—applicable far beyond trade—that turns not on whether a presidential action involves foreign affairs, but on which branch of government owns the underlying power being exercised. The answer, after a fractured decision that produced no fewer than six separate opinions, is: maybe. And that uncertainty is itself a story.

It is important to understand what that uncertainty means in practice. The decision has internal divisions: two competing rationales within the plurality, a Justice Neil Gorsuch/Amy Coney Barrett split that may determine how far the ruling travels, and three dissenters who would have gone the other way entirely. The analysis that follows tracks Gorsuch’s structural framework rather than Barrett’s—not arbitrarily, but because Gorsuch’s approach enables systematic scrutiny. It identifies a threshold question: Does the president have independent Article II authority over the subject matter, such that the statutory authorization failing would leave him with something? Gorsuch’s approach supplies a relatively clear answer in each case and yields predictions that can be tested. Barrett’s contextual textualism is more holistic and harder to apply predictably in advance. Thus, tracing Gorsuch’s logic is the only way to identify which statutes are structurally most exposed, even if his approach does not ultimately prevail. Gorsuch’s framework can be applied to four categories of congressionally delegated powers to the executive beyond trade: spending and impoundment, civilian export controls, foreign investment review, and outbound investment restrictions.

Ultimately, Learning Resources opens more than it closes—and the doctrine it deployed may prove more contested, and more fragile, than the headline result suggests.

The Concession That Drove Everything

To understand what Learning Resources actually held, start with something the government did not contest. The president has no inherent authority to impose tariffs during peacetime. None. The Constitution assigns the power to lay and collect duties to Congress in Article I, Section 8—a textual assignment clear enough that the administration never argued otherwise. The president’s entire case rested on IEEPA as the source of his authority, not on any claim of independent presidential power.

That concession turned out to be the case’s structural foundation. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for himself and joined in relevant part by Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, applied the major questions doctrine (MQD)—the principle, developed in recent cases including West Virginia v. EPA and Biden v. Nebraska, that Congress must speak clearly before authorizing executive action of major economic and political significance. The administration’s claimed authority to impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope on all imports from all countries was indeed a major question. And IEEPA’s authorization to “regulate importation,” the plurality held, does not clearly provide it. The word “regulate” does not ordinarily mean “tax.” The statute never mentions duties or tariffs. And no president had read IEEPA this way before Trump in 2025.

The three liberal justices—Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—agreed that IEEPA does not authorize tariffs, but reached that conclusion through ordinary statutory interpretation alone, expressly declining to invoke the MQD. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented on the ground that foreign commerce is historically a delegable power that Congress may hand to the president without the usual constitutional constraints on delegation. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Thomas and Samuel Alito, dissented on the grounds that the statute clearly does authorize tariffs, and that the MQD should not apply in foreign affairs and national security contexts regardless.

In the end, six justices agreed IEEPA does not cover tariffs. Only three signed on to the MQD rationale as the reason why. But that three-justice plurality status is not a technicality—it shapes what the decision means for everything that comes after it.

A Court Divided Against Itself

The fracture in Learning Resources reveals something more interesting than a dispute about trade law. The justices split in ways that map onto a deeper disagreement about whether the foreign affairs and national security context categorically insulates presidential action from the MQD’s demands.

Kavanaugh’s dissent argued directly that it does. In foreign affairs, he maintained, Congress routinely and intentionally grants the president broad discretion, so imposing a clear-authorization requirement misreads what Congress actually intended when it wrote statutes such as IEEPA. That argument draws support from Justice Robert H. Jackson’s famous concurrence in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, which observed that courts have long recognized the “unwisdom” of requiring Congress to lay down narrowly definite standards in the field of foreign affairs. It also draws on Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., the 1936 decision that suggested the president has special authority in external affairs dating to the founding of the Republic—authority that courts have cited, however controversially, ever since.

The Roberts plurality did not engage this argument on its own terms. Instead, it focused on something more specific: The tariff power is not just any foreign affairs power. It belongs to Congress explicitly and exclusively, with no presidential analog anywhere in Article II. When the statutory authorization failed, the administration had nowhere to go. That distinguishes tariffs from presidential decisions about which governments to recognize, or how to deploy military forces—areas where the president can draw on genuine independent constitutional authority even when a particular statute provides thin support.

This is Gorsuch’s core structural insight—one Roberts joins in the principal opinion, but that Barrett, as explained below, does not fully endorse: The foreign affairs context does not launder a power’s constitutional character. What matters is not the subject matter but the source—whether the power being exercised derives from Congress’s Article I grants, which the president wields only by virtue of delegation, or from Article II, where the president has constitutional authority independent of what Congress has said.

But the fracture does not stop between the plurality and the dissenters. It runs through the plurality itself. Understanding that internal split is essential to predicting how the doctrine travels from here.

Gorsuch’s concurrence, which Roberts joined in the principal opinion, grounds the MQD in something close to a constitutional structural principle. Because Article I vests all legislative power in Congress, delegating major policy decisions to the executive raises genuine separation-of-powers concerns that require a clear statutory anchor. On this view, the Article I/Article II distinction is load-bearing: The MQD applies with full force when Congress transfers its own constitutionally vested legislative power, but applies differently—or not at all—when the action falls within the president’s independent Article II authority. Gorsuch makes this explicit: Where the president has inherent constitutional power over the subject matter, the delegation concern diminishes because the president is not purely wielding borrowed legislative authority. Put differently: The concern about Congress handing off its own power dissipates when the president would have had the power anyway.

Barrett’s concurrence explicitly pushes back on what she reads as Gorsuch’s version of the doctrine, though she joins the result. For her, the MQD is best understood as ordinary textualism—Article I’s vesting of “all legislative powers” in Congress is relevant not as a constitutional command about delegation but as part of the interpretive context that a reasonable reader of a statute brings to the text. Statutes are read against that background, and the background makes it unlikely that Congress would quietly hand off enormous policy authority. On her approach, what counts as “clear authorization” can come from the statutory text, history, practice, and structural context read together. It is a holistic, flexible inquiry, not a hard clear-statement rule that snaps into place whenever a power has Article I origins.

The practical stakes of this disagreement are real. Gorsuch’s structural approach generates relatively predictable rules: Identify the constitutional origin of the power, determine whether the president has independent Article II authority over it, and apply the MQD with greater or lesser force accordingly. Barrett’s contextual textualism generates a more case-by-case inquiry: Whether the MQD applies to export controls on civilian technology depends not just on the constitutional lineage of the foreign commerce power, but on whether the statutory text, legislative history, and surrounding circumstances suggest Congress intended to authorize unprecedented action at that scale. The same facts could support the same outcome, or not, depending on how the context cuts—and it is harder to predict in advance.

Kavanaugh’s dissent attacks Gorsuch’s version directly on this point, arguing that tying the MQD’s applicability in foreign affairs to whether the president has “inherent or independent” Article II authority would be “novel and jurisprudentially chaotic”—Justice Jackson himself acknowledged in Youngstown that terms such as “inherent” and “independent” are “used, often interchangeably and without fixed or ascertainable meanings.” That criticism has some force. If courts must first determine whether a given foreign affairs power has a credible Article II analog before deciding whether the MQD applies, the preliminary inquiry can swallow the main event. And Kavanaugh points out that the traditional nondelegation cases never subdivided the foreign affairs power in the way Gorsuch now proposes.

The remaining analysis of this piece tracks Gorsuch’s approach rather than Barrett’s—and not arbitrarily. The reason is that Gorsuch’s framework, whatever its limitations, enables systematic analysis: It identifies a threshold question (Does the president have independent Article II authority over this subject matter?), supplies a relatively clear answer in each case, and yields predictions that can be tested against future decisions. Barrett’s contextual textualism does not lend itself to the same exercise. Whether the MQD applies to, say, civilian semiconductor export controls depends under her approach on a holistic assessment of the Export Control Reform Act’s text, legislative history, surrounding practice, and the scale of the specific action claimed—a multi-factor inquiry that is genuinely fact-sensitive and difficult to resolve in advance. Tracing Gorsuch’s logic is, in other words, the only way to identify which statutes are structurally most exposed—even if Barrett’s approach, not Gorsuch’s, ultimately prevails.

Where the Logic Travels

Under Gorsuch’s structural framework, the principle of Article I exclusivity applies with equal or greater force to several categories of presidential action well beyond trade. In each case, the analysis turns on the same threshold question his approach implicitly poses: If the statutory authorization fails, does the president have anything left to stand on?

Spending and Appropriations

The Appropriations Clause is more categorically clear than the Taxing Clause. No money may be drawn from the Treasury except pursuant to an appropriation made by law. The president has no inherent authority to spend or redirect federal funds. Unlike tariffs, which at least have a historical connection to foreign commerce prerogatives, the spending power has never been understood to reside in the executive. The entire point of the Appropriations Clause was to ensure that the executive cannot reach into the Treasury without legislative approval.

When Congress appropriates money for a specific purpose and the executive diverts it elsewhere, the constitutional structure is therefore even cleaner than the tariff situation. The Trump administration transferred approximately $3.6 billion in congressionally appropriated military construction funds to build border wall segments that Congress had specifically declined to fund—a diversion courts largely avoided on the merits, as Joe Biden became president and canceled the funding. Additionally, the first Trump impeachment centered in part on the administration’s decision to freeze congressionally appropriated military assistance to Ukraine, an action the Government Accountability Office concluded violated the Impoundment Control Act. The second Trump administration has moved aggressively to freeze and redirect foreign aid appropriated by Congress for specific statutory purposes.

In each of these cases, the administration’s claimed authority rested on broad statutory language—emergency powers, executive discretion over foreign policy—that under the plurality’s Learning Resources reasoning would need to authorize more clearly the specific claimed action. Invoking IEEPA to freeze assets is different from invoking foreign policy discretion to simply not spend money Congress has already appropriated. The latter is not an executive act at all under traditional constitutional understandings; it is a unilateral rewrite of congressional appropriations decisions. If the statutory hook for impoundment or diversion is unclear, there is no Article II reservoir to fill the gap, because the spending power belongs entirely to Congress.

Civilian Technology Export Controls

The Biden administration’s semiconductor export controls, announced in October 2022 and significantly expanded in 2023, imposed comprehensive restrictions on exports of advanced chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China. These controls were unprecedented in scope, affecting hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce and restructuring global supply chains in ways that will likely take years to fully understand. They represent the most significant exercise of export control authority in decades, and possibly ever in peacetime.

These controls were grounded in the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 (ECRA), and that statutory choice matters historically. After the Export Administration Act expired in 2001, the executive branch, for 17 years, maintained export controls through IEEPA emergency declarations rather than permanent legislation—a stopgap arrangement that Congress recognized as inadequate and deliberately replaced when it enacted ECRA in 2018 to provide permanent, targeted statutory authority. ECRA authorizes the president to restrict exports for national security, foreign policy, and short supply reasons, and specifically requires an interagency review process, consideration of the impact on the defense industrial base, and periodic review of controlled categories. Congress, in other words, has already done part of the work Learning Resources demands: It replaced an open-ended IEEPA hook with a more specific statute.

The question is whether ECRA’s text is clear enough for the specific scale of action the Biden administration claimed. The underlying power—determining what American companies may sell to foreign buyers—is the foreign commerce power, the same Article I clause at issue in tariffs. The president has no inherent authority to prohibit a private company from selling its products abroad. That basic point, unremarkable in ordinary commercial contexts, takes on structural weight under Learning Resources: If ECRA’s authorization does not clearly cover the claimed action, the president cannot fall back on any independent Article II authority to fill the gap, at least not for civilian commercial technology.

When the semiconductor controls are applied to chips that directly enable weapons systems or military communications, the analysis is more complex—there is at least a plausible connection to the commander in chief’s authority over military technology and the president’s independent responsibility for national defense. But the controls sweep far more broadly, covering civilian artificial intelligence applications, cloud computing infrastructure, and commercial semiconductor manufacturing equipment sold to nonmilitary buyers. For that civilian commercial technology, the Article II hook thins considerably. The “foreign policy purposes” authorization in the ECRA—essentially a self-referential presidential determination that exports would be contrary to U.S. foreign policy—begins to look like precisely the kind of open-ended, standardless delegation that the Learning Resources plurality treated as insufficient when applied to actions of major economic and political consequence.

The analogy to IEEPA tariffs is closer than it might initially appear. In both cases, Congress enacted a broad foreign affairs statute that gave the president authority to “regulate” commerce with foreign nations; the president claimed that authority extended to a sweeping, unprecedented action with enormous domestic economic consequences; and the administration’s argument rested almost entirely on the statutory delegation, with no credible independent constitutional foundation. The main distinction is that the semiconductor controls target exports rather than imports—but the foreign commerce clause covers both, and the president’s independent authority over either is equally nonexistent.

There is one important structural difference, however, that cuts against extending Learning Resources automatically to export controls. Gorsuch’s concurrence makes the Article I/II distinction the load-bearing threshold: The key question is whether, if the statutory authorization failed, the president would be left with nothing or whether some independent Article II power would remain. On tariffs, all parties agreed the answer was nothing. Export controls on military technology present a more difficult case. ECRA’s “national security purposes” prong gestures toward the president’s commander-in-chief responsibilities in ways IEEPA simply does not. For technology with clear military applications—such as advanced computing chips, advanced sensors, and directed-energy components—there is a plausible argument that the president’s independent authority over military readiness and technology provides a constitutional anchor that IEEPA’s trade regulation cannot supply. The semiconductor controls, in other words, may occupy a space where the Article I and Article II buckets genuinely overlap—which would make the Learning Resources framework less determinative than in the pure-tariff context.

Foreign Investment Review and Forced Divestiture

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) reviews foreign acquisitions of American businesses for national security implications and can recommend that the president block or unwind transactions. Since the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018 (FIRRMA), CFIUS jurisdiction has expanded significantly—covering not just outright acquisitions but minority investments in companies holding critical technologies, real estate transactions near sensitive military facilities, and transactions involving sensitive personal data of U.S. citizens. The president’s blocking authority ultimately rests on Section 721 of the Defense Production Act, which conditions presidential action on a CFIUS finding that a foreign acquisition “threatens to impair the national security” and requires “credible evidence” that a foreign person “might take action” to that end. Notably, the statute also provides that presidential blocking authority applies only when existing laws—other than Section 721 itself and IEEPA—are insufficient to protect national security, treating IEEPA as a related but distinct backstop.

Crucially, the statute significantly limits judicial review of presidential action: The president’s decisions to block transactions and findings with respect to the existence of a national security threat are expressly insulated from judicial review. This non-reviewability provision may itself be evidence of Congress’s considered judgment that CFIUS review occupies territory closer to Article II’s core than most economic regulation.

Under Gorsuch’s threshold test, CFIUS authority looks also more defensible than IEEPA tariffs, for a straightforward reason: The subject matter—who may own U.S. companies with national security equities—has a plausible connection to the president’s independent Article II responsibilities over military readiness and intelligence. When the president blocks a Chinese state-linked company from acquiring a semiconductor manufacturer or a telecom infrastructure provider, there is an argument that the action implements an independent presidential duty to protect the national defense that does not depend entirely on the congressional delegation. That Article II hook does not make CFIUS unreviewable, but it does mean that if Section 721’s authorization somehow fell away, the president may not be left entirely empty-handed in the way he was on tariffs.

The harder question arises at the edges—and those edges are expanding. Scholars have documented what Kristen E. Eichensehr and Cathy Hwang call “national security creep”: the progressive expansion of CFIUS’s claimed jurisdiction from core military and intelligence applications into cybersecurity risks, supply chain vulnerabilities, patterns of investment in the aggregate, and the sensitive personal data of American citizens. FIRRMA explicitly extended CFIUS review to noncontrolling investments in companies that “maintain or collect sensitive personal data of United States citizens that may be exploited in a manner that threatens national security”—a category that encompasses virtually any technology company with a substantial user base.

The TikTok episode illustrates both the reach of this expansion and its limits. When the first Trump administration sought to ban TikTok using IEEPA’s emergency powers, federal courts enjoined the ban—finding that IEEPA’s informational materials exception expressly barred the executive from “regulat[ing] or prohibit[ing], directly or indirectly” the importation or exportation of “information or informational materials.” The lesson was clear: IEEPA, standing alone, was an inadequate hook for restricting a social media application. Congress responded in 2024 by enacting the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act—a targeted statute that the Supreme Court upheld in TikTok Inc. v. Garland. The trajectory from IEEPA-based executive action to judicial rejection to targeted congressional enactment is itself an example of the constitutional correction mechanism the Learning Resources plurality’s reasoning contemplates.

The statutory authorization for the 2024 divestiture exists and is specifically worded—so the concern about fundamental policy changes being derived from small, vague, or obscure provisions of a law (“hiding elephants into mouseholes”) has much less purchase. But the further that “national security” review authority travels from its core military and intelligence applications into data platforms, algorithmic influence, and real estate near military installations, the thinner the independent Article II foundation becomes. And under Gorsuch’s framework, a thinner Article II foundation means a heavier load that the statutory text must carry.

​​Outbound Investment Restrictions

The Biden administration’s Executive Order 14105, issued in August 2023 and implemented through Treasury Department regulations, restricted outbound U.S. investment into Chinese companies developing advanced semiconductors, quantum information technologies, and certain artificial intelligence systems. Like the semiconductor export controls, these restrictions were grounded in IEEPA—which the administration invoked in a genuinely novel way, using a statute designed to regulate foreign property in the United States to instead restrict U.S. investors from moving capital abroad.

As policy analysts had documented even before the executive order, an outbound investment screening regime of this kind would represent “a break from U.S. foreign economic policy tradition”—the United States would be “one of only a handful of advanced economies with industry-specific outbound investment restrictions distinct from traditional sanctions regimes.” The policy community recognized that existing tools (such as export controls, sanctions, and supply chain rules) were deemed insufficient for this purpose, but the proposed legislative alternatives (including the National Critical Capabilities Defense Act) had not been enacted, precisely because Congress had not yet determined what authority to provide. The executive order filled that gap with IEEPA—a statute designed for a different purpose.

The structural argument under Learning Resources is significant here. The underlying power—deciding what U.S. citizens and companies may invest in—is not obviously a foreign affairs power at all in the traditional sense. It is closer to a regulation of U.S. persons’ economic activity that happens to have international dimensions. The president has no independent Article II authority to dictate U.S. investment decisions abroad. And crucially, this use of IEEPA was genuinely unheralded: prior to the Biden administration’s outbound investment order, IEEPA had not been used to restrict outbound capital flows of this kind. The combination of no independent Article II foundation, novel application of a broad statute, and enormous economic significance reads like a case study in the conditions that trigger the MQD under either Gorsuch’s or Barrett’s framework. An administration hoping to maintain this authority on firmer ground would need either a more targeted statute from Congress—of the kind proposed but not enacted before the executive order issued—or a theory of inherent presidential power over capital flows that the constitutional text and historical practice do not obviously support.

A Caveat: IEEPA May Be the Outlier

Before extending this logic too broadly, it is worth noting a feature of Learning Resources that may limit how far the plurality’s reasoning actually travels: IEEPA is, even by the standards of broad foreign affairs statutes, unusually open-ended. Once an emergency is declared, the statute gives the president essentially unconstrained discretion over what remedies to impose—there is no guidance on proportionality, no required link between the specific measure taken and the specific threat identified, and no built-in ceiling on the tools available to the executive.

But the tariff dispute illustrates a specific and somewhat unusual version of that problem. IEEPA is not a mousehole statute—it is a broad, carefully crafted grant of sweeping emergency powers that presidents have invoked more than 70 times since its enactment in 1977. And tariffs are not a small action; they are a major economic tool with consequences for every U.S. trading partner. The issue was not that the government was hiding an elephant in a mousehole. The problem was categorical: The specific hole Congress created with the term “regulate importation” turned out not to be the right shape for the elephant being pushed through it. Tariffs are a taxing power, categorically distinct from the sanctions, embargoes, and asset freezes that defined IEEPA’s historical practice. A broad statute still cannot authorize a categorically different kind of power simply because it authorizes other big things.

Other statutes in this space are more targeted in ways that reduce that mismatch risk. Section 232 conditions trade action on a specific finding that imports threaten national security impairment, lists factors the president must consider, and carries decades of recognized presidential use for tariff-like measures. The Export Control Reform Act ties its authorization to specific controlled categories with interagency review requirements. FIRRMA/CFIUS conditions presidential action on a formal finding about a specific transaction, not an open-ended emergency declaration covering the entire global economy. These statutes may produce sweeping results in practice, but their text more directly contemplates the actions being taken—which means an executive acting within their terms is less likely to be claiming a categorically different power than the one Congress actually authorized. The Learning Resources plurality’s concern was that “regulate importation” did not extend to the taxing power; for statutes that more specifically match the action to the grant, that categorical mismatch problem may not arise in the same form.

The Case Against

Kavanaugh’s point about congressional intent—providing the president with broad discretion in trade and foreign affairs—is not frivolous. There is a long historical practice of Congress doing so, a practice the Court itself has cited as evidence of constitutional meaning. If the MQD is at its core a tool for discerning what Congress actually intended, applying it to foreign affairs statutes may systematically misread what Congress means when it writes broadly in that domain. Congress knows how to write narrow foreign affairs statutes when it wants to—War Powers Resolutions are one example, and the Case-Zablocki Act’s requirements for reporting international agreements are another.

Thomas’s dissent makes a still more fundamental challenge. His argument—that foreign commerce was historically a royal prerogative power that the Constitution allocated to Congress without transforming it into a power subject to ordinary delegation constraints—would, if accepted, collapse the Article I exclusivity argument entirely. Gorsuch’s concurrence forcefully contests the historical evidence Thomas marshals, arguing that the founding generation consistently treated foreign commerce regulation as legislative in nature. But Thomas’s position, joined in dissent by two other justices, is not a historical curiosity—it is a live view on a Court whose composition may change.

There is also a more practical objection. Even accepting the plurality’s framework, the line between Article I powers with no presidential analog and powers with at least a partial Article II foundation is not always clean. Export controls on military technology have an obvious connection to the commander in chief’s authority over the armed forces.  Immigration exclusion has both Article I and Article II dimensions that courts have never fully disentangled. And the war powers question involves genuinely concurrent constitutional authority that neither branch can claim exclusively. The plurality’s principle is clearest at the poles—tariffs on one end, troop deployment on the other—and murkier in between, which is where most contested cases actually live.

What Comes Next

Learning Resources is not the last word on any of this. Kavanaugh’s dissent noted that the same tariffs could likely be justified under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, and other trade statutes with clearer textual authorization—potentially rendering the decision narrow to IEEPA rather than the broader structural principle the plurality’s reasoning implies. And the framework’s practical reach is constrained further by standing: Tariffs were litigable because importers paid them directly and immediately and faced concrete, quantifiable economic harm the moment the tariffs took effect, but the other categories discussed here are harder. Appropriations impoundment injures recipients who often cannot sue; export control and outbound investment challenges invite the regulatory scrutiny affected companies prefer to avoid; CFIUS targets have every incentive to negotiate rather than litigate. The statutes most structurally vulnerable to the plurality’s reasoning are also the ones where getting into court is hardest, and the tariff case was the rare instance where the standing question and the merits question resolved against the government at once.

That constraint is real, but it does not dissolve the analytical framework Learning Resources established. The key move, under Gorsuch’s structural approach, is not asking whether an action involves foreign affairs but whether the power being exercised has an independent Article II basis that would survive the statutory delegation failing—and that question yields different answers across the landscape: appropriations diversion cleanest against the government, outbound investment restrictions close behind, civilian export controls more contested, CFIUS review most defensible but thinning as its jurisdiction expands. Whether a future Court majority will adopt Gorsuch’s structural sorting mechanism, or resolve these cases instead through Barrett’s more contextual textualism, or decline to apply the MQD in foreign affairs at all, remains open. Learning Resources did not close these questions—it opened them. Indeed, whether, and in what form, the MQD as articulated by the Learning Resources plurality will survive is, at this point, something of a major question.