Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for
your support. All right, so we have some more lawfair
coming down the pike. Pipe, Pike, the pike. Yeah, I
think it's the pike. This is from Oh this is
regarding the tariffs, Okay, National Reviews David Zimmerman reports a
dozen states are suing the Trump administration over the president's
back and forth tariff policy, arguing the trade taxes on
foreign imports are not only hurting the American economy, but
are illegal. The federal lawsuit filed yesterday in the US
Court of International Trade. What's the matter was? I don't understand.
Was Judge Bosberg not available to hear this one too?
Maybe they have to file it there. The lawsuit challenges
President Donald Trump's use of the international Emergency Economic powers
Act to impose sweeping tariffs. The White House invoked that
law earlier this month to address the nation's large trade
deficit created by unfair foreign trading practices, which the president.
The president considers a national emergency. The twelve States argue
that the President can only invoke the I e e.
P A or the IEBA when a national emergency presents
quote unusual and extraordinary threats from abroad. I said this
from the very beginning that I thought this was a
pretty weak excuse, Like I don't think you get to
say just like I was critical of Roy Cooper, my
good friend Ray when he was governor, and he would
you know, he did the fake emergency declaration for school funding.
Like you can't just say something is an emergency because
you want to fund it more, or you want to
change a policy, or you want to do something. You
can't just say it's an emergency and then I get
to do whatever I want. And I thought that was
going to be a pretty shaky foundation upon which these
actions were taken. And so now you have the lawsuit
which says, by claiming the authority to impose immense and
ever changing tariffs on whatever goods entering the United States,
he chooses for whatever reason he finds convenient to declare
an emergency. The president has upended the constitutional order and
brought chaos to the American economy. They say that only
Congress can grant the president the authority to implement tariffs.
The state or states rather that joined the lawsuit. Spoiler alert,
We're not on the list. We are not on the list.
North Carolina not on the list. So Jeff Jackson, our
attorney general, even though he's a Democrat, has not signed
on to this. Maybe due to the North Carolina legislature.
Did they pass the bill that prevents the attorney general
from and from entering into lawsuits against like the federal government.
There was a there was an effort to try to
reign in this kind of behavior that was running rampant
under Josh Stein and Roy Cooper. Here are the states Arizona, Coloradhido, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota,
a Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and that powerhouse Vermont.
All twelve states have Democrat attorneys general. The Republican president
implemented a ninety day partial pause to give more than
seventy five countries time to negotiate with the US on
lowering tariffs. China is currently excluded from the negotiating table,
although the Wall Street Journal has reported now that administration
officials are considering cutting some of the one hundred and
forty five percent tariffs on China, but no decision on
that has been made. So what is at the heart
here of the case is whether or not Congress gave
the president this kind of sweeping power. Okay, because according
to the lawsuit, Congress had grown troubled with the proliferation
of EDS emergency declarations by what'd you think, I'm in
emergency declarations? Yeah, So this was by the nineteen seventies.
They were like, now, no more of these eds, you know,
under laws like the Trading with the Enemies Act or
the TWEA or the TWEA. Such laws were originally intended.
This is from the filing, So this is the Democrat
Attorney's General. Such laws were originally intended to lend the
president special or heightened powers during times of crisis, but
were ultimately used as shortcuts around peacetime constraints on the
president's powers, which, by the way of course, it would
be of course it would be used like that like this.
This is the core understanding for limited government adherents such
as myself. Right, we recognize government, like fire, is a
useful servant and a fearful master. And the natural tendency
of government, much like fire, is to spread. It's to
take more and more liberty from the people and get
involved in all these things. And that's why the founders
set up a federalist model, was to pit these power
hungry people that get into the positions against one another
to protect their turf, their powers. And the thought was
then that the people's liberties would be better protected by
having different levels and branches of governments balancing each other
out right, So presidents started using these laws in peacetime
in ways that they were not intended to be used.
So Congress recognized that the exception threatened to swallow the rule.
As one House report on efforts to reform the Trading
with the Enemies Act, the TWEA bestowed upon the president
essentially an unlimited grant of authority for the president to
exercise at his discretion broad powers in both the domestic
and international economic arena without congressional review. One reform Congress
made to curb the president's emergency powers was to then
restrict the TWEA to its original purpose, limiting its application
to quote times of war. At the same time, Congress
enacted the IEEPA, which allowed the President to regulate imports
and exports in response to certain non wartime emergencies, while
stressing that the triggering event had to be an unusual
and extraordinary threat. So the Attorney's General say, Thus, it
is not enough that the President declare a national emergency
under the National Emergencies Act, only those arising from unusual
end extraordinary threats originating in whole or substantial part outside
the United States. Only those kinds of threats unlock this
grant of powers. Congress also subjected the president's authority to
reporting requirements and reserved for itself the ability to terminate
declared emergencies by joint resolution, so Congress can do something
about this if it chooses. Not once, According to the
filing the lawsuit, not once has any other president used
the IEEPA to impose tariffs. In the nearly five decades
since it was enacted, no other president has imposed tariffs
based on the existence of any national emergency. Despite global
anti narcotics campaign spearheaded by the US and long standing
trade deficits. So this is the premise, the foundation of
their case as to why the president's tariff maneuvers are
not allowed under law. All right, So spring is here
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one other note here on the lawsuit by the Attorney's
General against the Trump administration over the tariff situation. This
is from John Sexton, writing at hot air dot com.
He says, the bottom line is that the attorneys General
want a court to rule the tariffs illegal and declare
this a matter for Congress. Okay, If that happens, the
current tariffs, at least the ones on our end would
presumably vanish, along with any existing interest on the part
of other countries that are negotiating new trade deals with
the US. Doubt that sounds pretty pretty good to China
right about now. Right other countries might also be tempted
to wait it out and see if the Democrats can
solve the problem for them. Right, when it comes to
law fare, the obstruction is the objective. That's what we
are witnessing.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: You can say, and not incorrectly, that the lawsuits are
in response to the flurry of executive orders and the
things that the administration has been doing on this breakneck
pace over the first one hundred days. And sure, sure,
the administration's moving very quickly. They're doing lots of things,
move fast, break stuff, right, But that also gives the
left lots and lots and lots of opportunities to sue.
And to be fair, it didn't matter really what did
that the left would sue because the delaying of Trump's
wins or policies or rollbacks of prior executive orders, right,
the point is to delay, that's all. Now, I'm not
sure Democrats have really thought all of this through with
the lawsuits, because if we take as a premise, which
let's just assume this to be the case, even if
you don't agree, but this is one of the arguments
that the tariff regime that Trump has rolled out and
the response from the markets and other countries, right, it's
caused this market turmoil and it's going to lead us
into a recession or a depression or whatever. Like there
are all these predictions of apocalypse. Let's assume that that's
true for the sake of this argument. Let's assume that
that's all true. If you're the Democrats, wouldn't you want
that to start happening, and then Trump and the Republicans
would be more easily defeated in the midterm elections, and
a Republican if it's JD. Vance, for example, who runs
in another three years for president, that he would be
tagged with the apocalyptic economy as well. Or maybe they
think that by filing the lawsuit, slowing everything down, get
a couple of injunctions going, so stuff has to pause,
create more uncertainty, and then even if you lose, by
the time it all gets sorted out, you're half a
year down the road or something, and you do see
the economic damage done. Again, the premise of this scenario
I'm laying out is that all of this results in
economic catastrophe which we don't know. Like I said this
the day Trump rolled these things out, well the day
after when I got on the air and I said,
and I have learned most For just as an aside here,
most of my talk show host in career has been
the Donald Trump era.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So I started as a host in like eighth nine,
and so I got to ride out the whole Obama years.
That was fun. But then Trump comes on the scene
and now for the last and by the time he's
out of office, right will have been he will have
been part of the political scene for you know, over
twelve years, and so that that's the bulk of my
career as a host. And what I have learned, albeit
a little late, which is to just wait and see,
don't rush in to whatever the you know, the media
narrative is of a particular day. You hear the initial
story and oh, my gosh, did you hear what Trump did?
Did you hear what he said? And you hear this
sound bite and it's like, oh my gosh, he said
good people on both sides. That sounds awful. And then
you go back and listen to the full clip and
it's like, oh, he didn't. He wasn't talking about the
neo Nazis. They're like, what are you guys talking about?
But had you gone out and taken the media story
their preferred narrative, using their selectively edited sound bite, right,
you would have been playing into their game. And so
I have learned just wait, be a little patient, let's
see what happens, and if stuff starts going sideways, then
we can assess it at that point. But like, I'm
not lighting my hair on fire based on lefty predictions
of doom and gloom. So this is the latest in
the Lawsuit front in the law Fair Front from the left.
There was also the ruling we went over this the
other day. Came out or not a ruling, but a
The Supreme Court said that they were going to take
up a case and they issued it in the middle
of the night. The ACLU had petitioned them and they
said they would take it. It was, you know, after midnight
they sent down this ruling. We covered the details on this,
and this has caused a lot of concern among the
court watching crowd, one of whom is Harvard Law professor
and constitutional scholar Adrian Vermule, who wrote a number of
judges have seemingly adopted a constitutional meta principle, which is
what a past president did, President Trump may not undo.
What a past president did, President Trump may not undo.
And that has been the case in Trump's first term
and is the case now. The immigration issue is a
perfect example of it in that. I mean, you can
go back to the DACA stuff. You know, Obama does DACA,
Trump tries to undo it. No, can undo it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Trump wants to do bans on countries that are hostile
to US. No, it's a Muslim ban. Can't do it.
And remember the one out of Texas, where when Texas
erected the razor wire fencing in order to protect its
state from illegal immigration coming across, the Biden administration sued
and said, you can't know. You got to do what
we tell you to do. And then when Trump gets
back in, then states are like, well, you can't tell
us what to do anymore. See, so when the Democrats
are in office, they get to rule with impunity. Joe
Biden can forgive student loan debt and whatever, try to
do it. He can basically adopt a constitutional amendment via
tweet or try. Right, he gets to do these things.
Trump comes in and says, no, we can't do that.
Then no, sorry, you don't get to undo what another
president did, even though he did it with an executive order,
and Trump is trying to undo it with a similar
executive order. Right. The border invasion is another, just the
overall issue. Joe Biden opens up the gates, lets everybody
in without any due process, right, just come on in.
And now when the next president comes in and says, whoa, whoa, whoa,
this was all illegal what you did. So now I'm
going to tell people to get out. I'm going to
remove them. Oh no, no, no, you can't do that.
We have to afford them the due process that they
did not go through to come in. We now have
to provide them due process to get rid of them,
which I think one estimate I saw was two hundred years.
That's how long it would take to run everybody through
essentially a trial, which is what now the left is demanding,
which is just absurd. Right, immigration proceedings are not criminal
court trials. They are not. They're different processes. And you
know who knows that best of all, our own Sheriff
Gary not my fault, McFadden. He's always talking about how
there's no criminal warrant from a judicial officer and all
of this stuff. He's aware of that. Yet yet now
we're supposed to believe that there needs to be like
a full on, you know, jury trial to deport any
single person, which is absurd and that has never been
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that'll last a lifetime. Let's talk with Travis. Now, Hello Travis,
welcome to the program.
Speaker 2: Wow, Pete, that was a content heavy news break there
that I just said, well, you're welcome in the Supreme Court.
And then that tiny space rocket that sounded like the
cut down to Thunderbirds in the opening. Anyway, with the
the invocation of APA, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly,
I think, yeah, yeah, is what you've been talking about
that the solution kind of provides an outline for what
the emergency was. Right. So if I tell you my
house is on fire and you go, oh, no, that's
a terrible emergency. You've got to call somebody, I go,
don't worry, I already called my cable provider and goes, Okay, well,
I guess the emergency is that your house be on
fire is a threat to your cable service. Right. So
if we say that these tariffs are a response to
an emergency, then is then I say, well, the solution
to that emergency could be repatriation of American jobs, It
could be rewriting trade agreement, it could be isolating China.
I think the best way forward is for Donald Trump
to pick one and then go to Congress and say
take action to solidify these tams because I want to
accomplish still in the blank, right, and that we could
do the way to this lawfare.
Speaker 1: Right. Well, So I think there's a fundamental fatal flaw
in this idea of yours, which is it would require
that Congress actually do something. That's the problem. Thanks all right, Travis,
I appreciate it now, and that like that, I mean,
I gave the rim shot there, but it is true,
like this is the This is the problem is that
whatever any president has been doing, Trump or Biden or Obama,
they increasingly rely on these executive orders, and in doing so,
they're cutting out Congress and the founders. When they set
up the federalist model, as I went over earlier, you've
they had this idea that you would have these different
branches that would be protective of their power. But they
could not have foreseen the importance of the thirty second
TikTok viral clip. How could they? And they and so
now you've got members of Congress that are not actually
interested in governing and writing legislation and going to committee
meetings and actually having to you know, read through bills
and you know, stuff like that's just so boring. I
would rather go down to the well of the chamber
and make a speech that nobody is there to see
or hear except the poor you know, clerk or whoever
it is that's running the you know, running the meeting,
and they got to sit there and listen to, you know,
a Senate speech to an empty chamber, and then you
isolate some portion of that speech and you blast it
out and you say, give me ten dollars so I
can keep doing more of this fighting the people that
you don't like. You know, and if you know anything
about like the life of a member of Congress, most
of their time is spent fundraising. They have to kick
up a ton of money to the national parties, so
they're constantly raising money that yes, they get to keep some,
but they also have to you know, pay the tribute
to the party so the party can then use that
to help other candidates win election. And that's the whole idea.
But so much of their time is eaten up by fundraising,
and they don't want to so they don't want to
do their jobs. They don't want to sit through the
committee meetings. That's why you end up with these members
of Congress sitting up there at the hearings, reading prepared
questions from some staffer that probably outsourced the you know,
the information gathering process to Twitter. You know, that's how
you end up with Mazie Herono. Okay, I was thinking
of her specifically, but it's true. So that was sort
of the The blind spot I think that the founders
had was that they never anticipated that these members of Congress,
their incentives would be aligned towards not doing stuff right.
They expected the House to move quickly on things. They
expected the Senate, with the longer terms but also representing
states' interests, to be protective of the states. So they
expected the Senate to you know, slow things down, to
cool the hot issues coming out of the House. But
when neither chamber cares very much to do the work
of legislating because their real power is derived someplace else,
then they won't do it, and you end up with
a president that just does executive orders which can then
be undone. And then the left is now saying, oh,
you can't undo these. We're going to assue you if
you try to undo them for whatever reason you've come
up with. That's the constitutional crisis. In my opinion. The
judiciary has got to do something. I've been saying this
for a couple of weeks now. The Supreme Court needs
to reign in their judges. Sam Alito made a reference
to it in the recent dissenting opinion that he put
out with the Supreme Court agreeing to take up the
temporary injunction, a nationwide injunction, and it's not going to
stop until the Supreme Court puts a stop to it
or Congress does. And see my previous comments moments ago
about Congress. I don't think that's happening. So the Supreme
Court's got to do something. And this Harvard law professor
Adrian Vermule, writing on Friday after the District Court judge
issued yet another lawless nationwide injunction meant to handcuff Trump
and halt his agenda. It's a criticism the Supreme Court
and particularly Chief Justice John Roberts, must take too heart,
writes Glenn Reynolds. Glenn Reynolds is a professor of law
at the University of Tennessee, and he is the founder
of instapundit dot com, sort of the Granddaddy of blogs.
One of the hallmarks of John Roberts's term, he says,
has been an overweening desire to guard the judicial branch's
quote legitimacy. But Roberts seems oblivious to the fact that
the biggest threat to the Court's legitimacy comes from the
courts themselves, and also his desire to preserve the judiciary
standing with a small circle of Washington and academic insiders.
We saw it as far back as twenty twelve when
Roberts switched sides in the case against Obamacare at the
very last minute. He was afraid that striking down the
unprecedented bill would upset the DC apple cart and harm
the Court's legitimacy. And that's how you ended up with
that bizarre ruling. You know that it's the tax isn't
a tax if we can call it a fee, and
fees aren't taxes except when they are. It was just absurd,
all right. If you're listening to this show, you know
I try to keep up with all sorts of current events,
and I know you do you too, And you've probably
heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why well,
because it's how you detect media bias. Which is why
I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app
and it's a website and it combines news from around
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Glenn Reynolds aka Instapundit, founder of the instapundit dot com blog.
He's also a professor of law at the University of Tennessee.
He has a piece at The New York Post titled
Alito's right to Warn. Alito is correct to warn the
Court's knee jerk habit of slapping Trump will cost it
dearly and he's taking aim, particularly at the Chief Justice
John Roberts, who seems, he says, less concerned with preserving
the Court's legitimacy in the eyes of America's citizens and
more with the views of the editorial pages of The
New York Times in the Washington Post, plus some Ivy
League law professors whose school's decaying reputations should give him pause.
In other words, he's putting his peers' opinion above the
citizen's opinion and above legitimacy because the legitimacy of the
Court is not solely vested in the opinions of his peers.
The legitimacy, the legitimacy of the Court is also due
to our opinions. There's a reason why I call them
lawyers with a wardrobe change, right, because oftentimes that's how
they behave They're not doing the thing that I was
led to believe for most or maybe half of my life,
that they were supposed to be doing. That They set
these things aside. They act in a certain way. They
look at the law, how it applies to this case, whatever.
But when I when I look around and I see,
you know, forum shopping, venue shopping, which is Judge shopping.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: There's a reason why that happens. There's a reason why
when you look at the Supreme Court makeup, you know
which way judges are going to rule on certain cases
based on their political affiliation, based on who nominated and
appointed them, right, And so the legitimacy of the court
is rooted in public opinion. And when the public sees
you doing these things, it then questions whether or not
you are actually calling balls and strikes, to quote John Roberts, right,
whether you are engaging in impartial jurisprudence. Reynolds goes on
to say, now, the flurry of lower court interference is
reaching crisis proportions. And it's not just Reynolds who is
saying that. The Harvard law professor and constitutional scholar Adrian
Vermule says it too. The prime issue, among others is
the illegal and yes, it was illegal. It was contrary
to the statutes on the books, the legal Biden administration
policy to admit millions of unvetted migrants into the country
and to allow them to stay here. Right. When I've
covered this extensively over the last what year. Alejandro Mayorcis,
Department of Homeland Security Secretary under Joe Biden. He threw
open the gates, and he did it with the app
and he allowed people to come in and get quote
unquote parole despite the fact that the law says he
is not allowed to do a blanket parolling program. The
law says you have to do individual decisions for these
parole applicants, and he did not do that. They did
not weigh somebody's history. They did not weigh their claims
that they had to be allowed into the country due
to you know, threats of murder and harassment or what, torture, imprisonment, whatever.
They didn't weigh these cases individually. They just let everybody
come click a couple buttons on an app and then
they got to stay. And then when the next guy
comes in and says, hey, heads up, if you came
in under this program, we're sending you back. Oh no, no,
now we have to do the individual assessments. Well, but
you didn't do it on the way in. You How
do you respond to this, right? How does an administration,
even if it had the congressional authority, right, just set
all the legal issues aside, Even if Congress said that okay, yeah,
now you've got to go through this quote due process.
You have to have everybody go through their own trial
or something. But they didn't come in the correct way.
It wasn't done correctly on the front end. So now
everybody gets to take advantage of that part of the law.
We get to follow that part of the law only
because it's Stemy's Trump's efforts. This all came to a
head early Saturday. John Roberts and six of his colleagues
stepped in to temporarily uphold a lower court opinion interfering
with Trump's deportations. The Supremes acted one sidedly and with
untoward swiftness to block the president. It's not clear that
justices had any actual jurisdiction to rule in this case
at all, which is what sam Alito pointed out, right,
So you have the jurisdiction question, and then you also
have the speed at which they issued it. They leapfrogged
the lower court, which was apparently drafting its own response
to the appeal. But then the ACLU went around them,
and the Supremes said, yeah, we'll take it from here,
issuing it on like the Saturday night before Easter Sunday.
From excessively easy forum shopping like how DC District Judge
James Boseberg and others seem to get quote randomly assigned
to an awful lot of high profile cases lately. Right, So,
from forum shopping to intemperate language, rushed rulings, and to
palpable hostility to Trump, the judiciary does not seem to
be calling balls and strikes. Instead, it's giving the impression
of going to bat for one team. Now, this has
played very well with the legacy media, right, and that's
apparently whose opinion John Roberts views as legitimate. But it
doesn't look so good to a lot of other people,
and their opinions matter too, He says, by design and
for good reason, the courts are insulated from the daily
ebb and flow of politics. But they are in and
can't be, and shouldn't be entirely insulated from the tides
of public opinion. Right, that's what gives the court legitimacy.
That people say, I may not agree with that, but
they got there the correct way, right, they followed a process.
They're citing these laws, right, But people don't believe that. Now,
that's why opinion in the Supreme Court has been on
the decline, and Roberts keeps clutching harder and harder to
try to hold on to it, and it's just it's
just sifting through his fingers. All right. That'll do it
for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I
could not do the show without your support and the
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you heard it here. You can also become a patron
at my Patreon page or go to thepetekaalanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.