Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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your support. So that was a short trade war. No,
I'm kidding, it's not over. It's I don't even know.
This is why I said, like, we'll see, let's just
wait and see. And so now we are. We're in
sort of the seeing part. Part of the seeing part,
it's like a prec part. We've got a ruling from
a federal court that blocked Donald Trump from imposing sweeping
tariffs on imports under an emergency powers law. God the
judiciary out of control. I actually I'm okay with this ruling.
I am, I'm okay with this ruling. And I've been
hammering away at the UH, the lawyers, with the wardrobe
change and these injunctions and everything else. This is not
of that kind. And I know the Trump administration is
is mad that they don't get to do the tariffs,
and they're going to appeal it. And I'm sure right like,
I have no doubt about their intentions to appeal to
the US Supreme Court or something. But I don't know
the exact pathway that it has to follow because it
came from the US Court of International Trade. Okay, it's
a three judge panel, one of whom is appointed by
Donald Trump, another was a Reagan appointee, the third was
an Obama appointee. And the decision was unanimous. And this
was part of Trump's Liberation Day tariffs. And what the
three judge panel has said is that it exceeded his authority.
And I said this from the very beginning. I'm not
so sure he can do all of this. I'm not
so sure he should do all of this. But I
recognize I said at the time, maybe you recall, if
you're a first time listener, welcome, but you would not
have heard me say this. But I said, maybe I
am a fish that doesn't know it's wet, you know,
because that's the environment I have just always known. And
the environment I've always known was one of free trade
which is different, I would submit, than fair trade right.
I mean, people use these terms, and I think they
mean different things. Because if you're free trading with a
country that employs slave labor China, then I don't think
that that's actually fair right, because they have an artificial
competitive advantage in that they don't have to pay their
people anything. So I was willing to all, right, well,
let's see is he going to use it to negotiate
better deals? Is he going to do something else with it?
Is it just a negotiating tactic, create the chaos upfront
and all of that. So I took the position of
let's see, let's see what happens. And then we had,
you know, this back and forth. We had the escalation
of tariffs, we had the reduction in tariffs, we had
deals getting cut and all these different things happening. Meanwhile,
this case was making its way start, it began and
then made its way through the courts. Now, the White
House spokesperson Cush Desigh said that trade deficits amount to
a national emerge agency that has decimated American communities, left
our workers behind, and weakened our defense industrial base. Facts
that the court did not dispute so that's what they're
calling a national emergency, but that's not actually what the
assortment of law that governs these types of deals, these
types of well, there's a bunch of different acts that
the Trump administration used from declaring the emergency to doing
the tariffs, and there were two different sort of buckets
that they did the tariffs in. And what the court
is saying that you need congressional approval because this is
what is outlined in the Constitution, and Congress cannot delegate
away constitutional powers that are prescribed to them in the
content Institution. Now, Trump might still be able to temporarily
launch import taxes of fifteen percent for one hundred and
fifty days on nations with which the US runs a
substantial trade deficit. The ruling noted that a president has
this authority under section one twenty two of the Trade
Act of nineteen seventy four. You're going to hear more
about the Trade Act of nineteen seventy four as I
go over this. It's all throughout the court ruling, which
runs about forty nine pages. The administration swiftly filed a
notice of appeal, and the US Supreme Court will almost
certainly be called upon to lend a final answer, reports
the Associated Press. The case was heard by three judges,
as I mentioned, Timothy Rife, who was appointed by Trump,
Jane Rostani, appointed by Ronald Reagan, and Gary Katzman, an
appointee of Barack Obama. The court wrote, quote the word
world wide and retaliatory tariff orders exceed any authority granted
to the president by ie EPA. That is the International
Emergency Economic Powers Act. That was a nineteen seventy seven law.
It's called the IEPA. And maybe when I say it
like that now it sounds familiar. We've talked about this before. Okay.
So you have the Trade Act of nineteen seventy four.
There is also then a Trade Expansion Act that was
from nineteen sixty two, and the ruling and the IEPA,
So there's three different things going on here. The ruling
from the court left in place any tariffs that Trump
put in place using his powers from the Trade Expansion
Act of nineteen sixty two. That's why two of these
buckets are being treated differently. One bucket which was done
under the Trade Expansion Act that is allowed to stand.
But the one done under or the mass of one
like this is where he came out with the big chart, remember,
and he's like baseline ten percent on everybody, and then
we're gonna nail everybody else with these additional tariffs on
top of the ten percent and all that that was
all under the IEPA. Okay, the IEPA is the stuff
that has now been has now been ruled to be
beyond his authority to do under the Trade Expansion Act,
the one that will stand. He put a twenty five
percent tax on most imported autos, automobiles, and parts, as
well as twenty five percent tax on all foreign made
steel and aluminum. Those tariffs depend on a Commerce Department
investigation that reveals national security risks from imported products, so
that one was those were done legit. It was filed
in the US Court of International Trade, which is a
federal court that deals specifically with civil lawsuits involving international
trade law. While tariffs must typically be approved by Congress,
Trump has said he has the power like he man
to act to address the trade deficits that he calls
a national emergency, and therein lies the problem is that
there is controlling law about what you deem a national
emergency and Congress's role in doing so he is facing
at least seven lawsuits challenging the levies. The plaintiffs argued
that the Emergency Powers law does not authorize the use
of tariffs, and even if it did, the trade deficit
is not an emergency because the US is running trade
deficit with the rest of the world world for forty
nine straight years. His administration argues that courts approved then
President Richard Nixon's emergency use of tariffs in nineteen seventy one,
and that only Congress and not the courts, can determine
the political question of whether the president's rationale for declaring
an emergency complies with the law. See, this is the
problem is that Congress isn't doing its job. Congress isn't
supporting Look, if you want all of this stuff with
Trump and or the tariffs, if you want all these
tariffs to be implemented in exactly the way Trump announced them,
then Congress needs to codify this stuff. We have different
branches of government for a reason, and I don't think
you get to logically make an argument that the judiciary
is overstepping its bounds, as I have on the injunctions front,
and that these loan judges in district courts are usurping
the power of the president because that's not what they're
entitled to do under the rights granted to them by
Article three of the Constitution. You can't make that argument
and then turn around and say, yeah, but Congress can
totally abdicate their Article two powers. No or sorry, Article
one powers. Article two is the president belief like, that's
not the way it's supposed to work. You guys have
this list. You guys are supposed to follow this list.
These are your powers, these are your powers. And part
of the problem is that we have a Congress and
I don't think the founding fathers could have foreseen this,
but we have a Congress populated by people that are
apparently all too happy to give up any kind of
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Hellia says, so Biden's tariffs were nonsense too or temporary.
He bragged about doing them too well. Biden's tariffs were
not justified under the same rationale. He did not declare
national emergencies for the purposes of doing the tariffs. And
you do have the ability to add tariffs the president
under the other like one of the sections of the law,
which will stand, he did have the power to do those.
It's under the AEPA that he did not. The court.
According to The New York Post, the court stated that
Congress is typically responsible for issuing tariffs, not the president alone,
and that Trump's rationale for the exception to the rule
did not meet the Emergency Act threshold in order to
have him act unilaterally. Like unless you've read through all
of the uh, the enabling legislation for all of this stuff, right,
it's not a like this is not a simple you know,
Trump can do it, and he did it. Now the
courts are blocking him. It's this goes back what sixty
years worth of various pieces of legislation into the sixties,
and so some of the some of the tariffs were
done excuse me, under the AEPA, which is the International
Emergency Economic Powers Act. That was the one that was widespread,
hitting every single country ten percent baseline everybody, and then
everybody got you know, additional tariffs on them, customized rates
against basically every country on the planet, and that was
justified by the administry under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
There's the second trunch or bucket that was under the
Expanded Trade Act, which is an offshoot i believe of
the or the Expanded Trade Act. And then and the
Trade Act. So there are those two pieces of legislation.
And if you read the opinion, and look, i am
not a lawyer, I'm not an expert in any of
this material. I'm just reading through the opinion by the court.
And here's like part of what they say. The Court
does not ask whether a threat is worth dealing with
or venture to review the bona fides of a declaration
of an emergency by the President. So they're not taking
up the question of whether or not it is an
emergency or not an emergency. Indeed, it says the question
here is not whether something should be done, It is
is who has the authority to do it? That's the question.
The Court simply asks whether the president's actions deal with
an unusual and extraordinary threat. And Congress provided the necessary
standards for resolving this inquiry when it enacted AIPA, and
the court's task is to then apply that. See what
constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat? Those parameters are spelled
out in the Congressional Act. And so the court looks
at the Act and then they look at the behavior
and the actions of the executive branch, and they say,
do they line up? Are these things lining up? And
if they don't line up, then the executive is in
the wrong because Congress said, this is what the law is.
These are the standards you're supposed to follow. The Court says,
this recoores. This duty requires one body of public servants,
the judges, to construe the meaning of what another body,
the lawmakers, has said. The duty does not abate when
foreign economic conduct forms part of the issue. According to
the government, there are two ways that the quote deal
with an Unusual and Extraordinary Threat provision retains its meaning
despite its unreviewability. The first is that it binds the president.
This means, the government states that the president still has
to look at and faithfully apply the statute. But what
happens if the president does not do so? Does the
court still have no role? Even if Congress could hypothetically
undo the president's invocation of AEPA powers by passing a
law to that effect over the president's likely Vito, Congress's
inherent power to legislate is no substitute for the judicial
function of determining the limits of statutory grants of authority.
They are making the argument that this can be reviewed
by the courts because the White House was saying you can't,
and so they say, yes, we can. Because if they
if the legislature says X, and you implement, why the
way that you reconcile this is the courts and they're
right under our system, they are correct in my view.
All right, if you're listening to this show, you know
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All right, So reading from this is page forty six
of the court ruling forty six out of forty nine.
The government's pressure argument, which is they're trying to get
at this idea of how you deal with these issues
that are arising, and so this is what they're kind
of testing. What does it mean, what is your definition
of dealing with and whatnot? And so the government said, well,
we are dealing with trafficking, human trafficking, and this is
how we're dealing with human trafficking by applying pressure on
these other countries through the tariffs. Right. The government's pressure
argument concedes, though, that the direct effect of the country
specific tariffs this is specifically about China or Mexico and Canada,
that the direct effect is to simply burden the countries
that they're targeting. It is the prospect of mitigating this burden,
according to the government's argument, that will induce the target
countries to crack down on trafficking within their jurisdictions and
the trafficking of fentanyl. Also. Now, however sound this might
be as a diplomatic strategy, which the Court has no problem, like,
you're trying, we understand the goal. You're trying to do
this other thing. So, no matter how sound this is
as a diplomatic strategy, it does not comfortably meet the
statutory definition cited in the AEPA legislation. So it's you
can't cite IEPA and then say this is you know,
we're doing it in order to force them to pressure
them to change their posture and their actions in limiting
the trafficking when IEPA doesn't empower you to do that.
For that reason, they say it's hard to conceive of
any IEPA power, then that could not be justified on
the same grounds of pressure. If it works in this case,
then you could say it for anything. This is a
restraining of the executive branch. And I know I wasn't
on the air here in WBT. I was up in
Ashville at the time in twenty fifteen when Rand Paul
was running for president. He was one of the candid
It's for president against Donald Trump at the time, and
I preferred Rand Paul because he was the only one
talking about reigning in the executive branch. And to me,
that's a really important thing to do. That's not to
say I don't want to see now like the judiciary
reined in and their abuses. I absolutely do. But this
idea of executive overreach is not new, and it used
to be actually one of the one of the the
planks in the Republican Party platform. This is something conservatives
have been worried about my entire life and before I
was born. Executive power overreach, the growth and the power
of the imperial presidency. Now, if you're okay with that
kind of an approach, then fine, I am not. I
am not because I have lived through enough Democrat presidents
that have engaged in this kind of overreach, and I've
made the same argument. I'm not changing my argument now
just because it's a guy that I voted for who's
in the office. The government's reading of the IEPA and
applying it to pressure would cause the meaning of quote
deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat to permit any
infliction of a burden on a counterparty to exact concessions,
regardless of the relationship between the burden inflicted and the
concessions exacted. If this can mean to you when you
say to deal with this thing, to deal with yeah,
to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat. If that
can mean that you can impose a burden until somebody
else deals with it. Somebody else deals with it, not you,
but somebody else, then everything is permitted. It means a
president may use AEPA to take whatever actions he chooses
simply by declaring them pressure or leverage tactics in order
to get some third party to do something about some
unrelated threat. Surely this is not what Congress meant when
it clarified that the IEPA powers quote may not be
exercised for any other purpose. So again they're looking at
what the law says and they're applying what the law says,
and that's what we should expect judges to do. Right,
let me go over and talk to Baine. Hello, Bain,
Welcome to the program. What's going on?
Speaker 2: It seems like the definition of emergency is kind of
what's up in the air right now. And my kind
of question is, and I agree with everything you said.
You did a great job explaining it. Does the lack
of action by a governing brand over a long period
of time constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat? And my
take is it's a similar but this don't this won't
match everything. As an analogy, a provider for a family
who is say, ninety to one hundred pounds overweight, smokes gambles,
is feeding the family. Well, the kids are happy, they
have cars, they got good SATs, the wise pleased with
the country club. But his lifestyle is going to cause
him to die even and his boss loves him because
he's good at his job. And it's the emergency over
a long period of time. When we think of emergency,
we don't think of, yeah, this is a sixty year
emergency right at that time, we just kind of ignore it.
Speaker 1: Yes, But the proper place to address that long standing
problem is in the Congress, correct. And that's where the
and that's where those responsibilities are vested in the constitution.
Speaker 2: Correct. And something has to be changed in that regard.
If the Congress just ignores.
Speaker 1: It, Yeah, you got to vote out to people that
are ignoring it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And how do you define ignoring your right? And
it's a tough one, but I agree with where we
are right now. But I see the problem, and it's
just a lot of stuff is embedded within the way
we do things. I use the way analogy. We don't
only think of it as a problem until we get
this physical done. And they say you've got to change,
even though you don't really feel bad.
Speaker 1: No, but that's something I got to do right now.
I'll just put that off and we'll just kick the
can down the road a little bit. And I don't
have to make any changes right now, right.
Speaker 2: And I think we are in an emergency. But I
also agree with you in the court that there's nothing
written or in law that allows them to address it
this way. But I do believe we have an emergent.
Speaker 1: Right and this is the right, I agree, And that's
why they they brought in all of these different laws,
because when you're talking about like the declaration of a
national emergency, they talk about that too in their ruling
and the limitations that Congress put on the executive branch
in declaring national emergencies, and they found problems with the
White House's argument on that front as well. So this
is again, if you don't like the parameters under which
these decisions are being made, then you have to change
the parameters. But those parameters were set in place by
Congress fifty sixty years ago, so that's the way you
have to address it. The problem is Congress refuses to
really do any kind of work that's and pass you know, reforms.
I mean, look at the stuff going on with Doge
right now, you wrap all of this stuff. I mean,
you know, Elon Musk is just dispirited. Yeah, welcome to
the Republican Party, Elon. That's the I mean, that is
the Republican Party in a nutshell. Like what we just
saw with Musk coming in, he was all exuber and
he was all excited, We're really going to make some differences.
Here's how we do it. And then nothing happens, and
then he's like, screw this, I'm out of here, Like
that's the gop in a nutshell has been my whole life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're right, Yeah right, thanks man.
Speaker 1: All right, buddy, I appreciate the call. Bane All right.
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I just want to read this quickly from KPMG Trade
and Custom Services. The court decision was based on the
interpretation of AIPA, which the court held does not grant
the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs. Such a broad
delegation of power would violate constitutional principles, specifically the non
delegation doctrine, which requires Congress to provide clear guidelines when
delegating its powers, and the major questions doctrine, which demands
clear congressional authorization for decisions of significant economic and political impact.
And so the worldwide and retaliatory tariff's were found to
be beyond the President's authority because they lacked any identifiable
limits and thus fall outside the scope of authority granted
under AEPA to regulate importation. All right, let's go to
the phones here. First up, as James, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: James, Hey, I have two issues. Issues here. One, I
believe that a number of the rulings we're hearing from
the judiciary are judicial overreach.
Speaker 1: I agree.
Speaker 3: The other one is The other one is the argument
that if we disagree in any way with anything that
president administration is doing, we need to shut up because
Donald Trump knows all.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I reject that argument as well. It sounds like
you do too. I am not convinced by people telling
me to shut up. That is not a convincing or
persuadable argument or persuasive argument that's ever worked on me.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't like these massive bills the Congress passes
because every one of them they passed has had all
sorts of horrors stuck in the middle of them, not
to mention the fact that they all seem to be
get ridden. Yep, and this one is not all that
different from the rest. But anybody who disagrees is being
told to shut up.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, it's the same thing. It's why I started
sniffing a rat with the climate change arguments as well, James.
I appreciate the call. Hey, when people say, oh, just
stop talking about it, the debate is over, man, that's
usually not the sign you got a strong argument Jerry,
Welcome to the show. Hey Jerry, Hey for you. How
you doing, Hey, I'm good? What's up?
Speaker 2: Hey?
Speaker 3: Man? In society that cares more about keeping up with
the Kardashians and who they sleeping than they do about
the Congress.
Speaker 1: And who they vote and how they vote, and.
Speaker 3: I think we never going to get it, Piggs, buddy.
Speaker 1: Well, as I've always said, it takes competent, good people
to volunteer their time and expertise, or else you're going
to be governed by bad and inpe in people. And yeah,
and the longer it takes for people to realize that
the worst software all going to be I suspect I
appreciate the call, Jerry. Let me get Ray on next. Hello, Ray,
welcome to the program.
Speaker 4: Hey Pete. How you doing?
Speaker 1: Hey, I'm good, what's up?
Speaker 4: I just wanted to call and say I call in
quite often to your show and others, but I and
I heard the first ruling about the terrace. It got
me upset and I thought, well, there they go again.
But since you clarified that it's not the same same
and I appreciate you doing that, and I thank you
for that, and I also thank you about being very
thorough in everything you talk about. You I can really
tell you do your homework when you're getting the show ready.
And also just for an instance, like you were reading
the forty nine page reports this morning and you said,
I'm going to read page forty six of forty nine
on It's little things like that that really make it good.
From my perspective, that you say forty nine and you
tell us of forty six. Yeah, that's kind of my
comp comment.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you, Ray, I know I appreciate the call.
Thanks so much. It's a lot of show prep and
most of it never even makes it on the air unfortunately.
All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening. I could not do the show
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