Trump's tariffs get grilled (11-06-2025--Hour3)

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. As I said, I am a man of my word. In the first hour, I said I would be discussing this topic, and so here it is. Yesterday, arguments were heard in the US Supreme Court about IEBA, which everybody knows all about, at least on Twitter. I was not aware how many experts on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of nineteen seventy seven existed on Twitter. There's almost as many experts on this as there are on deep water submersibles and the pressure required to crush them. But anyway, the Supreme Court heard the oral arguments in two different cases, but they were like put together. The case is I have it here, somewhere in the stack of stuff. Here it is Learning Resources Inc. Versus Trump, right, and this is about Donald Trump's so called emergency tariffs. Okay. There were three categories of tariffs at issue here. First was the worldwide ten percent tariff. That's the first one. The second one was the Liberation Day tariffs, aimed at closing trade deficits in goods, so the worldwide ten percent, then the Liberation Day tariffs, and then the third round where the tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China. Those were in retaliation for fentanyl trafficking. Okay. The Solicitor General representing the administration in this case was John Sower, and in all of the reports that I have seen about how the oral arguments went down, this did not go well for him. And it kind of makes sense because, like from a legal argument standpoint, it's a tough sell. This is a pretty tough thing to try to defend. According to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or the IEEPA, or as I call it, the a EBA because it's just fun to say it that way, the Court this, according to the editors at National Review, the Court should rule that the congressional power to tax cannot be delegated without clear and unambiguous statutory language and identifiable limiting principles. This is the very core of the Article one power of the legislature, the power to tax. Right. This has been a hallmark, a bedrock understanding in our American governing system from the very beginning. And it makes sense because you don't want a king. Dare I say it not to sound like a no king's lefty activist, but yeah, you don't want the king to be in control of all of the purse strings. AIPA has no unambiguous statutory language and no identifiable limiting principles. It never mentions tariffs, taxes, or any synonym for them. No prior president has ever argued that AEPA authorizes tariffs, so this is a brand new argument and a new use of this law. The most that AEPA says is that the president may regulate the importation or exportation of foreign goods during a non wartime emergency, can regulate import and export during non wartime emergency. Broader powers are granted during wartime, when presidents may have more sweeping Article two authority of their own. So, by the way, Article one of the Constitution is the legislature right. The powers of the legislature. Article two is the executive powers, and then Article three is the judicial powers. Okay, so the Solicitor General John Sower can seeded that the administration does not claim that presidents have any inherent authority to impose tariffs in peacetime. What they have has to come from a law. Moreover, many other statutes do grant teriff related powers to the president, but are much more carefully limited in doing so. Trump used AIPA specifically so he could circumvent all of those constraints while invoking an open ended emergency that courts would be hesitant to review. That's precisely the sort of too clever by half exploitation of vague at best statutory language that the court has regularly rejected. Right, it's a what's the When the left does something like this, they call it it's a it's a novel legal theory. Right, This is what it was. That's how they describe the lawsuit against the North Carolina legislature over the redistrict maps. It's a novel legal theory. In other words, it's made up. It's brand new, never tested. We're going to throw this against the wall, see if it sticks. There was broad concern about the nearly limitless powers claimed by the administration, and specific concern that it was invading the core control of Congress over taxation without a specific grant delegating that power to the president. Sour then had to acknowledge also that under Trump's theory, a future president could declare a global climate emergency. That's right. Roy Cooper did this as governor, except he did it with education. Right, he issued this, this fake emergency declaration. And what's to stop a Democrat who gets into the White House from issuing a climate emergency. I mean, the Guy of Earth is not happy going to kill us. So, I mean, we have generations of kids that have been raised on this belief, and so they'll believe it. They'll go along with it. They'll say, yes, it is a climate emergency. Throw a couple of people in some hard hats and yellow vests out into the middle of the street to block traffic during rush hour. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that they could organize enough support, you know, astro turfed or not. But they can organize enough of these kinds of actions to apply pressure and get a Democrat president to do it. Not that they would need a whole lot of convincing because they believe it as well. So you call for a or you declare a climate emergency, and then you could unlock these kinds of sweeping powers that would get no review by the courts if this case succeeds for Trump. Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that such an emergency could have been used to forgive student law owns. Right. I mean, you actually had COVID emergency going on at the time, right, So Biden could have done that under this theory of the law that the Trump administration is using, Joe Biden could have used IEPA, declare an emergency for COVID, then use IEPA and and do whatever he wants. Right. Justice Neil Gorsitch raised more fundamental questions. Could Congress simply delegate away all of its powers, right if the court rules in Trump's favor. Is the court then creating a one way ratchet in which those powers can never be clawed back As a practical matter, Right, if Congress keeps delegating the Okay, well let'll just turn it over to you. Oh, we'll just turn it over to you. And you just keep turning over more and more power to the executive branch because it happens to be your guy in charge at the moment. Right when does it ever return to Congress? Sours insistence that tariffs are regulations with only incidental benefits of raising revenue. It kind of flails upon the administration' zone claim that they will raise trillions of dollars and help close the budget deficit. So he goes to court and he makes the argument that the revenue being generated, that's not really the primary function of the tariffs. No, no, no, that's just incidental. These are regulations, that's what we're after. Like, that's a theory. You know. Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. 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And they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video dot com. Okay seven oh four five, seven oh eleven ten. That's also the text line present, the text line driven by liberty Buick GMC. And here's a very good point from an anonymous seven oh four number. You know, if you give me your name in a text like I can connect it. I can end your name just first name is fine, so I can identify you I name in the text when I read your text on the air. But this is a great point also that a future president could declare guns as a health problem right and declare national emergency over gun violence. And now that would allow a future president to do whatever he or she wanted to start, taking guns right or restricting their purchase, restricting AMMO, just doing all sorts of things without the legislative branch's input. The National Review says beyond allowing presidents to impose and change taxes without the legislature, And that's the lynchpin here, is that these are taxes and that has to originate in the House. That's the constitution. The creation of an executive slush fund of monies raised by executive FIAT gives presidents fiscal independence from Congress, right, because the money that's generated from the tariffs was used to pay off something with the shutdown. I forget what, I think it was, the Women and Infant Children's program. They took like three hundred million out of the tariff revenue. Well, so what the president now just gets a slush fund like that to fund different things in government. And it doesn't matter to me whether you think or I think the program was worthy of funding. That's irrelevant. The point is that some future president can decide to use the money for something else, and it's not going to be a good program, and it's not constitutional. The spending is supposed to originate in the House. Fear of a self financing executive goes back as far as England's Glorious Revolution. And was revived as recently as the Biden administry's threat to start issuing debt without Congress. This is the same argument I have with these calls now to scrap the filibuster. You're not going to be in power forever. Think about how these tools will be used by people that you oppose, and if you don't want to see your opponents with these powers, then you shouldn't be advocating the implementation of the powers. Let me go over here and get Mike on. Hello, Mike, Welcome to the show. Hello Pee, good afternoon, Good afternoon to you. I was telling and I think it was Isaac they picked up, and I said, you know, it's not every day. I guess she has to call up the PreK counter show and agree with your analysis. You could. Well, that's not true, Mike. You could totally. You could do that every single day. My analysis is that good? Well this afternoon, Yes, regarding this issue, I will give you big thumbs up, and you're right. I could do it. I could do it every day, but that would not be true being true to me here. Yeah, I know, but you know it's I think what you were saying and the way you analyze that I think was spot on. I actually listened to the argument yesterday Live, and you're correct. It did not go particularly well with John Sower, the Solicitor General, who was trying to argue the administration's point of view on this. And in fact, you will appreciate this. It reminded me a little bit of when I call your show on most occasions, because he was getting peppered with some really, really tough probing questions about his arguments, and I'm thinking to myself, you know, his should call on the pre Caunter Show sometimes because that'll be good practice when he gets to the Supreme Court. Yeah, that's very kind of you. But I look, I also maintain control over the phone connection, which the Supreme Court kind of does too. So that's your the lawyer like. It's one of the things that drives me nuts about the oral arguments is the amount of interruptions that they do. I don't I'm not a fan. Well, that's that's kind of the nature of the beast. I've not ever been to never never been up to schools. I've been in front of the Supreme Court of North Carolina twice. But that's what they do. They've got their own issues that they want to talk about, and a good advocate will stop with whatever point he is making and listen to what they're interesting because they're the ones that decide the decide the issue, right. The other thing that gets the other thing about this In addition to it being well potentially illegal in the minds of a lot of folks, for me, it's it's also one can scarcely think of a more socialist policy. I mean, forget free mark gets Uh. We're wanting to invest in one person the ability to set prices on these issues. I've realized in some situations for emergency bay, for emergency things. You know, the system allows that. But to do it across the board. Uh, I hate to say it, but in many ways that's that's socialist behavior. Team No, I don't. I don't agree with it as socialism. Tariffs, Uh is a It's a tax. That's how I've always viewed tariffs. They're taxes. And as a chief executive person, yeah, yeah, well but that power. But but again, like that's and that's the argument that's being made. It's not the concept of a tax is not socialism per se. Right, If your beef is that it's one person doing it. That's not an argument uh for or again socialism, it's an argument of consolidation of power in a in a single authority. And like that's not socialism, that's that's more tyranny, that's more of a monarchy or something. Yeah. Yeah, and you will, uh, you will rest assured that I am not, even though you brought in sort of no kings analogy that that was in this case. You know, the Supreme Court may go against it, just precisely for the reasons that we don't have kings that can unilaterally, by themselves, impose such widespread policies. Yeah. Maybe, but see, here's the thing. I didn't see anybody at the No Kings rallies making any arguments about. Tariffs, agreed. I think you know, it was more across the board. Yeah, it's just the Yeah, it's just they don't like Trump. They don't like Trump. I mean, that's that's all it was. It was a branding effort by Indivisible and that's yeah. But like to the point though, yeah, one person controlling uh, that kind of a revenue stream is antithetical to the article. What we're the yeah, to what we're about to what to what the American economy is supposed to be about. Uh that you don't that you don't give one person that type of authority. And and from my standpoint, and you talked about this something yesterday I listened to on and off about the results of the election. I think that's part of what we saw on TV is there was a lot of pushback from a lot of people to say, you know, uh, mister President, we we hate you were going to get But Mike, you know it's had to hate. You know as well as I do. You know as well as I do that people were not showing up to vote for vy Lyles because they hate Donald Trump, right, Like that's that was Donald Trump was not an animating figure in a school board district. Race, all right. I disagree to this extent, Pete, because if all you were looking at was all it in Mecklenburg County in terms of the type of results you had on Tuesday, that'd be one thing. But what you saw across the board, I mean in Mississippi and in Georgia, you had the state Senate seats that were flipping from red to blue. You had turnout site nobody anticipated across the board. And I think what that was, in my opinion, was a releasing of frustration, if you will, of people, not just Democrats, of people saying, look, this has gone too fall. I think what to do? No, I think you're wish casting some of that. I have no doubt that anti Donald Trump animus motivates Democrats, no doubt about that. And the shutdown up in northern Virginia animated a whole bunch of them up in Virginia when some seers not a great candidate either. And sure there's a component I would agree that that turnout because they hate Trump absolutely, But yeah, I think a couple all the blue states with the kinds of turnout numbers you were talking about, that's normal. I mean, that's that's this is always the case. Virginia's blue, Jerseys blue, Charlotte's blue. 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 too. And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. 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To suggest that tariffs are a tax on the American public would bring the assumption that every single dollar that is included in the tariff is then passed on to the American public. But I don't believe that's the truth, nor can that be positively proven. Okay, so no, it does not require an assumption that every single dollar included in the tariff is passed or the tax is passed on to the American consumer. But in the court arguments yesterday, the Solicitor General representing the Trump administration acknowledged that it's somewhere between thirty to eighty of the tariffs are passed on to the American consumer. So that's why, like the again, like I said this at the very beginning, I said two things. When Trump announced all of the tariffs, I said, number one, like, he better be right because otherwise, you know, the expectation from the people who are experts in this sort of thing. You know, they're saying that this is a tax and it's going to it's going to hurt the American taxpayers and consumers. So I but, like with all things Trump, I say, let's wait and see. We'll see what happens, but he better be right. And then the second thing I said was that, you know, maybe I am the fish that doesn't know it's wet because I am of an age where I grew up in this world where uh, the experts largely all agree that tariffs are taxing is on the consumers, and maybe that was wrong, and so we'll see. So anyway, that's what they I mean, that's what the Trump administration acknowledged in the court yesterday. So let me go to Richard. Hello, Richard, welcome to the show. Yes Hi, where I got through. It's been a long time to get here to talk to you. What I don't hear is I keep hearing it's a one way street with the tariffs. Whatever happened to the idea there reciprocal tariffs. We're being texted by all these countries as well. This is just reciprocal. That's what we were told. But then the tariffs came out and they were the numbers were all over the place. We were when we uh, we've got tariffs on countries that we were running a surplus. With the whole the whole idea of the program in long term, not short term and short term. It's going to cost us, but long term is to bring industry back to the country and get people more employed than they are now by millions. That's the long term. That's the long term. Look at this. We all know that short term, you know it's going to be a text on us for higher courts. I agree, but but that's not what you're look at the short term of is You've got to look at the long term. Benefits, right well, I mean that's what they're That was the pitch, right, that was the pitch that, yes, you know, some of these costs are going to get passed on, but there's going to be some benefit down the road. That that was the pitch. But again, I've not seen that, and I don't know what that time frame is, and it doesn't it doesn't explain why certain companies or industries have gotten carve outs, you know. So like I again, like just because that's what they say, doesn't mean that that's the actual result, that's what they predicted. What were I mean, Okay, I mean it's what you can hold on to and believe in. But things do take time. It took, you know, over four years to get this country screwed up. It's only been. Nine months he's been in office to try and get the straded. Look. I just got through saying like we will see, we'll see what happens. And maybe, you know, the belief that tariffs are taxes and they hurt the American consumer more, maybe that's all wrong. But if that were the case, then you know, I don't know, like if everybody's been wrong all this time, I'll be the first to acknowledge that Trump was right, but the jury's still out on this, and in the meantime, the way they went about doing all of this is being challenged in court because they did it as an end run around Congress. So that's what they're deciding now. I appreciate the PASA Richard, Thank you. This is from Aaron Solomon at The Hill. The case that sounds like a fight over toy imports, but it's really about the future of presidential power. The law at the heart of this case written in nineteen seventy seven to let presidents act fast in actual crises, to freeze terrorist assets, to cut off hostile regimes, etc. It was not designed to micromanage trade policy. But Trump's team argued that America's trade imbalance with China was itself a national emergency, and the result, companies like the one that sued this toy manufacturer makes educational toys and classroom supplies. They got hammered with new tariffs that had nothing to do with any genuine emergency. The core issue is actually pretty simple, he says, can the word emergency be stretched so far that it covers anything that a president feels like tackling without Congress, because if the answer is yes, that's not just a trade story. That's a blueprint for a permanent emergency presidency. Right. Congress wanted to reign in executive excesses after the Vietnam War and after Watergate. That's when this law was passed. Why it was passed. The idea was to keep presidents from declaring emergencies that never actually end. And over time those guardrails have eroded. There are right now more than forty official national emergencies still on the books. Most of them are many years old. They quietly get renewed every twelve months, like streaming services that nobody remembers ordering. So if you allow this precedent to stand, any president could call an economic problem an national security threat and start rewriting rules. I don't like the sound of that. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina? Just a quick drive up the mountain and cabins of Ashville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together for a big old reunion. Cabins of Asheville has the ideal spot for you where you can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that truly matter. Nestled within the breath taking fourteen thousand acres of the Pisga National Forest, their cabins offer a serene escape in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Centrally located between Ashville and the entrance of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. It's the perfect balance of seclusion and proximity to all the local attractions with hot tubs, fireplaces, air conditioning, smart TVs, Wi Fi, grills, outdoor tables and your own private covered porch. Choose from thirteen cabins, six cottages, two villas, and a great lodge with eleven king sized bedrooms. Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you for any occasion, and they have pet friendly accommodations. Call or text eight two eight, three six seven seventy sixty eight or check out all there is to offer at Cabins of Ashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Aaron Solomon at The Hill dot com. Any president could call an economic problem a national security threat and then start rewriting the rules, imposing tariffs, freezing investments, even restricting technology or energy flows without a single vote in Congress. Once the precedent exists, it becomes the playbook. Now, yes, Congress could step in. The Constitution gives it the executive power, or sorry, gives it the exclusive power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and to levy tariffs. That's reserved for Congress. But for decades, lawmakers have handed that power away, preferring the convenience of broad statutes that let presidents take the heat while they issue press releases. This is something that I don't believe the founding fathers contemplated. They set up the system with the belief that these lawmakers in power would protect their own powers from encroachment from the other branches. And at the federal level and the state level and at the local level, same dynamic right that these elected lawmakers would try to protect their power. And so they basically pitted them against each other. And it's brilliant. What I think they did not contemplate was TikTok, because how could they really right? I don't think they contemplated the idea that people would would run for the office draw the paycheck, become you know, masters of stock trading. I think it's a it's part of the orientation classes. They get all of the the key tips on how to make good stock trades. That's how they all get so rich on their their trades. And so anyway that they would go to Congress, draw the benefits, draw the salaries, and just be more interested in putting out viral videos of you know, a one minute SmackDown against some bureaucrat they drag in front of their hearings. Right, So, I think he's exactly right about this, is that they've offloaded so many of the of their own responsibilities to the executive branch. They've done it willingly because they don't want to take the heat, they don't want to be responsible, and it's easier just to all the paycheck. How much authority can Congress delegate before it stops being a coequal branch, though the Court has been hinting at this moment for years. In West Virginia versus the EPA, the Justices told the federal agencies that they cannot make major policy moves without clear authorization from Congress. In low per Bright versus Raymondo, they killed the old Chevron rule, which I celebrated that because that rule told judges that they had to defer to the interpretations of the agencies, and so if the law wasn't clear, then the agency would say what the law is and the judge had to differ. It's called the Chevron deference based on a case that Chevron Oil Company had sued over, and that went away because that is unconstitutional, and it was from the very beginning when the Court initially made that stupid ruling. That's how you ended up with Obamacare having I don't even remember. It was like thousands of uses of the phrase the Secretary of Health shall do these rules like all over the Obamacare law. The Congress just like gave a free hand to the Department of uh of Health, the secretary of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, right, and that's inappropriate. Congress rights the law. You don't just offload all of that to the executive branch. And so Chevron deference was killed by this court, as it should have been. That was the right decision. This case takes that same logic and points it at the Oval Office itself. Now, if the Court means what it said about restoring constitutional bounces. This is the natural next step. And so by doing what he did with the tariffs, forcing the lawsuit and then losing the case at the Supreme Court, Donald Trump might actually be reconstructing the guardrails and telling Congress forcing Congress, this is your job. You're supposed to be doing this stuff. Now. Whether Congress will actually do anything, that's uh oh hell, that's a different tail. If they uphold this sweeping emergency tariff power, any future president could come along and slap tariffs on let's say, gas powered cars, right because there's a climate emergency, and so we're going to tariff all of the gas guzzling cars. And that's not speculation. That is the conclusion of the Trump administration. His own lawyer during the oral arguments, that's what he said, that ruling in favor of the administration would open the door to precisely that. We'll see what the Supreme Court does. 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 support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page, or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.