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This is the Cater Daily podcast for Wednesday, April 16, 2025. I'm Caleb Brown. The Trump

tariffs, the product of massive delegations of authority from Congress, have constitutional problems as well.

The Liberty Justice Center is challenging the tariffs.

Cato's Ilya Soman is co-council on the case.

We spoke just before the lawsuit was filed.

Careful listeners of this podcast and people who follow the work of the Cato Institute are well aware that Congress has for decades delegated authority over trade and other areas and a number of emergency powers to the president. I think our scholars, yourself included, would say that those delegations are at least

dubious, but given the way that the president has made use of the tariff powers under claiming

emergency power to engage in this kind of laying of tariffs on countries all around the world.

What constitutional questions does that raise?

It raises a number of them.

One is, which is not purely constitutional, is just is the particular statute that he is

relying on here, the AIPA statute of 1977, whether it even

allows tariffs at all. I would contend that it does not because the word tariff is not mentioned

in the statute and no previous president has used it to impose tariffs. If it does authorize tariffs,

the statute also has two additional requirements. One is declaring a national emergency,

and the other is there has to be an unusual and extraordinary threat to the American economy

or security or the like. And we would know, we would contend there's no

unusual or extraordinary threat. There's no basis for an emergency either because the whole

justification is that we have bilateral trade deficits with lots of countries, which are neither

unusual nor extraordinary, nor they constitute a threat of any kind, because they're not actually

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