This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 18th, 2024.

On the matter of trade policy, Congress has for many decades delegated large swaths of

power of trade negotiation and notably trade restrictions to the White House.

That worries Rand Paul, Republican US.S. Senator from Kentucky.

He says the case for free trade is overwhelming.

And Congress should do its job in that area.

And he'd like to claw back some authority over trade from future presidents.

One of the areas where I think in some ways foolishly Congress has delegated

away its own authority has been trade.

Prior to the presidency of Donald Trump, what were the consequences of that?

You know, a couple things, I think for the most part over a several decade period

Congress gave a lot of the power to the executive branch but with the intention

that trade deals wouldn't get hung up in the legislative branch that actually trade deals wouldn't get hung up in the legislative branch that

actually trade deals would move forward and I would say the history from

World War II on is mostly of enhanced international trade I would say that's the general trend and

the general trend was the legislature to give more and more of this to the

executives but the executives tended to be in favor of international trade.

It also came with some potential

bureaucratic problems in the sense that since Congress wasn't fine-tuning these

trade deals and the executive branch was writing them, large

bureaucracies were developing, large international bureaucracies, and so sometimes the trade

deals became a trade-off in the sense that there were lowered tariffs which was

...