This is the Kaderie Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 30th,

2024. I'm Caleb Brown. The president has far too much specific, and too disruptive power over trade.

Clark Packard is co-author of the new Cato paper, Presidential Tariff Powers and the need for

reform.

We spoke last week about the importance of clawing back

some of those powers.

I spoke recently with Kentucky Junior US Senator,

Republican Rand Paul on this topic as a broad matter, but I was hoping

you and I Clark could drill down a little bit about the specifics of the policy and

maybe even get into a little bit of the Congress is supposed to jealously guard its prerogatives in a wide variety of areas,

but in trade, as in a few other areas, the Congress has in many ways delegated away its authority

specifically to the White House to govern things like trade or to make more decisions with respect to U.S. trade

policy. Can you give me the happiest version of why that was a good thing for Congress to

have done over several decades?

Yeah, sure.

I mean, you know,

you know,

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution says that Congress has the power

to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts,

and excises, and to regulate commerce with foreign countries.

And so from the earliest days of the Republic to about 1930, Congress set tariff rates, and

it was a messy prospect. You vote for my tariff and I was a messy prospect.

...