Jon Bateman and Peter Harrell
On this week’s episode of The World Unpacked, host Jon Bateman discussed the Supreme Court case challenging President Donald Trump’s tariffs with Peter Harrell, a nonresident scholar with Carnegie’s American Statecraft Program and one of the lawyers fighting the tariffs on behalf of some members of Congress.
A portion of their conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, is below.
Jon Bateman: [Let’s] start with the question of why and how the legal authority that Trump used for these tariffs is unprecedented. We know that the U.S. has had tariffs before, and in the first Trump administration, the president imposed tariffs, but this time he did it in a different way, and that’s why he’s in the Supreme Court now.
Peter Harrell: The Constitution gives Congress in Article I the power to levy tariffs and duties and to “regulate commerce.” So these things like imposing tariffs very clearly [are] Congress’s authority. So then the question becomes, for the president: Did Congress delegate to the president?
Starting in the 1930s, Congress has over the years given presidents various legal ways to raise tariffs. But those lawful delegations would not let Trump impose tariffs sort of overnight on the entire world the way he has wanted to. So what he did back in April with Liberation Day, he used this 1977 emergency powers statute called IEEPA, which Congress had passed mostly to let presidents impose sanctions—like Carter imposing sanctions on Iran in 1979 and Obama imposing sanctions on Russia when it took over Crimea in 2014. Trump used the statute, which had been used many times for sanctions, to impose all these tariffs. It had never been used for tariffs before.
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