MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
At the heart of legal challenges to President Trump's tariffs is a question about what authority the president has over tariffs at all. Willa Rubin from the Planet Money podcast has more.
WILLA RUBIN, BYLINE: The power to impose tariffs actually belongs to Congress. But over the years, Congress has delegated more of that power to the president, recognizing that they can be slow and the president needs to act quickly if there's a crisis. So, Georgetown trade law professor Kathleen Clawson says, there are a few statutes where Congress outlines when and how the president can impose tariffs.
KATHLEEN CLAWSON: Most of these statutes go by their three digits. So if you want to sound cool in the trade world, you have to start talking in three digits, right? Section 301, Section 232, Section 201, 122, 338. The list goes on.
RUBIN: Each of those three-digit statutes has clear rules. There need to be things like investigations, public hearings, reports. And if there's enough evidence, only then can the president impose tariffs. Now, President Trump campaigned on broad tariffs. So when he won, Kathleen and her trade law friends were wondering which statute he would use.
CLAWSON: Is it going to be 301? Is it going to be 232? Is it going to be 122, right? Very low on that list was IEEPA.
RUBIN: IEEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act - within weeks of taking office, President Trump invoked IEEPA to impose sweeping new tariffs on many countries, which was unprecedented. IEEPA had never been used for tariffs before.
CLAWSON: I think if we took a poll of anybody who's ever heard of IEEPA before, they would say, this is a sanctions tool.
RUBIN: IEEPA is a law from the 70s. It was first used by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 during the Iran hostage crisis. Since then, presidents have used IEEPA for dozens of international emergencies to do things like freeze assets, embargo goods or prohibit certain foreign transactions.
I mean, does IEEPA let Trump do this?
CLAWSON: That is the magic question of the moment, and I can see the arguments on both sides.
RUBIN: One argument Trump's lawyers make is that the text of IEEPA is broad. It gives the president the power to, quote, "regulate or prohibit" all kinds of transactions. So just looking at IEEPA's language...
CLAWSON: When you hear the words regulate importation, does that mean that I can charge you $5 to bring in your widget into the United States, regulate importation? I bet I'd find a good contingent of people who, knowing nothing more than that, could get behind that interpretation of the language. Regulate importation means I can charge you to bring it in.
RUBIN: On the other hand, the people arguing against Trump's tariffs say, this is overreach, that the president is taking two words in IEEPA - regulate importation - to kind of give himself a blank check to make whatever tariffs he wants.
How would you rule?
CLAWSON: Yeah, no. I don't think I would answer this, Willa. I think this is a very tough case.
RUBIN: So far, the people challenging Trump's tariffs have been winning in lower courts, though the tariffs are still in effect while the White House appeals these cases. But even if higher courts like the Supreme Court eventually say Trump's tariffs using IEEPA are unlawful, that wouldn't mean the end of tariffs. It would just mean the Trump administration would have to go back to using the three-digit system, you know, making tariffs the old-fashioned way. Willa Rubin, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
