Transcript: MAGA Fury Boils Over as Trump Tariffs Suddenly in Jeopardy

Somin: Yes, I think so. Although, it is also true that the court wasn’t completely clear whether the main emphasis of their analysis was on the words “extraordinary” and “unusual threat” or on the term “emergency.” What they did emphasize and what they did conclude is that the statute as a whole does have meaning, and it doesn’t just simply mean whatever the president says is an extraordinary and unusual threat. Or as one of the judges, Judge Restani, put it in oral argument, the president can’t just say any crazy thing qualifies as an emergency or an extraordinary and unusual threat. She used the example of a peanut butter shortage where the president could claim that’s an extraordinary and unusual threat and impose tariffs as a result. I think that’s just an example of the ridiculousness that you can get if the president just gets to unilaterally decide what qualifies as an extraordinary and unusual threat that allows triggering of the enormous powers created by the statute.

Sargent: And let’s be blunt about this, Ilya. That declaration by the court—that Trump doesn’t have unlimited authority to say what an emergency is—is almost certainly one of the things that really triggered some of the people around him, especially people like Stephen Miller, because they have a project. It’s a real project, which essentially entails giving the president unlimited authority to act against apocalyptic emergencies that he simply says are there. Can you talk about that? This is a big, big thing that’s at stake here beyond this case, isn’t it?

Somin: Yeah. Obviously, there’s been a bunch of other power grabs by this administration, some of which we can talk about. I myself have been involved in opposing that under the Alien Enemies Act. And when you put them together, a lot of them are essentially claiming that the powers normally reserved for extraordinary emergency situations can, in fact, be used as a matter of course. This is a standard tactic of various authoritarian regimes around the world. Admittedly, emergency power has been abused by previous presidents, including—I’m sorry to say—President Biden with, for example, his student loan forgiveness power grab. But the power grab here is even bigger than those. Trillions of dollars are involved. It’s the biggest such power grab, at least in economic terms, in modern American history. And there’s a number of others. And yes, if you look at the things that people like Stephen Miller and some of his other advisers have written and said, it seems like they have this vast outsize role for executive power in mind that would in fact turn the president into a quasi-dictator or even a king.