This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, June 8th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

On Monday, the President's new threatened tariffs on all Mexican goods may well go into effect. The economic

damage could be significant but is this really a new kind of power grab for a

president, particularly this president? Gene Healy vice president of the Cato Institute President, The president has threatened new tariffs, a 5% tariff on all goods coming in from Mexico that is scheduled to begin on June 10th until Mexico solves to the president's satisfaction, I suppose, the border

crossings issue into the United States. How is the president planning to do this? And by that I mean, what is he relying on in terms of presidential authority?

Yeah, it's never a dull moment in this administration. He in his statement on May 30 he invoked the authorities that he says are granted to him by something called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and

under that act he claims the power to hike tariffs on a monthly basis going perhaps all the way up to 25% in October if Mexico doesn't

crack down on US border crossings to his satisfaction.

All right, so how does this differ from the other powers that this White House has

assumed that others have not assumed or at least not done so quite so boldly.

There are statutory provisions allowing the president to raise tariffs to declare certain national emergencies. This seems

somehow different. Well it is we talked on this podcast before about in terms of the use of executive power for a self-styled

businessman president president president president Trump hasn't really been all that

entrepreneurial in the use of executive power.

He's like every, like most modern presidents, he's been an imperial president.

That's par for the course, but he's mostly, he hasn't really, in most cases forged

new frontiers in the use of executive power, he's mostly aggressively used authorities that were already expanded by past

presidents and they're up until recently there were I'd say two exceptions to

that areas where there's you could actually call them new executive power grabs and those were

the use of national security powers to impose steel tariffs

and of course the back in February the declaration of a

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