This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 4th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When the president issues an order via Twitter to American companies

to begin looking into doing business in countries other than China, it's easy to laugh.

Unfortunately, after decades of congressional delegation to White Houses past and present,

Donald Trump's claims of authority to issue these kinds of demands

is on stronger footing than you might prefer to believe.

Cato's Gene Healy comments.

When President Trump tweeted out that America's great companies were hereby ordered to begin

considering other opportunities for trade, then with China I thought, well, this is, you know, over-wrought, it's overstated,

and then when he was asked to follow up on it, he pointed to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, he claimed I have the absolute authority here.

And then I thought, well, maybe he may well be correct because there have been these broad delegations that Congress has made over many decades to the to the executive branch for regulating trade what is the IEEPA?

It's tough to pronounce is what it is.

It's a so yeah, President Trump does have this pattern of tweeting out, so what sound like

crackpot theories of executive power, you know, that he can pardon himself or shut down the board or things of that nature.

And, but sometimes, you know, disturbingly enough, he's not that far off about the powers we've

seated to the executive branch and in this case he he tweeted out case closed

because of this 1977 statute.

Maybe not quite case closed, but his claim is on stronger ground that it might seem at first blush.

So the IEPA of 1977, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act,

was part of, was actually part of a reform effort to try to

tighten up the president's emergency powers to some extent. It came in the year after the National

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