This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, April 11th, 2020.

I'm Keelip Brown.

It's a pretty typical move for this president suggests a policy that is highly controversial

and probably unconstitutional and then back down a few hours later.

But in the case of Donald Trump suggesting that he might quarantine three Northeastern states,

the hottest of the COVID-19 hotspots, the question has to be asked. the

the hottest of the COVID-19 hotspots the question has to be asked is that in any way constitutional

Cato's Jean Healy comments

What powers do we understand the president to possess with respect to

quarantining people or states or hot spots to use the president's term?

Well it wasn't much more than a week ago now that President Trump, as he often does,

tweeted out a proposal that was kind of shocking and talked about an all-caps federal

quarantine of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. And I think it is only several hours later, he backed it down to just having the

CDC issue a strong travel advisory, but for a period of several hours, he put on the table

the idea of a federal quarantine around three states with some 30 million people which was a fairly alarming idea.

So, you know, he makes a lot of you know, we've talked about this pattern before he he tends to

tweet out sometimes some crank theories and then you know never do much with them and a lot of times it ends up being like the you know a more

alarming version of hey let's let's buy Greenland in this, you know, I think it is worth worrying about because

we're in the middle of a fairly unprecedented crisis and, you know, in times a crisis often presidents are driven towards extreme and

highly visible and often regrettable action. So what quarantine authority does the federal government have?

I mean, it does have some.

The main law for that is something called the Public Health Service Act and it does include

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