This is John Baxter. Professor Richard Epstein commenting on the Supreme Court and the decision to hear the case for the president to issue tariffs on the basis of a trade imbalance, claiming it's an emergency that gives him the authority to do it, whether Congress likes it, whether the courts like it, whether anybody likes it. Emergency powers. That case is argued before the Supreme Court pending a decision.

There is another matter, however, where the president issued or threatened to issue tariffs

on the basis of a policy dispute over Greenland.

Richard points out the blunder by the Supreme Court,

which was to take the original case and wander into this, may ask.

The president is abusing the language of the original law, 1977, says Richard, but the court is now weighted into it and has got to decide.

Will it also take the case about Greenland and issuing tariffs on the basis, you disagree with me, therefore 10 percent? Richard thinks the

court has made difficulties for itself to understate the matter. Here's Richard to explain. More

of this tonight. Well, more challenging as Greenland. Yes, well, I said the thing I hope that the Supreme Court would do is to say if we're trying

to figure out what is obviously within the power and what's not within the power,

one of the things that is not within the power of the president is to use the tariff system

for purely political reasons so that even if you were to decide the case that he could

act under IEPA for dealing with economic matters, he could not do so here. Otherwise, this statute

becomes an absolute tool to blunder and abuse everybody else on the face of the globe. And I think

the argument is so manifestly correct that it would be nice for the Supreme Court to state it, because at that point, you don't have to go through the current charade

of bringing a lawsuit, having it decided by lower cause, having the Supreme Court say,

I'm going to let them impose these tariffs until we decided, at which point the entire

battle is lost.

The biggest wonder the Supreme Court has already made in this case

was that it let stand in order from below

that Trump could basically keep doing tariffs

until the case was decided by the Supreme Court.

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